News

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. It was sparked by British geneticist Richard Buggs pointing out in a journal that, strictly speaking, one fertile human pair could survive a bottleneck (Adam and Eve more or less, fig leaves optional). At first, he didn’t get mail. Then he got mail. Yesterday, we reported that Buggs (the Yes guy) was asking geneticist Dennis Venema (the big No guy) to provide sources for some claims. Over to Venema. Meanwhile, physicist Lee Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution, writes to say that adaptability is built into organisms by transposable elements and thus assumptions Read More ›

From Robert Arvay at American Thinker: Many scientists no longer regard us as having any special place. We are no longer regarded as having a spiritual dimension, but only a physical one. We are seen to be products of a cold, uncaring universe, indeed, not even a product, but only a mere byproduct, an accident, an unlikely outcome of events that had no plan, no purpose, no meaning. Indeed. Nearly 50% Americans now think humans are not special. The inevitable extension of this purely physical view of humanity is technological barbarism. If we are mere atoms, biological machines, then by what right can we expect to be treated as anything more than that? Indeed, there would be no rights at all, Read More ›

From Phys.org: Female swallowtail butterflies do something a lot of butterflies do to survive: they mimic wing patterns, shapes and colors of other species that are toxic to predators. Some – but not all – swallowtail species have evolved several different forms of this trait. But what kind of genetic changes led to these various disguises, and why would some species maintain an undisguised form when mimicry provides an obvious evolutionary advantage? In a new study published this week in Nature Communications, scientists from the University of Chicago analyze genetic data from a group of swallowtail species to find out when and how mimicry first evolved, and what has been driving those changes since then. It’s a story that started around Read More ›

The last round was Adam, Eve, Richard Buggs, and Dennis Venema: Could Adam and Eve have existed?, where Dennis Venema (no) replied to Richard Buggs (yes). Now, Richard Buggs replies, Now to look in more detail at the points you raise about allelic diversity. This is where I think your argument is strongest, so I would like to examine it in some detail. To do this full justice, I want to start with what you say about this in your book chapter. One of your most explicit statements about this in your book chapter is as follows: …scientists have many other methods at their disposal to measure just how large our population has been over time. One simple way is Read More ›

Closing our scheduled religion coverage for the week, we note, re Reason to Hope: We regret to advise that the 2018 Global Atheist Convention, Reason to Hope , has been cancelled. If you are a ticket holder, you are entitled to a refund (including fees) and we will be in touch with you directly. More. Apparently, Ayaan Hirsi Ali pulled out. Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie were expected, as were other atheist luminaries. The cited reason was poor ticket sales. Poor ticket sales don’t just happen. Is it possible that the public is losing interest in “bad boy” atheism, whether it is represented by profane Darwinian bloggers or high class hatemongers (religion as a “virus of the mind,” etc.)? Apart from professional obligations, Read More ›

Here is a piece I (O’Leary for News) wrote for the first edition of Salvo (2006). Interesting to see how it has held up after more than a decade has past. – 0 – About three years ago, I predicted that the intelligent design controversy would explode in a few years, with every instapundit punding away furiously — some thoughtful, some foolish, some merely malign. The latter mood was expressed beautifully by a board member of Kansas Citizens for [promoting materialism in] Science, who summarized her public relations strategy against intelligent design advocates in February 2005 as follows: She advised her troops to portray them “’in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled Read More ›

From Philip Ball at New Scientist: The idea that we create reality seems absurd. But an audacious new take on quantum theory suggests the fundamental laws of nature emerge from our own experiences That woo-woo has been around forever, or at least since the last remnants of the Stone Age. It was one of the things people had to fight, to get science off the ground. Now some are contemplating a mind-boggling alternative: that a coherent description of reality, with all its quantum quirks, can arise from nothing more than random subjective experiences. It looks like the “perspective of a madman”, says the author of this bold new theory, because it compels us to abandon any notion of fundamental physical Read More ›

At his blog: Recently I was interviewed by Matt Fradd for his Pints with Aquinas podcast. We talk a bit about Five Proofs of the Existence of God, but our main topic is Richard Dawkins’s critique of Aquinas’s Five Ways in The God Delusion. We work through each of the objections Dawkins raises and discuss where they go wrong. Matt is posting the interview in two parts, and the first part has now been posted. (podcast) If you think that anyone born after the invention of the Bomb must be smarter than the Angelic Doctor (Aquinas,1225–1274), fetch a mug and sit down and listen. Note: Aquinas points to ponder. See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down

From Ken Francis, journalism prof and author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, via a road trip through the United States, New English Review: On the Reagan road trip, there are many fond memories beneath those soulful, Doo-wop skies over the vast desert plains off Route 66. Driving into the night, with the car window rolled down and the radio playing A Thousand Miles Away by the Heartbeats, the fragrance of the desert breeze was enough to induce slumber. What did a tiny spec of metal automobile, crawling slowly below on the desert floor, like a nocturnal lightning bug, look like from the night splendor of those starry constellations? A sky where the vastness of God’s Read More ›

Kirk Durston here: In a recent speech, former astronaut Julie Payette, now the Governor General of Canada, displayed her unquestioning belief that science alone is worthy of our total trust and mocked those who are “still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process!” … Contrary to her leap of faith that science has shown us how life began, real science has utterly failed to reproduce such an amazing feat. Maybe someday, highly intelligent scientists will figure out how to build a simple life form, which will underscore the need for intelligent design, but we have not reached that milestone yet, much less Read More ›

From Jeannie Kever at University of Houston: Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, argues in an article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that a wide range of animal species exhibit so-called “executive control” when it comes to making decisions, consciously considering their goals and ways to satisfy those goals before acting. He acknowledges that language is required for some sophisticated forms of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. But bolstered by a review of previously published research, Buckner concludes that a wide variety of animals – elephants, chimpanzees, ravens and lions, among others – engage in rational decision-making. “These data suggest that not only do some animals have a subjective take on the suitability of Read More ›

This isn’t an area where facts seem to matter much anyhow, at least not at universities. From geneticist Jenny Graves at Intellectual Takeout: In their new paper, the authors Gershoni and Pietrokovsk looked at how active the same genes are in men and women. They measured the RNA produced by 18,670 genes in 53 different tissues (45 common to both sexes) in 544 adult post mortem donors (357 men and 187 women). They found that about one third of these genes (more than 6,500) had very different activities in men and women. Some genes were active in men only or women only. Many genes were far more active in one sex or the other. A few of these genes showed Read More ›

From Rebekah Rubin at Smithsonian Magazine: In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that evolution made man “superior” to woman. For Darwin, that superiority largely played out in the intellectual and artistic realm. He wrote: “If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music—comprising composition and performance, history science and philosophy … the two lists would not bear comparison.” Spencer echoed Darwin’s sentiments and went further, postulating that in order for the human race to flourish, women must devote their lives to reproduction. For the 44-year-old Blackwell, who had devoted her life to promoting women’s equality, Darwin and Spencer’s conclusions were unacceptable. By penning what would become the first published feminist critique Read More ›

Not in sub-Saharan Africa? Remains from Morocco dated to 315,000 years ago push back our species’ origins by 100,000 years — and suggest we didn’t evolve only in East Africa. … “Until now, the common wisdom was that our species emerged probably rather quickly somewhere in a ‘Garden of Eden’ that was located most likely in sub-Saharan Africa,” says Jean-Jacques Hublin, an author of the study and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Now, “I would say the Garden of Eden in Africa is probably Africa — and it’s a big, big garden.” Hublin was one of the leaders of the decade-long excavation at the Moroccan site, called Jebel Irhoud. Ewen Callaway, Nature Read More ›

That’s structuralism, in part. Further to Evelyn Fox Keller’s comment that the landscape of biological thought is being “radically reconfigured,” a cancer geneticist writes to say that a tumor’s physical environment fuels its growth and causes treatment resistance: The forces of cancer In vitro experiments showing that cancer cells actively migrate in response to fluid flow have supported the hypothesis that fluid escaping from the boundary of a tumor may guide the invasive migration of cancer cells toward lymphatic or blood vessels, potentially encouraging metastasis. There remains controversy over how the fluid forces induce the migration; the cells may respond to chemical gradients created by the cells and distorted by the flowing fluid,8 or the fluid may activate cell mechanosensors. Read More ›