2017

From Megan Gannon at LiveScience: BERLIN—As expected by many, the 2017 Nobel Prize for physics went to three scientists who helped detect gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein. “This year’s prize is about a discovery that shook the world,” said physicist Thors Hans Hansson, announcing the winners from Stockholm. … On Sept. 14, 2015, LIGO’s two extremely sensitive instruments in Washington state and Louisiana simultaneously observed a faint gravitational-wave signal. The ripples in space-time came from a pair of two massive black holes that spiraled into each other 1.3 billion years ago. More. Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon is, however, left with more questions than answers: The Nobel was awarded because the waves were finally seen–after 10 Read More ›

60 years ago origin of life (OOL) researches practically wet themselves with excitement over Miller-Urey.  Now everyone knows Miller-Urey, while perhaps mildly interesting, had nothing to do with OOL, because the early earth’s atmosphere was weakly reducing and the M-U reaction simply does not occur in such an atmosphere. No worries.  We get this from a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Science paper: As to the sources of nucleobases, early Earth’s atmosphere was likely dominated by CO2, N2, SO2, and H2O. In such a weakly reducing atmosphere, Miller–Urey-type reactions are not very efficient at producing organics. One solution is that the nucleobases were delivered by interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) and meteorites. This is amusing.  You can’t get nucleobases Read More ›

One after whom an informal logical fallacy is named, too. From Glenn Branch at National Center for Science Education: At a recent meeting of NCSE’s board of directors, Kenneth R. Miller was elected as president, replacing Francisco J. Ayala, whose term on the board expired. Miller is Professor of Biology and Royce Family Professor for Teaching Excellence at Brown University; his honors include the AAAS’s Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology as well as NCSE’s Friend of Darwin award. He testified for the plaintiffs in Kitzmiller v. Dover. His books include Finding Darwin’s God (1999) and Only a Theory (2008). More. A friend wrote to ask, But wait, isn’t Miller a creationist? [?] Oh yes, of course, the Read More ›

You know, that non-PC nerd who was warned that it wasn’t safe for him to go back to teach and eventually settled for $500k. From Eric Owens at Daily Caller: School officials at the 4,000-student school received approximately 120 incident reports involving 180 students during the days-long series of protests, reports The Olympian, the main newspaper in the town surrounding Evergreen State. “Of those 180 students, approximately 80 were found responsible for their actions,” Evergreen State spokeswoman Sandra Kaiser told The Olympian. “They received sanctions ranging from formal warnings, community service and probation, to suspension.” Read the rest of the story, it gets crazier. Then: Last month, school officials announced that Evergreen State is now facing a $2.1 million budget Read More ›

Earlier this evening, physicist Rob Sheldon responded to Geoscience Research Institute senior scientist Tim Standish’s view that no life form would likely thrive in the lava bath of very early Earth. The discussion concerns recent fossil finds thought to be about four billion years old. Standish replies, Yes, cyanobacteria are a good candidate, but I still believe they probably can’t really survive in the actual absence of other life. For example, the absence of phosphate is recognized as a problem for the origin of life, one that various solutions have been proposed for. Are cyanobacteria also phosphate solubilizers? I’m not asking a rhetorical question, I really don’t know, but I’m willing to bet that they can’t really live and thrive with only water, Read More ›

Earlier today Senior Scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute Tim Standish  responded to my question regarding a recent claim that life from 3.95 billion years ago was spotted in Newfoundland. I wrote to ask, On a practical basis, how did these earliest organisms even stay alive? Rob Sheldon writes to defend the idea, at least in principle, if very primitive life forms arrived on comets bombarding Earth: There is one type of life that can survive in a bath of water, sunlight, carbondioxide and nitrogen. That is to say, without any other life forms or sources of organic material or dissolved nitrate. It’s cyanobacteria, and some of the most common forms, are also the smallest. These organisms have the ability to Read More ›

From Barbara J. King at NPR: Now, psychologists David A. Leavens of the University of Sussex, Kim A. Bard of the University of Portsmouth, and William D. Hopkins of Georgia State University have framed their new Animal Cognition article, “The mismeasure of ape social cognition,” around Gould’s book. Ape (especially chimpanzee) social intelligence, the authors say, has been routinely mismeasured because apes are tested in comprehensively different circumstances from the children with whom they are compared — and against whose performance theirs is found to be lacking. Leavens et al. write: “All direct ape-human comparisons that have reported human superiority in cognitive function have universally failed to match the groups on testing environment, test preparation, sampling protocols, and test procedures.” Read More ›

In regard to a recent claim that life from 3.95 billion years ago was spotted in Newfoundland, I wrote Senior Scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute Tim Standish to ask, On a practical basis, how did these earliest organisms even stay alive? He got back to me to say, Exactly. The bottom line is that life couldn’t have lasted all that long without a complete nitrogen cycle, carbon cycle and who knows what else. Those things are generally the domain of multiple organisms. I’ve yet to see an actual organism that can survive and reproduce in the absence of other life. The closest might be the C. elegans I worked with for years. You can grow them without other organisms in their Read More ›

A friend who watches these things notes that genomic medicine prof (and ID foe) Joshua Swamidass hasn’t been active at BioLogos recently and doesn’t seem to be on their speakers’ list. The flies on the wall whisper that it relates to his willingness to entertain the idea of separate creation of Adam and Eve. Recently, he took issue with BioLogos head Deb Haarsma’s comments Haarsma:At BioLogos, our views on human origins are centered on essential biblical teachings about human identity and origins. We join all Christians in affirming that humans are made in the image of God, that humans have an elevated place in the created order, and that humans have a unique relationship with God. To this extent we Read More ›

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately. Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays Have you ever engaged with a Darwinist on the Internet who did not hold his views with a religious fervor?  Neither have I.  The Darwinists who frequent these pages might object that their views fall within neither of Russell’s categories, politics and religion.  Nonsense.  Darwinian true believers are just that — believers.  Darwinism is the creation myth of metaphysical materialism, as has often been noted.  Yet the zeal with which Darwinian views are advanced is inversely proportional to Read More ›

From J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,Life’s distinctive is agency. In a nutshell, this is where the crisis of biology looms, because our prevailing modes of thinking about life—the triumphant confluence of mechanism, materialism, and atomism that has made the twentieth century a golden age for biology—do not deal well with the concept of agency: that ineffable striving of living things to become something. See also: Small group study guide: See also: Homeostasis: Life’s balancing act as a challenge to unguided evolution J. Scott Turner in the Chronicle of Higher Education — ID is asking the right questions! (2007)

From Astrobiology: Life on early Earth seems to have begun with a paradox: while life needs water as a solvent, the essential chemical backbones of early life-forming molecules fall apart in water. Our universal solvent, it turns out, can be extremely corrosive. … In recent years the solvent often put forward as the eligible alternative to water is formamide, a clear and moderately irritating liquid consisting of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Unlike water, it does not break down the long-chain molecules needed to form the nucleic acids and proteins that make up life’s key initial instruction manual, RNA. Meanwhile it also converts via other useful reactions into key compounds needed to make nucleic acids in the first place. Harvard Read More ›

If we evolve at all, we are transient by nature and cannot live in a transient state forever by definition. Never mind, from ScienceDaily: As Charles Darwin explained, natural selection results in the fittest individuals for a given environment surviving to breed and pass on their genes to the next generation. The more fruitful a trait is at promoting reproductive success, the stronger the selection for that trait will be. In theory, this should give rise to individuals with traits which prevent ageing as their genes could be passed on nearly continuously. Thus, despite the obvious facts to the contrary, from the point of evolution ageing should never have happened. This evolutionary contradiction has been debated and theorised on since Read More ›

A friend drew our attention to this: From a 2012 letter to Nature: Among egalitarian communitarians, science literacy and numeracy (as reflected in the composite scale Science literacy/numeracy) showed a small positive correlation with concern about climate change risks(r = 0.08, P = 0.03). In contrast, among hierarchical individualists, Science literacy/numeracy is negatively correlated with concern(r = −0.12, P = 0.03). Hence, polarization actually becomes larger,not smaller, as science literacy and numeracy increase (Fig. 2and Supplementary Table S4 and Fig. S3). As the contribution that culture makes to disagreement grows as science literacy and numeracy increase, it is not plausible to view cultural cognition as a heuristic substitute for the knowledge or capacities that SCT [Science Comprehension Thesis] views the Read More ›

From Ken Francis, journalism prof and author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, at New English Review: Even in works of fiction, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the barbarity humans are capable of. The protagonist in the novel, Raskolnikov, has a glass of vodka, but he’s not used to drinking alcohol. He then staggers to a park and immediately goes to sleep. He dreams that he is back in his childhood, aged seven, and as he is walking with his father, he sees a drunk trying to make his old horse pull a wagon full of people. When the crowd laugh at him struggling, the drunk peasant becomes furious and begins beating the horse so Read More ›