Denyse O'Leary

Carrying some groceries home from the plaza today, I came across an interesting sight: Note: More altruism vs. Darwinism stories here. A rat in broad daylight. We see this sometimes here, in good years for rats. The rat rushed into traffic and got its right hind foot run over. I wasn’t about to rush out to rescue it. I knew it would bite very deep, and might have rabies. (Rats are nocturnal, generally. A common feature of rabid nocturnes is diurnal restlessness and weird behaviour. Indeed, a biologist friend commented that about half of skunks seen in broad daylight have or are carrying rabies. So why not rats?) The anti-rabies series of injections is not quite as much fun as Read More ›

A friend advises me that the Creation Museum in Kentucky disturbs some visitors, according to LiveScience. Its sponsors chose to respond by defending their beliefs.

It seems to me that there is a larger principle at stake here. People can have a private museum on their own land about whatever interests them. I could have a museum featuring heritage tomatoes, if I wanted to, on land that I own. Assuming I charged admission or was selling seeds, a question might arise whether it is for profit or not for profit. But that is an administrative issue.

I knew that this was part of a growing culture war when I heard that the fact that the museum ‘disturbs’ some is supposedly important.

I told my friend, who supports the museum’s cause: You don’t need to defend your beliefs. Defend your right to have a private museum. It doesn’t become someone’s business to interfere just because they disagree, and have friends in influential places. Period.

I strongly recommend Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, for orientation in this area.

I summarize his key findings here. Read More ›

Darwinists have long had a problem with the fact of human longevity, compared to that of chimps. Presumably, that is because they need equivalence between humans and chimps. The article referenced here, from Nature, takes, for once, a skeptical view of Darwinist claims.

I don’t see why an explanation is required at all. If you live like a chimp, you will die like one. Nowadays, if you live like a responsible human being with a mind, you can reach eighty years old quite easily in a technologically advanced democracy. (You know, Rabbi ben Ezra, and “Grow old along with me/The best is yet to be …) The rabbi’s  thoughts are only meaningful for creatures with a mind.

So this  skepticism re the “news from Darwinism”, rightly casting doubt on how grandmothers help natural selection, points to  the ridiculous disgrace that Darwinism has become, while dominating the academy for so long:

These researchers found that among Tanzanian hunter-gatherers, the Hadza, mothers faced a trade-off between foraging for food for themselves and any weaned offspring, and caring for new infants. But if grandmothers helped with foraging, they were rewarded with healthier, heavier grandchildren who weaned at a younger age. Over evolutionary time, this fitness boost could have selected for women who survived long past menopause, an anomaly among humans’ evolutionary kin.

“Chimps almost never live into their forties in the wild, but most humans, if they’re lucky enough to make it to adulthood, live beyond the childbearing years,” says Hawkes.

Further support for the grandmother hypothesis came from studies of other subsistence cultures, as well as from historical records, although not all studies back up the hypothesis. (Ewen Callaway, 24 August 2010 Nature )

Contrary to such claims, aged seniors can be a considerable burden on their families, and are normally cared for due to reasons of affection, morality, religion, etc. In other words, reasons that begin with the assumption that we are thinking beings in real time, making decisions.

Some true key causes of increased human longevity (all of which require an active mind) are Read More ›

If you want to hear some silly explanations of crying (weeping), go here. One theory is that crying may have evolved as a kind of signal — a signal that was valuable because it could only be picked up by those closest to us who could actually see our tears. Tears let our intimates in — people within a couple of feet of us, who would be more likely to help. “You can imagine there’d be a selection pressure to develop a signaling system that wouldn’t let predators in on the fact that you’re vulnerable,” says Randy Cornelius, a psychologist at Vassar College. College is often a waste of money. Any human can see when another is crying, close or Read More ›

I was writing about this earlier. Michael Moyer at Scientific American notes,

Once again, the world is about to end. The latest source of doomsday dread comes courtesy of the ancient Mayans, whose calendar runs out in 2012, as interpreted by a cadre of opportunistic authors and blockbuster movie directors. Not long before, three separate lawsuits charged that the Large Hadron Collider would seed a metastasizing black hole under Lake Geneva. Before that, captains of industry shelled out billions preparing for the appearance of two zeros in the date field of computer programs too numerous to count; left alone, this tick of the clock would surely have shaken modern civilization to its foundations.

And more. Well, there is always a catastrophe somewhere; right now, the floods in Pakistan.

It looks like an interesting SciAm issue, though I don’t think that fear of catastrophe is – as claimed – the outcome of “pattern-seeking brains.” That’s just another neuro Darwinism crock. For one thing, for most catastrophes, there is no pattern. That’s the problem. Read More ›

A reader kindly shares this BBC story with me, “Bat and moth arms race revealed” (19 August 2010 ) by Jason Palmer.

In a strategy that may be a moth-hunting adaptation, some bats are known to use clicks that are at a frequency, or pitch, either above or below moths’ hearing ranges.

High-pitched clicks have a larger range, while lower-pitched clicks are absorbed less by the atmosphere It remains unclear whether these pitch-shifting techniques adapted specifically to bypass moth defences or simply to cope in certain environments or situations.

Dr ter Hofstede and her colleagues were able to listen in on the Barbastella bat as it hunted, demonstrating that it had a completely different approach – its clicks were much reduced in volume, becoming even quieter as it closed in on prey.

“It seems like the majority of bats… call very loudly because they need as much information as possible from their surroundings,” Dr ter Hofstede told BBC News.

“We’re saying that this [low-volume tactic] is an adaptation to get around the moths’ defence – it doesn’t have any other useful purpose.” Read More ›

This is a media release, obviously, but I know from experience that its basic thesis is true, and that it can work, even with seniors of advanced age: Increasing scientific evidence shows that actively participating in appropriately designed brain fitness workouts aids mental agility. Scientific Brain Training PRO exercises were developed by a team of neurologists, cognitive psychologists and educational scientists to offer unique and challenging configurations that target various areas of cognitive impairment. The Memory Treatment Program is the latest program to take advantage of the SBT PRO online platform features of clinician-managed patient accounts and consistent patient records to meet the need of professionals who treat patients with cognitive impairment. One caution: Success is greatly increased if the Read More ›

We are told by Howard Falcon-Lang, science reporter for BBC news, that the fate of the universe is now revealed by the galactic lens and that the universe will expand forever (19 August 2010): Knowing the distribution of dark energy tells astronomers that the Universe will continue to get bigger indefinitely. Eventually it will become a cold, dead wasteland with a temperature approaching what scientists term “absolute zero”. Professor Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University, a leading cosmologist and co-author of this study, said that the findings finally proved “exactly what the fate of the Universe will be”. Hmmm. I thought that pulpit-splintering, Bible-whacking fundamentalists had settled that one along time ago. And I give about as much credit to each Read More ›

In “Is quantum theory weird enough for the real world?”, Richard Webb explains why we might need a new theory of quantum mechanics: In our day-to-day world, we are accustomed to the idea that two events are unlikely to be correlated unless there is a clear connection of cause and effect. Pulling a red sock onto my right foot in no way ensures that my left foot will also be clad in red – unless I purposely reach into the drawer for another red sock. In 1964, John Bell of the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, described the degree of correlation that classical theories allow. Bell’s result relied on two concepts: realism and locality. Realism amounts to saying Read More ›

Nowhere better illustrated than in this article from Wired Science about claims of stone tool use by supposed prehumans. How about “Australopithecus was a very primitive, ape-like early human,” said biological anthropologist Craig Stanford at University of Southern California, who edited a book on meat eating and human evolution. “The fact that they were using tools and eating meat indicates this was something that was widespread very early in human history.” The ability to carve meat off large mammal carcasses likely put Australopithecus in competition with dangerous scavengers, Alemseged says. It is unlikely they were hunting for the large game because their body shape would not have allowed them to run fast, which is necessary to chase down an antelope Read More ›

This NOVA program looks interesting. They look like dragons and inspire visions of fire-spitting monsters. But these creatures with their long claws, razor-sharp teeth, and muscular, whip-like tails are actually monitors, the largest lizards now walking the planet. With their acute intelligence, these lizards—including the largest of all, the Komodo dragon—are a very different kind of reptile, blurring the line between reptiles and mammals. Thriving on Earth essentially unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, they are a very successful species, versatile at adapting to all kinds of settings. This program looks at what makes these long-tongued reptiles so similar to mammals and what has allowed them to become such unique survivors. I have never been a fan of the Read More ›

Randal Rauser, a self-described “Tentative Apologist” explains, I ventured into turbid waters a couple days ago by mentioning that in the future I would discuss Steve Meyer’s Signature in the Cell in the blog. What followed was a barrage of discussion which led AnAtheist.Net to observe: “It looks like you have discovered a quick way to attract a fiery horde of new readers.” Indeed. Actually I learned last year about the effect that mention of “intelligent design” has in a blog. I like to think of it as being like a bucket of fish heads and blood. Slop it in the ocean and within fifteen minutes you’ll have a number of sharks swimming around the boat snapping things like: “That’s Read More ›

It is Sunday, so I allow myself one religious story. One is informed by the Reverend Michael Dowd, and evangelist for Darwinism, that the “new atheists” are God’s prophets: According to Dowd, God is speaking pointedly to Christians today through some very unlikely messengers outside the church—namely New Atheists, such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. These bestselling authors mock the biblical view of a God who, according to the U.S. Department of Defense’s definition of terrorism, is a cosmic terrorist. “The God that Richard Dawkins says is a delusion is a delusion!” asserts Dowd. “That way of thinking about God reflects an outdated, Bronze Age worldview that we have blindly believed for generations simply because someone said Read More ›

Here, in “Justification by Faith”, Darwinist atheist Michael Ruse comments on Christopher (new atheist) Hitchens’s esophageal cancer diagnosis ( bad news): Third, with Hitchens I simply don’t see that deathbed conversions, especially those done in fear or pain, are worth a thing. They have about as much validity as a confession forced out through waterboarding. I have often wondered, when I am on a plane, if it were announced that it was hijacked and we were on the way to the White House or whatever, what then would I do? Would I tell Jesus that I am sorry? I confess that I might. But if Jesus thinks that that is worth anything, then he loses my respect entirely. This is Read More ›

Get a load of this one: Infants presumably acquire the special strain of bifido from their mothers, but strangely, it has not yet been detected in adults. “We’re all wondering where it hides out,” Dr. Mills said. The indigestible substance that favors the bifido bacterium is a slew of complex sugars derived from lactose, the principal component of milk. The complex sugars consist of a lactose molecule on to which chains of other sugar units have been added. The human genome does not contain the necessary genes to break down the complex sugars, but the bifido subspecies does, the researchers say in a review of their progress in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The complex sugars were Read More ›