2017

Lauren Frayer and Gokce Saracoglu report: At a news conference last month, Turkey’s education minister announced that new textbooks will be introduced in all primary and secondary schools, starting with grades 1, 5 and 9 this fall, and the rest next year. They will stop teaching evolution in grade 9, when it’s usually taught. “Evolutionary biology is best left to be taught at the university level,” Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz told reporters. “It’s a theory that requires a higher philosophical understanding than schoolchildren have.” That means students who don’t go on to university may never learn who Charles Darwin was. More. Huh? When Darwin’s publicists speak without thinking, they reveal their true concerns. The big problem, put starkly in the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In nature, plants engage in a never-ending battle to avoid being eaten. Unable to run away, plant species have evolved defenses to deter herbivores; they have spines, produce nasty chemicals, or grow tough leaves that are difficult to chew. For years, scientists have assumed that herbivores and plants are locked into evolutionary competition in which a plant evolves a defense, the herbivore evolves a workaround, and so on. New research led by the University of Utah challenges this paradigm of an evolutionary arms race. The study analyzed multiple species of Inga, a genus of tropical trees that produces defensive chemicals, and their various insect herbivores. The researchers found that closely-related plants evolved very different defensive traits. Additionally, their Read More ›

Laszlo Bencze, photographer and philosopher, asks us to reflect on the claim: I’ve just reread two marvelous books dealing with this topic. The first, Undeniable, by Douglas Axe explains in meticulous detail why the probabilities are so preposterously stacked against the creation of information by accident. He truly bends over backwards to make his point as simple as possible via analogy and easy math. The second, Genetic Entropy, is by John Sanford and details the work of many evolutionist geneticists who demonstrate that virtually all mutations are not only nearly neutral but also non selectable. As for positive mutations, if they exist at all, they exist in such small numbers as to not be capable of being shown on a Read More ›

From Phys.org: A commonly proposed solution to help diffuse the political and religious polarization surrounding controversial scientific issues like evolution or climate change is education. However, Carnegie Mellon University researchers found that the opposite is true: people’s beliefs about scientific topics that are associated with their political or religious identities actually become increasingly polarized with education, as measured by years in school, science classes, and science literacy. “A lot of science is generally accepted and trusted, but certain topics have become deeply polarizing. We wanted to find out what factors are related to this polarization, and it turns out the ‘deficit model’—which says the divisions are due to a lack of education or understanding—does not tell the whole story,” said Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: For many people today, post-modern science is more of a quest to express an identity as believer in science, irrespective of evidence. Cosmologist Paul Steinhardt got a sense of this in 2014, when he reported that some proponents of early rapid cosmic inflation “already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected.” It fulfilled their needs. In 2017, cosmologist George Ellis, long a foe of post-modern cosmology, summed it up: “Scientific theories have since the seventeenth century been held tight by an experimental leash. In the last twenty years or so, both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash.” We have so Read More ›

From Jay Richards at Evolution News & Views: On August 21, we Americans get to see a total solar eclipse. As I mentioned in a previous piece, we can see solar eclipses only because our planet, our Moon, and our Sun sometimes come together in a straight line in space. When the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, those in the Moon’s shadow see an eclipse. But the story doesn’t end there. A rare alignment of events allows Earthlings to witness not just solar eclipses, but what we might call perfect solar eclipses. Our Moon just barely covers the Sun’s bright photosphere. Such an eclipse depends on just the right sizes, shapes, and relative distances of the Sun, Moon, Read More ›

Some friends and I drove up to Casper, which was in the exact center of the zone of totality of the eclipse.  The experience was indescribably spectacular.  It was even worth enduring the worst traffic jam of my life in which the normal four-hour drive back to Denver was stretched to ten hours. This morning I learned that Neil deGrasse Tyson‏ tweeted The divided United States of America will unite today, sharing a cosmic event predicted by the methods and tools of science. Most commenters have interpreted this as a dig at climate alarmism skeptics.  So, let’s play “Spot the Equivocation”! A.  The “methods and tools of science” used to predict the eclipse have been extremely well understood for hundreds Read More ›

My latest ‘Critic’s Corner’ post is now up. This one features the work of ID critic Sahotra Sarkar. Sarkar is one of the more sophisticated critics of ID so his work is worth engaging with. I have responded to some of his arguments in a previous post and plan to do more in the future:                          Critic’s Corner: Sahotra Sarkar     

Integrative biologist Kevin Padian reviews Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution by Jonathan B. Losos at Nature. He likes it but with quite a few qualifications: Early in Jonathan Losos’s Improbable Destinies, the narrative goes off the rails. Losos sets up the problem of historical contingency in evolution by repeating the story that 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, an asteroid smacked into Earth, killing off the dinosaurs and paving the way for mammalian success. Had the asteroid missed, he writes, dinosaurs would have continued their domination and we humans might never have evolved. The problem is much evidence has come to light in recent years that he dinosaurs were declining anyway and the Read More ›

From Meera Nanda, author of Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, at Butterflies and Wheels: Science studies, as I said, is not an ordinary academic discipline. It constitutes the beating heart of postmodernism, for it aims to “deconstruct” natural science, the very core of a secular and modern worldview. Since its inception in the 1970s, the discipline has produced a sizeable body of work that purports to show that not just the agenda, but even the content of theories of natural sciences is “socially constructed.” All knowledge, in different cultures, or different historical times – regardless of whether it is true or false, rational or irrational, successful or not in producing reliable knowledge – Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Every gene in (almost) every cell of the body is present in two variants — so called alleles: one is deriving from the mother, the other one from the father. In most cases both alleles are active and transcribed by the cells into an RNA message. However, for a few genes, only one allele is expressed, while the other one is silenced. The decision whether the maternal or the paternal version is shut down occurs early in embryonic development — one reason, why for long it was thought that the pattern of active alleles is nearly homogeneous in the various tissues of the organism. The new study (DOI:10.7554/eLife.25125), where CeMM PhD Student Daniel Andergassen is first author (now Read More ›

An excerpt at ScienceFriday from Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution by zoologist Jonathan B. Losos: Ironically, it was research on the birds bearing Darwin’s name—the Galápagos finches—that drove the dagger through the heart of the idea that evolution is always slow. Like the peppered moth, Darwin’s finches have become one of the poster-child examples of evolution, and not just because of their name and history. Rather, much of their fame stems from the extraordinary forty-year research program of Princeton biologists Rosemary and Peter Grant. Starting in 1973, the Grants spent several months each year on the small, crater-shaped Galápageian island of Daphne Major. Their goal was to study the population of the medium ground finch (so named Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have described a new species of brittle star, which are closely related to starfish, and showed how these sea creatures evolved in response to the rise of shell-crushing predators during the late Palaeozoic Era. The results, reported in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, also suggest that brittle stars evolved new traits before the largest mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and not after, as was the case with many other forms of life. A fossilised ‘meadow’ of dancing brittle stars — frozen in time in the very spot that they lived — was found in Western Australia and dates from 275 million years ago. It contains several remarkably preserved ‘archaic’ brittle stars, a newly-described genus and species Read More ›

From English prof Lisa Emerson’s publisher: In The Forgotten Tribe: Scientists as Writers, Lisa Emerson offers an important corrective to the view that scientists are “poor writers, unnecessarily opaque, not interested in writing, and in need of remediation.” She argues that scientists are among “the most sophisticated and flexible writers in the academy, often writing for a wider range of audiences (their immediate disciplinary peers, peers in adjacent fields, a broad scientific audience, industry, and a range of public audiences including social media) than most other faculty.” Moreover, she notes, the often collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of their work results in writing practices that “may be more socially complex, and require more articulation, mediation, and interpersonal communication, and more use Read More ›

Make it look like you are working… From Time and Date, how much eclipse you can see from where you live and the date of the next eclipse (moon). Here’s a compendium of historical eclipse information from LiveScience, including: One of the greatest eclipse observers in history was the Persian scholar Ibn al-Haytham, also known by the Latinized version of his name, Alhazen. Born in Basra, in what in now Iraq, Al-Haytham spent most of his life in the Egyptian city of Cairo during the Fatimid Caliphate in the 11th century A.D. His great invention was named “Al-Bayt al-Muthlim” in Arabic (which translates to “the dark room” in English) — the earliest known “camera obscura,” where a bright external image, such Read More ›