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Just when it was noted that Amazon has been going all negative on “I haven’t read the book but … ” “noviews”,  Wikipedia carries a notice on the Haeckel’s embryos page (June 11, 2011): This article’s use of external links may not follow Wikipedia’s policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive and inappropriate external links.(August 2010) The links may well have been cleaned up since then; at one time, much material on the Internet defended the fakes and attacked those who exposed them. Thoughts? Follow UD News for breaking news on the design controversy.

As in here. Also: What make you of this, from Wikipedia?

Sources note: Choosing only those embryos of species that fit the Darwin/Haeckel frame for teaching purposes – as opposed to a range of accurate depictions – isn’t the biggest problem, nor is exaggerating the similarities midway through development. Haeckel’s most serious misrepresentation is that he left out the earliest stages in embryo development – when various classes differ markedly.

Why would he do that? In order to demonstrate common ancestry through embryos, what you need is for them to all start out very similar and gradually diverge as they develop. And that does not happen. Of course, common ancestry can be true even if embryos do not demonstrate it. But if we believe there is sufficient evidence for common ancestry, why choose  fake evidence to demonstrate it?

See Jonathan Wells, “Haeckel’s embryos: Setting the record straight,” The American Biology Teacher (May 1, 1999): Read More ›

Does ” Oxbridge-on-Thames” provide a test of the social power of new atheism?

Here, we noted that AC Graying was beginning to take heat, alongside Richard Dawkins, for refusing to debate American Christian apologist William Lane Craig, as other new atheists have done. He’s in the news again, as the organizer of a private, very expensive private New College of the Humanities (18,000 quid a year), where Richard Dawkins will have a key role: Read More ›

In “Black, White and Stinky: Explaining Bold Coloration in Skunks” (ScienceDaily June 8, 2011), we learn about warning colors in mammals (who can’t usually do fashion runway colours): Read More ›

Too many false alarms in the nervous system when heat is mistaken for light? Here: “For a long time, people assumed that light and heat had to trigger via different mechanisms, but now we think that both types of energy, in fact, trigger identical changes in the pigment molecules,” says Yau. Moreover, since longer wavelength pigments have higher rates of false alarms, Yau says this may explain why animals never evolved to have infrared-sensing pigments.”Apart from putting to rest a long-standing debate, it’s a wake-up call for researchers to realize that biomolecules in general have more potential thermal energy than previously thought,” says Luo. – “Why Animals Don’t Have Infrared Vision: Source of the Visual System’s ‘False Alarms’ Discovered”, (ScienceDaily Read More ›

Here. Note: Re Expelled, this was rumoured. The site has not been serviced for some time. Hang on to your DVDs.) Here is the auction page. Here are some excerpts from the screenplay. Expelled quotes

After this recent claim that autism was somehow adaptive in the prehistoric era,  many are reading with interest this: Two other studies published in the June 9 issue of Neuron report on the same families studied by State, Sanders and their co-authors. One of these, by a group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, paints a very similar picture — that autism is a highly genetically diverse disorder and that sporadic changes in the structure of the genome present only in the affected individuals and not in other families often play a key role.The other study, by researchers at Columbia University, suggests that although hundreds of genes may be involved in autism, they appear to disrupt a common Read More ›

So contend Salverda and de Visser in Current Biology,

Given that there is genetic variation in evolvability, how can it evolve? This is not straightforward, as natural selection benefits organisms with high fitness and not those with increased evolutionary potential. In order to evolve by natural selection, variants with increased evolvability must be associated with direct or indirect fitness benefits. Direct positive effects on offspring fitness are unlikely, at least for short-term evolvability, because genotypes that produce relatively many beneficial mutations tend to be those with relatively low fitness [7]. Variants with increased evolvability thus rely on longer-term benefits arising from the association with rare beneficial mutations, which they produce at an increased rate. Such second-order selection due to hitchhiking with beneficial mutations (Figure 1) is also the mechanism by which mutators, i.e. mutants with an increased mutation rate, reach high frequency in microbial populations [8].In the new study, Woods et al.[2] report a detailed demonstration of second-order selection of evolvability in a large population of the bacterium Escherichia coli.  Read More ›

Here (06/09/2011), Wintery Knight pursues the question of why AC Grayling, as well as Richard Dawkins won’t debate William Lane Craig, complete with clips. Grayling gives as his reasons:

Having been invited to debate Craig, Professor Grayling replied: 

I am not interested in debating Professor Craig, though if he would like to co-opt me for the publicity for his tour – I would be happy to debate him on the question of the existence of fairies and water-nymphs. But as for the very uninteresting matter of whether there is just one god or goddess and that it can be debated despite the claim that it is transcendently ineffable and unknowable – that is an empty prospect, hence my declining the invitation. –

Which prompted this response from a popular British TV presenter: Read More ›

The second award offer in the recent contest, a copy of Don Johnson’s Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability, asks “What do you call a guy who reviews/trashes a book without reading it?”

It goes to homerj1 at 3 for

The review is a noview and the reviewer is a noviewer.

This won because it can be used effortlessly in a sentence, as in:

Prof. Retro Darwin’s noview of biochemist Michael Behe’s latest  …

Rev. Darwin Santa, noviewer of Steve Meyer’s …

Recently, Dimbo Darwin, science writer, noviewed Bill Dembski’s latest …

Ease of use is important. And dropping the pretense of reading makes for more honest communication: Read More ›

Three recent papers in Science:

In Evolution, the Sum Is Less than Its Parts

Sergey Kryazhimskiy1,2,
Jeremy A. Draghi1, and
Joshua B. Plotkin1
Propagating bacteria in a lab for thousands of generations may seem tedious, or even irrelevant, to most evolutionary biologists. Nonetheless, such experiments provide an opportunity to deduce quantitative principles of evolution and directly test them in controlled environments. Combined with modern sequencing technologies, as well as theory, recent microbial experiments have suggested a critical role for genetic interactions among mutations, called epistasis, in determining the pace of evolution. Two papers in this issue, by Khan et al. on page 1193 (1) and Chou et al. (2) on page 1190, present precise experimental measurements of these epistatic interactions.

Read More ›

In “New Data Still Have Scientists in Dark Over Dark Matter,” (ScienceDaily, June 8, 2011), we learn: The new seasonal variation, recorded by the Coherent Germanium Neutrino Technology (CoGeNT) experiment, is exactly what theoreticians had predicted if dark matter turned out to be what physicists call Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).”We cannot call this a WIMP signal. It’s just what you might expect from it,” said Juan Collar, associate professor in physics at the University of Chicago. Collar and John Orrell of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who lead the CoGeNT collaboration, are submitting their results in two papers to Physical Review Letters. The researchers have not ruled out random fluctuation. Dark matter accounts for nearly 90 percent of all matter Read More ›

Before it’s deleted: A riff on the publicly funded, court-enforced Darwin lobby. Stars long-ago scientist Richard Dawkins and Darwin’s broomstick Eugenie Scott*: Lines like “He’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!”  and “You don’t know me, you don’t know Dick!” Stuff that People Who Count complain about tends to disappear so, if interested, watch now … * Mistakenly identified earlier as pseudo-ID expert Barbara Forrest.

Yes, Darwinists are bringing back one of the most famous fakes in biology: Darwin disciple Ernst Haeckel’s hundred year old fake embryo drawings are scheduled by some publishers for Texas schoolbooks:

In addition, many of these curricula contain glaring scientific errors based on outdated science.For example, three of the proposed curricula (from Adaptive Curriculum, Holt McDougal, and Rice University) use Haeckel’s inaccurate embryo drawings—called fraudulent by multiple evolutionary scientists—to claim that vertebrate embryos are similar in their earliest stages. Clearly inaccurate as well as outdated, Haeckel-derived embryo drawings were previously removed by the TBSOE from textbooks designed for use in Texas during the 2003 biology textbook adoption process; these bogus drawings should not be allowed to re-enter the curriculum. Read More ›

Harris’s view is interesting, in the light of the recent Christianity Today cover story on the Christian Darwinists of the BioLogos institute, which Collins founded: Read More ›