In “A Home Before the End of the World” (Design Observer Group, 06.09.11), Adelheid Fischer reminds us, To date, only about two million species of plants and animals have been identified and described. An estimated 10 million species still await discovery, description and naming. But this taxonomic handshake is just the beginning and tells us Read More…
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Major novelist thinks co-author Leonard Mlodinow mostly wrote “no God needed” book, headlined as by “Stephen Hawking”
Umberto “Name of the Rose“ Eco (not the person you’d immediately expect to not like Stephen Hawking’s latest effort, The Grand Design) apparently doesn’t like it. That’s according to Vox Day’s translation from the Italian. Yes, for one thing, Eco thinks the book was mostly written by co-author Cal Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow: the book Read More…
Yeast evolve multicellularity? Actually, Darwinists still searching for Hat Rabbit Eject button.
At Creation-Evolution headlines, Dave Coppedge asks, “If This Is Evolution, What Is Trivia?” (June 24, 2011): New Scientist printed a dramatic headline, “Lab yeast make evolutionary leap to multicellularity.” A leap of the imagination, as it happens. This challenge to Darwinian evolution turned out to be a cinch, it went on to claim: “In just Read More…
Terry Eagleton: Leave Darwinism to earthworms and mildly intelligent badgers
In “Who needs Darwin? (22 June 2011), a New Statesman review of George Levine’s The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, Terry Eagleton gets it mostly right about Darwinism’s take on religion: None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We Read More…
William Lane Craig is “disingenuous,” and he “shocked” Larry Krauss in a recent debate?
Paul Lucas offers atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss’s reflections on his debate with William Lane Craig (June 23, 2011), in interview with Michael Payton and Theo Warner. Krauss seems to regret it now and has nasty things to say about sponsor Campus Crusade for Christ, as well as Craig: PM: … Craig draws a distinction between Read More…
Song birds claimed to use grammar
In “Finches tweet using grammar,” Clare Pain (ABC , 27 June 2011) reports The scientists played jumbled-up birdsongs to individual finches to see whether the birds responded with the usual burst of calls to the jumbled songs. To their surprise they found that there were some jumbled songs that elicited a call-burst response and some Read More…
Cosmology: String theory – a first step to understanding it …
Douglas and Dine and their co-workers have taken the first steps in finding the statistical rules governing different string vacua. I can’t comment usefully on this, except to say that it wouldn’t hurt in this work if we knew what string theory is. – Nobelist Steven Weinberg, The Nature of Nature , p. 550 A Read More…
Sociologist: Darwinism is the astrology of science
And its biggest asset right now is public funding and court judgments. Steve Fuller, agnostic sociologist at Warwick University (Britain) and author of Dissent over Descent, gives us an entertaining picture of astrology in the decades before its collapse that unmistakably echoes Darwinism today: … in the four centuries that separated the early Oxford scholastics Read More…
New atheist Sam Harris explains why he thinks but little of old-fashioned theistic evolutionist John Polkinghorne
New atheist and PhD neuroscientist Sam Harris on theistic evolutionist John Polkinghorne: … here is Polkinghorne describing the physics of the coming resurrection of the dead: If we regard human beings as psychosomatic unities, as I believe both the Bible and contemporary experience of the intimate connection between mind and brain encourage us to do, Read More…
This just in: Most Americans believe in God
… as usual: Despite the many changes that have rippled through American society over the last 6 ½ decades, belief in God as measured in this direct way has remained high and relatively stable. – Frank Newport, “More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God: Professed belief is lower among younger Americans, Read More…
Speaking of fake environment issues, …
… like this one, here’s a doozy from the archives: On the first Earth Day, in 1970, some scientists predicted that pollution would make “breathing helmets” necessary in ten years’ time. Prophecy above may be used as a substitute for the usual Sunday apocalypse. Of course the prediction was fulfilled. It “shows environmental concern.” Such Read More…
Darwin’s Sunday School papers?
In an act of touching faith, Darryl Cunningham tries his hand at cartooning Darwin’s pious legends here. No really, he believes every one of them. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista
Why Darwinian medicine is a dead loss
In “Darwinian Medicine and Proximate and Evolutionary Explanations,” at Evolution News & Views (June 25, 2011), neurosurgeon Mike Egnor makes a critical distinction between proximate explanations and evolutionary explanations,s they apply to medicine:
In science, you can consistently get it wrong and still keep your job?
How’d that work out at a used car lot? In “Wrong Again: Planetologists Embarrassed” (Creation-Evolution Headlines, June 23, 2011), Dave Coppedge comments on getting it wrong about planets: In most careers, being wrong too often is grounds for dismissal. False prophets in ancient kingdoms were stoned or shamed out of town. Only in science, it Read More…
Big Euro research fraud: More and more science today resembles the medieval trade in fake relics.
In Nature News, we learn: “Europe tackles huge fraud: Regulators scramble to recover millions of euros awarded to fake research projects.” (Quririn Shiermeier, 14 June 2011): talian authorities and the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) in Brussels, Belgium, have confirmed that they are prosecuting members of a large network accused of pocketing more than €50 million Read More…