Culture

If a pop playwright does see that, things are  surely changing, big time. In his new play, The Hard Problem, British playwright Tom Stoppard, writer for Shakespeare in Love proposes the following plot: Above all don’t use the word good as though it meant something in evolutionary science. Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brain-science institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? This is ‘the hard problem’ which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Is the day coming when the computer and Read More ›

If you have been in the habit of using Twitter to get notice of new UD News posts, please note that the account was falsely reported for spam. Note: This message from UD News could not be reported on Twitter: Service note: Re Twitter: Account falsely reported for spam.http://is.gd/OqeOCb Falsely reported?: If you signed up, you would get UD News posts (now and then MercatorNet, or stuff my friends wrote that I found interesting, usually re freedom of speech). No sales, no rankings manipulations, etc. Just News hitting: Tweet! I guess this is what some people do when they run out of arguments after they run out of rent money. See also: Darwin’s Doubt: Fake Steve Meyer Facebook pages a new Read More ›

… think we should maybe start space colonies (and spread the misery)? From Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Startalk: Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the future of humanity with one of the men forging that future: billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Join us as Neil and Elon talk about NASA funding, getting humans excited for the colonization of Mars, and why Elon feels it’s important to not be stuck here on Earth. You’ll also find out why sustainable production and consumption of energy is critically important, but flying cars may not be such a good idea. Meanwhile, back in the studio, guest engineer Bill Nye schools Neil and Chuck Nice about SpaceX’s major innovations and how they’ve improved Read More ›

Wave enough hands (and pom poms) and Air TV thinks you are only a step from a major discovery. This from commentator Steven Hayward: Ironically the best evidence for the abuse of climate science by the political class comes from a very sober commentary in Nature magazine this week about how climate scientists are concerned that the upcoming UN climate summit in Paris next December won’t reach a serious agreement (they’re right about this), but especially how the politicians are ignoring what scientists are telling them and the dilemma this supposedly causes climate scientists: Climate science advisers should use the time before Paris to reassess their role. Do they want to inform policy-makers or support the political process? The climate Read More ›

Because nothing is a problem for a theory like Darwin’s. (Or Freud’s, for that matter.) Further to Berlinski’s Question Remains Unanswered, embryologist Jonathan Wells writes to say, Regarding the first line in the comments (by eigenstate): Haldane’s “rabbit in the Cambrian” suffices as a simple example of a devastating find for evolutionary theory’s basic model. In 2009, Steve Meyer and I spoke at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma. The day before, the museum’s curator of invertebrate paleontology, Dr. Stephen Westrop, made a pre-emptive strike by giving his own talk about why the Cambrian explosion poses no challenge to Darwinian theory. He concluded by taking exception to J.B.S. Haldane’s claim that finding a fossil rabbit Read More ›

From Philip Ball at Nautilus: Ah, but isn’t all this wonder simply the product of the blind fumbling of Darwinian evolution, that mindless machine which takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection? Well, not quite. You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive. “Darwin’s theory surely is the most important intellectual achievement of his time, perhaps of all time,” says evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner of the University of Zurich. “But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded his theory. And he couldn’t even get close to solving it.” Hey, wait a minute. I put the obvious Read More ›

Because the Templeton Foundation is a sponsor: As Darwin’s man Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne tells it, Once again the World Science Festival (WSF) will take place in New York City in May, the brainchild of Brian Greene and Tracy Day. Let me begin by affirming that I’m all in favor of the Festival as a way to excite the public about science. Greene and Day have put enormous effort into this event, which has been a live affair, and a successful one, since 2008. But there’s a fly in the ointment: one of the big sponsors of the WSF is the John Templeton Foundation (JTF), which was also one of its founding benefactors. This is shown on the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Now Northwestern University scientists propose a new model for how neural crest cells, and thus vertebrates, arose more than 500 million years ago. … The study also turns conventional thought on its head. Previously, scientists thought neural crest cells had to evolve to gain their incredible properties, but the Northwestern work shows the power was there all along. Researchers now can focus on the molecular mechanisms by which neural crest cells escaped having their potential restricted. If the neural crest cells did not have to evolve, but rather the “incredible properties” were there all along, is that not an argument for design in nature? Not that we can expect the researchers to make such an argument. They have Read More ›

Should know better. In an article defending consensus science, physicist Ethan Siegel opines, Think about evolution, for example. Many people still rally against it, claiming that it’s impossible. Yet evolution was the consensus position that led to the discovery of genetics, and genetics itself was the consensus that allowed us to discover DNA, the “code” behind genetics, inherited traits and evolution. Actually, modern genetics started with Gregor Mendel who was as oblivious to Darwin’s work as Darwin was to his. The triumph of Darwinism has distorted genetics, such that horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and convergence were for many decades routinely underresearched. Scientists scrambled for evidence of the great wonders of accumulated information supposedly performed by Darwin’s natural selection acting on Read More ›

Further to Build your own worm (and bring your own dirt too), from Ann Gauger at Evolution News & Views: offers, The white space in evolutionary thinking. When certain biologists discuss the early stages of life there is a tendency to think too vaguely. They see a biological wonder before them and they tell a story about how it might have come to be. They may even draw a picture to explain what they mean. Indeed, the story seems plausible enough, until you zoom in to look at the details. I don’t mean to demean the intelligence of these biologists. It’s just that it appears they haven’t considered things as completely as they should. Like a cartoon drawing, the basic Read More ›

We didn’t think so, but just for the record: From the Edge: One of the things that I’ve always done is not make a clear separation between books that are aimed at popularizing, books that are aimed at explaining things to other people, and books that explain things to myself, or explain things to my scientific colleagues. I think the separation between doing science and popularizing science has been overdone. And I have found that the exercise of explaining to other people, which I suppose I’ve been fairly successful at, is greatly helped by the fact that I first have to explain it to myself. And explaining it to myself … the biomorph program, which I originally wrote to explain Read More ›

Trivers. Vignette of Stephen Jay Gould here (a reluctant Darwinian, so Trivers doesn’t like him): As I left his office, I said to myself, this fool thinks he is bigger than natural selection. Perhaps I should have said, bigger than Darwin, but I felt it as bigger than natural selection itself—surely Stephen was going for the gold!! Many of us theoretical biologists who knew Stephen personally thought he was something of an intellectual fraud precisely because he had a talent for coining terms that promised more than they could deliver, while claiming exactly the opposite. One example was the notion of “punctuated equilibria”—which simply asserted that rates of (morphological) evolution were not constant, but varied over time, often with periods Read More ›

Closing our religion coverage a bit late today, here’s an interesting item on eight common factors as to why atheists change their minds. One key reason appears to be that they are propagandized to think that theists are dumb. But then, as one witness writes, And then there’s Leah Libresco—another atheist blogger turned Catholic. Leah recalls the challenging impact of reasonable Christians in her academic circle: “I was in a philosophical debating group, so the strongest pitch I saw was probably the way my Catholic friends rooted their moral, philosophical, or aesthetic arguments in their theology. We covered a huge spread of topics so I got so see a lot of long and winding paths into the consequences of belief.” Read More ›

Skulls used as bowls, the rest discarded. From ScienceDaily: Dr Silvia Bello, from the Natural History Museum’s Department of Earth Sciences, lead researcher of the work said, “The human remains have been the subject of several studies. In a previous analysis, we could determine that the cranial remains had been carefully modified to make skull-cups. During this research, however, we’ve identified a far greater degree of human modification than recorded in earlier. We’ve found undoubting evidence for defleshing, disarticulation, human chewing, crushing of spongy bone, and the cracking of bones to extract marrow.” The presence of human tooth marks on many of the bones provides incontrovertible evidence for cannibalism, the team found. In a wider context, the treatment of the Read More ›

In response to Science writer boilerplate Jonathan Wells writes to say, Based on my reading of thousands of Peer-Reviewed Articles in the professional literature, I’ve distilled a template for writing scientific articles that deal with evolution: 1. Darwinian evolution is a fact. 2. We used [technique(s)] to study [feature(s)] in [name of species], and we unexpectedly found [results inconsistent with Darwinian evolution]. 3. We propose [clever speculations], which might explain why the results appear to conflict with evolutionary theory. 4. We conclude that Darwinian evolution is a fact. Yes, it’s a fact, all right. About the mindset of the people who do that. Wells is the author of The Myth of Junk DNA, which is not short of examples on Read More ›