Sorry for judging delay. The contest, you’ll recall, riffed off New Scientist’s offer of a Mars rock: Tell New Scientist what the first person to set foot on Mars should say. The winner gets a copy of The Nature of Nature , where Guillermo Gonzalez discusses the constraints of the galactic habitable zone. (Note: That […]
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Should Kentucky’s government fund a Noah’s Ark theme park?
The average American commentator would likely say of the Ark Encounter venture, under way in Kentucky, what Americans United for Separation of Church and State head Barry Lynn did in fact say: “The state of Kentucky should not be promoting the spread of fundamentalist Christianity or any other religious viewpoint … Let these folks build […]
Does “recursivity” make us human?
Here, Liz Else (New Scientist, (3 June 2011) tells us, that “recursivity” or “thoughts within thoughts” make us human: Chimps, bonobos and orangutans just don’t tell stories, paint pictures, write music or make films – there are no great ape equivalents of Hamlet or Inception. Similarly, theory of mind is uniquely highly developed in humans: […]
Found! Former Biologos honcho Karl Giberson …
We’d noted his disappearance from BioLogos here and taken heat for so doing. Now Biologos president Darrel Falk, says he’s resigned from that and from his position as Professor of Physics at Eastern Nazarene College in Boston, to … create more time for writing. At some point he hopes to find a “writer in residence” position […]
Rare mutation produces blue lobster
Here. Pulled up off the coast of the province of Prince Edward island (Canada). Said to be a 4 million to one shot. This one’s for the aquarium, not the table. Mutation explained here. Apparently, there is a trade in blue crayfish for aquariums, but any similar trade on blue lobsters depends on finding another […]
Bending, not breaking, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle produces double-slit measurements
Or so they say. At CBC News (June 2, 2011), Emily Chung reports, “‘Impossible’ physics feat traces path of light”: Canadian researchers have traced the average path of single light particles through two slits, probing the limits of a famous physics principle that seemed to suggest doing so wasn’t possible.
Look out, ghosts in the machine of evolution: That guy over there has a … a vacuum cleaner!!
Pointing out that there is probably no overwhelmingly dominant way that evolution occurs (like, for example, the natural selection of the biology textbook and the Darwin lobby literature/court cases … ) materialist atheists Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini admit that that’s not the solution a Darwin culture is looking for: Perhaps that strikes you as not […]
Nematode worm found in gold mine sparks new hope for extraterrestrial life
Recently, as John Biello tells it in “High temperature, low oxygen and permanent darkness are no problem for a previously unknown species of nematode,” (Scientific American, June 1, 2011), researchers found a nematode worm that lives more than a kilometre underground in South African gold mines. The species, called Halicephalobus mephisto, is believed to consume […]
Elephants forget, … when they are lonely
They forget assumed species differences, that is. In “Researchers Solve Mammoth Evolutionary Puzzle: The Woollies Weren’t Picky, Happy to Interbreed” ScienceDaily (May 31, 2011), we learn that DNA studies suggest that the woolly mammoth interbred with a “completely different and much larger” species 12,000 years ago (it went extinct 10,000 years ago). They suggest,
Why were the Soviets trying to create a human-chimp hybrid?
Here’s an intellectually respectable “Blast from the past” to understand the motives, a (August 23, 2008), “The Soviet ape-man scandal” by New Scientist’s Stephanie Pain: When Ivanov put his proposal to the Academy of Sciences he painted it as the experiment that would prove men had evolved from apes. “If he crossed an ape and […]
Mars formed “in record time”?
In “Mars ‘remains in embryonic state’”( BBC News, 27 May 2011), Jennifer Carpenter floats an interesting idea about Mars: Mars formed in record time, growing to its present size in a mere three million years, more quickly than scientists previously thought.Its rapid formation could explain why the Red Planet is about one tenth the mass […]
Sometimes smart people just don’t notice the world around them as closely …
This from Martin Eiermann’s (The European, 30.05.2011) interview with Stewart Brand, author, biologist, and environmental activist from the 1960s onward: Brand: Steven Pinker [materialist cognitive scientist (Harvard)] is currently working on a book about the decline of violence through human history. We like to think that we are living in a very violent time, that […]
Looking for the ultimate knot that explains the sweater
Senior scientist at the Biologic Institute, Ann Gauger, reflects on “Life, Purpose, Mind: Where the Machine Metaphor Fails”, Evolution News & Views (June 1, 2011): Up until now, the materialist, reductionist method has been very successful, because cells can be ground up, probed, measured and tested in a way that life forces or agency can’t […]
There were land-based life forms a billion years ago …
Here’s David Tyler at Access Research Network (05/31/11), on “Non-marine life throughout the Neoproterozic”: What do these findings mean for our understanding of life on the Precambrian Earth? Dr Charles Wellman, an author of the paper, is quoted by ScienceDaily as saying: “It is generally considered that life originated in the ocean and that the […]
Christian Darwinists talk around the slam-dunk “junk” DNA – Casy Luskin dissects
Whatever your theology, notice the significance of the fact that self-identified Christians were shown to be wrong because they made a prediction against God’s design in nature. It’s one thing to be wrong. It’s another to be wrong for discreditable reasons. Here at Evolution News & Views (June 1, 2011), Casey Luskin reviews Giberson and […]