Brown University Catholic biochemist Ken Miller is to receive the Stephen Jay Gould Prize prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution because Dr. Miller has proved an eloquent and passionate defender of evolution and the scientific method. Dr. Miller received his PhD in Biology from the University of Colorado and taught from 1974 Read More…
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Why one scientist checked out of Darwinism
Because Darwinism requires “fantastic leaps of faith” The Darwinist troll bawling up a storm in his cave about this recent defection may not have heard about the one below: The author worked for ten years as a Senior Research Scientist in the medical and scientific instrument field. The complexity of life came to the forefront Read More…
Coffee!!: Non-materialist neuroscientist offers Skeptiko his theological views
From PR Underground, neurotheology researcher, physician and author, Andy Newburg explains, how fundamentalists Christians and Atheists share a minority view of God. (PRUnderground, April 27th, 2011) Join Skeptiko guest host Steve Volk for an interview with Dr. Andy Newburg. A distinguished researcher at Thomas Jefferson University Medical College, and professor in Religious Studies at the Read More…
Intelligent design is antievolution … or maybe not …
Here is a current debate on the subject from Cassandra’s Tears and here at Intelligent Reasoning is a comment, if you’d like to weigh in. Many sources think that intelligent design is concerned principally with the plausibility of proposed mechanisms for evolution, not with denying that it occurs. Most ID theorists are skeptical – based Read More…
Saturday afternoon science show: Pigs love mud because we all evolved from fish
“Pigs have ‘evolved to love mud’”, Victoria Gill explains (BBC News, 29 April 2011). Dutch researcher Marc Bracke from Wageningen University and Research Centre theorizes that … the behaviour could have evolved in pigs’ most ancient relatives.”We all evolved from fish, so it could be that this motivation to be in water could be something Read More…
Time out: He invented it, he disowned it, but we’re supposed to go on believing it?
A friend of Uncommon Descent writes to say that E. O. Wilson abandoning his kin selection theory (group Darwinism vs. the selfish gene) due to lack of evidence has caused quite the little uproar in Britain. He adds, The gist of the responses in Nature seemed to be that Nowak and Wilson did not understand Read More…
Directions for perpetrating a science hoax
Here, Adam Ruben, – “Experimental Error: Forging a Head” Science (April 22, 2011), reflects on how to construct a science hoax and have free publicity coming out of your ears: Attach the bones of something to the bones of something else. You have just created the missing link between those two species. “It’s amazing!” you Read More…
Remember the telephone game?
Yes, we all do, but that’s not the whole story … Some findings in the field of collaborative memory research have been counter intuitive. For one, collaboration can hurt memory. Some studies have compared the recall of items on lists by “collaborative groups,” or those who study together, and “nominal groups,” in which individuals work Read More…
Coffee!! For the lone reader in Downadashack, New Brunswick, who isn’t …
… plenty sick of the Royal Wedding, here’s New Scientist’s evolutionary psychology take on Kate’s “ruthless mating intelligence”: AH, THE eugenic thrill of it! Status weds beauty: a promising start. Royalty weds a good-genes commoner: excellent progress. A 6-foot, 3-inch prince who flies rescue helicopters and shows self-deprecating humour weds a 5-foot, 10-inch Amazon with Read More…
Awesome powers of common shrew or weakening powers of current classification?
This New Scientist article (Michael Marshall, 28 April 2011) on the interbreeding of shrews despite the fact that their chromosomes have been rearranged does not use the “biological species concept” (it’s hard to know how to do so under the circumstances). Stuck for a term, Marshall calls the differently arranged groups “races” instead. Anyway, Searle Read More…
Don’t defund SETI, science broadcaster pleads
Bob McDonald, the science guy at Canada’s government broadcaster, CBC, critiques (April 28, 2011) the spending on the Royal Wedding, contrasting it with the small amount required to keep the recently defunded, 50-year-old Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program going: … Until recently, their efforts had been hampered by the fact that they had to Read More…
Something to get up for tomorrow morning …
Hey hey, ho ho Six planets in a row here, April 30 (and maybe eight planets if you have binoculars).
From the “science is about concise, simple explanations that work” file …
Shimon Malin explains, Nature Loves to Hide (Oxford University Press, p. 6), why you don’t need science for that: One role of science is to explain phenomena, anf an explanation is different from “economy of thought.” Consider the example of tides. People made accurate tables of the times of high and low tides in many Read More…
He said it: Why doesn’t Christian Darwinist Francis Collins accept “evolutionary psychology” as ultimately explaining away religion?
Here’s Warwick U’s Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent (2008) on Francis Collins’s curious affection for C.S. Lewis and other thinkers who assumed the reality of the mind, while believing just about anything else that Darwinism throws through the mailbox: Theistic evolutionists … Simply take what Collins calls “the existence of the moral law Read More…
Mummy wars: DNA experts now hold separate conferences about ancient Egyptians
This one’s for DNA buffs: Enter the world of ancient Egyptian DNA and you are asked to choose between two alternate realities: one in which DNA analysis is routine, and the other in which it is impossible. “The ancient-DNA field is split absolutely in half,” says Tom Gilbert, who heads two research groups at the Read More…