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Tim Standish responds to Terrell Clemmons on Darwinism

Standish: The impossible task that Darwinists have is not just to show that what they propose is possible, it is to show that this is what actually happened, not just with one or two genes or traits or morphologies or whatever else you want to look at, but with the whole lot. They are masters at picking ambiguous and exceptional examples and treating them as if they are the rule. Read More ›

Winston Ewert discusses the dependency graph of life

In a 2018 article which merits continued discussion: This hypothesis postulates that different biological species share modules related by a dependency graph. We evaluate several predictions made by this model about both biological and synthetic data, finding them to be fulfilled. Read More ›

Why do researchers need to try to prove that animals have personalities?

Mammals, birds, and reptiles differ by ability but those that have been studied seem to have individual personalities within the frame of their intelligence. What they don’t have or make little use of is abstract reasoning. Read More ›

At Wall Street Journal: Science needs critics, not cheerleaders

From an interview with John Staddon we learn that constructive criticism is more useful than cheerleading when one’s game needs work. One outcome of the problems Staddon describes is that “trust the science” is becoming something of a joke in a broad variety of areas and that is not good news. Read More ›

The human genome at 20. We have some answers but way more questions now.

At The Conversation on junk DNA: Bewilderingly, scientists found that the non-coding genome was actually responsible for the majority of information that impacted disease development in humans. Such findings have made it clear that the non-coding genome is actually far more important than previously thought. Read More ›

New paper by Steiner Thorvaldsen on intelligent design and natural theology

Thorvaldsen: Intelligent Design is a relatively new scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent sources, and challenges basic parts of contemporary Darwinism. Fred Hoyle first issued the ideas of Intelligent Design in modern times when he discovered the unique energy level of the carbon atom in the 1950s. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder explains why she thinks that the computer sim universe is pseudoscience

Hossenfelder: You can approximate the laws that we know with a computer simulation – we do this all the time – but if that was how nature actually worked, we could see the difference. Indeed, physicists have looked for signs that natural laws really proceed step by step, like in a computer code, but their search has come up empty handed. Read More ›

Researchers: A form of Darwinism preceded and enabled the origin of life

Those of us who are already skeptical of the immense role Darwinism is supposed to play after life already exists will find this prebiotic Darwinism hard to swallow. But reader Eric Anderson writes to assure us that that is in fact what origin of life researchers really do believe. Question: If it’s that simple, why isn’t life coming into existence from non-life all the time? As opposed to, say, never? Read More ›

Interesting new items from the Neanderthal genome

At Sapiens: Thanks to this work, we now know details about Neanderthals that the archaeological record alone could never have provided. For example, fragments of DNA from specimens found in Spain and Italy showed that at least some Neanderthals likely had pale skin and reddish hair—although, interestingly, the variations for this coloring are different from the variants found in modern humans. Apparently, redheads among Homo sapiens evolved separately… Read More ›