Denyse OLeary

William Lane Craig offers some thoughts at YouTube: More. Relevant article: Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan. He is the only creature in the universe who asks, “Why?” Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions. “Who am I?” man asks. “Why am I here? Where am I going?” Since the Enlightenment, when he threw off the shackles of religion, man has tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible. “You are the accidental by-product of nature, a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death.” Modern Read More ›

From Nathan Muse at Apologetics 315, a review of Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, It should be noted that the scientific critiques in this volume are not new. The beauty of this project is distilling them into one volume. Even if some readers will not be completely convinced by the scientific critique in these chapters, the reader is given much food for thought. At the very least, a byproduct of this section is showing that the scientific position of TE suffers from being ill-defined and nebulous. There is no agreed upon scope of the evolutionary process and no clear definition of the term itself. Indeed, some have criticized this volume’s definition of TE as not being accurate. Read More ›

From Wintery Knight Here’s a lecture by New York University professor Paul Vitz to explain a connection between atheism and fatherlessness: Wintery Knight also suggests an article by Paul Copan which points out how father presence/absence and father quality affects belief and disbelief in God: Seventh, the attempt to psychologize believers applies more readily to the hardened atheist.It is interesting that while atheists and skeptics often psychoanalyze the religious believer, they regularly fail to psychoanalyze their ownrejection of God. Why are believers subject to such scrutiny and not atheists? Remember another feature of Freud’s psychoanalysis — namely, an underlying resentment that desires to kill the father figure. Why presume atheism is the rational, psychologically sound, and default position while theism Read More ›

In response to the recent story “Do racial assumptions prevent recognizing Homo erectus as fully human?”, a friend wrote to say that many Darwin defenders miss the point, as follows: The problem is not merely that Darwin, a man of his age, was a racist. The problem is that his bias resulted in him and others distorting the fossil record to suit a racist worldview. To “get past” the fact that Darwin was a racist, we must be willing to undo science that begins by assuming that non-European features are sub-human. But the “hierarchy of man” is rooted in the fundamental assumptions of the “Descent of Man,” the idea that Darwin popularized. Rooting it out would call so many things Read More ›

From Phys.org, A zebrafish view of the world has been forensically analysed by researchers at the University of Sussex to reveal that how they see their surroundings changes hugely depending on what direction they are looking. The study of the colour vision system of zebrafish larvae, published today in Current Biology, reveals they use their near 360 degree view of their world to detect threatening silhouettes above them in black-and-white but can seek out the almost transparent single-cell organisms they feed on by detecting the scattering of light in UV. Dr. Tom Baden, a senior lecturer in neuroscience at the University of Sussex who led the research, said: “By measuring the activity of thousands of neurons in the live animal Read More ›

With respect to “A “junk DNA” jumping gene is critical for embryo cell development, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson writes to say, In personal correspondence over the past couple of years with a tenured geneticist at a major university who is a “junk DNA” proponent, I’ve pointed out that “x has no function” propositions in biology have just about the worst track record one can imagine. Namely, the propositions lead nowhere (empirically), and sit in a forlorn dim corner with other such propositions, waiting to be overturned by research. One doesn’t need to be an ID proponent to see that natural scientific curiosity will have investigators poking at apparent junk, wondering what it might be doing. As expressed beautifully in Read More ›

Should young ID theorists study language origins, as retired linguist suggests below? From Ben James at The Atlantic: Oren Kolodny, a biologist at Stanford University, puts the question in more scientific terms: “What kind of evolutionary pressures could have given rise to this really weird and surprising phenomenon that is so critical to the essence of being human?” And he has proposed a provocative answer. In a recent paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Kolodny argues that early humans—while teaching their kin how to make complex tools—hijacked the capacity for language from themselves. That is provocative: hijacking a capability from “themselves”…? Kolodny’s arguments build off the groundbreaking experiments of Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory Read More ›

From molecular biologist Mike Klymkowsky at The Scientist There is a pernicious temptation in science to speak authoritatively about topics that are beyond scientific exploration and certainty. This has led some theoretical physicists to advocate for a “post-empirical” form of science. That is the idea that theories need not be judged on their ability to make new and testable predictions about the observable universe, in some cases, the absence of a plausible alternative is sufficient. … Klymkowsky is certain that there was a single Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)* but before that? But what came before and the exact steps leading to LUCA are unknowable. Moreover, the billions of years that have elapsed since LUCA’s origin and the active nature Read More ›

From J. R. Miller at More Than Cake: Inspired by Darwin, the Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois set sail in 1891 for Indonesia in search of the missing link between humans and apes. On the island of Java, he discovered a tooth, a femur bone, and a skull with a low forehead and enlarged brow which came to be called “Java Man.” Dubois immediately assumed—in the tradition of many men before him—that these non-Europon features were indicative of the non-human ancestor to Homo sapiens. Based on later fossil finds this “missing link” was classified as a pre-human species Homo erectus (upright man). In the book, Contested Bones, authors Rupe and Sanford (R&S) make the case that based on the phenotypical distinctives Read More ›

If it is still on. From Per Snaprud at New Scientist: TWENTY years ago this week, two young men sat in a smoky bar in Bremen, northern Germany. Neuroscientist Christof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers had spent the day lecturing at a conference about consciousness, and they still had more to say. After a few drinks, Koch suggested a wager. He bet a case of fine wine that within the next 25 years someone would discover a specific signature of consciousness in the brain. Chalmers said it wouldn’t happen, and bet against. (paywall) More. And so now: Inside Higher Ed recently ran a piece on a scholarly meeting on consciousness, asking if it was “the World’s Most Bizarre Scholarly Meeting?” Read More ›

This was discovered by someone who was skeptical of the idea that our geomes are largely useless junk. From Nicholas Weiler at Phys.Org: A so-called “jumping gene” that researchers long considered either genetic junk or a pernicious parasite is actually a critical regulator of the first stages of embryonic development, according to a new study in mice led by UC San Francisco scientists and published June 21, 2018 in Cell. Only about 1 percent of the human genome encodes proteins, and researchers have long debated what the other 99 percent is good for. Many of these non–protein coding regions are known to contain important regulatory elements that orchestrate gene activity, but others are thought to be evolutionary garbage that is Read More ›

From molecular cancer biologist Ahmed Alkhateeb at Aeon: Science is in the midst of a data crisis. Last year, there were more than 1.2 million new papers published in the biomedical sciences alone, bringing the total number of peer-reviewed biomedical papers to over 26 million. However, the average scientist reads only about 250 papers a year. Meanwhile, the quality of the scientific literature has been in decline. Some recent studies found that the majority of biomedical papers were irreproducible. The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: Our earliest hominin ancestors lived at least seven million years ago. The first species to look a little like modern humans appeared between about two and three million years ago. But our own species – Homo sapiens – evolved about 200,000 years ago. So, if H. naledi lived 300,000 to 200,000 years ago that’s a remarkable discovery. It means that a species of human with some surprisingly primitive features – including a tiny skull and brain – survived into the relatively recent past. Conceivably, H. naledi might even have met early members of our species, H. sapiens. One could even speculate we had something to do with it going extinct. More. It also means Read More ›

From ScienceDaily Paleontologists have uncovered a new fossil species that sheds light on the origin of mandibulates, the most abundant and diverse group of organisms on Earth, to which belong familiar animals such as flies, ants, crayfish and centipedes. Named Tokummia katalepsis by the researchers, the creature documents for the first time the anatomy of early mandibulates, a sub-group of arthropods with specialized appendages known as mandibles, used to grasp, crush and cut their food. … “The pincers of Tokummia are large, yet also delicate and complex, reminding us of the shape of a can opener, with their couple of terminal teeth on one claw, and the other claw being curved towards them,” said Aria. “But we think they might Read More ›

From Nancy Atkinson at LiveScience: Now, researchers have produced what they say is the first composite image of a dark matter filament that connects galaxies together. … In their paper, they explained that in order to study the weak lensing signal of the dark matter filaments, they required two sets of data: a catalog of galaxy cluster pairs that were lensed, and a catalog of background source galaxies with accurate distance measurements. They combined lensing data from a multi-year sky survey at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope with information from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that mapped luminous red galaxies (LRGs), which are massive, distant, and very old galaxies. … Hudson and Epps combined or “stacked” more than 23,000 galaxy pairs, all Read More ›