Klinghoffer: Hedin’s persecutor, Jerry Coyne, “was a prominent academic, enjoying maximum career safety at the University of Chicago. Let’s be honest: between the two, there was no contest. Coyne could move against Hedin without fear, and he did. On the other hand, Hedin’s career was on the line, and both knew it.” Sounds like Darwinism as she is spoke.
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
The Bee stings again: 7 ways Christianity ruined science
Babylon Bee: The scientific method was created by a devout Christian, which burdens scientists with restrictive fundamentalist rules: The scientific method limits our science. We’re tired of fundamentalist Christians always imposing strict rules. Live a little, for goodness sake!
Ethan Siegel: Failure to replicate a dark matter experiment is “an incredible success” for the scientific method
Siegel offers an inside look at the details. While the finding is doubtless a success for the scientific method, it must be frustrating for those physicists who need dark matter to exist in order to make cosmology understandable — but can’t find any.
US Prez accuses Texas and Mississippi governors of “Neanderthal thinking”
How about New York governor Cuomo packing nursing homes with COVID patients, which resulted in thousands of deaths? Now that we have channelled Neanderthal man anyway, does he have an opinion on that?
Granville Sewell: Why does Darwinism remain popular when new findings make it less plausible every day?
Sewell: Most non-scientists intuitively understand that explaining how plants and animals, and intelligent, conscious humans, could have arisen from a lifeless, barren planet is a very different and much more difficult problem than others solved by science. But most scientists are still confident that nothing could possibly be beyond the reach of their science.
Researchers: Early stone tool culture of Neanderthals and other humans lasted much longer than thought
Overlap between the two cultures for many thousands of years would make a lot of sense because the newer technologies may not have been self-evidently better. Many considerations of time, energy, and risk would need to be factored in.
At Oscillations: Cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria torches obscurantism in science in new book, Suzan Mazur reports
He was an early non-Darwinian evolutionist (1988 is pretty early), mainly a structuralist. He continues to publish books at nearly 100 years of age.
Avi Loeb at Scientific American on the importance of reproducibility in science
Okay re the importance of reproducibility but it was never clear why Oumuamua was supposed to be ET anyway. More Oumuamuas would not make it more likely.
Michael Egnor on why the multiverse is just a way of evading reality
Michael Egnor: The fact that the universe is tuned — that is, the fact there is any consistency at all in the laws of physics — demonstrates God’s existence. This is Aquinas’ Fifth Way, which is the proof from design.
The “smaller game” theory of the human brain
If the ability to hunt small prey requires a lot more intelligence, cats are definitely smarter than people, let alone smarter than dogs (a more frequently heard claim).
Eric Holloway: Is AI the next stage of evolution?
Holloway: The complex organization of energy we humans see around us in our verdant fertile nest is enormously atypical. This fundamental law drives right through the heart of any technology, genetic or otherwise, that we might invent …
NASA stresses naturalist origin of life to kids
Example: In response to a question re space aliens, ““The question presumes that aliens do exist. And again, because we haven’t found any yet, we don’t know if they do. It is possible they may exist, for one simple reason: we exist. Whatever made the likes of bacteria evolve into complex bodies with intelligent brains on Earth may have also occurred on another planet.”
Researchers: Neanderthals could speak like other humans
Researchers: “Most previous studies of Neandertal speech capacities focused on their ability to produce the main vowels in English spoken language. However, we feel this emphasis is misplaced, since the use of consonants is a way to include more information in the vocal signal and it also separates human speech and language from the communication patterns in nearly all other primates.”
Claim: Neanderthal protein may reduce COVID-19’s severity
Neanderthal man gets smarter and more socially acceptable every time he crosses our radar. At one time, the story would have been: A COVID-like illness wiped him out.
Richard Lenski and Avida: But wait! Can software evolve?
Richard. W. Stevens is skeptical. He thinks the claims for Avida fail the most basic test. He wrote a simple program, InforMutation,to demonstrate that.