From Nicola Davis at the Guardian: “Erectus needed language when they were sailing to the island of Flores. They couldn’t have simply caught a ride on a floating log because then they would have been washed out to sea when they hit the current,” said Everett, presenting his thesis at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin. “They needed to be able to paddle. And if they paddled they needed to be able to say ‘paddle there’ or ‘don’t paddle.’ You need communication with symbols not just grunts.” It is unknown when language emerged among hominids; some argue that it is a feature only of our own species, Homo sapiens, which suggests a timing Read More ›

From a review of Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design by Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt, quoted at ENST: After reading Leisola and Witt’s book, it is clear that a paradigm shift is needed in order to explain the origin and diversity of life, from chemical and Darwinian evolution towards a design explanation. This raises the question of whether the research community is willing to follow the evidence and allow such a shift to take place. If not, there is a great risk that the judgement of future generations will be hard. However, such a change will not come easily, since ultimately our worldview is at stake. – Ola Hössjer, Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Stockholm University More. Read More ›

Specifically, the claim that global warming promotes violence. From the editors of Nature: Such retrospective analyses raise two questions related to cause and effect: did climate change alter the weather? And did the change in the weather provoke the conflict? Only a solid yes to both can justify bold statements that global warming promotes violence — and establishing this answer is difficult, if not impossible, in many cases. That hasn’t stopped such controversial claims being made. A decade ago, the United Nations went as far as to state that climate warming and desertification were one of the causes of the Darfur conflict in Sudan, which started in 2003 and led to the deaths of up to half a million people Read More ›

Earth’s history, our planet’s continents would have been devoid of all life except microbes. All of this changed with the origin of land plants from their pond scum relatives, greening the continents and creating habitats that animals would later invade. The timing of this episode has previously relied on the oldest fossil plants which are about 420 million years old. New research, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that these events actually occurred a hundred million years earlier, changing perceptions of the evolution of the Earth’s biosphere. The researchers were using molecular clock technology. Co-lead author Mark Puttick described the team’s approach to produce the timescale. He said: “The fossil record is too Read More ›

From Robert D. McFadden at the New York Times: Günter Blobel, a molecular biologist who was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering that proteins in any living cell have virtual ZIP codes that guide them to where they can help regulate body tissues, organs and chemistry, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 81. … The mystery Dr. Blobel confronted was how cells control their internal traffic, so that large proteins can get through tightly sealed membranes surrounding their birthplace and then travel to sites within the cell, or even through cell walls on intercellular trips through the body, where they can find specific worksites, called organelles (little organs) and penetrate them to perform assigned tasks. More. Read More ›

Further to Basener stands his ground at Skeptical Zone: Fisher’s Darwinian theorem is clearly false, here is Part 2: Defending the validity and significance of the new theorem “Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection With Mutations, Part II: Our Mutation-Selection Model by Basener and Sanford: In short, we agree with JF and ML that our paper does not show that deleterious mutations necessarily result in declining fitness. However, we have clearly falsified the converse claim, which is that genetic variance plus selection necessarily result in increasing fitness. If Joe F and Michael L write a response, we politely request that they provide quotes from our paper that support their claims that we argue that fisher’s FTNS “is the basis for all Read More ›

So labelled in the first vid below. The reader who sent this clip commented, “As I watched the video in amazement, the thought that those creatures are the result of random Darwinian processes didn’t even cross my mind. Whereas, the thought that God is one incredible artist did cross my mind!” At times, jellyfish almost seem like they are not part of the same world of life forms as ourselves. Not because they are boneless and brainless but because they just seem so different. It feels easier to understand an ant or a squid, even though they are very different. See also: Grand evolution theory for complex animals in ruins; fossil is, in fact, a jellyfish Sponges definitely oldest animals, Read More ›

Readers may remember Nick Matzke, especially for getting a publisher to abandon the Cornell University papers and for other contributions to Darwinism. A reader now writes to tell us that two Field Museum researchers have just published a critique of Nick Matzke’s (probable) most important contribution to research so far. “Conceptual and statistical problems with the DEC+J model of founder-event speciation and its comparison with DEC via model selection” by Richard H. Ree, Isabel Sanmartín, Journal of Biogeography. 2018 Abstract: Phylogenetic studies of geographic range evolution are increasingly using statistical model selection methods to choose among variants of the dispersal-extinction-cladogenesis (DEC) model, especially between DEC and DEC+J, a variant that emphasizes “jump dispersal,” or founder-event speciation, as a type of Read More ›

Yes, “astrovirology” is a new term, for the possibility that viruses originated in space. Suzan Mazur wonders at Oscillations: If viruses originated on Earth—which is NASA astrovirology chief Ken Stedman’s “best guess”—just why do we need a new field called astrovirology? That’s a very good question. If viruses originated elsewhere than Earth, the history of the origin of life would become very complex indeed. In her interview with Stedman, she asks about a recent article (paywall US$50.00) in Astrobiology, a publication with curious connections with NASA: My question is why didn’t you publish your astrovirology article independently? Why publish in a journal that despite its disclaimer is seen as a propaganda arm of NASA and “the Darwinian government”—as the late, Read More ›

In “contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model” From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (June, 2018), at Back(Re)Action: Yes, I know the headlines said the LHC would probe string theory, and the LHC would probe supersymmetry. The headlines were wrong. I am sorry they lied to you. But the LHC, despite not finding supersymmetry or extra dimensions or black holes or unparticles or what have you, has taught us an important lesson. That’s because it is clear now that the Higgs mass is not “natural”, in contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model. That the mass be natural means, roughly speaking, that getting masses from Read More ›

From Katyanna Quach at UK Register: A team within Google Brain – the web giant’s crack machine-learning research lab – has taught software to generate Wikipedia-style articles by summarizing information on web pages… to varying degrees of success. Glitches remain: We are still a very long way off from effective text summarization or generation. And while the Google Brain project is rather interesting, it would probably be unwise to use a system like this to automatically generate Wikipedia entries. For now, anyway. Also, since it relies on the popularity of the first ten websites on the internet for any particular topic, if those sites aren’t particularly credible, the resulting handiwork probably won’t be very accurate either. More. Google Brain is Read More ›

Are there long, gradual, pathways of functional intermediate structures, separated by only one or perhaps a few mutations, leading to every single species, and every single design and structure in all of biology? As we saw last time, this has been a fundamental claim and expectation of evolutionary theory which is at odds with the science.* If one mutation is rare, a lot of mutations are astronomically rare. For instance, if a particular mutation has a one-in-a-hundred million (one in 10^8) chance of occurring in a new individual, then a hundred such particular mutations have a one in 10^800 chance of occurring. It’s not going to happen. Let’s have a look at an example: nerve cells and their action potential signals. Read More ›

It’s too cool a concept for accuracy to matter. Further to “Remember the ‘developmental hourglass’? Well, not so fast,” Jonathan Wells writes to point out that vertebrate embryos more closely resemble each on another than do their adult forms only if one carefully cherry-picks the desired stages, which are long after the beginning of development. In Zombie Science, he writes, — In 2008, University of Chicago historian Robert Richards published a book defending Haeckel against charges of fraud. According to Richards, Haeckel’s drawings were no less accurate than those of his contemporaries, including the people who criticized him. 37 Cambridge historian Nick Hopwood also defended Haeckel against the fraud charge in a 2015 book that included several pages criticizing Icons of Evolution as Read More ›

Eh? We’re as surprised as Heman Mehta at Friendly Atheist: She talked about how having multiple authors (because “God” didn’t write it) led to “two different creation myths, three sets of Ten Commandments, and four contradictory versions of the Easter story.” She explained the possible forgeries, the mixing of literary genres, the possible mistranslations, and the numerous examples of “inside baseball” that made sense to the writers but not necessarily to people reading it today. More. Valerie Tarico has written hundreds of articles promoting atheism. We would have thought that her kind of thing was right up Salon’s alley. Here it is at Alternet: Why is the Bible so badly written? Mixed messages, repetition, bad fact-checking, awkward constructions, inconsistent voice, Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media, in support of Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design , including evolutionary creation: Deborah Haarsma, president of BioLogos, argued that the scientific theory of evolution is compatible with biblical creation. She made a clear distinction between Darwinistic evolutionism — which uses evolution to disprove God — and the scientific theory, which does not necessarily have theological implications. “Thus, evolution is not a worldview in opposition to God but a natural mechanism by which God providentially achieves his purposes,” Haarsma wrote. She presented the theory of accommodationism — that God spoke in scripture in a way that the Jews and Christians would understand at the time. God has revealed Himself in two books: Read More ›