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First gear discovered With two diminutive legs locked into a leap-ready position, the tiny jumper bends its body taut like an archer drawing a bow. At the top of its legs, a minuscule pair of gears engage—their strange, shark-fin teeth interlocking cleanly like a zipper. And then, faster than you can blink, think, or see with the naked eye, the entire thing is gone. In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g’s—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand. At top speed the jumper breaks 8 mph—quite a feat considering its body is less than one-tenth of an inch long. This miniature marvel is an adolescent issus, a kind of planthopper insect Read More ›

While having lunch at ICC 2013 with biologist and genetic engineer Robert Carter and the unnamed evolutionary biologist who got laughed off stage (let us call him Erik), I raised a question which the evolutionary biologist and other Darwinists (including Michael Lynch) have not provided satisfactory answers for, namely, “what is the evolutionary simulation that will resolve problems of speed limits of evolution, cost of substitution, rate of substitution, neutral evolution, Haldane’s dilemma, Muller’s ratchet, Haldane’s ratchet, Kondrashov’s question, mutational meltdown, etc?” John Sanford, Walter ReMine, John Baumgardner, Wes Brewer, Paul Gibson, Robert Carter, others created Mendel’s Accountant. Erik kept lambasting the program, “did you model recombination, do you model variable population sizes, do you model linkage, synergistic epistasis, truncation Read More ›

The anti-theist soap opera continues. PZ used to fawn over Dawkins, but no longer. I was surprised Dawkins didn’t even give so much as a tweet for PZ’s book, now it is apparent why — the two don’t seem to be bosom buddies anymore. PZ writes: I’ve strained to pardon Richard Dawkins’ many insensitivities — ‘dear muslima’, the missteps on twitter, the petty snits against other people — but his latest is just a disaster. In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, he said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s. … other children in his Read More ›

Nothing. First, let us compare Darwinism against real scientific theories like electro-magnetism. If electro magnetism is true, then we already know what there is to gain by electro-magnetism being true. We can build appliances that work on electricity and magnetism. We can build radios, cell phones, computers and space ships and do all sorts of cool things. Second, let us compare Darwinism against other possibly wrong theories like various alternative energy theories. For example, if we can rectify the zero-point energy that is present in all space via a Josephson junction diode, we could solve the world’s energy problems. Some will say this violates the 2nd law, and others will say the 2nd law doesn’t apply to that situation, we’re Read More ›

Favorite atheist thinkers? Bertrand Russell, Nathaniel Branden, Fred Hoyle, Jack Trevors, TJ Rodgers. That said, have any of you met anyone who said, “once I stopped believing in God, I cleaned up my life and became a better person”? Yet I know of many who left their old life after becoming Christians. A pastor of church I once attended was an atheist drug dealer. His name was Lon Solomon: Lon’s life became a relentless search for meaning and purpose. He sought to fill the void he felt on the inside with fraternity life, partying, gambling, and he even developed a serious drinking problem. When all this failed to supply the inner peace he was seeking, Lon became deeply involved in Read More ›

What would count as evidence against common descent given that organisms share such strong similarities? Darwin for the sake of argument assumed that the Creator (presumably God) created life, but argued the data accorded better with universal common ancestry. Nelson contested that view in his keynote address by arguing that if the principle of continuity is violated, there is no need to assume common ancestry. That even if a pair of organisms are 90% similar, that 10% difference could be sufficient to falsify common ancestry if the gap in differences are sufficiently large to be bridged by mindless processes. IF it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight Read More ›

[Sometimes debate at UD can be heated, and I commend Mark Frank for his temperance with his critics. If I shut down every unfriendly comment made by either side in the discussions I host, I think there wouldn’t be any discussion!] There is sometimes a fine line between what is believable and what is true. Further there are true statements that might be formally or practically undecidable. I find the existence of God believable. I also believe that in the existence in an Intelligent Designer of life, and that the Intelligent Designer is God. Even though many ID proponents have publicly said they believe the Intelligent Designer is God (myself included) the inference to God is insufficient from the definition Read More ›

One my scoundrel-hero-bankers of Wall Street, Goldman-Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein famously said: “we’re doing God’s work“, responding to criticism that his firm made huge profits from the demise of others and he paid himself fat bonuses. Well, in like manner “we’re doing God’s work” here at UD, benefiting from the demise of Darwinism. Novelists and writers have referred to Jamie Dimon (left) and Blankfein (right) along with other bankers as “Masters of the Universe”. Due to popular demand, I’m starting another off-topic thread in honor of BA77’s contributions to UD. Here is an off topic. Dawkins is under the impression that religious belief is mostly perpetuated through indoctrination. I don’t know about that because of people like Mitsuo Fuchida who Read More ›

[precursor to Denyse’s post Darwin in the School’s Lobby has a new]From the Ultraman Series we have the Science Patrol: From DC Comics, we have the Justice League of America: So what do you get when you put together these two fictional ideas? The NCSE’s latest: NOTES:1. And the NCSE might even have a march to go along with their latest offering: 2. Denyse will post on the NCSE latest shortly 3. Photo Credits:http://www.chrisroberson.net/uploaded_images/Science-Patrol-710762.jpghttp://ncse.com/files/blog-images/blogLogo.jpghttp://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100310031007/superfriends/images/f/f7/Justice_League_of_America_(FOUNDERS).jpg

YECs are very interested in mechanism of accelerated nuclear decay. Ironically, so is the mainstream in order to find better methods of dealing with nuclear waste instead of burying it underground (or worse putting it in containers and tossing it in the sea). Here is a breaking development published in a peer-reviewed article in 2013: Accelerated alpha-decay of uranium isotopes induced by exposure of aqueous solution of uranium salt with gold nanoparticles to laser radiation a pre-print of the work is available here: Accelerated alpha-decay of 232U isotope achieved by exposure of its aqueous solution with gold nanoparticles to laser radiation One notable highlight was that nuclear decay was accelerated by a factor of 6-trillion! In other words, the half-life Read More ›

I had advocated Barry Setterfield’s decaying speed of light model as a possible mechanism for seeing distant starlight on shorter time scales than billions of years. At this time I need to appraise those who have followed my defense of Barry’s theory, that I no longer think Setterfield’s versions of the c-decay are workable as stated. Although we still have potentially anomalous data points in the measurement of the speed of light that could argue for a universal, isotropic decaying speed of light (as reported in Nature), and even though Joao Magueijo, John Barrow, Paul Davies have argued for the possibility that the speed of light was universally faster in the past, I have not been able to resolve difficulties Read More ›

In a previous thread I summarized geneticist Jeff Tomkins findings that demonstrates human DNA is not 98% similar to chimps but more on the order of 70% (and even that is a generous estimate). Tomkins has a book out that goes into the details I sketched out here. More Than a Monkey NOTES: photo credits: Amazon.com

natural selection cannot build any feature in which intermediate steps do not confer a net benefit on the organism. Jerry Coyne as reported in Hopless Matzke contrast this with what Allan Miller said at The Skeptical Zone It is sufficient that NS does not act too strongly against, not that it must act for, a particular change. Allan Miller TSZ Allan Miller says natural selection has to fail for evolution to work I actually agree with Miller to the extent that Miller agrees with Michael Lynch and Mae Wan Ho many genomic features could not have emerged without a near-complete disengagement of the power of natural selection Michael Lynch opening, The Origins of Genome Architecture and a relative lack of Read More ›

The answer appears to be yes (at least for electrical and mechanical means, don’t know for sure about chemical and biological means). A physics professor assigned our class term papers of our choosing. Our goal was to learn something new. I chose to explore the effects of electricity and chemistry on nuclear processes. I thought the professor would take my head off for such a radical claim, so I determined to look at mainstream peer-reviewed literature on the topic. We all had to make presentations of our term papers in class, and the professor had a big smile after I gave mine, he said, “that was the topic of the night!” [The Vodka designation in the title indicates speculative ideas Read More ›

From the Evolution News and Views: Hopless Matzke.