2018

From David Klinghoffer at ENST: The newly launched podcast Great Minds with Michael Medved goes where few other podcasts would dare to tread. On a new episode, Medved talks with historian Richard Weikart about the clear intellectual and genealogical links between the thought of Charles Darwin and that of Adolf Hitler. Weikart, a meticulous scholar, traces the connection in his book From Darwin to Hitler, demonstrating that Darwin’s theory is tainted at its origins. This is an aspect of history that most historians won’t tell you about. It’s timely for me because over the weekend my family went to see Darkest Hour, about the crucial moment of decision for Great Britain under Winston Churchill — whether to appease Hitler and Read More ›

From David Snoke at the Christian Scientific Society: On Friday night, Mike Keas and I debated whether and how much human sin could be seen as a reason for animal death. We agreed on many things, for example, that the age of the earth is billions of years, that animals died before Adam and Eve lived, that predatory animals are not “evil” in a moral sense, and that they glorify God. Much of the debate revolved around the interpretation of Romans 8:18-25. Mike feels that the “groaning,” “bondage,” and “corruption” in this passage clearly show a negative aspect placed on creation due to human sin. In his view, before people came along, predatory animals were not “evil” and in fact Read More ›

A friend writes to say, “Some noted medieval theologians were quite wiling to consider that God had created other inhabited worlds. They saw no logical or scientific difficulty in assuming that such worlds might indeed exist.” Our friend cites in evidence: – When Tempier [d. 1279] declared that the omnipotent God could create a vacuum if he so desired, Tempier insisted that God could break any Aristotelian law. God could create life on other worlds if he wished. There could be thousands of other Earths, each teeming with creatures; it was certainly within God’s power, whether Aristotle agrees or not. – Nicholas of Cusa [1401 – 1464] was bold enough to say that God must have done so. The regions Read More ›

From Rafi Letzter at LiveScience: According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals. That snippet of code is still very much alive in humans’ brains today, where it does the very viral task of packaging up genetic information and sending it from nerve cells to their neighbors in little capsules that look a whole lot like viruses themselves. And these little packages of information might be critical elements of how nerves communicate and reorganize over time — tasks thought to be necessary for higher-order thinking, the researchers said. Though it may sound surprising that bits of human genetic code come from viruses, it’s Read More ›

From Brian Owens at Nature: More than 98% of entomology papers contain so little species information on the insects being studied that they are essentially impossible to replicate, according to a survey of more than 550 articles published in 2016. aurence Packer, an entomologist at York University in Toronto, Canada, and his colleagues examined every paper published in 2016 in nine major entomology journals published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Entomological Society, the Entomological Society of America and the Entomological Society of Canada. Less than 2% of the papers included three key pieces of information: a description of how an insect was identified; evidence that biological samples had been documented and placed in a repository; and a reference to a Read More ›

From Lisa Grossman at ScienceNews: Not all fundamental forces are created equal. An alternate universe that lacks the weak nuclear force — one of the four fundamental forces that govern all matter in our universe — could still form galaxies, stars, planets and perhaps life, according to calculations published online January 18 at arXiv.org. Researchers have done calculations to that effect. Why? “People talk about universes like they’re very fine-tuned; if you changed things just a little bit, life would die,” Adams says. But “the universe and stars have a lot more pathways to success.” It soon becomes clear that this is a pitch for a multiverse: The paper does not help figure out if the multiverse is real, though. Read More ›

Not your high school science teacher’s evolution. From Genome Web: A Dutch-led team of researchers examined blood samples obtained from individuals whose mothers were pregnant with them during the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944 to 1945, toward the end of World War II, and from their siblings who were born either before the six-month famine or after, as they report in Science Advances. This cohort of individuals whose mothers were pregnant during the famine has been shown to have higher rates of obesity, dyslipidemia, diabetes, and schizophrenia, the researchers note. More. Carl Zimmer reports at New York Times: “How on earth can your body remember the environment it was exposed to in the womb — and remember that decades later?” Read More ›

While we’re on a roll on AI and its import at the hands of evolutionary materialistic scientism dressed in a lab coat, BA77 has linked a comic strip — see here (main site here; cf. twist on The Cave currently top of the heap) — that is at first funny then soberingly serious: As in, where do you think these issues fit in: And perhaps Engineer Derek Smith’s model has a few points to ponder as we think about the higher order, supervisory controller in the cybernetic loop: Food for thought. END PS: Could I put up for reflection the notion that the human soul is at the interface of spirit and body, including Brain and CNS?

Sometimes a comment is too good to leave there in the combox. So: LM, 2 in the AI intelligent agency thread: >>It brought to mind the evolution of AI. It all began with lightning (electrons) striking rocks (silicon) for billions of years (might a nearby warm pond be helpful?) until now we have the delicate motions of electrons thru silicon that we know of as computers. The software is the result of random noise in the bits and bytes of the operating system (we’re still working out how that originated. Any day now!) that were duplicated as a separate file and eventually, driven by natural selection, resulting in the wonderful programs we enjoy today. At the furious rate of evolution Read More ›

From philosopher Edward Feser at Claremont Review of Books, reviewing Daniel Dennett’s Bacteria to Bach and Back: How do you get blood from a stone? Easy. Start by redefining “blood” to mean “a variety of stone.” Next, maintaining as straight a face as possible, dramatically expound upon some trivial respect in which stone is similar to blood. For example, describe how, when a red stone is pulverized and stirred into water, the resulting mixture looks sort of like blood. Condescendingly roll your eyes at your incredulous listener’s insistence that there are other and more important respects in which stone and blood are dissimilar. Accuse him of obscurantism and bad faith. Finally, wax erudite about the latest research in mineralogy, insinuating Read More ›

Readers may recall A. N. Wilson’s book, Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker. Jonathan Wells reviews it at Washington Times. He notes the historical errors but says, Mistakes in historical details, however, are not what infuriated Darwin’s defenders. The problem is Mr. Wilson’s irreverent attitude toward Darwin’s theory of evolution. Mr. Wilson points out that there is a difference between minor changes within existing species (“microevolution”) and the origin of new species, organs, and body plans (“macroevolution”). (One hostile reviewer claimed that this distinction is merely “a strategy of the modern creationists,” but it actually originated with evolutionary biologist Yuri Filipchenko soon after 1900.) … So Darwinian evolution is not so much a scientific theory as it is a secular creation myth. Read More ›

Good project. Hope differs from hype by more than a single letter. From Brian Wang at ScienceNews: Babak Saif and Lee Feinberg at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have shown for the first time that they can dynamically detect subatomic- or picometer-sized distortions — changes that are far smaller than an atom — across a five-foot segmented telescope mirror and its support structure. Collaborating with Perry Greenfield at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the team now plans to use a next-generation tool and thermal test chamber to further refine their measurements. … To find life, these observatories would have to gather and focus enough light to distinguish the planet’s light from that of its much Read More ›

From Victoria Gill at BBC News: New Caledonian crows spontaneously make hooks out of plant material, using them to “fish” for grubs and spiders. Experiments have now revealed that these hooked tools are 10 times faster at retrieving a snack than the alternative tool – a simple twig. Lead researcher on the crows study, Prof Christian Rutz, told BBC News: “[Our invention of fish hooks] was incredibly recent – only 1,000 generations ago, which is an eye-blink in evolutionary terms. “When you think that we went in that 1,000 generations from crafting fish hooks to building space shuttles – that’s absolutely mind-boggling.” More. The New Caledonian crow is smart, no doubt about it. Smarter than apes about some types of Read More ›

In his well-known work, No Free Lunch, p. 11, ID Researcher William A Dembski has illustrated the search challenge concept in terms of an arrow hitting a target amidst a reference class of possibilities. In so doing, he reaches back to the statistical mechanical and mathematical concept of a phase space “cut down” to address configurations only (leaving out momentum), aka state space.  He then goes on to speak in terms of probabilities, observing: >>. . . in determining whether an event is sufficiently improbable or complex to implicate design, the relevant probability is not that of the event [= E] itself. In the archery example, that probability corresponds to the size of the arrowhead point in relation to the Read More ›

From Yu Liu and David Sumpter at ArXiv: Spontaneous emergence of self-replication in chemical reaction systems Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously proposed mathematical models either supply an explicit framework for a minimal living system or only consider catalyzed reactions, and thus fail to provide a comprehensive theory. We set up a general model for chemical reaction systems that properly accounts for energetics, kinetics and the conservation law. We find that (1) some systems are collectively-catalytic where reactants are transformed into end products with the assistance of intermediates (as in the citric Read More ›