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Further to: A prof has resigned from Bethel College. Can’t affirm Adam created directly by God: This from (formerly Bethel’s, currently BioLogos’) Jim Stump’s review of An Introduction to Design Arguments, by Virginia Tech’s Benjamin C. Jantzen: in a magazine for churches no one goes to any more (As if anyone cares*). Anyway, here: The idea of irreducible complexity has had remarkable intuitive staying power among ID followers, but when the intuition is converted into an argument, it has considerably less persuasive force. First, almost all biologists think Behe is wrong about the specific examples of structures that he says are unexplainable by evolution. But most people’s intuition is guided by a caricature of how evolution works. They think that each Read More ›

At the Daily Beast, Karl Giberson tells us, In a story becoming all too familiar, another pro-evolution faculty member has been forced to leave his evangelical institution. Jim Stump, longtime professor of philosophy, productive scholar, and popular, award-winning teacher at Bethel College in Indiana, resigned his position in June because of pressures put on the college by its sponsoring denomination, the Missionary Church. The issue, once again, was evolution. Most members of the Missionary Church reject Darwin’s theory of evolution in favor of a literal interpretation of the creation story in the Book of Genesis. But many faculty members at Bethel College accept evolution and consider it part of their “teaching ministry” to help their students do the same, within the Read More ›

Regular readers will of course be familiar with Vincent Torley’s insightful posts. It is a pleasure to report that he has made three lists of his 380 articles: one ordered by date, one indexed by subject, and one indexed by subject’s name. Make your writing assignments fun! Okay, okay, can we settle for better and faster?

We wouldn’t have believed it possible. Trust a celebrated Darwinian atheist to bring it off. And so now here (Huffpo): Outspoken atheist writer Richard Dawkins took to Twitter this week to air concerns about the status of women in Islam. Needless to say, his unsolicited advice to a religion of 1.6 billion people didn’t sit well with many. It shouldn’t sit well. The status of women in Islamic regions is a disgrace in the eyes of the world and everyone knows it, including all decent Muslims. So why do we need an outspoken atheist to point it out? Dawkins pointed to child marriage, female genital mutilation and other atrocities in some countries as evidence of Islam’s inherent bias against women. Read More ›

Here: Nasa scientists have announced the discovery of Kepler 452b, also known as ‘Earth 2.0’, an earth-like planet in our galaxy. Over the course of years of data-gathering by the Kepler space telescope and even more analysis and work here on Earth, scientists confirmed the existence of the distant exoplanet, which is the most earth-like planet ever discovered. Although the planet is far too far away to photograph, advanced Nasa technology means we know a surprising amount about this ‘New Earth’. Earlier this year, there were eight of them. We shall see. The new planet is slightly larger than Earth, and is estimated to have twice the gravitational pull of our own planet. However, according to the scientists on the Read More ›

From their earliest cinematic appearance in Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon” in 1902, our conception of life beyond Earth has changed to reflect our hopes and fears, the technology we’ve mastered, and our growing knowledge of the universe. Watch our depictions of extraterrestrial life change over nearly 100 films and 112 years. Good chance the vid below is as good as it’ll get re space aliens. Follow UD News at Twitter! B

From ScienceDaily: The idea that integrating abstract information drives many of the human brain’s unique abilities has been around for decades. But a paper published1 in Current Biology, which directly compares activity in human and macaque monkey brains as they listen to simple auditory patterns, provides the first physical evidence that a specific area for such integration may exist in humans. Other studies that compare monkeys and humans have revealed differences in the brain’s anatomy, for example, but not differences that could explain where humans’ abstract abilities come from, say neuroscientists. “This gives us a powerful clue about what is special about our minds,” says psychologist Gary Marcus at New York University. “Nothing is more important than understanding how we Read More ›

Here. The life forms are not abundant, and their metabolisms run at very low levels. Still, they are alive and well, surviving on powdered coal and hydrogen and pumping out methane, the signature molecule leftover by life in extreme environments. They belong to the less commonly known domain of life called Archaea, home also to the extremophiles living in volcanic hot springs and deep sea hydrothermal vents. “They’re kind of just really cool bugs,” Huber said. “They are very successful organisms.” There are still a number of questions left to answer. Have these new microbes changed over the course of time? Have they adapted or branched off into new species? Or have they always been the same critter just barely Read More ›

Small pre-Cambrian oxygen jump in atmosphere helped enable animals take first breaths Not big ones? Can someone just make a list of pop science media assumptions? Would save trouble. Maybe we could mechanize it. Here is one: We must always be looking for a “small” event that kickstarted life or some advance in life. ScienceDaily: If oxygen was a driver of the early evolution of animals, only a slight bump in oxygen levels facilitated it, according to a multi-institutional research team that includes a Virginia Tech geoscientist. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, calls into question the long held theory that a dramatic change in oxygen levels might have been responsible for the appearance of complicated life forms like Read More ›

Here. John Horgan is one of the most colorful and thought-provoking science writers of the last several decades. He defies pigeonholing and enjoys challenging conventional wisdom. In the best Socratic tradition, he has been a gadfly to the scientific community, constantly urging it to be more self-reflective and to strive for sober understanding of the scientific enterprise—its prospects, possibilities, and pitfalls. Excerpt. John Horgan: I still stand by the thesis of The End of Science, that the era of truly monumental, paradigmatic discoveries has ended. In fact, the argument seems even more compelling today than it did 20 years ago when the book was first published. My guess is that some of the great remaining mysteries—How, exactly, did the universe Read More ›

Dunno. He was referring to this “hair bleach” claim: Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Professor John Brindley, from the University of Leeds, and his colleagues, said: ‘The story of the relationship between hydrogen peroxide and life is complex and dynamic, and fraught with certain natural tensions which have led to human misapprehensions. ‘In this work, we show that the association may be extremely ancient, that the story may have begun more than 3.7 billion years ago, the first chapter providing the periodic pH and thermal drive that enabled the RNA world to replicate, evolve and develop enzyme activity. ‘We affirm that concern over the alleged toxicity of hydrogen peroxide to life is largely misplaced in the current Read More ›

  We are so informed, at ScienceDaily: Evolution moulds the shapes of living creatures according to the benefits they offer. At the microscopic level, do the various shapes of bacteria also contribute to their survival? Does a spherical bacterium (coccus) have a better chance of infecting its host than its stick-shaped neighbour (bacillus)? Analysis of the evolution of the pathogenic bacteria that live in the nasopharynx suggests that the shape of these bacteria has changed over time, shifting from bacillus to coccus. In an article published in the journal PLOS Genetics, Professor Frédéric Veyrier, of INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier Research Centre, and his colleagues demonstrate that this change may have occurred to make the bacteria better at slipping through the defences of Read More ›

By new facts, not the latest political correctness (so this is worth paying attention to): From ScienceDaily: “It’s incredibly surprising,” said David Reich, Harvard Medical School professor of genetics and senior author of the study. “There’s a strong working model in archaeology and genetics, of which I have been a proponent, that most Native Americans today extend from a single pulse of expansion south of the ice sheets–and that’s wrong. We missed something very important in the original data.” Good thing we paid in advance to learn your earlier incorrect ideas. Previous research had shown that Native Americans from the Arctic to the southern tip of South America can trace their ancestry to a single “founding population” called the First Read More ›

Well, get this: Far from being selfish organisms whose sole purpose is to maximize their own reproduction, bacteria in large communities work for the greater good by resolving a social conflict among individuals to enhance the survival of their entire community. This part is rubbish, of course: “It’s an example of what we call ’emergent phenomena’,” explained Gürol Süel, an associate professor of molecular biology at UC San Diego who headed the research effort. “Emergent phenomena” is an elegant of saying “We don’t know what we are talking about.” That’s fine, just admit it. Meanwhile: The conflict is essentially this: Bacteria at the outer edges of the biofilm are the most vulnerable within their community to chemical and antibiotic attacks. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Until now, researchers believed farming was ‘invented’ some 12,000 years ago in an area that was home to some of the earliest known human civilizations. A new discovery offers the first evidence that trial plant cultivation began far earlier — some 23,000 years ago. … “While full-scale agriculture did not develop until much later, our study shows that trial cultivation began far earlier than previously believed, and gives us reason to rethink our ancestors’ capabilities,” said Prof. Sternberg. “Those early ancestors were more clever and more skilled than we knew.” And we didn’t “knew” this because … Can we just complete the thought here? Because Darwin’s boys said … ? See also: Why Darwin’s boys are of no use Read More ›