Recently, Brandon Keim, presenting “11 Animal Wonders of Evolution” (June 28, 2011) at Wired says no, After all, their lineages haven’t survived ice ages and warm spells and every natural upheaval just to be visualized in amber by some upstart hairless ape. A better term is “evolutionarily distinct.” They’re simply, impressively unique. One could say Read More…
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
We can still legally refuse to drink the Kool-Aid
In “Making Stories Visible The Task for Bioethics Commissions” (Issues in Science and Technology 27/2), Meera Lee Sethi and Adam Briggle explore claims made for science finds – under the banner, “Critical skepticism is always appropriate”: blockquote> Narrative explanations can help us understand difficult scientific issues, but they can also mislead us. Critical skepticism is Read More…
Who else believed in the myth of junk DNA? Jerry Coyne, for example
In 2009, University of Chicago geneticist Jerry A. Coyne compared predictions based on intelligent design with those based on Darwinian evolution. “If organisms were built from scratch by a designer,” he argued, they would not have imperfections. “Perfect design would truly be the sign of a skilled and intelligent designer. Imperfect design is the mark Read More…
Is Reader’s Digest semantically conceding the field to intelligent design?
The April 2011 edition of Reader’s Digest features an article by Shaun Pett called “Intelligent Design” (p. 82). We are told, “A new field of research uses nature to solve everyday human problems.”: The term “biomimicry,” popularized by American natural-sciences writer Janine Benyus in the late 1990s, refers to innovations that take their inspiration from Read More…
“Evolutionary arms race” explains THIS Cambrian statistic?
Lead author Dr Michael Lee, of the South Australian Museum and University of Adelaide, says the “exceptionally preserved fossil eyes” also underscore the speed and magnitude of the evolutionary innovation that occurred during this period. “If the development of complex life is viewed as 24 hours, everything of interest happened in the first hour,” Read More…
Political correctness re Stone Age village almost falsifies evolutionary psychology
In “Family ties doubted in Stone Age farmers” (New Scientist, 01 July 2011), Michael Marshall reports that Blood may not always be thicker than water, if a controversial finding from one of the world’s best-preserved Stone Age settlements is to be believed. At Çatalhöyük in Turkey, it appears that people did not live in families. Read More…
“Darwinists have constructed a virtual world that does not match the real world”
British physicist David Tyler comments at Access Research Network on the “Modern optics in the eyes of an Early Cambrian arthropod” (July 1, 2011): We have known for many years that the eyes of trilobites, going back to the Early Cambrian, have highly sophisticated optics. Although vision has been invoked as a probable characteristic of Read More…
BioLogos contributor blasts Christian Darwinists’ treatment of Steve Meyer’s Signature in the Cell
In “Signature in the BioLogos” (June 28, 2011) at his The Hump of the Camel blog, retired British doctor and BioLogos contributor Jon Garvey blasts the Darwinthink treatment of Steve Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009): What struck me in all this was that every single contribution contained at least some degree of Read More…
Symbiosis between animals and bacteria half a billion years ago
At ScienceDaily (June 28, 2011), we learn: “Ancient Symbiosis Between Animals and Bacteria Discovered” Marine shallow water sandy bottoms on the surface appear desert-like and empty, but in the interstitial space between the sand grains a diverse fauna flourishes. In addition to bacteria and protozoa numerous animal phyla have been found here, some only here. Read More…
Reader says, It’s outcomes, not theory, that gets attention, guys
A reader writes to offer a suggestion about how to communicate about stuff that really matters, so that people know why it matters, based on his experience as a flight school instructor: Early in the training for a private pilot certificate we were required to introduce the student to stalls and their proper recovery. If Read More…
Tenure: How the university became a bureaucracy and how to fix it
In “The Economic Upside to Ending Tenure” (Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2011), Naomi Schaefer Riley goes beyond the usual complaints about tenured lecture room mediocrities to say, Tenure means not having to worry about having to find new employment in middle age, and that means a lot to professors. As the George Mason Read More…
Update re John Lennon vs. Charles Darwin: Lennon earliest to diss Darwin profs?
“It keeps all the old professors happy in the university. It gives them something to do. I don’t know if there’s any harm in it except they ram it down everybody’s throat.” At Evolution News & Views, David Klinghoffer elaborates on Lennon’s Darwin-dissing views: He laughed at what he regarded as the ludicrousness of Darwinian Read More…
Darwin matters far more in politics than your history teacher ever let on
Here, Martin Olasky, editor-in-chief of World tells us how “Darwin matters” (June 29, 2011): Politics.Woodrow Wilson started federal government expansion in 1912 by opposing the “Newtonian” view that the government should have an unchanging constitutional foundation, somewhat like “the law of gravitation.” He argued that government should be “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It Read More…
Here’s a first: A reviewer skeptical of airhead neuroscience claims
That’s Adam Hanft on the recent The Compass of Pleasure by neuroscientist David J. Linden, who writes at Barnes & Noble Reviews (June 27, 2011): Disciplines from neuroscience to behavioral psychology to evolutionary biology have created a new cranial transparency that’s unleashed a gush of books like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; Sway: The Irresistible Pull Read More…
How do people understand algebra if they never encounter it?
In “Geometric Principles Appear Universal in Our Minds” (Wired Science, May 24, 2011) , Bruce Bower reflects on the fact that research among peoples who do not even count suggests that abstract geometric principles are probably innate in humans: If geometry relies on an innate brain mechanism, it’s unclear how such a neural system generates Read More…