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From Coner Friedersdorf at the Atlantic: ‘I Am a Man With Down Syndrome and My Life Is Worth Living’ Last week, the actor, Special Olympian, and advocate Frank Stephens gave this testimony to Congress: “I am a man with Down syndrome and my life is worth living.” In fact, he went farther: “I have a great life!” For those conceived with his developmental disability, it is the best and worst of times. “The life expectancy for someone born with Down syndrome has increased from twenty-five in the early 1980s to more than fifty today,” Caitrin Keiper writes in The New Atlantis. “In many other ways as well, a child born with Down syndrome today has brighter prospects than at any Read More ›

He offers assorted notes… In a compiled video of 50 elite scientists, no scientific evidence was ever presented for atheism but their arguments were philosophical and theological, i.e. ‘their typical arguments are rather common and shallow – god of the gaps and the existence of evil.’ Elite Scientists Don’t Have Elite Reasons for Being Atheists: (November 8, 2016) Excerpt: Dr. Jonathan Pararejasingham has compiled a video of elite scientists and scholars to make the connection between atheism and science. Unfortunately for Pararejasingham, once you get past the self-identification of these scholars as non-believers, there is simply very little there to justify the belief in atheism…. What I found was 50 elite scientists expressing their personal opinions, but none had some Read More ›

And we can still read him. From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost, including a 2008 interview: We are grateful to Jerry Fodor—perhaps the most substantial philosopher of our time, who has now died—for exposing what he called the “empty” Darwinian theory of natural selection and for his courage as well as his superb humor in the face of unrelenting opposition. “I’m in the Witness Protection Program,” Fodor joked when I called him to request an interview following publication of his provocative article in the London Review of Books (“Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,” October 2007) about the problems of Darwin’s selectionist theory. Fodor never claimed to be a biologist. “It’s not my field,” he told me. But he was the son Read More ›

Reader Joey Campagna writes to ask about a controversial Canadian prof: He is a pro-Darwin and pro-Evolution professor of psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada. He is a tenured professor with hundreds of academic works, many peer-reviewed, and is widely cited in the literature of his field. He is being decried and denounced by academics and media outlets. I have seen online sources call him all manner of names from moron to a bigot, alt-right to Hitler, fundamentalist to ill-informed, just Google his name to confirm, links below. His name is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. What did he do wrong? To oversimplify an extremely complex person and situation, he is refusing to tow the PC party line by Read More ›

From Brian Miller at Evolution News & Views: The first issue relates to the comparison of the sequencing of amino acids in proteins to the letters in a sentence. This analogy is generally disliked by design critics since it so clearly reveals the powerful evidence for intelligence from the information contained in life. It also helps lay audiences see past the technobabble and misdirection often used to mislead the public, albeit unintentionally. … The challenge for nucleotide based enzymes (ribozymes) is equally daunting. Stumbling across a random sequence that could perform even one of the most basic reactions also requires a search library in the trillions. So, any multistage process would also be beyond the reach of chance. A glimmer Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A team of palaeontologists from Uppsala (Ben Slater, Sebastian Willman, Graham Budd and John Peel) used a low-manipulation acid extraction procedure to dissolve some of these less intensively cooked mudrocks. To their astonishment, this simple preparation technique revealed a wealth of previously unknown microscopic animal fossils preserved in spectacular detail. Most of the fossils were less than a millimetre long and had to be studied under the microscope. Fossils at the nearby Sirius Passet site typically preserve much larger animals, so the new finds fill an important gap in our knowledge of the small-scale animals that probably made up the majority of these ecosystems. Among the discoveries were the tiny spines and teeth of priapulid worms — small Read More ›

From Jeanne Lenzer at Undark: In another case of cure as cause, a landmark study of Prozac to treat adolescent depression found that it increased overall suicidality — the very outcome it is intended to prevent. In the study, 15 percent of depressed adolescents treated with Prozac became suicidal, versus 6 percent treated with psychotherapy, and 11 percent treated with placebo. These numbers were not made obvious by Eli Lilly, the manufacturer, or the lead researcher who claimed that Prozac was “the big winner” in the treatment of depressed teens. Doctors, unaware that the drug could increase suicidality, often increased the dosage when teens became more depressed in treatment, thinking the underlying depression — not the drug — was at Read More ›

That’s the big change that naturalism (nature is all there is and you did not evolve to understand it correctly) has created in science. Evidence isn’t critical any more. From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: String theory (or, more technically, M-theory) is often described as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. But there’s no empirical evidence for it, or for any alternative ideas about how gravity might unify with the rest of the fundamental forces. Why, then, is string/M-theory given the edge over the others? … This basic sequence of events has led most experts to consider M-theory the leading TOE candidate, even as its exact definition in a universe like ours remains unknown. Whether the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Three mathematicians have a different explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe that does without theories of “dark energy.” Einstein’s original equations for General Relativity actually predict cosmic acceleration due to an “instability,” they argue in paper published recently in Proceedings of the Royal Society A. Paper. (public access) – Joel Smoller, Blake Temple, Zeke Vogler. An instability of the standard model of cosmology creates the anomalous acceleration without dark energy. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science, 2017; 473 (2207): 20160887 DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2016.0887 More. Well, if we don’t need dark energy to account for cosmic expansion, isn’t that a bit like not needing Santa Claus to explain the wine, cheese, and chocolates Read More ›

Yes, yes, it’s Friday night. Philip Cunningham offers us some notes on the subject. We rather suspect he agrees. 😉 A single sand grain harbours up to 100,000 microorganisms from thousands of species.” Your visit to the beach will never be the same. The sand you sit on, build sand castles with and bury yourself in is crawling with germs. But not to worry; they’re good germs. They’re doing you and the world a favor by helping keep the ocean clean and keep earth’s nitrogen and carbon cycles going…. You travel to Antarctica. Now are you germ-free? No;… Surprisingly, the same kinds of bacteria live at both poles…. Bacteria Rule the Earth – David F. Coppedge, December 14, 2017 Information Read More ›

From Steve Twomey at the Smithsonian Magazine (2010), presumably a vintage article recycled this morning or so, without context, about the catastrophic brain injuries that supposedly greatly changed a man’s personality (psych lecture room staple): Gage’s initial survival would have ensured him a measure of celebrity, but his name was etched into history by observations made by John Martyn Harlow, the doctor who treated him for a few months afterward. Gage’s friends found him“no longer Gage,” Harlow wrote. The balance between his “intellectual faculties and animal propensities” seemed gone. He could not stick to plans, uttered “the grossest profanity” and showed “little deference for his fellows.” The railroad-construction company that employed him, which had thought him a model foreman, refused to Read More ›

You shouldn’t exist either. But the people saying so in this case are not population bombers or jihadis. From Philip Perry at BigThink: What CERN scientists say as a result of their latest experiment is: the universe itself is a miracle, as it shouldn’t exist at all. This is of course taken in reference to the Big Bang theory. Though the prevailing one, it’s not the only theory to explain how all and everything came into being. Still, in this view, it all starts with the singularity. We all pretty much know by now that naturalists (nature is all there is) hate th ig Bang and the only question is, how much will they twist science to discredit its significance. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new analysis of the oldest known fossil microorganisms provides strong evidence to support an increasingly widespread understanding that life in the universe is common. The microorganisms, from Western Australia, are 3.465 billion years old. Scientists from UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison report today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that two of the species they studied appear to have performed a primitive form of photosynthesis, another apparently produced methane gas, and two others appear to have consumed methane and used it to build their cell walls. The evidence that a diverse group of organisms had already evolved extremely early in the Earth’s history — combined with scientists’ knowledge of the vast number Read More ›

We’d heard that. But of course, the Twitterverse could nuke tweet such a claim to depress sales. We waited till science historian Michael Flannery read it. He says yes and worse at Evolution News & Views: But my uneasy sense of déjà vu turned to dismay when I read Wilson’s claim that Darwin did more than merely suppress his predecessors, he actually stole ideas from Edward Byth’s proto-theory of natural selection, published in two essays appearing in the Magazine of Nature History in 1835 and 1837. Wilson claims some mysteriously missing pages in Darwin’s notebooks prove it. The problem is, these have long been recovered and are readily available in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844 (1987). Historians have since examined these Read More ›

Philosopher Étienne Gilson (1884–1978): A scientist never begins by defining the method of the science he is about to initiate. Indeed, the surest way of recognizing false sciences is by the fact that they make the method come first. The method, however, should derive from the science, not the science from the method.” – Etienne Gilson, Methodical Realism. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011, p. 100. Evolution does not exist in order to make Darwin right. One thinks here of molecular evolutionist Dan Graur’s war cry: “… if ENCODE is right, then evolution is wrong. ENCODE argues that there is not much “junk” in our DNA. Graur disagrees. How about: Either ENCODE or Graur could be wrong but the facts are never Read More ›