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.

Here. Including a vignette about how Dr. Meyer owned a materialist who lied about Newton’s approach to science.

The main topic of a recent Science article is a claim that life on Earth was jumpstarted by a very early hit by a moon-size object that precipitated a metallic hailstorm. But while sketching that scenario, which wowed a 2018 conference in Atlanta in October, Robert F. Service also recounts some of the more interesting conflicts in origin of life studies: Arguments have sometimes been heated. At a 2008 meeting on the origin of life in Ventura, California, [biochemist Robert] Shapiro and John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, wound up shouting at each other. “Bob was very critical about published routes to prebiotic molecules,” Sutherland says. If the chemistry wasn’t ironclad, “he felt Read More ›

The BBC is now reporting on a trend in India to identity politics in science: The 106th Indian Science Congress, which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, runs from 3-7 January. The head of a southern Indian university cited an old Hindu text as proof that stem cell research was discovered in India thousands of years ago… Another scientist from a university in the southern state of Tamil Nadu told conference attendees that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were both wrong and that gravitational waves should be renamed “Narendra Modi Waves”. Dr KJ Krishnan reportedly said Newton failed to “understand gravitational repulsive forces” and Einstein’s theories were “misleading”.Soutik Biswas and others, “India scientists dismiss Einstein theories” at BBC The Read More ›