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From best known early twentieth century Catholic writer and apologist [take this, current Pontifical Institute!] G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (book text here:

Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is something more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of clarity that sees things like life rather than words like evolution.For this purpose it would really be better to turn the handle of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass growing and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment could contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole affair. Read More ›

An apparently reasonable thesis re the origin of human societies is offer by an archaeology team that argues (Science 22 April 2011), Early Farmers Went Heavy on the StarchRecent evidence shows that agriculture began in fits and starts in the Near East, more than 10,000 years ago. Now a U.S.-German team is gathering the first comprehensive evidence that the earliest farmers in the Levant ate a wide variety of plants, including starchy tubers, which may have allowed them to experiment with grain cultivation without fear of starvation, the team reported at the Society for American Archaeology meeting. Their interpretation dovetails with the observation that hunter-gatherer societies do not, as a rule, innovate much over millennia. Innovation happened rapidly, by comparison, in Read More ›

A curious feature of science literature in a materialist age is the frequent appearance of stories about things everyone knows are true that we are now assured are “proven by research.” Take the fact that animals have personalities: This ScienceDaily story (April 28,) and this related one (May 30, 2007) both announce that research shows that animals have personalities.

From the first,

An individual’s personality can have a big effect on their life. Some people are outgoing and gregarious while others find novel situations stressful which can be detrimental to their health and wellbeing. Increasingly, scientists are discovering that animals are no different.

and from the second,  Read More ›

Remember this as you direct your aid dollar wisely:

Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We’ve also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues.

What we’ve found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn’t necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice. Read More ›

Warwick U’s Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent (2008):

Our first witness is the poster boy Francis Collins, the born-again Christian who led the US National Institutes of Health’s drive to map the human genome. His recent bestseller, The Language of God, recounts how his bohemian upbringing resulted in a spiritual emptiness that only came to be filled upon reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity as a graduate student in biochemistry. This small fact is telling. Lewis, a colleague of J.R.R. Tolkien at Oxford, is often recommended to open-minded people to ease them into the Christian faith. Read More ›

At Townhall, Jonah Goldberg analyzes the recent “Cooling on Global Warming”: Why has climate change lost its oomph? Plumer lays out some of the reasons, though he minimizes the damage greens have inflicted on their own credibility thanks to the 2009 Climategate email scandal and wildly overstated predictions. For instance, the United Nations predicted there would be 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010. Notably, the islands of the Caribbean would see massive population losses as denizens fled for their lives. Never happened. (Meanwhile, the UN Environment Program has removed the map of predicted devastation from its website.) Note: Climate change is not, in principle, UD’s “thang” exactly – after all, in a designed universe, humans could indeed futz up the climate Read More ›

In The Nature of Nature , Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse offers us his take on ethics: “Ethics is an illusion put in place by natural selection to make us good cooperators.” (—Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, 1985), p. 855)

Wilson has since dropped off this vine, so let’s just go with Ruse:

What kind of metaethical justification can one give for the love commandment or a Rawlsian justice-as-fairness? I would argue that ultimately there is no justification that can be given! Read More ›

From “What Can Twins Tell Us About Mate Choice?” (ScienceDaily, Apr. 26, 2011), we learn:

What factors influence our choice of a mate? Is it our genes? Does a man look for someone like his mother and a woman someone her father? None of the above, according to a study of Australian twins.

Body size, personality, age, social attitudes, and religiosity played little role in identical twins’ choice, but get this:

A twin’s spouse was much more similar to the twin and co-twin than the twin’s opposite-sex parent.

That suggests that the strong influence is actually the family environment. The identical twin would be more highly motivated than most people to seek out someone who is “like me.” Singletons consider ourselves lucky to get “someone who understands me.”

Twin studies should be taken with a gallon of salt anyway:  Read More ›

In “Why science is the source of all progress,” (New Scientist, 26 April 2011), Oxford quantum computation expert David Deutsch explains, Solutions always reveal new problems. So one must also always seek a better hard-to-vary explanation. That, at its heart, is the scientific method. As Richard Feynman remarked: “Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.” Because it is prior to experimental testing, the practice of requiring good explanations can drive objective progress even in non-scientific fields. This is exactly what happened in the Enlightenment. Although the pioneers of that era did not put it that way, it was, and remains, the spirit of the age. It is the source of all progress. – (Registration Read More ›

… here (MSNBC, April 27, 2011):

This record-smashing Rube Goldberg developed by engineering students at Purdue University takes you on a journey from the big bang to the apocalypse in 244 easy steps — culminating in … [what did you expect?]

Fans of Mike Behe will recall his use of the concept in Darwin’s Black Box:

Now let’s talk about a different biochemical system of blood clotting. Amusingly, the way in which the blood clotting system works is reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine. Read More ›

At MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle tells us “How tycoons will fuel space flight” (April 22, 2011):

With the shuttle program winding down, the future of American spaceflight may well depend on how starry-eyed tycoons spend their money — and some of NASA’s money as well. Read More ›

No, not what you think: More from Raymond Tallis, this time What neuroscience cannot tell us about ourselves (New Atlantis, Fall 2010), debunking “the tropes of neuromythology.”:

So when we are talking about the brain, we are talking about nothing more than a piece of matter. If we keep this in mind, we will have enough ammunition to demonstrate the necessary failure of neuroscientific accounts of consciousness and conscious behavior. Read More ›

Dane Leif Asmark sends this PowerPoint (static here), which notes the poster campaign, the film, and debates … in most Western countries, not half as much is reported.

Written debate with the Hungarian Skeptic Society- Written rules for the debate, moderation.

– Four exchanges of letters.

-Is ID a reasonable answer to the origin of the living world?”

Living world? Shades of Darwin’s banished co-theorist Wallace and the World of Life.
Sources don’t think most Western counties are doing a tenth of this. Read More ›

The contest (Saturday, April 16) asked: What would be acceptable evidence for other universes? And the prize is a copy of The Nature of Nature , which goes to Brent at 16 (see below).

(Next contest still in progress: Is Richard Dawkins or Francis Collins the cuter poster boy for selling Darwinism? Closes April 30.)

Readers may recall Steven Weinberg’s comment, quoted,  that Read More ›

Here.

(CNN) — Interstellar radio has lost one of its most avid and high-profile listeners.A collection of sophisticated radio telescopes in California that scan the heavens for extraterrestrial signals has suspended operations because of lack of funding, a spokeswoman said Monday.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute operates the Allen Telescope Array, the field of dish-like scopes some 300 miles north of San Francisco. The telescopes are a joint effort of SETI and University of California-Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Lab and have been funded largely by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who donated more than $25 million to the project.

Comments? Read More ›