From Shannon Hall at New Scientist: So where are these unseen universes in relation to ours? How many are there? What goes on inside them? And can we ever hope to visit one? Such questions might sound daft, particularly given the lack of observational evidence that the multiverse exists. And yet thanks to new ideas on where distant universes might be hiding or how to count them, physicists are beginning to get their bearings. Rather fittingly, though, there is not just one answer – depending on which version of the multiverse you’re navigating, there are many. (paywall) More. [colour emphasis added] Question: “New pics from Pluto, including strange, icy haloes” sounds like science, a matter of public interest. “How far away Read More ›

At Space.com: NASA’s New Horizons probe has visited a place never before visited by a robotic probe from Earth: Pluto. In July 2015, the spacecraft completed a nearly-decade-long journey to fly by Pluto, and reveal humanity’s first close-up look at the distant dwarf planet. See photos and images from the New Horizons mission to Pluto in this gallery. More. See also: Did Pluto get tipped over? Pluto has been resurfaced. But how? Pluto has ice mountains? and Weather Network: Slug-like object spotted on Pluto Follow UD News at Twitter!

From science philosophers Adrian Currie and Derek Turner at Aeon: Both Triceratops and Torosaurus lived in what is now western North America near the end of the Cretaceous period. Torosaurus was bigger and had a longer frill on its head, which sported openings or ‘fenestral’. The two species are considered quite distant (different genera). But In 2010, the palaeontologists John Scannella and John Horner challenged this consensus with the so-called ‘Toroceratops’ hypothesis. They argued that Torosaurus and Triceratops were really the same kind of animal, and that the differences were just a question of the creature’s age. As individuals grew up, they got bigger, their frills got longer, and they developed holes. According to this view, a Torosaurus is just Read More ›

Obviously, for all to see. A sentence appears in a paywalled article in a peer-reviewed publication (Journal of Molecular Evolution): Since the subject of cellular emergence of life is unusually complicated (we avoid the term ‘complex’ because of its association with ‘biocomplexity’ or ‘irreducible complexity’), it is unlikely that any overall theory of life’s nature, emergence, and evolution can be fully formulated, quantified, and experimentally investigated. But that is not a justified change in terminology and certainly not an improvement. “Complicated” is usually a pejorative term, that is, a term that means something negative. Compare: “The new system is more complicated” [= messy, time-wasting, not ergonomic, typical product of a committee, etc.… ] vs. “The new system is more complex” Read More ›

This article by Stephanie Margaret Bucklin in Astronomy Magazine is remarkably candid. Bucklin admits that any multiverse theory that is not testable (which, currently, is all of them) falls within the realm of metaphysics, not physics.  She writes:  “But how credible is a scientific theory that might not be testable? . . . theories like the multiverse have drawn criticism from some scientists, who warn of the danger of speculation beyond what data can tell us.” She also admits what ID proponents have known all along — fine tuning is a real thing crying out for an explanation, and a primary motivating factor behind multiverse theory is a search for a materialist answer to that problem: Though scientists have no direct Read More ›

Here, on the thugs’ attack on Thomas Nagel for doubting Darwin: The intelligentsia was so furious that it formed a lynch mob. In May 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece called “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong.” One paragraph was notable: Whatever the validity of [Nagel’s] stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad….” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error. It’s the cowardice of the Chronicle’s statement that is alarming—as if the only conceivable Read More ›

In response to our Steampunk Darwin, David Klinghoffer observes, at Evolution News & Views, a classic example of the way in which mediocrities know they are right: Because they can attract a consensus of, mainly, themselves to end discussions of problematic new information: Shutting Down the Evolution Debate, the “Mainstream Science” Way We noted the other day our biologist colleague Cornelius Hunter’s online adventure, parachuting into a discussion with theistic evolutionists over at the BioLogos website. The debate in a thread at their Open Forum, “What is Universal Common Descent?,” is long and discursive. It runs to 212 entries so far. I can’t claim to have read every word, but this struck me as telling. At comment #203, Washington University’s Joshua Read More ›

The abstract of a paper by Rene van Woudenberg of the Abraham Kuyper Center and Jeroen de Ridder, Design Hypotheses Behave Like Skeptical Hypotheses (or: Why We Can’t Know the Falsity of Design Hypotheses) It is often claimed that, as a result of scientific progress, we now know that the natural world displays no design. Although we have no interest in defending design hypotheses, we will argue that establishing claims to the effect that we know the denials of design hypotheses is more difficult than it seems. We do so by issuing two skeptical challenges to design-deniers. The first challenge draws inspiration from radical skepticism and shows how design claims are at least as compelling as radical skeptical scenarios in undermining Read More ›

From Ewen Callaway at Nature: A virus that infects bacteria listens to messages from its relatives when deciding how to attack its hosts. Its relatives? These aren’t the viruses we learned about in health and safety class. The discovery — in viruses that attack Bacillus bacteria — marks the first time that any type of viral communication system has ever been found. But researchers say that many other viruses could communicate with each other through their own molecular languages — perhaps even viruses that are responsible for human diseases. If that is the case, scientists might have found a new way to disrupt viral attacks. When levels of arbitrium build up — after a large number of cells have died Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: the top five big problems for evolutionary theory: namely, the fossil record, the origin of biological information, the necessity of early mutations in development, the existence of epigenetic information, and Dr. Axe’s recent contribution in his new book Undeniable, the universal design intuition. More. Here. See also: Darwinism: Replacement or extension? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: An international group that includes a University of Kansas researcher has discovered a brownish piece of split limestone in a site in Croatia that suggests Neanderthals 130,000 years ago collected the rock that stands out among all other items in the cave. “If we were walking and picked up this rock, we would have taken it home,” said David Frayer, a professor emeritus of anthropology who was part of the study. “It is an interesting rock.” The finding is important, he said, because it adds to other recent evidence that Neanderthals were capable — on their own — of incorporating symbolic objects into their culture. The rock was collected more than 100 years ago from the Krapina Neanderthal Read More ›

Robert Tracinski reports on how recent reports that 2016 was the hottest year on record was, unsurprisingly, extremely misleading: They should have been in the first paragraph, but at least they’re in the third paragraph: “This puts 2016 only nominally ahead of 2015 by just 0.01C—within the 0.1C margin of error—but….” There’s stuff after the “but,” but it’s just somebody’s evaluation. Even this report can’t give us a straight fact and leave it alone. For the benefit of science reporters and other people who are unfamiliar with the scientific method, let me point out that the margin of error for these measurements is plus or minus one tenth of a degree Celsius. The temperature difference that is supposedly being measured Read More ›

From BBC radio: One of Britain’s finest comedians, Rob Newman returns to Radio 4 with a witty, fact-packed series mixing stand-up and sketches, challenging notions of Survival of the Fittest and The Selfish Gene with a new theory that’s equal parts enlightening and hilarious. Rob is our guide on a journey through a unique audio A-Z of nature that takes in everything from altruistic amoebae and dancing squid to Richard Dawkins wrestling naked with a postal worker. Piecing these fragments together allows Rob to correct some major distortions of Darwinism, as well as rejig the theory of natural selection in the light of what we now know about epigenetics, mirror neurons and the Flintstones. Written by Rob Newman Starring Claire Read More ›

Recently, we picked up on the story that life on Earth may be datable to 4.1 billion years ago: UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago — 300 million years earlier than previous research suggested. The discovery indicates that life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 billion years ago. The estimate is based on studies of zircons. Zircons? Champagne gemstones on a beer budget? Our favourite physicist and physics colour commentator Rob Sheldon kindly writes to explain why zircons matter to origin of life studies: —- To answer your question, carbon comes in various isotopes or flavors. Giving the longest lasting of these isotopes: Isotope Half-life ——– Read More ›

Recently I read my first steampunk novel, Jim Butcher’s The Aeronaut’s Windlass.  For those of you who have never heard of steampunk, it is a sub-genera of science fiction that anachronistically fuses Victorian steam powered technology into the digital age. It occurred to me that Darwinism is “steampunk science.”  It is an analog-based Victorian relic trying to make its way in the digital information age.  Darwin had no conception of the information problem facing any account of naturalistic evolution.  Darwin’s 21st century successors certainly know about the problem, but in 2017 they are no closer to solving it than Darwin was in 1859.  Naturalistic evolutionary science has not come remotely close to solving the problem of how the meaningful information on Read More ›