Once again, when the secular ruling elite of the science establishment can’t make a convincing case on the merits they try to get their conclusions mandated by judicial fiat. US Supreme Court appears divided over global warming
Chromosomal sex determination in the platypus discovered to be a combination of mammal and bird systems. The resemblance to birds is now more than just superficial. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6568
It’s funny how Paul Myers, Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, et al say that evolution isn’t about religion yet you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one of their rants on religion. But that’s not the point of this article.
I have a problem with these people in that they arbitrarily limit what science can potentially explain. The so called supernatural remains supernatural only as long as there’s no metric by which to measure it. Once a metric is discovered the supernatural becomes the natural.
Paul quotes someone on the virgin birth of Christ saying that it defies everything science has revealed in regard to mammalian reproduction. This is utter dreck. Even (especially!) Myers should know that meiosis is a two stage process wherein the first stage results in the production of two perfectly viable diploid cells. The second stage of meiosis then splits these two cells into four haploid gametes. Interrupting the process at the completion of the first stage results in parthenogenesis. Indeed, there are number of organisms in nature that have lost the second stage of meiosis and now reproduce parthenogenetically. See here for more detail. Moreover, it has also been scientifically established that an XX genome can produce phenotypical male offspring. Morever, while all observed XX males in humans are sterile, pathenogenetic populations can still reproduce sexually if sexual reproduction still exists in the species (Da Vinci Code fans will be happy to know this). While it was widely believed that mammals had completely lost the ability for parthenogenetic reproduction, in 2004 researchers in Tokyo managed to create viable parthenogenetic mice. So Paul, science now reveals that the virgin birth of a human male is quite possible. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. What I want to know now is whether ignorance or dishonesty explains why you’d quote someone who claims the virgin birth of Christ defies everything we know about mammalian reproduction. Neither explanation becomes you of course and it gives me immeasurable delight to put you in the proverbial position of choosing between a rock and a hard place. 😆 Read More ›
Richard T. Hughes (whose accomplishments other than being an ATBC poster child remain unknown) writes on religiosity and intelligence in response to Dembski:
Already been done, Bill:
http://www.answers.com/topic/religiosity-and-intelligence
http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/Jesus/Intelligence%20&%20religion.htm
Numerous studies and meta-studies show that theistic belief is negatively correlated with IQ. I am fascinated by the causation aspect. Thick because they’re fundies? Fundies ’cause they’re thick. Shallow end of the gene pool? Does anyone have a hypothesis?
Hey Dick (I trust you don’t mind if I call you that as long as I capitalize it), did you know that shoe size correlates with level of education? The larger your shoe size the more education you’ve likely had. Is that because big feet cause big brains? Or because big brains cause big feet? Duh.
Anyhow, the primary point I wanted to make wasn’t that mixing idiots and loose correlations result in loose idiotic conclusions. That was a tertiary point. Read More ›
Received from a dear childhood friend and fellow Marine. Farewell
1984: Semi-Meiosis as an Evolutionary Mechanism 1993: The Blind Alley 1998: Evolution as a Self-Limiting Process 2000: An Evolutionary Manifesto 2000: Ontogeny, Phylogeny and the Origin of Biological Information 2003: Do We Have an Evolutionary Theory? 2004: Julian Huxley’s Confession 2004: Is Evolution Finished? 2005: A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis 2006: Darwinism as Delusion: A Response to Richard Dawkins
On September 16th, 2006 uncommondescent.com was mysteriously dropped from indexing by google.com. Deindexing means that any google search would never return a hit to uncommondescent.com. We became blogona non grata at google. We were never given a reason beyond we were in violation of webmaster guidelines. Not knowing how, we tried everything we could think of to fix it, including the new WordPress Theme “Cutline”, a sitemap, and shutting down an unauthorized mirror site (antievolution.org/buud). We know that google reevaluated us after all this (it’s in the webmaster report) and we were still not reindexed. The next automatic cycle for evaluations was coming up in December but we had nothing new to try so we held out little hope. Then Read More ›
The following was brought to my attention as an example of how a lot of bad science passes the so-called peer review process at well respected publications like Nature. It’s specifically about pencil-whipped temperature data in global warming but is more broadly about a flawed peer review process in general. Especially flawed when the paper under review is supportive of consensus science like Global Warming or Neo-Darwinian Evolution. Can you say “rubber stamp”? FLAWED NATURE PAPER ON GLOBAL WARMING Douglas J. Keenan, November 2006
From the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works… Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming – Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics Washington DC – One of the most decorated French geophysicists has converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics. Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific “consensus” on climate alarmism. Claude Allegre, a former government official and an active member of France’s Socialist Party, wrote an editorial on Read More ›
A news brief in Scientific American (subscriber only, no link) alerted me to the following article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060601091313.htm Summarized: Core sediments retrieved by three icebreakers recently analyzed reveal the following: -North Pole’s temperature 55 million years ago: 23C/73F (today it is -20C/-4F) -Concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere 55mya was 2000 ppm (today it is 380 ppm) -Global average temperature 55mya under above conditions was 5C/9F degrees C higher than today (in Sciam News Brief only, Science Daily says tropics remained liveable). Obviously, the earth recovered, if it was even “harmed”. I post this because so-called global warming is blamed on human activities by the worst kind of consensus pseudoscience (Darwinian evolution is consensus pseudoscience as well) and is projected Read More ›
We at Uncommon Descent have in the past talked about NAS scientist Philip Skell’s observation that evolutionary biology contributes little if anything to experimental biology. Just recently Professor Skell placed a phone call to Professor John A. Davison and they had a long conversation the details of which were not disclosed to me. John invited Philip to participate here at Uncommon Descent and I’d like to take this opportunity to say that all of us here would like to echo John’s invitation. Professor Skell, if you’re reading this, we’d love to hear from you.
To read Professor Skell’s article and response in The Scientist read on… Read More ›
Scientist says: Science is the discovery of how things in the natural world work. Engineering is the practical application of scientific discovery. Engineer says: Engineering is the practical application of scientific discovery. Scientific discovery is simply reverse engineering. So you see, it’s really all engineering. You either take something that already exists and reverse engineer it (that’s science) or you take the knowledge gained from reverse engineering and create something that doesn’t already exist with it.
The article on voles reminds me of an ongoing and more general mystery. How are instincts encoded in DNA? It’s a given that a bird egg contains all sorts of instructions about how to go about building nests, flying, preening, perching, predator avoidance, song, what to eat and how to find it, what not to eat, and etcetera. I’ve raised many birds from eggs and very young hatchlings and without exception they all appear to be conceived with a built-in operating and maintenance manual for their bodies that distinguishes them from other bird species and are identical with others of their own species. They do this with no exposure whatsoever to other members of their species and indeed without exposure Read More ›
Commenter DK asks:
What is the official ID position on junk DNA? Has anyone proposed that it might be a mechanism to cause wholesale change in other parts of the DNA?
I thought this subject might be good for its own discusson thread so here it is. I don’t believe ID has any more “official” position on it than NDE does. It is largely regions of DNA with no known function and that isn’t to say it has no function at all. IDists tend to say there is a lot of function waiting to be discovered in it under the rubric that design is less wasteful than chance processes. The NDE position tends more toward much of it being detritus of an evolution driven by chance processes. Read More ›
More complicated than previously thought… gee, ya think? 😛 A new review in Science by Lemons and McGinnis that surveys Hox gene clusters in different lineages shows that the control of the Hox genes is much, much more complicated than previously thought. Source