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Pro ID Steve Meyer. No ID Larry Krauss. As noted here, and live streamed: Note: The University of Toronto has been fairly open-minded in hosting these types of events. One remembers – with some distress – a disgraceful scene at U Texas Amarillo (2013) where the admin totally caved to some nondescript Darwin troll displaying his asshat. But, come to think of it, Toronto is a world class city (Economist ranks it best place to live) and it is a long way from Amarillo. Maybe it should stay a long way away. Presser below: Lawrence M. Krauss, Stephen C. Meyer and Denis O. Lamoureaux discuss origins of the universe in public event News Release Thursday, March 17, 2016 FOR IMMEDIATE Read More ›

From 3 Tags: Scientists have sequenced the oldest human DNA ever, extracted from 430,000-year-old samples of fossilised tooth and a thigh bones, found in Spain’s Sima de los Huesos, which translates to “pit of bones”. In doing so, the team from Germany has found evidence that the ancient ancestors of modern humans must have split from the ancestors of Neanderthals hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we thought, which means it might be time for us to redraw the human family tree. Located in the Cueva Mayor-Cueva del Silo cave system in north-central Spain, the Sima de los Huesos archaeological site contains the largest and oldest collection of human remains ever discovered, with more than 6,500 fossilised bone fragments Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: Stump your Darwinist friends by asking them to explain, in evolutionarily adaptive terms, biological features like the precise pattern of the maple leaf or of an angiosperm flower. “That’s a fantastically serious challenge to Darwinism,” says Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton in this brief but delightful video conversation — a “nightmarish scenario.” Why? Because Darwinism by definition must justify such features, including the taxa-defining novelties, as having been seized upon by natural selection because they were adaptive. I mean, that pattern specifically and not some other. It’s the specificity that’s the problem. More. Worse, Denton is too old to be denied a degree or fired. Note: Some friends will find the challenge Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Pioneering Rutgers scientist helps reconstruct an ancient East African landscape where human ancestors lived 1.8 million years ago Our human ancestors, who looked like a cross between apes and modern humans, had access to food, water and shady shelter at a site in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. They even had lots of stone tools with sharp edges, said Gail M. Ashley, a professor in the Rutgers Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences. But “it was tough living,” she said. “It was a very stressful life because they were in continual competition with carnivores for their food.” To say nothing of them and the carnivores’ becoming each others’ food sources. During years of Read More ›

And when they do… Seriously, from Amy Harmon at New York Times: Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication. And what about the “name” journals? Researchers say they participate in the process in large part because the imprimatur of highly selective journals like Science, Nature and Cell has come to be viewed as a proxy for quality science. Like a degree from certain Read More ›

From Mustafa Akyol at New York Times: The scarcity of intellectual freedom under self-described Islamic states has received criticism from many corners, from Islamophobic conservatives to Muslim liberals. In response, the authorities who censor books or ban blogs usually shrug. They typically think that freedom of speech is a Western invention to which they don’t have to subscribe. In Malaysia, the government brazenly condemns “liberalism” and “human rights-ism.” These censors like to think that by protecting believers from dangerous ideas they are doing a great favor to Muslim societies. They are doing the opposite. Their thought-policing only helps enfeeble and intellectually impoverish Muslims: When Muslim minds aren’t challenged by “dangerous” ideas they cannot develop the sophistication needed to articulate their Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Although traditionally viewed as a predator of insects, researchers have become increasingly aware that spiders are not exclusively insectivorous. Some spiders have been shown to enrich their diets by occasionally feasting on fish, frogs or even bats. A new study by Zoologists from the University of Basel, Brandeis University (US) and Cardiff University (UK) now shows evidence of spiders eating plant food as well. “The ability of spiders to derive nutrients from plants is broadening the food base of these animals; this might be a survival mechanism helping spiders to stay alive during periods when insects are scarce”, says lead author Martin Nyffeler from the University of Basel in Switzerland. “In addition, diversifying their diet with plant is Read More ›

Maybe. From Nature: The tyrannosaurs of the late Cretaceous period (80 million to 66 million years ago) are among the biggest carnivores to have walked the Earth. But their predecessors — who lived as far back as 170 million years ago, in the Jurassic period — were much smaller; they were generally no bigger than a horse. They also had proportionally smaller heads and longer arms, and lacked the sense of smell and ability to hear low-frequency sound of later tyrannosaurs. A 20-million-year gap in the fossil record, from 100 million years ago to the time of the giant tyrannosaurs’ appearance, has made it difficult to trace how the keen-sensed giant carnivores evolved. But fossil fragments found in the Kyzylkum Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “This study shows that the unique bill contributes to the birds’ ability to use and probably make tools,” he said. “We argue that the beak became specialized for tool manipulation once the birds began using tools, and that this enhanced tool manipulation ability may have allowed the crows to make more complex tools.” Probably. It works that way with appendages too. In fact, some differences in apparent animal intelligence may come down to whether the animal can carry out an action for its own benefit. Shellfish are closer anatomically to octopuses than birds are but both octopuses and birds can use body parts to do something. Shellfish can’t. Can we quantify intelligence apart from the ability to demonstrate Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: By looking at distantly related bacteria from different branches of the evolutionary tree, the team speculate that the ability to alter torque in this way may have evolved up to two billion years ago. “Entire branches of the bacterial family tree have evolved motors with different torques, leading to a diversity of species each geared to their own environment,” said Dr Beeby. The team is now investigating how and when the evolutionary steps that altered motor torque happened. More. Evolved two billion years ago? That’s not a lot of time for Darwinian evolution, even if a wheel could be achieved that way, given enough monkeys, enough typewriters. See also: You’ll never guess why biological wheels are not irreducibly Read More ›

Neanderthals diet: 80% meat, 20% vegetables, according to ScienceDaily: The paleo-diet is one of the new trends among nutrition-conscious people — but what exactly did the meal plan of our extinct ancestors include? “We have taken a detailed look at the Neanderthals’ diet,” explains Professor Dr. Hervé Bocherens of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, and he continues, “In the process, we were able to determine that the extinct relatives of today’s humans primarily fed on large herbivorous mammals such as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses.” The two excavation sites in Belgium that were examined offered the international team of scientists led by the biogeologist from Tübingen a vast array of 45,000 to 40,000 Read More ›

[cannot locate drive] From BBC News: So Itskov is putting a slice of his fortune in to a bold plan he has devised to bypass ageing. He wants to use cutting-edge science to unlock the secrets of the human brain and then upload an individual’s mind to a computer, freeing them from the biological constraints of the body. “The ultimate goal of my plan is to transfer someone’s personality into a completely new body,” he says. … But Itskov is far from home and dry. At Duke University, one leading neuroscientist argues that the brain’s dynamic complexity – from which the human condition emerges – cannot be replicated. “You cannot code intuition; you cannot code aesthetic beauty; you cannot code Read More ›

The cottage industry attempting to show that great apes are just fuzzy people has a new one for us: From ScienceDaily: In one of the twelve tasks, children needed to use a stick as a lever to retrieve pom poms from a small box. Similarly, great apes use twigs to remove kernels from nuts or seeds from stingy fruits. The tasks could only be solved by using a tool, but children were not told that. Dr Claudio Tennie, Birmingham Fellow, explained, “The idea was to provide children with the raw material necessary to solve the task. We told children the goal of the task, for example to get the pom poms out of the box, but we never mentioned using Read More ›

From Nature News: The pupfish has evolved distinct differences from related species that live nearby, including reduced aggression, larger eyes and missing pelvic fins. But Many researchers thought that the fish species had been isolated in its cavern from around 13,000 years ago — the last time major flooding occurred in the region. But Christopher Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his colleagues say that genetic sequencing suggests that the pupfish became trapped in Devils Hole somewhere between 105 and 830 years ago — and since then has continued to exchange genes with neighbouring populations of pupfish species. “That was the big surprise,” says Martin. “Every few hundred years there’s a fish or Read More ›

From New Scientist: Behold – the only known example of a biological wheel. Loved by creationists, who falsely think they are examples of “intelligent design”, the bacterial flagellum is a long tail that is spun like a propeller by nano-sized protein motors. … Indeed, the diversity of the motors and the fact that they have evolved many times in different bacterial lineages, scuppers the creationist view that the machinery is “irreducibly complex”. More. Have a look. The New Scientist writer seems anxious to so mangle the idea of irreducible complexity that “irreducible complexity” means lack of diversity and “evolved only once.” People indulge in this kind of thing when their claims are so intimately a part of their readers’ lives Read More ›