Dave S.

A tough choice for teh environmentalist whackos if I ever saw one. Wind Turbines Give Bats the “Bends,” Study Finds Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News August 25, 2008 Wind turbines can kill bats without touching them by causing a bends-like condition due to rapidly dropping air pressure, new research suggests. Scientists aren’t sure why, but bats are attracted to the turbines, which often stand 300 feet (90 meters) high and sport 200-foot (60-meter) blades. The mammals’ curiosity can result in lethal blows by the rotors, which spin at a rate of about 160 miles (260 kilometers) per hour. But scientist Erin Baerwald and colleagues report that only about half of the bat corpses they found near Alberta, Canada, turbine Read More ›

Professor Antony Flew writes:

The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’).

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I made the following response in the commentary on another thread. Because some people thought it deserved to become an article in its own right… here it is.

Also with an apology to Jonathan Wells for calling him a “Moonie”. I had no idea it was considered by many to be derogatory. I thought it was merely a neutral descriptive like “Jehovah” or “Mormon” or “Amish”.

Ever wonder what Science Bloggers do when they’re not science blogging? Wonder no longer. http://trends.google.com/websites?q=scienceblogs.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 Top Five Things Science Blog Readers Search For: 1. scotch tape mosquito bites 2. kate beckinsale 3. sponge bob 4. bruce lee 5. britney spears Interesting (if you’re a 12 year old). Top Five Blogs Science Blog Readers Also Visit 1. richarddawkins.net 2. catholicleague.org 3. rememberthycreator.com 4. dirtgetswet.com 5. politicalirony.com Yup. All science.

I see all these scientists and science teachers in this video proclaiming they see “God’s Hand” in the universe all day long then in the same breath they say design detection is bogus. So what exactly do they “see” that convinces them that God’s hand is all over the place? Obviously it isn’t rational evidence that can weighed, measured, or otherwise rationally evaulated because that would be science and furthermore it would be the science behind intelligent design. Personally I think these people are either liars who are not convinced they see God all over the place or they are being truthful in becoming convinced of things with no rational evidence which technically means they are hallucinating and probably shouldn’t Read More ›

The paper whose abstract lies below the fold has been cited as supportive of intelligent design here by my friend Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute . I’m afraid I disagree with Casey’s analysis but I don’t have access to the full paper and would welcome review of my take on it from someone with access and expertise in virology. I’ve never agreed that ID, per se, predicts that “junk DNA” isn’t really junk. That’s a prediction based on young earth creationism. If an omnipotent designer created a perfect human genome 6,000 years ago then we might reasonably expect most of it today would still be functional. Design detection in and of itself does not predict any specific state of perfection or decay in the design. Thus the common assertion that “ID” predicts junk DNA will have function is not strictly an ID prediction at all but rather a young earth creation science prediction. Failure to make the origin of the predictions clear in these cases is a big reason why we keep getting slapped down in courts. It’s too transparent that design detection alone doesn’t predict things about junk DNA. You have to add in some young earth creationism to get there.

I blogged on this almost a year ago here: Front loading passes peer review in Cell Cycle Cell Cycle has a policy of making articles availabe without subscription after one year passes from initial publication. It’s been just over a year. The full paper is at: http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/cc/article/shermanCC6-15.pdf

Nick Matzke’s problematic evolutionary narrative of the Type Three Secretory System (TTSS) into the bacterial flagellum quickly made it into a peer reviewed journal while the response from the ID camp took two years longer. Our position, which I mentioned several times in the past, was that the flagellum preceded the TTSS in nature and thus the TTSS represents a devolution from flagella rather than flagella being evolved from a TTSS. Nick had it ass-backward. No surprise there. Devolution is much easier than evolution, Nick. Always look for devolutionary explanations first. I’d like to say that devolution being far easier than evolution is something that ID predicts but alas, it’s predicted by nothing more than common sense. Of course ID Read More ›

This discussion was spawned in the Artificial Life commentary and I think it deserves thread of its own. First of all Laws of Nature are those things which are observed over and over and over again without exception. We need not have physical theories to explain them. One such Law of Nature is the law of gravity. We have observed its effects countless times without exception. Mass is attracted to other masses. We don’t have a physical theory to explain the mechanism by which gravity works but due to empirical observations it is considered a law nonetheless. An exception may exist that disproves the law but until an exception is observed the law remains intact. Another law that doesn’t get Read More ›

Buffalo hit an all time record low high of 64 degrees for this day breaking the previous record of 66 degrees set in 1882. Global warming is MIA in this neck of the woods. I’m just sayin’.

An interesting article talking about the progress, or lack thereof, in evolution of computer “life”.

Can we make software that comes to life?

A few choice snips:

On January 3 1990, he started with a program some 80 instructions long, Tierra’s equivalent of a single-celled sexless organism, analogous to the entities some believe paved the way towards life. The “creature” – a set of instructions that also formed its body – would identify the beginning and end of itself, calculate its size, copy itself into a free region of memory, and then divide.

Before long, Dr Ray saw a mutant. Slightly smaller in length, it was able to make more efficient use of the available resources, so its family grew in size until they exceeded the numbers of the original ancestor. Subsequent mutations needed even fewer instructions, so could carry out their tasks more quickly, grazing on more and more of the available computer space.

A creature appeared with about half the original number of instructions, too few to reproduce in the conventional way. Being a parasite, it was dependent on others to multiply. Tierra even went on to develop hyper-parasites – creatures which forced other parasites to help them multiply. “I got all this ecological diversity on the very first shot,” Dr Ray told me.

Hmmm… starts out complex and then gets simpler and simpler. Yup. That’s how Darwin described it. Right? Oh hold it. That was our side who said life had to begin with all the complexity it would ever have because RM+NS can’t generate CSI. Read More ›

Contrary to last year’s hysteric proclamations that arctic sea ice would completely vanish this summer it has instead increased to an extent not seen since 2004.
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Tuesday Aug 05, 2008 Ultimate Issues Hr: The edge of Evolution Dennis Prager talks to Micheal Behe, professor of biology at Lehigh University and author The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Originally broadcast on July 03, 2007 Click here to listen to the podcast. Don’t miss the last several minutes where Dennis goes ballistic when someone claims that you can’t be a doctor or medical researcher if you don’t believe that random genetic accidents turned bacteria into bananas. It’s hilarious. I wish either Dennis or Mike would have informed the caller of the fact that no medical school in the world requires medical students to take a course in evolutionary biology. That serves to underscore Read More ›

This is off topic. Specifically botany and mycology. I thought some readers might find it of interest. I’m vacationing for the summer up north, it’s been wet and warm, perfect for mushrooms so this morning my daughter and I went walking through some woods and fields looking for mushrooms. I really wanted to get a sack of table mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus; button mushroom; portobello) to cook up. All I found in that regard was one lonely old portobello long past its prime. We found lots of boletes, amanitas, lbm’s (little brown mushrooms), death caps, and one odd thing that was sort of mushroom shaped, lumpy, light violet, but no gills I could discern. Disappointingly, no puffballs. We did find something Read More ›

PZ Myers and Abbie Smith have an hour-long video conference here. A few surprising things, not the least of which is neither of them thought to bolster their points with the cussing that characterizes their blogs.

Anyhow, the first 15 minutes they talk about epigenetics, the Altenberg 16 conference, Susan Mazur, and try to downplay the Altenberg theme that evolutionary biology is in a vast state of disarray. Abbie lets us know how little she understands epigenetics and is evidently still laboring under the outdated Dawkins era notion that genes and proteins are everything. PZ, who is more up on the subject, looks a bit aghast after Abbie describes her understanding of epigenetics. If Abbie had been one of us he’d have called her an idiot but since she’s on his side he gently tried to correct her, saying his students have the same misunderstandings and it’s difficult to teach. Abbie rudely interrupts over and over as PZ attempts to explain. Several epigenetic mechanisms were discussed. One that wasn’t touched on, remarkably, was RNA in the cytoplasm. When a cell divides the cytoplasm of the mother is divided up among the daughter(s) and the vast, complex assortment of RNA molecules which participate in and control a huge number of cellular processes (more roles for RNA are constantly being discovered) is inherited by the daughter. Ostensibly this process of dividing up the cytoplasm along with copying the DNA goes back in an unbroken line of cells for billions of years… but I digress.

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