A writer encountered this all-too-common type of behavior recently and was, well, surprised. To see why it feels normal to many of us, it is helpful to understand a bit about Darwinism as a social phenomenon. Faithful readers of various vintages will, of course, remember University of Toronto evolutionary biologist Larry Moran, best known publicly through his blog Sandwalk. At his blog Southern Prose, writer John Leonard happened to come across him the other day trashing well-known chemist James Tour. That was back in 2014 but the internet is forever. Tour signed the Discovery Institute statement, “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” (2001), calling for more openness on discussion of evolution: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random Read More ›

I fear my ears are going to bleed the next time I hear some materialist bleating about how design is a science stopper. On second thought, maybe the conversation will go something like this: Materialist: But design is a science stopper. Barry: Dang. Isaac Newton said this: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” And because he believed that he was unable to: Discover the laws of motion Discover universal gravitation Make seminal contributions to the science of optics Prove Kepler’s theory of planetary motion Account for tides, the trajectory of comets, and the precession of the equinoxes  Build the first practical reflecting Read More ›

In a comment to a prior post frequent guest Seversky writes: If I tell you that I tried to drop a stone but it flew up in the air and disappeared out of sight, would you believe me? Probably not. Why not? Because every time you have dropped a stone it has fallen to the ground and, when you check with other people, they report the same experience. Mankind’s uniform and repeated experience over countless trillions of trials: Release stone; stone drops to ground. Never in a single one of those trials has it been: Release stone; stone flies up in the air. Sound reasoning Sev. Now, let’s try Sev’s formula with respect to an extraordinarily complex semiotic code: If Read More ›

They’ve heard lots of noise but also seen lots of foot-dragging, about making research reports available publicly for free: The board told Nature that given the journal’s subject matter — the assessment and dissemination of science — it felt it needed to be at the forefront of open publishing practices, which it says includes making bibliographic references freely available for analysis and reuse, and being open access and owned by the community. “It’s essential that this work be made openly available and that the communication of the research be managed by the community,” says Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Indiana University Bloomington and a resigning board member. Board members also wanted Elsevier to lower the journal’s article-publishing charges for Read More ›

And the science paper that claimed so has been retracted. A team from the Shanghai Institute of Technology sought to study whether accuracy made any difference to whether a post goes viral on social media. They cited a concern about “the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy”: “The paper found that even though individuals may prefer to read and share “quality information”, factors such as “information overload and limited attention” contributed to “a degradation of the market’s discriminative power”. In other words, Qiu and colleagues concluded, quality material and the rate at which it spreads across the internet “reveals a weak correlation”. Low quality material – fake news, complete rubbish – is just as likely to go viral as the Read More ›

If they did, that’ll be even less reason to think of them as some kind of “missing link”: What if, long before Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, the Neanderthals were humanity’s first artists? At any rate, this is the hypothesis raised by new dating of Spanish rock paintings published in February 2018 in the journal Science (link is external),indicating that the hands and animals depicted on the walls of three caves date back 65,000 years. This would mean that they were painted 25,000 years before the arrival of the first Homo sapiens in the Iberian peninsula. The estimated ages are based on uranium-thorium dating of the calcite layer that coats the frescoes. Could these be the work of Neanderthals? A Read More ›

Douglas Axe talks about a long-running dialogue he has had as a result of his 2016 book, Undeniable , where he can’t seem to get his dialogue partner to focus on what he is saying in his book and not what someone else is saying and what a fourth party is saying about them: But why address what Douglas Axe is saying when so many talking points against design in nature are tailored to what someone/anyone else is saying? We wish Axe all the luck. I think we’re addressing the same question, Hans. You’re absolutely right to focus on my treatment of the probability of organisms evolving by chance. Veering Off Course On the other hand, if you’re focusing on Read More ›

I’ve found that a lot of people, including biologists, aren’t aware of the evidence for cell-directed mutations. Therefore, I did a video describing the evidence for this. Video here: It’s kind of long, but I try to cover most of the objections. I’ll have a second video covering more about how to use this information to conceptualize mutational processes in the light of directed mutation, and use these ideas in research.