DLH

The debate: Does Good Come From God II by Sam Harris vs William Lane Harris 7 April 2011 at Notre Dame is now on YouTube.

Part 1 of 9 – Harris vs Craig – Does Good Come From God Read More ›

A fine tuning and multiverse advocate, Martin J. Rees, today won the 2011 Templeton Prize. The astrophysicist with no religion won the Prize originally “for Progress in Religion.”
The 2011 Templeton Prize was announced today.

LONDON, APRIL 6 – Martin J. Rees, a theoretical astrophysicist whose profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize.
Rees, Master of Trinity College, one of Cambridge University’s top academic posts, and former president of the Royal Society, the highest leadership position within British science, has spent decades investigating the implications of the big bang, the nature of black holes, events during the so-called ‘dark age’ of the early universe, and the mysterious explosions from galaxy centers known as gamma ray bursters. Read More ›

A new measure of information has been invented – the Zettabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 10^21 bytes.
Zettabytes overtake petabytes as largest unit of digital measurement Heidi Blake, 4 May 2010, The Telegraph UK “The size of the “digital universe” will swell so rapidly this year that a new unit – the zettabyte – has been invented to measure it.”

Humanity’s total digital output currently stands at 8,000,000 petabytes – which each represent a million gigabytes – but is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year. Read More ›

ID seeks to reliably distinguish complex specified information from noise. Now Princeton Jason Fleischer and co-author Dmitry Dylov have discovered that there is residual information in “noise” that can be recovered using non-linear optical techniques by “stochastic resonance” with energy from added noise. See:

Turning noise into vision

“Normally, noise is considered a bad thing,” said Jason Fleischer, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton. “But sometimes noise and signal can interact, and the energy from the noise can be used to amplify the signal. For weak signals, such as distant or dark images, actually adding noise can improve their quality.” Read More ›

Formation of “irreducibly complex systems” via purported scaffolding has been an ongoing debate amongst evolution and intelligent design theorists. Now a natural scaffolding has been discovered – and it may itself be part of another “irreducibly complex system”.

Sharma et al., discovered that natural fat works as a biological scaffold for “cells to grow and mature”. Then fascinatingly, “when the cells have matured into the desired tissue, they secrete another substance that breaks down and destroys the scaffold.”

Could the formation of this natural biological scaffold AND its subsequent removal form an irreducibly complex system? E.g. is such scaffolding essential or necessary to achieve a minimum growth rate? Could the secretion removing the scaffolding also be essential to trim function rather than being “bloated”? I expect this fat scaffolding/removal system will be found to be another irreducibly complex system which very efficiently reuses its materials.

See: Body fat may help us heal Read More ›

Judge Robert W. Sweet has turned the biotech patent industry into turmoil.

See: After Patent on Genes Is Invalidated, Taking Stock By ANDREW POLLACK, March 30, 2010

Although patents are not granted on things found in nature, the DNA being patented had long been considered a chemical that was isolated from, and different from, what was found in nature.

But Judge Sweet ruled that the distinguishing feature of DNA is its information content, its conveyance of the genetic code. And in that regard, he wrote, the isolated DNA “is not markedly different from native DNA as it exists in nature.” . . . Read More ›

RomanM has a fascinating challenge. Out of seven photos at: MyPics Which one was not manipulated by Photoshop?

How well neoDarwinian evolution is established and the universal “consensus” over it is demonstrated by:
Bird-from-Dinosaur Theory of Evolution Challenged: Was It the Other Way Around?

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) — A new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that birds did not descend from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs, experts say, and continues to challenge decades of accepted theories about the evolution of flight. Read More ›

TED granted Jill Tartar her wish to: “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. TED and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has set up SETIQuest.org to:

. . . make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish the SETI Institute’s signal-detection algorithm as open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to make it even better. . . . You are officially invited to join the search for extraterrestrial life. . . .With available cloud storage and processing resources, we can prov de digital signal processing experts and students with a lot of raw data … and invite them to develop new algorithms that can find other types of signals that we are now missing,”

The Challenge for ID
1) Is SETI’s methodology valid? Read More ›

Philosopher at Large, Dr. Jerome Ravetz has a fascinating exploration of moral and peer review issues on ClimateGate as “Post-Normal science” at Watts Up With That

. . .
At the end of January 2010 two distinguished scientific institutions shared headlines with Tony Blair over accusations of the dishonest and possibly illegal manipulation of information. Our ‘Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035′ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is matched by his ‘dodgy dossier’ of Saddam’s fictitious subversions. . . . The parallels are significant and troubling, for on both sides they involve a betrayal of public trust. . . .
Climategate is particularly significant because it cannot be blamed on the well-known malign influences from outside science, be they greedy corporations or an unscrupulous State. This scandal, and the resulting crisis, was created by people within science who can be presumed to have been acting with the best of intentions. Read More ›

RNA replications have now been discovered to be “essential” to DNA error correction systems. If they are “essential”, how could they arrive by random mutation and “selection”? On what basis does neoDarwinism predict error correction in the first place?

From Intelligent Design, methodology one expects to see evidence of design in complex biochemical systems. From engineering design, I posit a foundational ID principle to be:
“Design systems to protect their design” Read More ›

Can the methods of Intelligent Design be brought to bear to detect anthropogenic influence in temperature records? Core to the climate debate is the danger of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. We hear of “tipping points” promising coast lands drowning in glacial melt. Defining “very likely” as > 90%, the IPCC’s Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report holds that:

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.

In The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero Willis Eschenback examines temperature records at Darwin, North Australia. Read More ›

O’Reilly told Dawkins”

you insist you can’t even mention it, that is fascism, sir.

Was he right? Is it constitutional/scientific to insist that only materialistic evolution can be taught?
See: O’Reilly vs. Atheist Author Richard Dawkins

O’REILLY: . . . It’s not fair to leave it out of the science class if the science class is incomplete. And you, by your own admission, say we don’t know how it all began. So if the science class is going to say evolution only, but I really don’t know how it started, that gap has got to be explored. Read More ›

Were one to design the encoded DNA “blueprint” of life, would not one incorporate ways to preserve that “blueprint”? The Nobel prize in medicine has just been awarded for discovery of features that look amazingly like design to preserve chromosomes. See:

3 Americans win medicine Nobel for chromosome research

Three U.S. researchers were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on how chromosomes are protected against degradation, the Nobel Foundation reported Monday. Read More ›

Why People Believe What They Do
Scientific American April 10, 2009

On Scientific American’s Science Talk, Steve Mirsky interviews cognitive psychologist Tania Lombrozo from the University of California, Berkeley detailing some surprising data on understanding of vs belief in evolution. Particularly amazing is Steve’s positing: “So it may be justifiable to say, “Here’s what we understand about evolution as a science. We don’t care whether you accept it; we just want you to understand it.””

. . .Lombrozo: Sure. So I think one of the most surprising findings has to do with the relationship between understanding the basics of evolutionary theory and accepting it as our best account of the origins of human life. So most people, I think, [or] in particular scientists, tend to think that if people reject evolution and in particular evolution by natural selection, it’s because they don’t understand it very well; they don’t really understand what the theory is telling us. But in fact, if you look at the data from psychology and education, what you find is either no correlation between accepting evolution and understanding it or very, very small correlation between those two factors, and I think that’s surprising to a lot of people and in particular to educators and scientists. Read More ›