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Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, responds at his blog to a claim by Paul Thagard at Psychology Today that science and philosophy offer more for grief than religion does: Thagard’s view is that religion is false comfort, and that science (and philosophy) can do better. He begins by outlining four major problems with Asma’s view [NYT article “which advanced the utility of religion in personal and societal spheres, even for the secular,” irrespective of the fact base]: – “It depends on a view of how emotion works in the brain that has been rendered obsolete by advances in neuroscience.” – It underestimates how much science can help to understand the nature of Read More ›

From Rabbi Moshe Averick, author of author of  The Confused World of Modern Atheism (Mosaica Press, 2016), at Times of Israel: Dr. Leonard Susskind is a renowned professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and is credited as being one of the fathers of string theory. He was asked to comment at a NASA panel discussion on the lack of design in the universe, and replied: Dr. Susskind responded by saying: “I don’t believe the universe was designed by an intelligence. I believe the universe was designed the same way the incredible human being was designed. It certainly looks – and before Darwin – it looked like some designer must have, what else could possibly account for the complexity of a Read More ›

An open letter to William Lane Craig and the proponents of theistic evolution from Karsten Pultz,: author of Exit Evolution, in response to William Lane Craig’s questions around whether Adam and Eve really existed. For 30 years I didn’t believe in a personal God. I was not an outright atheist but was an agnostic leaning just a little towards new age explanations and interpretations of the reality we experience. I had the greatest mistrust in the Bible although I found the New Testament important as a philosophical text. I considered the Bible a collection of myths rather than historical facts. I was raised with a materialistic worldview but happened to experience so much spiritual richness in music, that it made Read More ›

With an interesting chapter on carnivorous plants. At Oscillations, Suzan Mazur takes note of the new book by structuralist Antonio Lima de Faria, now an emeritus professor at Lund University, whom she describes as “one of the Osaka Group of ‘structuralists,’ whose other members included Brian Goodwin, Mae-Wan Ho, Peter Saunders et al.” The main theme of Periodic Tables Unifying Living Organisms at the Molecular Level: The Predictive Power of the Law of Periodicity is that “the recurrence of form and function in biology makes possible a periodic table similar to the periodic table of chemical elements (a subject first explored in his 1983 book) and reveals the “law of biological periodicity.” Carnivorous plants have long been an evolutionary puzzle: In the section “Periodicity of Plant Carnivory,” Lima-de-Faria makes Read More ›

Sometimes. From Helen Gordon at Wired: Long thought an impossible dream, the emerging field of palaeocolour is revolutionising our view of the prehistoric world, turning it from black-and-white into glorious technicolour. So far only a handful of dinosaurs, insects and reptiles have been studied but, as Johan Lindgren, a scientist from the University of Lund, says, “We’re only just scratching on the surface.” Finding evidence of colour in the fossil record will do much more than simply tell us what hue to paint a T-Rex. Bones can fossilise. but behaviour does not. “When we look at the animals and plants we see in the world around us we see striking colours and colour patterns,” says Maria McNamara from the University Read More ›

Hugh Ross thinks so. From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: On Wednesday, media outlets breathlessly reported that scientists have discovered a “lake of liquid water” on Mars. Fox News called it a “game changer” in the search for alien life, and Yahoo News reported something similar. The New York Times headline spelled out the implications: “Raising the Potential for Alien Life.” He quotes Hugh Ross, Ph.D. astronomer Hugh Ross told PJ Media that these reports twisted the truth. In reality, the scientists found what could be a lake, but Ross noted that it certainly does not contain life. The peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science reported on findings from 22 planetary astronomers in Italy working on data from the Read More ›

From Mind Matters Today: A recent conference raises concerns, according to Science Magazine, that our machines may never be able to get wise to human deviancy. So-called “white hat” hackers who test the security of AI have found it surprisingly easy to fool. Matthew Hutson reports, Last week, here at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), a group of researchers described a turtle they had 3D printed. Most people would say it looks just like a turtle, but an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm saw it differently. Most of the time, the AI thought the turtle looked like a rifle. Similarly, it saw a 3D-printed baseball as an espresso. These are examples of “adversarial attacks”—subtly altered images, objects, or sounds Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The reproductive history of the unisexual, ladies-only salamander species is full of evolutionary surprises. In a new study, a team of researchers at The Ohio State University traced the animals’ genetic history back 3.4 million years and found some head-scratching details — primarily that they seem to have gone for millions of years without any DNA contributions from male salamanders and still have managed to persist. For some time, it has been assumed that they steal other species’ sperm, “which the males of sexual species deposit on leaves and twigs and the like. When this happens, it stimulates egg production and the borrowed species’ genetic information is sometimes incorporated into the genome of the unisexual salamanders, a process Read More ›

Some articles in science journals leave one wondering, that’s for sure. At Nature: Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts Abstract: Observations of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) provide valuable comparative data for understanding the significance of conspecific killing. Two kinds of hypothesis have been proposed. Lethal violence is sometimes concluded to be the result of adaptive strategies, such that killers ultimately gain fitness benefits by increasing their access to resources such as food or mates1,2,3,4,5. Alternatively, it could be a non-adaptive result of human impacts, such as habitat change or food provisioning6,7,8,9. To discriminate between these hypotheses we compiled information from 18 chimpanzee communities and 4 bonobo communities studied over five Read More ›

… maybe by changing the landscape in ways we might not like. Referring to a mathematical concept discussed by Bertrand Russell, he calls it “theft” vs. “honest toil.” From Bill Dembski at Mind Matters Today: AI (artificial intelligence) poses a challenge to human work, threatening to usurp many human jobs in coming years. But a related question that’s too often ignored and needs to be addressed is whether this challenge will come from AI in fact being able to match and exceed human capabilities in the environments in which humans currently exercise those capabilities, or whether it will come from AI also manipulating our environments so that machines thrive where otherwise they could not. AI never operates in a vacuum. Read More ›

Does that mean anything? The reason we ask is, From Lisa Grossman at Science News: A Mars orbiter has detected a wide lake of liquid water hidden below the planet’s southern ice sheets. There have been much-debated hints of tiny, ephemeral amounts of water on Mars before. But if confirmed, this lake marks the first discovery of a long-lasting cache of the liquid. “This is potentially a really big deal,” says planetary scientist Briony Horgan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “It’s another type of habitat in which life could be living on Mars today.”More. and From JPL/NASA: New comprehensive mapping of the radiation pummeling Jupiter’s icy moon Europa reveals where scientists should look — and how deep they’ll Read More ›

The genes were transferred to the beetles, researchers say, from sea squirts (tunicates) , with whom they have, may we say, not much in common, by microorganisms (symbiont bacterial strains). From ScienceDaily: An international team of researchers led by scientists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology in Jena has discovered that bacteria associated to Lagria villosa beetles can produce an antifungal substance very similar to one found in tunicates living in the marine environment. The researchers revealed that this commonality is likely explained by the transfer of genes between unrelated microorganisms. … The discovery of a new bioactive substance produced by the dominant strain B. gladioli Lv-StB was particularly Read More ›

Which now seem to serve an as-yet-unknown function in the bat. From ScienceDaily: Some 18 million years ago, an ancestor of mouse-eared bats “stole” genetic material from an ancient virus related to Bola. The swiped genetic sequence — a gene called VP35 — has remained largely intact in the bats despite the passage of time, with few changes since it was co-opted, a new study finds. The research also sheds light on the gene’s possible function in bats, suggesting that it may play a role in regulating the immune system’s response to threats. “We’re using a multidisciplinary approach to understand the evolution, structure and function of a viral gene co-opted by a mammal,” says Derek J. Taylor, PhD, an evolutionary biologist at Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have captured video showing how pieces of DNA once thought to be useless can act as on-off switches for genes. These pieces of DNA are part of over 90 percent of the genetic material that are not genes. Researchers now know that this “junk DNA” contains most of the information that can turn on or off genes. But how these segments of DNA, called enhancers, find and activate a target gene in the crowded environment of a cell’s nucleus is not well understood. Now a team led by researchers at Princeton University has captured how this happens in living cells. The video allows researchers to see the enhancers as they find and connect to a gene to Read More ›

From Mind Matters Today: Succinctly, researchers using Bell’s theoretical insight into quantum entanglement have shown that there are no deterministic local hidden variables. This means that the final state of entangled quantum particles is not determined by any variables in the initial state. Nature at its most fundamental level is indeterminate. The states of bound particles are not determined by any local variable at the moment of separation. Bell’s inequality and the experimental work that has followed on it conclusively demonstrate that quantum entanglement, and thus nature, is not determinate, at least locally. There remains the remote possibility of non-local determinism, but that view is considered fringe and is rejected by nearly all physicists working in the field. It is Read More ›