News

The Earth as its continents would have been seen from space, starting 500 million years ago just before the Cambrian explosion (courtesy MSNBC Cosmiclog): As he built the visualizations, Mendez said he was struck by the fact that the distribution of land mass among the continents has changed dramatically over the past 750 million years, but the total land area has stayed consistent – between about 10 and 30 percent of total surface area. “I was expecting to see more,” he said.

In Scientific American, we learn “ThNeuroscience of the Gut: Strange but true: the brain is shaped by bacteria in the digestive tract” (Robert Martone, April 19, 2011): We human beings may think of ourselves as a highly evolved species of conscious individuals, but we are all far less human than most of us appreciate. Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial Read More ›

Here. Dedicated to philosopher of science Ernan McMullin (1924–2011).

Latest news from Loughborough University in Leistershire, UK (18 April 2011): “Sweat research sparks evolution speculation”: Research at Loughborough University to find out where athletes sweat the most has revealed surprising results (the cntral and lower back, near the spine).  [ … ] Discussions with colleagues with expertise in evolutionary biology raised a speculative explanation. Prof Havenith said: “Our research records scientific data but asking ‘why’ raises an interesting question. “If this pattern that we observe is a remnant from when we moved on all fours, before we walked upright, then sweating on the back would make sense. One biologit commented, “Does this imply that human ancestors lost body hair (and started sweating) before we became bipedal? This would go Read More ›

At AITSE (Caroline Crocker’s outfit), we are reminded of an Atlantic article (November 2010) on how little peer review actually contributes to the growth of a stable knowledge base:

Dr. John Ioannidis, formerly of Harvard University, Johns Hopkins and National Institutes of Health, is currently leading a team investigating whether medical research studies can be trusted and is making waves. He says that 90% of published results cannot. Moreover, he claims that peer-review by the scientific community is ineffective in addressing the problem. His research shows that, of the top 49 articles published in the last 13 years, only 25% of the claims to have found an effective intervention (e.g. daily aspirin or Vitamin E to reduce risk of heart attacks) were retested. This is understandable because 1) there is little funding for repeating someone else’s work, and 2) for an article to be accepted for publication it needs to contribute new understanding; repeated experiments do not. Of those claims that were re-tested, 41% were found to have been significantly exaggerated or simply wrong.

The problem isn’t that peer review does no good but that it isn’t doing the good needed now.

Suzan Mazur (non-Darwinian evolution news desk 1, new media) offers a number of articles on the defects of the current system in assessing the validity of research: Read More ›

In “A golden orb-weaver spider from the Middle Jurassic” (4/21/11), David Tyler at manchester U comments on a recent find:

The golden orb-weaver spider features in newly reported research and provides an exciting insight into past ecosystems. Today, these animals adorn tropical rainforests, with giant females of Nephila maculate (legs spanning up to 20 cm), and small males (just a few centimetres across). However, the fossil record of the Nephilidae family is meagre. The earliest example of the genus Nephila comes from the Eocene (considered to be about 34 Ma) and the earliest example of the family Nephilidae is a male from the Cretaceous (considered to be 130 Ma). The newly reported fossil golden orb-weaver spider is a giant female with a leg span of about 15 cm.

and observes

So this particular living fossil exhibits stasis at the genus level and raises again the issue of what can be learned from the phenomenon of stasis. A previous blog expressed some frustration at Neodarwinian evolutionists who file stasis in a box that says: no environmental change, no selection pressures, no evolution. The problem with Read More ›

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, explain, Such cases of elaborate innate behavioural programs (spider webs, bee foraging as we saw above, and many more) cannot be ccounted for by means of optimizing physico-chemical or geometric factors. But they csan hardly be accounted for by gradualistic adaptation either. It’s fair to acknowledge that, although we bet that some naturalistic explanations will one day found, we have no such explanation at present. And if we insist that natural selection is the only way to try, we will never have one. – What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 91

It’s often said that many European non-Darwinian evolutionists are fans of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Here’s something to know, however: The Catholic thinker most identified with evolution, the French Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin … des not loom as large on the Catholic intellectual landscape as he did a generation ago. Teilhard concocted from evolutionary theory a kind of process theology that, among other things, implicitly denies the doctrine of original sin. Pope Pius XII once asked the great French thelogican Etienne Gilson to write a critique of Teilhard’s work. Gilson replied that such a task was impossible because Teilhard’s books were poetry and not philosophy You cannot “refute” a poem. Even Teilhard’s serious defenders, Read More ›

In “Primordial Weirdness: Did the Early Universe Have One Dimension? Scientists Outline Test for Theory”, at ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2011), we re asked to consider whether the universe started out with only one dimension: That’s the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010.They suggested that the early universe — which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first — was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today). The theory, if valid, would address important problems in particle physics. Now, in a new paper in Physical Read More ›

The way Darwin lobbyists don’t.

California-based Caroline Crocker, Expelled and now the director of an integrity in science institute and author of Free to Think, offers some reflections on how to teach science as if it wasn’t a cult:

…biological systems are a complex mixture of chemical and electrical reactions controlled by application of many levels of information, not to mention the environment, so that predicting the outcome of changing one parameter can be almost impossible. The complexity, and thus the impossibility of drawing absolutely accurate conclusions and predicting the effect of a change in one parameter, further increases as one progresses into psychology, sociology, ecology and the like.To illustrate this principle, we can consider the work of Dr. Carolyn Nersesian of the University of Sydney. This ecologist used a technique from chemistry (titration) to understand the feeding behavior of eight brushtail possums. Basically, she slowly increased the concentration of a poison in the food in a sheltered area (tree) while offering the animals untainted food in a less sheltered area that had been pre-treated with fox urine and feces The goal was to see what concentration of poison would cause the animals to risk exposure to predators by moving from the sheltered to the unsheltered area. Read More ›

Always used to attack any traditional assumption, never used to attack nonsense, no matter how scofffable, talked in Darwin’s name.

Western Michigan University philosopher Tim McGrew offers some thoughts on evidence, forthcoming in an anthology from Routledge: Read More ›

Neuron tangle 1: Okay then, if I don’t have a self, do you have a self? If so, why are you talking to me?

Neuron tangle 2: No, I don’t have a self either. This here prof is quoted in New Scientist (Liz Else, “Your brain creates your sense of self, incognito”, 19 April 2011), and he knows more than the two of us put together: Read More ›

In “Jesus would believe in evolution and so should you” (CNN, April 10, 2011) Christian Darwinist Karl Giberson, BioLogos vice-prez, enlightens: Science is not a sinister enterprise aimed at destroying faith. It’s an honest exploration of the wonderful world that God created. We are often asked to think about what Jesus would do, if he lived among us today. Who would Jesus vote for? What car would he drive? To these questions we should add “What would Jesus believe about origins?” And the answer? Jesus would believe evolution, of course. He cares for the Truth. Here’s Southern Baptist seminary prez Albert Mohler’s response.

Southern Baptist seminary prez Al Mohler’s response (April 19, 2011) to Giberson’s CNN Belief blog, “Jesus would believe in evolution and so should you” (April 10, 2011) is here:

… he throws the Bible under the bus. In language hauntingly reminiscent of Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot [novelist John Updike’s classic liberal reverend], Professor Giberson describes the human authors of the Old Testament as “ancient and uncomprehending scribes.”In his new book, The Language of Science and Faith:, written with Francis S. Collins, readers will find this strange paragraph: Read More ›

Yes, righties predominated overwhelmingly even back then. Or longer? (ScienceDaily, Apr. 19, 2011):

Now, David Frayer, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, has used markings on fossilized front teeth to show that right-handedness goes back more than 500,000 years. He is the lead author (with colleagues in Croatia, Italy and Spain) of a paper published this month in the British journal Laterality. His research shows that distinctive markings on fossilized teeth correlate to the right or left-handedness of individual prehistoric humans.

“The patterns seen on the fossil teeth are directly and consistently produced by right or left hand manipulation in experimental work,” Frayer said.

There are some issues around handedness, especially the putative problems of left-handed or ambidextrous people. One difficulty is that because most human are right-handed, “right” tends to mean good or dexterous but “left” tends to mean bad or sinister. And “ambidextrous” easily translates to: ambivalent. Read More ›