At ScienceDaily (June 28, 2011), we learn: “Ancient Symbiosis Between Animals and Bacteria Discovered” Marine shallow water sandy bottoms on the surface appear desert-like and empty, but in the interstitial space between the sand grains a diverse fauna flourishes. In addition to bacteria and protozoa numerous animal phyla have been found here, some only here. Read More…
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Reader says, It’s outcomes, not theory, that gets attention, guys
A reader writes to offer a suggestion about how to communicate about stuff that really matters, so that people know why it matters, based on his experience as a flight school instructor: Early in the training for a private pilot certificate we were required to introduce the student to stalls and their proper recovery. If Read More…
Tenure: How the university became a bureaucracy and how to fix it
In “The Economic Upside to Ending Tenure” (Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2011), Naomi Schaefer Riley goes beyond the usual complaints about tenured lecture room mediocrities to say, Tenure means not having to worry about having to find new employment in middle age, and that means a lot to professors. As the George Mason Read More…
Update re John Lennon vs. Charles Darwin: Lennon earliest to diss Darwin profs?
“It keeps all the old professors happy in the university. It gives them something to do. I don’t know if there’s any harm in it except they ram it down everybody’s throat.” At Evolution News & Views, David Klinghoffer elaborates on Lennon’s Darwin-dissing views: He laughed at what he regarded as the ludicrousness of Darwinian Read More…
Darwin matters far more in politics than your history teacher ever let on
Here, Martin Olasky, editor-in-chief of World tells us how “Darwin matters” (June 29, 2011): Politics.Woodrow Wilson started federal government expansion in 1912 by opposing the “Newtonian” view that the government should have an unchanging constitutional foundation, somewhat like “the law of gravitation.” He argued that government should be “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It Read More…
Here’s a first: A reviewer skeptical of airhead neuroscience claims
That’s Adam Hanft on the recent The Compass of Pleasure by neuroscientist David J. Linden, who writes at Barnes & Noble Reviews (June 27, 2011): Disciplines from neuroscience to behavioral psychology to evolutionary biology have created a new cranial transparency that’s unleashed a gush of books like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell; Sway: The Irresistible Pull Read More…
How do people understand algebra if they never encounter it?
In “Geometric Principles Appear Universal in Our Minds” (Wired Science, May 24, 2011) , Bruce Bower reflects on the fact that research among peoples who do not even count suggests that abstract geometric principles are probably innate in humans: If geometry relies on an innate brain mechanism, it’s unclear how such a neural system generates Read More…
Don’t ask us how the most complex eyes appeared at the beginning. Instead, we offer to solve a tautology for you.
In John R. Paterson’s “Modern optics in exceptionally preserved eyes of Early Cambrian arthropods from Australia (Nature, 30 June 2011) from Nature by, we learn of a particular, “exceptionally preserved” trilobite-like eye from South Australia that predates other known finds from 85 million years later: The arrangement and size of the lenses indicate that these Read More…
This just in: John Lennon doubted common descent of man and apes – so why was Yoko Ono suing Expelled?
From John Nolte at Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Hollywood,” we learn John Lennon’s take on evolutionary theory. “More on John Lennon’s Move Away from ‘Imagine’: Evolution is ‘Absolute Garbage’: Even more shocking to the idea of Lennon as a secular leftist, or a deep thinker, the man rejected evolution. “Nor do I think we came from Read More…
In 2006, Nature covered PZ Myers’s Pharyngula as one of the “top five science blogs.” What were they thinking?
Perhaps they weren’t thinking how other evolutionists might react. The fact that the Sage of Morris, Minnesota scored in Technorati’s top 3500 doesn’t tell us much about who reads his blog or why, and that’s now Nature made the decision. And you have to pay to read about it. Over at Evolution News & Views Read More…
Cosmos: Universe clumpier than it is supposed to be
Also, from Stephen Battersby (New ScientistJune 21, 2011), we learn: , “Largest cosmic structures ‘too big’ for theories”: We know that the universe was smooth just after its birth. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the light emitted 370,000 years after the big bang, reveal only very slight variations in density from place Read More…
“Pin-ups of the cosmos” puzzle scientists
Catching up with the news from outer space, from New Scientist’s Vanessa Thomas and Richard Webb (June 13, 2011), we learn that spiral galaxies are a headscratcher for cosologists: Easy as these spiral beauties are on the eye, for cosmologists they are becoming something of a headache. As we survey the spiral galaxies around us Read More…
Is Darwinism hinted to be on life support in this journal article?
At Eurekalert, we learn about “The mechanics of speciation: Model examines factors that contribute to the emergence of new species” (24-Jun-2011). And we learn that sympatric speciation – a key current claim – is “not impossible.”
Resources: Need to do some clear thinking?
The latest edition of The Reasoner (Volume 5, Number 7 – July 2011), a monthly digest highlighting exciting new research on reasoning, inference and method broadly construed. It is interdisciplinary, covering research in, e.g., philosophy, logic, AI, statistics, cognitive science, law, psychology, mathematics and the sciences, is available for download. Articles of interest:
Paul Chien on the suppressed significance of the Chinese Cambrian fossils
“… the most complex animal group, the chordates, were represented at the beginning, and they did not go through a slow gradual evolution to become a chordate.” The Darwin circus wagons should have halted there at Chengjiang and been repurposed as hot dog stands for public convenience. But too much had been invested. Paul Chien, Read More…