News

According to David Shiga (New Scientist 18 May 2011), they’ve been repurposed after the recent shutdown* when state funds dried up: “Alien-hunters focus in on habitable planets”:

Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, the SETI Institute of California, and the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory are listening for alien signals from dozens of planets in the so-called “habitable zone” of their stars, the first time a targeted search of this kind has been undertaken.

“We’ve honed the list to the really exciting exoplanets,” says team member Dan Werthimer of UC Berkeley

Essentially, they are looking for planets in habitable zones. Read More ›

Insurmountable problems, actually, or as Mike Behe would call them, the Edge of Evolution.

Ann Gauger writes to say,

The final podcast discussing the implications of Doug’s and my paper is available now. I also address the points raised by critics. I recommend it for those who might have found the paper too technical.

Here. (First pod is here.) Intro to this second one: Read More ›

Dark matter theorist Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN director since 2009, told The European, , that “We Are Crossing the Boundary Between Knowledge and Belief” (17.05.2011), but just what that means is unclear, as is who the “we” are in this case:

The European: Can something as vast and as complex as the universe ever be reduced to the scope of human mental capacities, or are there natural limits to what we can know?Heuer: That is a difficult question. Every time we discover something, we open the door to new knowledge but find new sets of questions that are more complex and dig deeper into the subject. So there is no real limit, the process of discovery never stops. Maybe the time to answer these questions, i.e. to open these new doors, will increase, but eventually we will be able to open them.

[ … ]

The European: Do you think it is conceivable that we will eventually learn something about before the Big Bang?

Heuer: I doubt it.

The European: How do you make sense of that paradox? Read More ›

… figure out what they want to you say, then say it, acting like you believe it.

Why? Microbiologist Caroline Crocker, author of Free to Think, having been driven from George Mason University for pointing out problems with Darwinism, found all academic doors closed. She was appointed to head up the IDEA Center

… but difficulties arose. Read More ›

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), observes, First, despite how it’s typically portrayed in the anti-intelligent design literature, I maintain that Behe’s irreducible complexity argument is not a God-of-the-gaps argument at all. Behe is not saying that we don’t know (or can’t know) how irreducibly complex systems like the bacterial flagellum could plausibly arise naturalistically. Instead, Behe is giving positive reasons that the sequence of events that would have to happen for irreducibly complex systems like the bacterial flagellum to arise via an undesigned process is an improbable sequence, and hence the design hypothesis should be taken seriously. p. 115. Anyway, do people other than Christian Darwinists use the expression Read More ›

Or anyway, the latest attempt at it. The Darwin lobby promotes uniformitarianism (long, slow gradual change caused by natural selection acting on random mutation), which is at odds with the evidence of rapid bouts of change followed by long periods of stasis.

Over at Access Research Network, David Tyler discusses “The unscientific hegemony of uniformitarianism” (05/16/11), and new approaches in progress. Read More ›

Here’s Lee Billings at New Scientist coming to the point with admirable swiftness:

Two decades of searching have failed to turn up another planetary system like ours. Should we be worried?- “No place like home: Our lonesome solar system” (11 May 2011)

He answers his own question, in part:

It was clear we had ignored a fundamental rule of science. “We had been judging the cosmic diversity of planetary systems based on a sample size of one,” says Marcy.

If these were the first hints that our solar system was not normal, they were not the last. Other planets were soon caught breaking all sorts of rules: orbiting in the opposite direction to their star’s spin, coming packed in close orbits like sardines in a can, or revolving on wildly tilted orbits far away from their star’s equator.

Soon “theorists began to supply the necessary creation stories.”

Billings brings us up to date on how planets are detected, then comes the punch line:

All this makes the status of our solar system increasingly clear. “Our system is a rarity, there’s no longer a question about that,” says Marcy. “The only question that remains is, just how rare is it?”

Expelled ID guy Guillermo Gonzalez predicted this state of affairs. Here, for example, in 2001:

Well, no one told the life forms about it, and frogs, snapdragons, and snakes, among other, apparently broke it with impunity, so that the “law” is in the process of being retired.*

Now, a research team has, usefully, come up with estimates of the probability of mutations being reversible. From ScienceDaily (May 11, 2011):

Physicists’ study of evolution in bacteria shows that adaptations can be undone, but rarely. Read More ›

As David Klinghoffer puts it at ENV:

Over the weekend, Jonathan Wells’s The Myth of Junk DNA broke into the top five on Amazon’s list of books dealing with genetics — a list normally dominated at its pinnacle by various editions of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Not bad, Jonathan.The juxtaposition with Dawkins’ Selfish Gene is appropriate, notwithstanding the demurrals of biochemist Larry Moran et al. Dawkins and other Darwinists, such as Jerry Coyne, have indeed posited that neo-Darwinian theory predicts that swaths of the genome will turn out to be functionless junk. The Junk DNA argument has been a pillar of the Darwin Lobby’s efforts to seduce public opinion and influence public policy. Professor Moran wants to imagine that Dawkins never held that neo-Darwinism predicts junk DNA. But that’s not how other Darwinists see it. (Compare, for example, Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, page 316.)

So far, with none of them having actually read the book (though P.Z. Myers threatens to do so), the Darwin apologists’ response to The Myth of Junk DNA has followed along four lines of defense. Read More ›

Few things in that area show much promise, but this one does.

Two economists have spent some time studying precommitment, the idea of freely choosing what’s right and ten instructing others not to listen when you say you have changed your mind. The first well-known precommiter was Homer’s Odysseus (1000  BCE), who

has been warned about the Sirens, whose seductive song leads sailors to destruction, but he wants to hear it anyway. So he gives his men earplugs and orders that they tie him to the mast, ignoring all subsequent pleas for release until they are safely past the danger.

– Daniel Akst, “Commit Yourself: Self-control in the age of abundance” Reason , May 2011

As Akst tell it, Read More ›

“Thank God for Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow!”

—Francisco J. Ayala

2010 Templeton Prize-winner; Past President of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science)

He and other luminaries recommend you get saved by evolutionizing your life here.

The science of how to decode human behavior, eliminate self-judgment, and create a big-hearted life of purpose and joyful integrity.

Benefits include

You’ll no longer feel empty or flat from the service you provide others. It will be as if the Universe has put its stamp of approval on your life, and you will know the thrill of living in right relationship to reality and in alignment with your highest values.

In other news: Believing that “the Universe has put its stamp of approval on your life” is the surest route to being a world class shothead. Read More ›

Here. Plantinga, Alvin Plantinga, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, talks about “God and Evolution: Where the Conflict Really Lies.” (May 10 and 12, 2011) Note: Plantinga was one of the two Christian philosophers who complained about the hit job on colleague Frank Beckwith in Synthese, incorrectly tagging Beckwith as ID, and in general as one bad dude.

Apparently, “Satan” has noticed our interview with Nancy Pearcey, author of Saving Leonardo (here), and he is cheesed. He describes Uncommon Descent as “an equally dangerous blog.” Not for lack of trying, Yer Scorchership.

Story here. Now put up your feet. Here’s the three-men-a-side debate that Dawkins says convinced him that Craig was an unworthy opponent. What you think? Offered alongside the one above at YouTube: Here’s why he says he “won’t debate creationists” and here he compares them to Holocaust deniers. How do you think a debate between Dawkins and Craig would go?

For talking about God? “No one should be talking about God in a science classroom“. Agreed.

As discussed here, Darwin does.

See this article. Read More ›