News

Are you currently enrolled as a student in the natural or social sciences and wanting to take your ID involvement to the next level? Consider applying to participate in one of two intensive summer seminars hosted by the Discovery Institute, running from 12-20 July and hosted at Seattle Pacific University. As an alumni of the summer seminar program, I can attest that the seminar is one event that you do not want to miss out on. Featuring leaders in the field of ID, the seminar will give you a unique opportunity to interact with many of the major figures in the ID community, including William Dembski, Michael Behe, Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells, Richard Sternberg, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, and many Read More ›

The Foundation for Thought and Ethics have just released a kindle-format version of an interview that our own Bill Dembski did for “The Best Schools” website. Download it here. Be sure to also  check out Bill Dembski’s response to Thomas Nagel’s critics over at Evolution News & Views.  

Go here for further details. Featured speakers at this year’s conference (5th & 6th of April) include John Lennox, Stephen Meyer, Douglas Axe and Paul Nelson. I (Jonathan M.) hope to attend — anyone else going?

BBC News reports on an atheist church in North London: An “atheist church” in North London is proving a big hit with non-believers. Does it feel a bit like a new religion? Not many sermons include the message that we are all going to die and there is no afterlife. But the Sunday Assembly is no ordinary church service. Launched last month, as a gathering for non-believers, it is, in the words of master of ceremonies Sanderson Jones, “part foot-stomping show, part atheist church, all celebration of life”. A congregation of more than 300 crowded into the shell of a deconsecrated church to join the celebration on Sunday morning. Instead of hymns, the non-faithful get to their feet to sing Read More ›

The Huffington Post carries an article concerning a recent academic freedom bill in Colorado. It opens by asserting that, A Republican bill that would have paved the way for creationism to be taught in Colorado schools as well as encouraged teachers to deny the science of climate change was killed in committee on Monday, as expected. As anyone who knows anything about this academic freedom bill knows full well, however, it explicitly does NOT protect the teaching of creationism (which is unconstitutional). Nor for that matter does the bill protect the teaching of intelligent design. The bill only covers those subjects which are already part of the science curriculum. In the case of creationism, the Colorado bill states that “This bill only Read More ›

The UK Guardian reports on Richard Dawkins’ debate last week with Rowan Williams, which you can read about here.

BBC News Magazine carries an interesting article today about so-called “atheist churches”. It’s an insightful read: An “atheist church” in North London is proving a big hit with non-believers. Does it feel a bit like a new religion? Not many sermons include the message that we are all going to die and there is no afterlife. But the Sunday Assembly is no ordinary church service. Launched last month, as a gathering for non-believers, it is, in the words of master of ceremonies Sanderson Jones, “part foot-stomping show, part atheist church, all celebration of life”. A congregation of more than 300 crowded into the shell of a deconsecrated church to join the celebration on Sunday morning. Instead of hymns, the non-faithful Read More ›

Today, the UK Guardian newspaper published a piece about academic freedom bills in Colorado, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma. Readers will not be surprised to learn that the Guardian has seemingly bought into the common myth continuously recycled and promulgated by the NCSE and the Darwin lobby that the bills are “just creationism in disguise”, despite the fact that the bills do not protect the teaching of religious-based views (like creationism), nor even, for that matter, subjects which aren’t already part of the curriculum (like intelligent design). Although the Guardian apparently interviewed critics of the bills, including spokespersons from the NCSE, it seems that they failed to interview any individuals representing the other side. The article in the Guardian even opens with a Read More ›

BBC News reports, Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams will discuss religion on Thursday Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams are to discuss the role of religion at a Cambridge Union debate. Prominent atheist Prof Dawkins and the former Archbishop of Canterbury will discuss whether “religion has no place in the 21st Century” on Thursday. They were involved in a public discussion at Oxford University last year. Ben Kentish, president of the union, said it should be a highlight of the debating society’s 200-year history. “Our speakers are the most renowned commentators on this subject,” he said. In Cambridge, about 1,000 students will be in the audience. “The prospect of seeing Professor Dawkins and the former Archbishop of Canterbury debate the subject Read More ›

From Science Insider, Virtually all books about evolution—along with more than 100 other titles from other fields—have apparently disappeared in recent months from the selection of popular science books for sale by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), the country’s main science funding agency. The missing books have prompted the latest skirmish in the long-running conflict between the government and parts of the country’s academic community. But TÜBİTAK has denied censoring the books, saying that they are unavailable because of copyright issues. Click here to continue reading. Objective seekers of truth and proponents of academic freedom should find this report concerning. When one disagrees with a position or perspective, the right course of action is to present arguments Read More ›

From the Biologic Institute blog: What do Han Chinese characters and proteins have in common? Both can be thought of as two- or three-dimensional functional shapes. Change their shapes significantly and you change what they mean or do. For proteins the flow of functional information goes like this:   protein coding sequence ⇒ 3-D structure ⇒ function If a code could be devised that specifies Han character traces in vector space, then the Han character set would have a similar information flow:  Han coding sequence ⇒ 2-D structure ⇒ meaning And suddenly all the parallels between genetic code and language become a rich environment in which to test evolutionary scenarios. Click here to continue reading.

An infographic lists a few of what its author considers to be “2012’s biggest moments in science.” These are: Higgs boson discovered. Curiosity lands on Mars. Fetal genome sequencing. Quantum teleportation distance record broken. The discovery of an earth-sized exoplanet “orbiting Alpha Centauri B, one of the stars in the stellar system nearest to our own” (This is listed despite the fact that, as the infographic itself informs us, “Because the planet orbits much closer to its star than Earth, it likely does not host life.”). Superstorm Sandy as a consequence of climate change. Notice number 3 in particular. The text states, Researchers in June announced the successful sequencing of a fetus’ genome using snippets of DNA in the mother’s Read More ›

A new paper has just been published in Nature, reporting on the successful use of DNA to store data including Shakespearean sonnets and an MP3 file. Reports the abstract, Digital production, transmission and storage have revolutionized how we access and use information but have also made archiving an increasingly complex task that requires active, continuing maintenance of digital media. This challenge has focused some interest on DNA as an attractive target for information storage because of its capacity for high-density information encoding, longevity under easily achieved conditions and proven track record as an information bearer. Previous DNA-based information storage approaches have encoded only trivial amounts of information or were not amenable to scaling-up, and used no robust error-correction and lacked examination of their cost-efficiency Read More ›

New Scientist carries an interesting article on the subject of ORFan genes (i.e. genes which possess no known homologue): NOT having any family is tough. Often unappreciated and uncomfortably different, orphans have to fight to fit in and battle against the odds to realise their potential. Those who succeed, from Aristotle to Steve Jobs, sometimes change the world. Who would have thought that our DNA plays host to a similar cast of foundlings? When biologists began sequencing genomes, they discovered that up to a third of genes in each species seemed to have no parents or family of any kind. Nevertheless, some of these “orphan genes” are high achievers, and a few even seem have played a part in the Read More ›