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From Robert D. McFadden at the New York Times: Günter Blobel, a molecular biologist who was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering that proteins in any living cell have virtual ZIP codes that guide them to where they can help regulate body tissues, organs and chemistry, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 81. … The mystery Dr. Blobel confronted was how cells control their internal traffic, so that large proteins can get through tightly sealed membranes surrounding their birthplace and then travel to sites within the cell, or even through cell walls on intercellular trips through the body, where they can find specific worksites, called organelles (little organs) and penetrate them to perform assigned tasks. More. Read More ›

Further to Basener stands his ground at Skeptical Zone: Fisher’s Darwinian theorem is clearly false, here is Part 2: Defending the validity and significance of the new theorem “Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection With Mutations, Part II: Our Mutation-Selection Model by Basener and Sanford: In short, we agree with JF and ML that our paper does not show that deleterious mutations necessarily result in declining fitness. However, we have clearly falsified the converse claim, which is that genetic variance plus selection necessarily result in increasing fitness. If Joe F and Michael L write a response, we politely request that they provide quotes from our paper that support their claims that we argue that fisher’s FTNS “is the basis for all Read More ›

So labelled in the first vid below. The reader who sent this clip commented, “As I watched the video in amazement, the thought that those creatures are the result of random Darwinian processes didn’t even cross my mind. Whereas, the thought that God is one incredible artist did cross my mind!” At times, jellyfish almost seem like they are not part of the same world of life forms as ourselves. Not because they are boneless and brainless but because they just seem so different. It feels easier to understand an ant or a squid, even though they are very different. See also: Grand evolution theory for complex animals in ruins; fossil is, in fact, a jellyfish Sponges definitely oldest animals, Read More ›

Readers may remember Nick Matzke, especially for getting a publisher to abandon the Cornell University papers and for other contributions to Darwinism. A reader now writes to tell us that two Field Museum researchers have just published a critique of Nick Matzke’s (probable) most important contribution to research so far. “Conceptual and statistical problems with the DEC+J model of founder-event speciation and its comparison with DEC via model selection” by Richard H. Ree, Isabel Sanmartín, Journal of Biogeography. 2018 Abstract: Phylogenetic studies of geographic range evolution are increasingly using statistical model selection methods to choose among variants of the dispersal-extinction-cladogenesis (DEC) model, especially between DEC and DEC+J, a variant that emphasizes “jump dispersal,” or founder-event speciation, as a type of Read More ›

Yes, “astrovirology” is a new term, for the possibility that viruses originated in space. Suzan Mazur wonders at Oscillations: If viruses originated on Earth—which is NASA astrovirology chief Ken Stedman’s “best guess”—just why do we need a new field called astrovirology? That’s a very good question. If viruses originated elsewhere than Earth, the history of the origin of life would become very complex indeed. In her interview with Stedman, she asks about a recent article (paywall US$50.00) in Astrobiology, a publication with curious connections with NASA: My question is why didn’t you publish your astrovirology article independently? Why publish in a journal that despite its disclaimer is seen as a propaganda arm of NASA and “the Darwinian government”—as the late, Read More ›

In “contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model” From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (June, 2018), at Back(Re)Action: Yes, I know the headlines said the LHC would probe string theory, and the LHC would probe supersymmetry. The headlines were wrong. I am sorry they lied to you. But the LHC, despite not finding supersymmetry or extra dimensions or black holes or unparticles or what have you, has taught us an important lesson. That’s because it is clear now that the Higgs mass is not “natural”, in contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model. That the mass be natural means, roughly speaking, that getting masses from Read More ›

From Katyanna Quach at UK Register: A team within Google Brain – the web giant’s crack machine-learning research lab – has taught software to generate Wikipedia-style articles by summarizing information on web pages… to varying degrees of success. Glitches remain: We are still a very long way off from effective text summarization or generation. And while the Google Brain project is rather interesting, it would probably be unwise to use a system like this to automatically generate Wikipedia entries. For now, anyway. Also, since it relies on the popularity of the first ten websites on the internet for any particular topic, if those sites aren’t particularly credible, the resulting handiwork probably won’t be very accurate either. More. Google Brain is Read More ›

It’s too cool a concept for accuracy to matter. Further to “Remember the ‘developmental hourglass’? Well, not so fast,” Jonathan Wells writes to point out that vertebrate embryos more closely resemble each on another than do their adult forms only if one carefully cherry-picks the desired stages, which are long after the beginning of development. In Zombie Science, he writes, — In 2008, University of Chicago historian Robert Richards published a book defending Haeckel against charges of fraud. According to Richards, Haeckel’s drawings were no less accurate than those of his contemporaries, including the people who criticized him. 37 Cambridge historian Nick Hopwood also defended Haeckel against the fraud charge in a 2015 book that included several pages criticizing Icons of Evolution as Read More ›

Eh? We’re as surprised as Heman Mehta at Friendly Atheist: She talked about how having multiple authors (because “God” didn’t write it) led to “two different creation myths, three sets of Ten Commandments, and four contradictory versions of the Easter story.” She explained the possible forgeries, the mixing of literary genres, the possible mistranslations, and the numerous examples of “inside baseball” that made sense to the writers but not necessarily to people reading it today. More. Valerie Tarico has written hundreds of articles promoting atheism. We would have thought that her kind of thing was right up Salon’s alley. Here it is at Alternet: Why is the Bible so badly written? Mixed messages, repetition, bad fact-checking, awkward constructions, inconsistent voice, Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media, in support of Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design , including evolutionary creation: Deborah Haarsma, president of BioLogos, argued that the scientific theory of evolution is compatible with biblical creation. She made a clear distinction between Darwinistic evolutionism — which uses evolution to disprove God — and the scientific theory, which does not necessarily have theological implications. “Thus, evolution is not a worldview in opposition to God but a natural mechanism by which God providentially achieves his purposes,” Haarsma wrote. She presented the theory of accommodationism — that God spoke in scripture in a way that the Jews and Christians would understand at the time. God has revealed Himself in two books: Read More ›

One would almost think they were the necrotic mainstream media. From Douglas Axe at ENST, on BioLogos’s Dennis Venema’s critique of his book Undeniable at what sounds like an attempted thugging: First, considering the critical view I take not just of Darwinism but also of the academic echo chamber that, with iron-lung-like artificiality, allows this otherwise dead theory to persist, it should be clear that I wrote primarily for people outside the echo chamber. The exclusion of anyone who fits that description from providing even one of the reviews of my book therefore raises questions about the true intent of the exercise. Second, although I was offered the advantage of having the last word, my response was restricted to about Read More ›

From William Basenerand John Sanford at The Skeptical Zone: Joe Felsenstein and Michael Lynch (JF and ML) wrote a blog post, “Does Basener and Sanford’s model of mutation vs selection show that deleterious mutations are unstoppable?” Their post is thoughtful and we are glad to continue the dialogue. This is the first part of a response to their post, focusing on the impact of R. A. Fisher’s work. Paper. R. A. Fisher was one of the three founders of population genetics, and is considered by many to be the first and primary founder. His Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection contributed significantly to a “revival of Darwinism” (see Koonin quote above and Wikipedia). His theorem has been considered by many a Read More ›

From Matthew Hutson at Science: The booming field of artificial intelligence (AI) is grappling with a replication crisis, much like the ones that have afflicted psychology, medicine, and other fields over the past decade. AI researchers have found it difficult to reproduce many key results, and that is leading to a new conscientiousness about research methods and publication protocols. “I think people outside the field might assume that because we have code, reproducibility is kind of guaranteed,” says Nicolas Rougier, a computational neuroscientist at France’s National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in Bordeaux. “Far from it.” Last week, at a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in New Orleans, Louisiana, reproducibility was Read More ›

From Stephen Skolnick at Physics Buzz: At the intersection of physics and philosophy, there’s a question that’s weighed on the minds of great thinkers for centuries: Is there truly such a thing as free will? When we make a choice, are we fundamentally any different than a calculator “choosing” which segments of its display to light up when the = button is pressed? The question has its roots in the acceptance that humans are, for all our astounding complexity, purely physical systems. Once you drop the notion that we’ve got an intrinsic, metaphysical soul that sits behind the eyes and pulls the levers, the question of why we make the choices we make becomes urgent…if only philosophically. Funny no one Read More ›

Further to the question of whether evolution is random, a reader draws our attention to a 2015 post by Ann Gauger at ENST: Mutation, drift, selection, and environmental change all play a role. Three out of these four forces are random, without regard for the needs of the organism. Even selection can be random in its direction, depending on the environment. So tell me. Is evolution random? Most of the processes at work definitely are. Certainly evolution won’t make steady progress in one direction without some other factor at work. What that factor might be remains to be seen. I personally do not think a material explanation will be found, because any process to guide evolution in a purposeful way Read More ›