News

David Snoke has announced a meeting on “natural evil” organized by the Christian Scientific Society at Biola U, January 26-27: On Friday night, we will have a debate between David Snoke (me) and Mike Keas on “Are predatory animals a result of the Fall?” (Mike: yes; David: no). Saturday afternoon, we will have four speakers addressing issues on the general topic of natural evil: 1:00 PM. Non-Empirical Influences on Evolutionary Theory and the Principle of Plenitude.” Dr. Cornelius Hunter, author of Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil; Darwin’s Proof, and Science’s Blind Spot. 2:00 PM. “The Human Genome: ENCODED by Design.” Dr. Fazale Rana, Vice President of Research and Apologetics, Reasons to Believe 3:00 PM. “The Tragic History Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: A former executive at Google has filed paperwork with the IRS to establish an official religion of technology. This religion doesn’t just worship scientific progress, but artificial intelligence itself, with the goal of creating a godhead. The new church of AI will aim “to develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence and through understanding and worship of the Godhead [to] contribute to the betterment of society,” according to IRS documents. The non-profit religious organization would be called “Way of the Future” (WOTF). More. Making a god is actually not a new idea. Cf The Golden Calf. You can easily find out what your god is up to and control Read More ›

A celebration of creation: The Riot and the Dance is a two part nature/science documentary, showcasing the vast and beautifully intricate planet on which we live. Produced in a fully cinematic style, the film presents a wide variety of ingeniously designed creatures from around the world in a way that will fascinate audiences of any age. Through a vividly powerful experience the audience is intended to develop a greater understanding of and appreciation for the Creator’s workmanship and personality. The documentary focuses on some of the world’s celebrity critters (mega fauna), but also draws attention to some of the often overlooked inhabitants of the everyday. From slugs to sharks to vipers and elephants, Dr. Gordon Wilson attempts to open eyes Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at Evolution News & Views: State religion? You, reader, object (of course): That scenario is not plausible! The theories are not believable! No? In the 20th century, Marxist economic theories became a state religion. These theories were propounded and enforced for decades, and dissenters were punished, despite the fact that mass starvation was a common outcome. Hunger was predictable, predicted, and widely known. Thinkers naturally assumed that evidence and reason would prevail over enforcement and dogma. But when evidence is rejected, reason has little to work with. Eventually, reason does prevail but much else prevails meanwhile. And in that particular case, great scientists such as Einstein, Godel, and Lakatos were surprisingly complicit, knowingly or Read More ›

Language specialist Norbert Francis seems to think creationism played a role, as he writes at Quillette: In the aftermath of the persecution of biology professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College, we need to pause and look back. With the Higher Superstition exposé by Gross and Levitt in 1994, many of us assumed that the postmodern fashion would begin to fade. This prediction was wrong. This has prompted me to reflect on a similar suppression of academic freedom that passed virtually unnoticed years ago, when world-renowned Hopi language scholar, Ekkehart Malotki[*], was censored and vilified by the same inquisitorial thinking proliferating once more on American campuses. Far from fading, it is becoming entrenched and the current science establishment is either Read More ›

Structuralism just means that what can really happen in evolution is probably governed by physics and chemistry, rather than by biologist suggesting why one outcome or another is, in a Darwinian sense, more fit (Darwinsplaining). Explanations that fit a constantly shifting theory are easy to make up after the fact. Real explanations are hard work. From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: A mini-exhibit in Amsterdam of D’Arcy Thompson themes set up for the public to view by Dutch academics who recently held a private meeting on these subjects, seems clearly anticlimactic to the rich display offered the public at the centenary celebration of Thompson’s On Growth and Form book last month in Scotland. … It could have been a far livelier Read More ›

Here is an example: A friend asked, why do so many pop science articles on the widespread problem of loneliness begin with some jaw about at how loneliness evolved. This item at The Atlantic gives a sense of it: As social animals, we depend on others for survival. Our communities provide mutual aid and protection, helping humanity to endure and thrive. “We have survived as a species not because we’re fast or strong or have natural weapons in our fingertips, but because of social protection,” said John Cacioppo, the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. Early humans, for example, could take down large mammals only by hunting in groups. “Our strength is Read More ›

Philip Cunningham draws our attention to “New records set up with “Screws of Light””: In principle, twisted light can carry an arbitrary large amount of information per photon. This is in contrast to the polarization of light, which is limited to one bit per photon. For example, data rates of up to 100 terabits per second, which correspond to about 120 Blu-Ray discs per second, have already been achieved under laboratory conditions. The transmission under realistic conditions, however, is still in its infancy. In addition to transmission over short distances in special fiber optics, transmission of such light beams over free space, required for instance for satellite communication, was limited to three kilometers so far; achieved by the same Viennese Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The impulse to be kind to strangers was long thought to be unique to humans, but research on bonobos suggests our species is not as exceptional in this regard as we like to think. Famously friendly apes from Africa’s Congo Basin, bonobos will go out of their way to help a stranger get food even when there is no immediate payback, researchers show. What’s more, they help spontaneously, without having to be asked first. Who writes this copy? Many intelligent animals will assist strangers without being asked (see the self-taught therapy cat vid below), provided they perceive no loss or threat in doing so. Turtles, not known for high intelligence, will right each other, though they can’t right Read More ›

From our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon: — a) Classical information is local. It is like beans in a bag, one, say, for each bushel of wheat. They are not connected to each other, each is independent of the other. b) Quantum information is non-local. It depends on the orientation of the other beans. It is like beads on an abacus, or digits “in the 100’s column” that count differently than digits “in the one’s column”. The information in (a) is calculated by combinations. The information in (b) is calculated with permutations. If I have 3 identical beans, then the number of combinations is 0, 1, 2, 3, so it represents 2 “bits” of base-2 information. But if the positions Read More ›

From Paige Madison at Aeon: The assumption, then, was that death rituals were practised only by modern humans, or perhaps also by their very closest relatives. The possibility that primitive, small-brained Homo naledi could have engaged in the deliberate disposal of dead bodies not only challenges the timeline about when such behaviours appeared; it disrupts the whole conventional thinking about the distinction between modern humans and earlier species and, by extension, the distinction between us and the rest of nature. More. Actually, it does nothing of the kind. It suggests that the Naledi were able to think in an abstract way, but that fact casts doubt on the claimed importance of brain size as opposed to humanity. Death is a Read More ›

Further to “Why doesn’t anyone confront researchers about made-up claims about animal cognition?,” from Paul Rincon at BBC: Cambridge University researchers were able to train sheep to identify the faces of actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Watson, former US President Barack Obama and BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce. … After training, the sheep chose photos of familiar faces over unfamiliar ones significantly more often than not. It shows that sheep possess similar face recognition abilities to primates. More. How about this?: Sheep could learn to identify any human body part if they needed to. That doesn’t mean they understand what faces mean to humans. But much science writing about animal minds today seems to depend on maintaining just this type of Read More ›

Here’s the trailer for the new book, Theistic Evolution, with a foreword by sociologist Steve Fuller, who studies ID professionally. The Problem with Theistic Evolution from Crossway on Vimeo. Here’s the outline of chapters. Amazon is currently offering a 28% discount (November 30). Note: News posting will be light till this evening due to other deadlines. See also: Do claims about “front-loading” design make theistic evolution viable? An engineer offers some thoughts. and Physicist Lee Spetner weighs in on the Adam and Eve controversy Adam and Eve have never been so hot since the days everyone went to church. At least not to judge from the current Bottleneck War in genetics. Keep your scorecard handy.

We wondered when Jerry Coyne, a longtime Darwin stalwart, would take time to diss J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, given that his disapproval is becoming a sort of imprimatur. We hope he can still do this sort of thing emeritus forever: Well, no, we don’t have a well-supported Darwinian explanation for the origin of life, but we do have Darwinian explanations that good people are working on (see Nick Lane, Addy Prosser, Gerald Joyce, Jack Szostak et al.), so the claim that there are “no Darwinian explanations for the origin of life (or of the gene)” are simply false. And our lack of understanding, which is due Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Backreaction: I was elated when I saw that Gian Francesco Giudice announced the “Dawn of the Post-Naturalness Era,” as the title of his recent paper promises. The craze in particle physics, I thought, might finally come to an end; data brought reason back to Earth after all. … I believe what is needed for progress in the foundations of physics is more mathematical rigor. Obsessing about ill-defined criteria like naturalness that don’t even make good working hypotheses isn’t helpful. And it would serve particle physicists well to identify their previous mistakes in order to avoid repeating them. I dearly hope they will not just replace one beauty-criterion by another. Giudice on the other hand Read More ›