From Jonathan Wells at ENST: … Dr. Lents just published his own book titled Human Errors, in which he repeats on page 5 his claim that the human eye is badly designed because the photoreceptor cells “appear to be installed backward.” Over thirty years ago, Richard Dawkins had used this claim as an argument for Darwinian evolution in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker. Since then the argument has been repeated by evolutionary biologists George Williams, Kenneth R. Miller, Douglas Futuyma, and Jerry Coyne, among others. But even before Dawkins published his claim in 1986, scientists writing in standard textbooks on eye physiology had shown why the “backwards retina” is functionally better than its opposite. Those scientists and textbooks included Read More ›

From Douglas E. Soltis, Michael J. Moore, Emily B. Sessa, Stephen A. Smith, and Pamela S. Soltis, Using and navigating the plant tree of life, at Amerian Journal of Botany 7 April 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.1071 (open access) : The “tree of life” has become a metaphor for the interconnectivity and breadth of all life on Earth. It also has come to symbolize the broad investigation of biodiversity, including both the reconstruction of phylogeny and the numerous downstream analyses that are possible with a firm phylogenetic underpinning. … Accompanying these exciting advances are equally significant challenges that remain for the construction of a better and more complete picture of the evolution of plant lineages. In addition to the computational challenges of larger Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It’s very difficult to determine when, how and why human language began. While fossil primates provide important clues about human evolution, the sounds they made and the soft tissue involved in making those sounds weren’t preserved. But chimpanzees — one of our closest living relatives — provide important points of comparison for inferring the sorts of sounds our early ancestors may have made. During the 175th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, being held May 7-11, 2018, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Michael Wilson, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, will present his group’s work searching for similarities between the vocal communications of chimpanzees and humans. “Chimpanzees give a range of different calls: hoots, pant-hoots, pant-grunts, pant-barks, Read More ›

Sometimes, one of UD’s frequent objectors makes an inadvertently telling objection that deserves highlighting in order to publicly document what we are up against. In this case, AK has provided us with TWO, as headlined. Accordingly, over the past several days, I responded in the Skeptical Review thread. This morning, on seeing doubling down, I have further responded and I now highlight for all to see: KF, 125: >> . . . let us go back to your context from 64 above: “the ID technique [–> that’s already a Big Lie agit prop tactic and slander] that you excel at called the Gish Gallop [–> diagnostic, terrible sign], made famous by Duane Gish and others [–> root-slander]” and again at Read More ›

From John Ellis at PJ Media: The belief that inanimate objects, like rocks and tableware, contain consciousness is quickly picking up steam among respected philosophers and scientists. … The problem for these “credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists” who take panpsychist seriously is, as Goldhill points out, “The materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from physical matter. It’s unclear, though, exactly how this could work.” She cites philosophy professor David Chalmers who noted, “It’s very hard to get consciousness out of non-consciousness.” While this is an academic discussion on one level, there is another level that directly affects our ethics. The Judeo-Christian worldview and ethics that undergird Western society have as part of their core anthropology the recognition of Read More ›

Proteins are a problem for theories of spontaneous origins for many reasons. They consist of dozens, or often hundreds, or even thousands of amino acids in a linear sequence, and while many different sequences will do the job, that number is tiny compared to the total number of sequences that are possible. It is a proverbial needle-in-the-haystack problem, far beyond the reach of blind searches. To make matters worse, many proteins are overlapping, with portions of their genes occupying the same region of DNA. The same set of mutations would have to result in not one, but two proteins, making the search problem that much more tricky. Furthermore, many proteins perform multiple functions. Random mutations somehow would have to find Read More ›

From David Nguyen at Think Tank Learning: From [] at : More. See also: Science news fact check: Was a new organ really discovered?

And we learn some other things as well. From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations, an interview with Craig James Hogan, affiliated with Fermilab: Suzan Mazur: Thank you. There is criticism that the holographic investigation has been going on for almost 20 years, kicked off by Juan Maldacena and that there’s very little evidence so far, despite the bold headlines. That at some point in scientific investigations if the data doesn’t correlate with the experiment as modeled, it’s time to move on. I gather you don’t share that perspective. You’ve said you’re only at the beginning of the investigation. Do you see this as an emerging field like origin of life, spawning an increasing number of virtual research hubs in various parts Read More ›

From Mante Nieuwland at Retraction Watch: On April 10th 2018, eLife published the first large-scale direct replication study in the field of cognitive neuroscience, co-authored by 22 colleagues and myself. This publication detailed a replication effort that spanned 9 laboratories and attempted to replicate a high-impact 2005 publication in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience from DeLong, Urbach and Kutas (from hereon referred to as DUK05). People often ask why our replication study was not published in Nature Neuroscience, especially in light of its recent public commitments to replication research (here and here). It certainly wasn’t for our lack of trying. In this post, I offer a behind-the-scenes account of what happened when we tried to replicate DUK05 and submitted our Read More ›

From Marina Koren at the Atlantic: As recently as January of this year, Tarter suggested a rebranding for seti. “Seti is not the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We can’t define intelligence, and we sure as hell don’t know how to detect it remotely,” she said. Seti “is searching for evidence of someone else’s technology. We use technology as a proxy for intelligence.” Call it sett instead, she said. NASA does not, we are told, recognize SETI as part of astrobiology. Call that prejudice if you like, or call it an unwillingness to be seen spending tax money on a search for little green men when attested phenomena out there await exploration. … With the House bill on the table, Tarter says Read More ›

From science historian James Gleick at the New York Times, reviewing astrophysicist Adam Becker’s What Is Real?: So quantum physics — quite unlike any other realm of science — has acquired its own metaphysics, a shadow discipline tagging along like the tail of a comet. You can think of it as an “ideological superstructure” (Heisenberg’s phrase). This field is called quantum foundations, which is inadvertently ironic, because the point is that precisely where you would expect foundations you instead find quicksand. … The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics When scientists search for meaning in quantum physics, they may be straying into a no-man’s-land between philosophy and religion. But they can’t help themselves. They’re only human. “If you Read More ›

Here’s a recent paper dealing with the deadly and devastating hurricane Harvey which hit the Gulf last year. I haven’t looked at very much of the paper; however, their basic take on it is that the ferocious effects of Harvey can be explained by the OHC (Ocean Heat Content) of the Gulf’s surface waters. And, of course, they want to blame ‘global warming’ (oh heavens, I should have said “climate change”). You know, more CO2 in the upper atmosphere reflects escaping heat energy back onto the ocean’s surface, causing more water vapor–the real culprit in ‘global warming.’ So, I simply invite you to look at Figure 1 (p 36). You will notice that the OHC calculated for ocean depths between Read More ›

At Phys.Org there’s a press release that talks about how “information” can be “hidden” in plain text. They use some kind of ‘perturbation’ method, which, I suspect is linked to some kind of set of statistics. Here’s what they say: Computer scientists at Columbia Engineering have invented FontCode, a new way to embed hidden information in ordinary text by imperceptibly changing, or perturbing, the shapes of fonts in text. FontCode creates font perturbations, using them to encode a message that can later be decoded to recover the message. . . . “While there are obvious applications for espionage, we think FontCode has even more practical uses for companies wanting to prevent document tampering or protect copyrights, and for retailers and Read More ›

From Nathan H. Lents at Skeptic: Even if ID offered intellectual gains over creationism through the principle of irreducible complexity, and a focus on observations rather than biblical scripture, it did little to explain how poor design could be so rampant in creatures that were specifically designed by an intelligent force. Therefore, glitches in nature, particularly in the human body, call out for an explanation. Evolution usually provides elegant and deeply informative explanations. What are the explanations provided by ID? My book documents scores of these “human errors,” but I would love to know what intelligent design supporters say about these five in particular. His book is Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes: Read More ›

From Emily Conover at ScienceNews, describing the work of physicist Nicholas Gisin: Gisin — known for his work on the foundations and applications of quantum mechanics — takes issue with real numbers that consist of a never-ending string of digits with no discernable pattern and that can’t be calculated by a computer. Such numbers (for example, 1.9801545341073… and so on) contain an infinite amount of information: You could imagine encoding in those digits the answers to every fathomable question in the English language — and more. But to represent the world, real numbers shouldn’t contain unlimited information, Gisin says, because, “in a finite volume of space you will never have an infinite amount of information.” Instead, Gisin argues March 19 Read More ›