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That guy at Nature who rides “Genetic determinism rides again” was right. Now, from ScienceDaily: For the first time, locations on the human genome have been identified that can explain differences in meaning in life between individuals. This is the result of research conducted in over 220,000 individuals by Professor Meike Bartels and PhD student Bart Baselmans from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The researchers identified two genetic variants for meaning in life and six genetic variants for happiness. The results were published this week in the scientific journal Scientific Reports. The fact that genetic variants for a meaning in life have been found indicates that everyone is different and that differences between people in complex processes such as a meaning Read More ›

Also known as the “warfare thesis.” Sometimes real manuscripts are torn up to manufacture this kind of dreck for gullible tourists and museums: As I prepared to teach my class ‘Science and Islam’ last spring, I noticed something peculiar about the book I was about to assign to my students. It wasn’t the text – a wonderful translation of a medieval Arabic encyclopaedia – but the cover. Its illustration showed scholars in turbans and medieval Middle Eastern dress, examining the starry sky through telescopes. The miniature purported to be from the premodern Middle East, but something was off. Besides the colours being a bit too vivid, and the brushstrokes a little too clean, what perturbed me were the telescopes. The Read More ›

J. R. Miller offers some thoughts on the recent book, Spectacle, and the documentary, Human Zoos: The recent book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, by Pamela Newkirk shows how Darwin’s theory of universal common descent led to the dominant scientific view that blacks were lower on the scale of evolution and a missing link between ape and humanity. In 1906, Benga was put on display in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo as a symbol of scientific progress toward proving human origins. … In addition to the book, the recent documentary, Human Zoos, illustrates the life of Benga and how these same leading scientists were instrumental in the founding of the eugenics movement which was determined to Read More ›

Youth speaker Sean McDowell interviews J. P. Moreland on his new book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: J.P. Moreland is one of the 50 most influential living philosophers. He’s also a colleague and friend of mine at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. He has spent his career writing largely in the philosophy of mind and the intersection of science and faith. … MCDOWELL: You make the bold claim that there are some truths in theology and philosophy that we know better than scientific claims. Can you give me an example, and how would you defend such a claim? MORELAND: The truths of logic, mathematics, introspective knowledge of one’s own conscious states, moral truths (e.g., Read More ›

Frank Turek tackles intelligent design: One wonders if we could do with more biologists who just looked at the facts of nature without Darwinglasses on. It is certainly a different, more complex picture. Hat tip: Ken Francis See also: Frank Turek: Why does the Bible not talk about dinosaurs?

Bridge Radio podcast: J. Warner Wallace joins BRIDGE Radio again to continue the discussion of his book “God’s Crime Scene.” We talked about irreducible complexity and eight characteristics of design that points to an intelligent designer – God. (51:34 min) More on J. Warner Wallace: J. Warner Wallace is a cold-case homicide detective, popular national speaker and best-selling author. He continues to consult on cold-case investigations while serving as a Senior Fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He is also an adjunct professor of apologetics at Biola University and a faculty member at Summit Ministries. … J. Warner’s professional investigative work has received national recognition; his cases have been featured more than any other detective on NBC’s Dateline, Read More ›

The aliens, we are told, are needles in a cosmic haystack: A new calculation shows that if space is an ocean, we’ve barely dipped in a toe. The volume of observable space combed so far for E.T. is comparable to searching the volume of a large hot tub for evidence of fish in Earth’s oceans, astronomer Jason Wright at Penn State and colleagues say in a paper posted online September 19 at arXiv.org. “If you looked at a random hot tub’s worth of water in the ocean, you wouldn’t always expect a fish,” Wright says.Lisa Grossman, “We may not have found aliens yet because we’ve barely begun looking” at ScienceNews Paper. Abstract: Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox have as a Read More ›

Reviewing behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin’s Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, a history of medicine prof writes, Crude hereditarianism often re-emerges after major advances in biological knowledge: Darwinism begat eugenics; Mendelism begat worse eugenics. The flowering of medical genetics in the 1950s led to the notorious, now-debunked idea that men with an extra Y chromosome (XYY genotype) were prone to violence. Hereditarian books such as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) and Nicholas Wade’s 2014 A Troublesome Inheritance (see N. Comfort Nature 513, 306–307; 2014) exploited their respective scientific and cultural moments, leveraging the cultural authority of science to advance a discredited, undemocratic agenda. Although Blueprint is cut from different ideological cloth, the consequences could Read More ›

According to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel: Personally, I don’t expect these direct detection attempts to be successful; we’re stabbing in the dark hoping we hit something, and there are little-to-no good reasons for dark matter to be in these ranges. But it’s what we could see, so we go for it. If we find it, Nobel Prizes and new physics discoveries for everyone, and if we don’t, we know a little more about where the new physics isn’t. But just as you shouldn’t fall for the hyper-sensationalized claims that dark matter has been directly detected, you shouldn’t fall for the ones that say “there’s no dark matter” because a direct detection experiment failed. We are after the most fundamental stuff in Read More ›

Dust this off, spruce it up and put it in a museum of popular culture: Getting back to evolution, it is amazing that 150 years after the scientific theory was proposed and generally accepted by the scientific community, it is still controversial in many segments of the public. In the US we have made some modest gains, but belief in pure creationism remains high at 38%, with a further 38% believing that life evolved but with God’s help, and only 19% accepting pure evolution. This puts the US near the bottom, only above Turkey. So recent reports of the teaching of evolution being opposed in Turkey is not surprising. It is more so in Israel, as those of Jewish faith Read More ›

The belief that there is no free will is a much more dangerous myth, he writes, at Mind Matters Today: There are four reasons to affirm the reality of free will against denial by materialist determinists. Two reasons are logical, and two are scientific. … 4. While scientific experiments do not entirely settle the matter, an objective review of the neuroscientific evidence unequivocally supports the existence of free will. The first neuroscientist to map the brains of conscious subjects, Wilder Penfield, noted that there is an immaterial power of volition in the human mind that he could not stimulate with electrodes. The pioneer in the neuroscience of free will was Benjamin Libet, who demonstrated clearly that, while there is an Read More ›

At Mind Matters Today, he explains, Along with millions of others, you are providing free training data: All of the most successful AI projects tend to follow a similar pattern. One of AI’s biggest needs is lots of data, and one of the most important tasks is finding ways to get people to provide them with the best data… for free. Currently, Facebook is utilizing hashtags applied to its Instagram photos to generate AI-based algorithms for detecting specific types of objects in images: Having so many images for training helped Facebook’s team set a new record on a test that challenges software to assign photos to 1,000 categories including cat, car wheel, and Christmas stocking. Facebook says that algorithms trained on Read More ›

“Africa’s Stone Age was also a Bone Age,” we are told: Ancient Africans took bone tools to a new level around 90,000 years ago by making pointed knives out of animals’ ribs, scientists say. Before then, bone tools served as simpler, general-purpose cutting devices. Members of northern Africa’s Aterian culture, which originated roughly 145,000 years ago, started crafting sharp-tipped bone knives as fish and other seafood increasingly became dietary staples, researchers suggest online October 3 in PLOS ONE…  Bruce Bower, “A 90,000-year-old bone knife hints special tools appeared early in Africa” at Science News Paper. (open access) Meanwhile, the world’s oldest fishing nets (29,000 years ago) may have been discovered in Korea: The 14 stone sinkers were discovered in the Maedun Read More ›

Matti Leisola, author of Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, offers some thoughts on the recent announcement: I am an enzyme bioengineer, so I greeted with enthusiasm Wednesday’s announcement… that part of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a fellow enzyme bioengineer. She is Frances H. Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech. … There is one point of confusion in descriptions of this year’s prize winners. It’s the talk of “directed evolution.” The Nobel Prize organization itself has encouraged such talk. If it is “directed” by researchers engineering the rates for specific purposes, sorting according to specific goals, it isn’t “evolution” in the usual schoolbook sense at all. It is more like plant breeding. Read More ›

In the story we ran yesterday, “‘Compelling new evidence’ claimed for comets generating phosphates for earliest life,” we noted that our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon thinks that the idea that building blocks of life came from space is plausible and should be demonstrable. He offers his somewhat controversial thesis here: — I’ve argued elsewhere that the presence of cyanobacterial and eukaryotic microfossils on carbonaceous chondrites (comet fragments that land on the Earth), is evidence for ubiquitous cometary transport of life throughout the solar system and galaxy. This makes Darwin’s theory moot, because extraterrestrial transport destroys any “tree of life” that relies only on terrestrial modifications. It may also explain why NASA is adamantly opposed to publishing/acknowledging these discoveries. Every Read More ›