News

… 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, Easterners, and liberals,” Gallup (June 3, 2011) The new atheists have played a central role, sources say, in strengthening belief in God.

… 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 predictions are always granted Fulfilled status. Also file under: You’d think people’d notice that there are enough real environment issues out …

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

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: Read More ›

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 seems, can experts consistently get it wrong, and not only keep their jobs, but be highly esteemed as experts. Among the guiltiest of the lot are planetary scientists, whose predictions have been consistently wrong for almost every planetary body studied since the dawn of the space age. Their orbital mechanics is solid; they do get their spacecraft to arrive at the right place at the Read More ›

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 (US$72 million) in EC grants for fake research projects. In Milan, Italy, the Finance Police last month charged several individuals in relation to the fraud. In Brussels, meanwhile, the EC has terminated four collaborative projects in information technology, and excluded more than 30 grant-winners from participation in around 20 ongoing projects. Investigations are still under way in the United Kingdom, France, Greece, Austria, Sweden, Slovenia and Poland. 

“We don’t have any records of [previous] fraud at such a scale,” Read More ›

Granville Sewell, math prof, satirist of silly ideas, and apology recipient (from math journal), has this to say about Darwinists’ attempt to rescue their theory from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Organization always decrees, left to itself. Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as it is “compensated” somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. [ … ] According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting Read More ›

Unless, of course, it’s okay that bureaucrats and social engineers do your thinking for you … in which case, you won’t be next, you’ll just be toothpaste.

“In Defense of ‘Hurtful’ Speech” (The Wall Street Journal June 24, 2011) Geert Wilders speaks out on an issue of critical importance to the intelligent designcommunity: free thought:

I was tried for a thought crime despite being an elected politician and the leader of the third-largest party in the Dutch parliament.[ … ]

I was brought to trial despite being an elected politician and the leader of the third-largest party in the Dutch parliament. I was not prosecuted for anything I did, but for what I said.

[ … ]

I was dragged to court by leftist and Islamic organizations that were bent not only on silencing me but on stifling public debate …

Is this happening in your country? Shame! It was happening in Canada, and we have started to put a stop to it. We have a long way to go …

The secret of success is Read More ›

In 2006, Skeptic Magazine publisher Michael Shermer wrote: “We have to wonder why the Intelligent Designer added to our genome junk DNA, repeated copies of useless DNA, orphan genes, tandem repeats, and pseudogenes, none of which are involved directly in the making of a human being. In fact, of the entire human genome, it appears that only a tiny percentage is actively involved in useful protein production, It looks as though Rather than being intelligently designed, the human genome looks more and more like a mosaic of mutations, fragment copies, borrowed sequences, and discarded strings of DNA that were jerry-built over millions of years of evolution.”- Jonathan Wells, The Myth of Junk DNA, p. 23 Incidentally, at Amazon it’s (10:00 Read More ›

In “Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory,” Hugo Merciera and Dan Sperbera argue (loaded word, that!) for a theory about how argument evolved:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought.
Read More ›

And that’s what matters. Every Darwin myth you’ve ever heard is crammed into David Brooks’ recent happy face novel., The Social Animal (Even so, P.Z. Myers didn’t like it.) But, the curious thing is, notes John Gray in “Mr. Brooks’s Miracle Elixir”, is who did like it: DAVID BROOKS is not the first contributor to the airport book stand to whom our leaders have turned for enlightenment and instruction. In the search for insight on the issues of the day, the politicians who are meant to be guiding us toward a better world have nudged, blinked, pirouetted on tipping points and anxiously pondered the wisdom of crowds. Yet none of these brightly packaged manuals has proved to have the practical Read More ›

“The Unexplainable Interactive Computer Systems in Life”  from Don Johnson on Vimeo: Johnson is the author of Probability’s Nature and the Nature of Probability.

Donald E. Johnson compiled a handy list of people who, beginning over a century ago, have suggested that extraterrestrials could have started life on Earth: S. Arrhenius., Worlds in the Making, 1908. Francis Crick, “The Origin of the Genetic Code” J. Mol Biol: 38, 1968, p. 367-379. Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, 1983, pp. 16-17. Bernstein. Max, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, George Cooper, and Louis Allamandola, “Racemic amino acids from the ultraviolet photolysis of intestellar ice analogue,” Nature”: 416, 3/28/02 – from Probability’s Nature and the Nature of Probability, p. 32. Even Richard Dawkins has stated that such intelligent design ay be possible (Ben Stein, Expelled: The Movie, 2008.), p. 32 And if so many great scientists entertain the idea, Read More ›

Books trying to explain evil scientifically, that is. In “I’m O.K., You’re a Psychopath,” he makes a good point: People with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, Baron-Cohen argues, are also empathy-deficient, though he calls them “Zero-Positive.” They differ from psychopaths and the like because they possess a special gift for systemizing; they can “set aside the temporal dimension in order to see — in stark relief — the eternal repeating patterns in nature.” This capacity, he says, can lead to special abilities in domains like music, science and art. More controversially, he suggests, this systemizing impulse provides an alternative route for the development of a moral code — a strong desire to follow the rules and ensure they are applied fairly. Read More ›

In “Evolution to the Rescue: Species May Adapt Quickly to Rapid Environmental Change, Yeast Study Shows” (ScienceDaily, June 23, 2011), we learn:

… according to McGill biology professor, Andrew Gonzalez, the question arises, “Can evolution happen quickly enough to help a species survive?” The answer, according to his most recent study, published in Science, is a resounding yes.
By using a long-armed robot working 24/7 over a period of several of months, McGill Professors Graham Bell and Gonzalez were able to track the fate of over 2000 populations of baker’s yeast for many generations. Yeast was chosen for the experiment because a lot is known about the genetic makeup of this model organism and because it can reproduce in a matter of hours.

[ … ]

What they observed was that the likelihood of evolutionary rescue depended on the severity and rate of change of the environment and the degree of prior exposure of populations to the environmental stressor (salt). The degree of isolation from neighboring populations also affected the capacity of the yeast populations to adapt through the accumulation of beneficial mutations.
Gonzalez and his team were in effect watching evolution at work. And what they discovered is that it can happen surprisingly fast, within 50 to 100 generations.

Then the wheels fell off. Read More ›