In “Did deadly formaldehyde give life to Earth?”, Clara Moskowitz tells us, “Scientists test the theory in their lab, and say the answer is most likely ‘yes’” (MSNBC4/4/2011): “We may owe our existence on this planet to interstellar formaldehyde,” said researcher George Cody of the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, Read More…
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Comprehensive gene map discovery: Humans have similar brains
In “First Comprehensive Gene Map of the Human Brain: More Than 90 Percent Similarity Among Humans” (ScienceDaily, Apr. 13, 2011), we learn: In developing the Allen Human Brain Atlas, the Allen Institute has now thoroughly characterized and mapped the biochemistry of two normal adult human brains, providing opportunities for scientists to study the brain with Read More…
The devil has left Dover, and was last spotted in Nashville
At Religion Dispatches, Laurie “Devil in Dover” Lebo reports, “Anti-Science Bill Passes Tennessee House”: The bill, which has yet to pass the Senate, would require teachers to be helped “to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies.” It also says that teachers may not be prohibited from “helping students Read More…
Darwin womb to tomb: Darwinism and abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia
Richard Weikart’s essay, “A History of the Impact of Darwinism on Bioethics”* appears in 150 Years of Evolution: Darwin’s Impact of Contemporary Thought and Culture, showing the way that Darwinism has impacted discourse on eugenics, infanticide, euthanasia, etc.: In November 2009, scholars representing academic disciplines from across the globe gathered at San Diego State University Read More…
Follow the arguments wherever they may lead …
Who said that? Phillip Johnson? Mike Behe? Nope. Materialist atheists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, in What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. xxii: … we’ve been told by more than one of our colleagues that, even if Darwin was substantially wrong to claim that natural selection is the mechanism of evolution, nonetheless Read More…
Audio: Rabbi who knows science better than atheists
Historically, not a rare event. Here Rabbi Moshe Averick does an interview with host Ken R. Unger,a “true Renaissance Man”, who notes Atheists sound real smart until they come up against someone who knows science better than they do. Today’s guest, Rabbi Moshe Averick, is just that kinda guy. His book Nonsense a High Order: Read More…
Quote mining: Quoting someone saying something that proves inconvenient to a would-be authority
In the face of charges from a frantic Darwinist, Paul Nelson points out that he is not “quote mining” when he quotes Lewis “Six Impossible Things” Wolpert making the same argument as himself:
Is intelligent design science? Here’s an answer you didn’t expect from an atheist prof
Bradley Monton, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, offers: So does intelligent design count as science? I maintain that it is a mistake to put too much weight on that question. Larry Laudan got the answer right: If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we Read More…
ID theorists are “evil and adulterous generation”?
[If so, give your UD news staff a chance to duck before you tell their wives … Like, we just report, okay … ] Apparently worried by a recent trend toward critical thinking, the evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Covalence has republished a 2002 article by Christian Darwin stalwart George Murphy on what’s wrong with Read More…
Natural selection proves a harsh mistress anyway
Paul Nelson has fun at Evolution News and Views with diagrams and “ontogenetic depth”: Understanding Ontogenetic Depth, Part I: Naming Versus MeasuringI was supposed to do this a year ago — well, long before that, too — but a glacier passed me on the interstate, and then I ran out of gas, got so depressed Read More…
He said it: Science needs to fail to advance?
At National Public Radio, Marcelo Gleiser asks (April 6, 2011), “Can Scientists Overreach?”.Glieser, a theoretical physicist, offers an appreciation of Marilynne Robinson’s Yale lectures, offering: For science to advance it needs to fail. The truths of today will not be the truths of tomorrow. For example, … Lord Kelvin remarked in 1900 that there were Read More…
Darwinism and popular culture: PayPal co-founder on Darwin’s effect
At TechCrunch (Apr 10, 2011), Sarah Lacy catches Peter Thiel in a politically incorrect moment in “We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.”: the idea that attending Harvard is all about learning? Yeah. No one pays a quarter of a million dollars just to read Chaucer. The implicit promise is Read More…
Stasis for a half billion years …
File under this one under: If it ain’t broke … In Current Biology (Volume 21, Issue 7, 612-616, 24 March 2011), we read that A 525 million year old fossil hemichordate with preserved soft tissues is the earliest and largest fossil hemichordate zooid and offers unmatched insight into the fossil anatomy and evolution of the Read More…
They said it: Why did two materialist atheists write a book against Darwinism?
“A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem.” You might reasonably wonder whether writing a critique of the classical Darwinist programme is worth the effort at this late date. Good friends in ‘wet’ biology tell us that none of them is Read More…
He said it: ID means that divine and human are comparable
University of Warwick sociologist Steve Fuller has commented The Guardian (3 May 2010): The most basic formulation of ID is that biology is divine technology. In other words, God is no less – and possibly no more – than an infinitely better version of the ideal Homo sapiens, whose distinctive species calling card is art, Read More…