… by viewing Wikipedia edits via this handy new tool: Friend says, “Enter any controversial topic and enjoy.” Possible last-ditch therapy for any who take Wikipedia seriously. See also: How Wikipedia can turn fiction into fact Follow UD News at Twitter!
First, the sensible stuff: From BioLogic Institute’s Ann Gauger Homo naledi as Spin Detector: In reading the coverage of Homo naledi, as the species is called now, it seems clear to me that the spin put on the actual bones depends on the assumptions of the writers. What do I mean? Bones can only tell us so much. The rest is a matter of interpretation, and one’s point of view inevitably tends to color that interpretation. Let me give two examples: The first example is how writers interpret skull size. H. naledi had a small brain compared to ours, about the size of a chimpanzee’s. To some writers that seems to indicate the probable lack of high levels of cognition. Read More ›
Discussion here. Kicked off here: Well, this has been an interesting discussion! Much thanks to BA77 for useful background info. Recommended. Some respondents also attempted to interject the claim that ID does not have a valid research program (RDFish?) First, whether any intellectual enterprise has a “valid” research program isn’t a reasonable question unless the public is being asked to buy in (public funding, legislation, curricula, etc.). Private parties should be free to spend their money on any not-obviously criminal enterprise they wish. Is it valid to spend (waste?) money on the search for ET? Origin of life? In the absence of useful answers, that must remain an open question. My own view (O’Leary for News) favors spending a certain Read More ›
Darwinian evolution is not a valid research program I do not have a cat entered in the fight, so I don’t really care that much. But look at this post, and the ensuing comments, and ask yourself, why should any of Darwin’s followers’ rubbish be publicly funded? If you were an investor, would you invest? Note: Your money, not the government’s (= other people’s) Follow UD News at Twitter!
In his The Evolution Revolution, Lee Spetner has collected a number of Dawkins squawks in favour of natural selection (the fittest at any given time survive) as a mystical explanation for everything that happens on the only planet we know of that has life, for sure: One cannot honestly say evolution in the sense of Common Descent is a scientific theory, despite the Darwinists’ hyperbolic statements about evolution — the kinds of statements no scientist would think of making in another field. RichardDawkins wrote about evolution (Dawkins 2009) It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur Read More ›
From RealClearScience: Wikipedia Wars: ‘Controversial’ Science Topics Are Edited More Often Than Uncontroversial Topics Blow us away again, will you? “Controversial,” we repeatedly find, means nothing more than that some powerful lobby doesn’t like the information presented. It often has nothing to do with whether the information was accurately or adequately sourced. Adam Wilson and Gene Likens, both based out of the University of Connecticut, were curious just how often this happens. So they downloaded the complete revision histories (dating from 2003 to 2012) of three politically controversial scientific topics — acid rain, global warming, and evolution — and compared them to four politically uncontroversial topics — heliocentrism, general relativity, continental drift, and the standard model in physics. They found Read More ›
Megan Fox at PJMedia writes, Anyone who questions the great religion of Darwinism, specifically that all living things come from one common ancestor and more specifically, that people evolved from apes, is violently and quickly attacked, silenced, and treated like they’re a heretic. … I have personally been threatened by people who say they want to call the state and report me for child abuse because I made a video questioning the validity of some of the evolutionists’ claims at the Field Museum in Chicago. These threats are not to be taken lightly, considering that children have been taken from their parents over idiotic circumstances like a homeschooling father who takes a natural supplement that the FDA doesn’t approve of Read More ›
Purposeful Darwinism? From Mercatornet, The retail giant is conducting an experiment to see how far it can push white-collar employees. After reading the quotes and claims by former and current employees, both named and anonymous, “purposeful Darwinism” doesn’t quite capture what is being described, rather English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ abbreviated view of the state of nature is more fitting: “And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk” said Bo Olson, a former books marketing employee. “Raising children would most likely prevent her from success at a higher level because of the long hours required,” is what Michelle Williamson explained regarding what her boss, Shahrul Ladue, Read More ›
Closing our religion news coverage for the week, we have Steve Pinker on faitheism. Readers may remember Pinker from this: A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution based on nebulous but sweeping principles such as “dignity,” “sacredness,” or “social justice.” … Here he is on the dangers of “faitheism” (a Jerry Coyne coinage): The backlash against the New Atheists has given rise to a new consensus among faith-friendly intellectuals, and their counterattack is remarkably consistent across critics with little else in common. The new atheists are too shrill and militant, they say, and just as extreme as the fundamentalists they criticize. They are preaching to the choir, and only driving Read More ›
The modern synthesis (schoolbook Darwinism) must be replaced, says philosopher of science Günther Witzany. Modern synthesis The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis is the name given to the school of thought which is now broadly accepted by evolutionary scientists around the world. Formal amalgamation of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Gregor Mendel’s genetics and August Weismann’s germ plasm theory was key to the Modern Synthesis, but other advances in population genetics and palaeontology were also important. From an interview with Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, at Huffington Post: Over the last half dozen years, philosopher of science and language, Günther Witzany, working from his private practice in Austria, has organized and/or co-organized two major conferences, Read More ›
Details here: A few months ago I painted this portrait of noted evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins. I shipped the portrait to England on May 15th, 2015, destined for Cambridge, UK CB3. It was shipped from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. It hasn’t been seen since. If you have any information on the whereabouts of this very special portrait, please contact me at heather “at” heatherhorton “dot” com. Thank-you very much… We have no idea where the portrait is. Except Canada Post, absent a tracking number, is a black hole. To judge from the portrait, if Dawkins believed in God, it could be a Sunday School poster. Follow UD News at Twitter!
A great, simple way to see why philosophy is still important in an age of science.
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The way Darwinism got on it. Including tax-funded textbooks in compulsory public schools and all the rest. At Evolution News & Views, Kirk Durston writes, Science is also advancing our understanding of just how fantastically improbable the origin of life is. Evolutionary biologist, Eugene Koonin, looking at the possibility that life arose through the popular “RNA-world” scenario, calculates that the probability of just RNA replication and translation is 1 chance in 10 with 1,017 zeros after it. Koonin’s solution is to propose an infinite multiverse. With an infinite number of possible universes, the emergence of life will becomes inevitable, no matter how improbable. So the multiverse has become atheism’s “god of the gaps” but some scientists point out that multiverse Read More ›
Was Al Seckel a con man who fronted Dawkins? We dunno. We love to begin the day here with a mug and a story. Well, This is sure a story: In postwar America, there emerged a loose coalition of groups fighting the influence of religion and supernatural thinking. The most famous freethought group is American Atheists, founded in 1963 by the notorious Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who was widely loathed for, among other efforts, her successful court challenge to Bible readings in public schools. (In 1995, she was killed and dismembered by a three-man crew that included one of her former employees; her body was identified by the serial number on her prosthetic hip.) But O’Hair’s hard-core atheism was just one Read More ›
Says Cosmos Magazine here: National Geographic’s senior editor Christopher Sloan had seen a feathered dinosaur fossil or two. But the specimen he described in the magazine’s November 1999 issue, dubbed Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, took his breath away. … Archaeoraptor would later be dubbed “Piltdown chicken”. Cut n’ paste job. But even smart folks have been taken in. The problem of faked fossils in China is serious and growing. Rather than being excavated by palaeontologists on fossil digs, most of the region’s fossils are pulled from the ground by desperately poor farmers and then sold on to dealers and museums. More. Gotta have one? Don’t pay more than you would for some other souvenir. How about a stuffed gotta-have-one toy dressed as Read More ›