2017

Yesterday UD News reported on Kevin Laland’s comments about the controversies currently roiling in the materialist evolutionist community.  See The Royal Society Meeting: Keeping the lid on for now.  Larry Moran, prominent professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto and inveterate defender of materialist evolution, dropped by and commented: The problem with Kevin Laland and his colleagues is not that there’s no debate … it’s that there IS a furious debate and they’ve missed it entirely. The real ongoing debate is between adaptationists and those pluralists who accept Neutral Theory and the importance of random genetic drift. Dr. Moran is certainly correct.  There is a furious debate between old-school “adaptationists” and those, like Moran, who reject the “gene-centric neo-darwinist Read More ›

From evolutionary biologist Richard O. Prum at the New York Times: Are These Birds Too Sexy to Survive? Natural selection can’t explain this. Wow. Careers have been wrecked over such departures from dogma. Most biologists believe that these mechanisms always work in concert — that sex appeal is the sign of an objectively better mate, one with better genes or in better condition. But the wing songs of the club-winged manakin provide new insights that contradict this conventional wisdom. Instead of ensuring that organisms are on an inexorable path to self-improvement, mate choice can drive a species into what I call maladaptive decadence — a decline in survival and fecundity of the entire species. It may even lead to extinction. Read More ›

But admitting that the pot is boiling. From Kevin Laland in Trends in Ecology & Evolution: November 7–9, 2016 witnessed a joint discussion meeting of the Royal Society and the British Academy (the UK national academies for the sciences and social sciences, respectively) entitled ‘New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Biological, Philosophical and Social Science Perspectives’. The meeting, anticipated with a mix of feverish enthusiasm and dread, sold out months in advance, the eager audience perhaps expecting radical and traditional evolutionists to go toe to toe, rather than the constructive dialogue among biologists, social scientists, and researchers in the humanities that the academies advertised. One issue under discussion was whether or not the explanatory core of evolutionary biology requires updating in Read More ›

From an interview by Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, with archaeologist Ian Hodder, at HuffPost: Suzan Mazur: Templeton is known for its pairing of religion and science, inserting the divine in science. … I’m asking this because Templeton has come under fire for putting its fingers all over science from the investigation of the origin and evolution of life to space science. It’s perceived that the foundation is compromising the work of scientists and retarding science. Maurice Bloch, one of your own Çatal book authors has said pursuing a religion angle at Çatal is “a misleading wild goose chase” because humans only thought up religion 5,000 years ago at the earliest. Bloch says humans largely live in their reflective Read More ›

Open access here: … we have constrained the depositional age of Homo naledi to a period between 236 ka and 335 ka. A friend offers: “This means is that predictions of a 2-3 million year old age for Homo naledi were just plain wrong. They wanted it to be that age for evolutionary reasons, but the true age of the fossil is about 10 times younger.” (Face facts. Mother nature is a bitch.) From Mpho Raborife News24: “After the description of the new species in 2015, experts had predicted that the fossils should be around the age of these other primitive species. Instead, the fossils… are barely more than one-tenth that age,” Berger said. … Researchers and scientists had previously Read More ›

In my last post I pointed to Walter Meyers’ destruction of Barbara Forest’s three-step argument from (1) the success of science to (2) the superiority of methodological naturalism as a way of knowing about the physical world to (3) the superiority of metaphysical naturalism generally. To which Bob O’H responded: Weird. I find Myers’ argument really weak – it’s simply an argument from ignorance. What makes it weird is that Forrest’s argument is inductive, so there are better ways of constructing a counter-argument. Even weirder, Forrest’s argument for why methodological naturalism isn’t compatible with supernaturalism seems really weak: essentially she suggests that one would need more than one methodology and epistemology, and these should be compatible with each other. I Read More ›

Recently, Barry Arrington noted Walter Myers III’s response to at Barbara Forrest, on the question of whether “ the success of science compels acceptance of metaphysical naturalism.” Her name keeps turning up, actually. A friend writes to note her endorsement of a new book, by Guillermo Paz-y-Mino-C and Avelina Espinosa, Measuring the Evolution Controversy – A Numerical Analysis of Acceptance of Evolution at America’s Colleges and Universities (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017): The great contribution of ‘Measuring the Evolution Controversy’ is the rich content of data and analysis that asks detailed questions about the social, economic and political backgrounds of those who tend to reject evolution vs. those who accept evolution as science. Paz-y-Miño-C and Espinosa deftly analyze their data drawn Read More ›

From George Musser, author of Spooky Action at a Distance and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory, at Nautilus, noting Neuroscience is weighing in on physics’ biggest questions. The physicists and philosophers I asked to comment on collapse driven by information integration are broadly sympathetic, if only because the other options for explaining (or explaining away) collapse have their own failings. But they worry that Integrated Information Theory is poorly suited to the task. Angelo Bassi, a physicist at the University of Trieste who studies the foundations of quantum mechanics, says that information integration is too abstract a concept. Quantum mechanics deals in the gritty details of where particles are and how fast they’re moving. Relating the two is Read More ›

A thought from Raya Bidshahri at Singularity Hub: Today, what survives on Earth can be determined entirely by human beings. We can alter the genetics of almost any life form and potentially design entirely new ones. According to renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, “In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.” In their book Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans describe a world where evolution is no longer driven by natural processes. Instead, it is driven by human choices, through what they call unnatural selection and non-random mutation. As a result, we will see the emergence of an entirely new species of human beings. More. The sheer volume Read More ›

From Jeff Miller at Apologetics Press: As with inflation theory, the multiverse is untestable and unobservable, making it unscientific. Astrophysicist and Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University Adam Riess and astrophysicist Mario Livio, previously at the Space Telescope Science Institute, stated: “Even just mentioning the multiverse idea…raises the blood pressure of some physicists. The notion seems hard to swallow and harder to test—perhaps signifying the end of the classical scientific method as we know it. Historically this method has required that hypotheses should be directly testable by new experiments or observations.”1 But observation, direct testing, and experimentation are not possible with the multiverse. More. But then, objectivity is so sexist now. The multiverse is an alternative to science! See also: Read More ›

Looking for an odd piece of information in the middle of the night (unrelated to controversies around design in nature), I stumbled across a claim from The Skeptical Zone back in June 2015: Uncommon Descent is starving I was naturally curious, as I don’t recall anyone starving at the time. Or anything in particular, really. Post author Tom English seemed to think it odd that one of our authors, Eric Anderson, and Casey Luskin, then a podcaster with the Discovery Institute, had said nice things about UD. Building on that remarkable discovery, English announces, Anderson lives up to Jeff Shallit’s characterization of him, revealing that he is laughably far behind the curve. He’s not worth my time. And there’s something Read More ›

Responding to Walter Myers III at ENV, Barry Arrington brings up a name that rings a bell: Over at ENV Walter Myers III takes a sledgehammer to the argument that the success of science compels acceptance of metaphysical naturalism, this time as argued by Barbara Forrest More. There are over 18,000 posts here but I remember Forrest from the curious case of her wholly unjustified attack on fellow philosopher Frank Beckwith in a philosophy quarterly a few years back. The story, so far as we knew it, is this: Beckwith used to hang out with ID theorists. Forrest published a savage attempt at a takedown in Synthese, without apparently having paid much attention to what Beckwith actually said. He, naturally, Read More ›

Over at ENV Walter Myers III takes a sledgehammer to the argument that the success of science compels acceptance of metaphysical naturalism, this time as argued by Barbara Forest: [Forest] reasons, however, that based on the success of methodological naturalism, and the great knowledge it has contributed to the world, along with the simple dearth of evidence for the supernatural, that the “only reasonable metaphysical conclusion” from an empirical and logical perspective is philosophical naturalism.2 She sees methodological naturalism as procedural and epistemological, as opposed to philosophical naturalism which is a metaphysical position. The heart of Forrest’s argument is as follows: “Adopted in the sciences because of its explanatory and predictive success, methodological naturalism is the intellectual parent of modern Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Now scientists have reviewed all the evidence pointing towards an animal identity of the Weng’an fossils. Their findings have revealed that none of the characteristics previously used to define the fossils as animals are actually unique to animals alone, opening up the possibility for alternative identifications. Professor Philip Donoghue, another Bristol co-author, added: “Many proponents of animal affinity have argued that the Y-shaped junctions between the cells in the fossils are an important animal character, but this a feature common to many multicellular groups, including algae, that are very distant relatives of animals.” Dr Cunningham added: “It could be that the fossils belong to other groups, such as algae, and these possibilities need to be investigated carefully.” Despite Read More ›

Don’t watch this if you are completely committed to your local End of Science rent-a-riot: See also: Book: Computer simulations yield very minor results for Darwinian evolution Evolutionary Informatics is, despite the math stuff, quite readable. It’s a good look at one part of the real future of discussions around evolution: What can and can’t happen is a stark contrast with the Darwin of the textbooks, where anything can happen, given enough time. Follow UD News at Twitter!