Category: Darwinism
J. Scott Turner and the “Giant Crawling Brain”
| September 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
J. Scott Turner, author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, features in a long read about his specialty, termites. For a time, superorganisms were all the rage. The concept dealt neatly with what Charles Darwin had called the “problem” with social insects. Darwin’s theory […]
New book: Darwin, unlike some of his followers, was an “evolutionary pluralist”
| September 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science |
Now they tell us. But how did his followers get it so wrong? Or were they just funning us all these years? Re Revisiting the Origin of Species: The Other Darwins (Thierry Hoquet, CRC Press, August 13, 2018): Contemporary interest in Darwin rises from a general ideal of what Darwin’s books ought to contain: a […]
How Darwinism played a role in misreading emotions
| September 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Mind, Psychology |
Efforts to enable machines to read our emotions are hitting a roadblock and, oddly enough, Charles Darwin (1809-1882), founder of popular evolution theory, plays a role in getting it wrong: The world is being flooded with technology designed to monitor our emotions. Amazon’s Alexa is one of many virtual assistants that detect tone and timbre […]
New goal: 66k animal genomes mapped
| September 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Genomics, Intelligent Design, speciation |
Earlier this month, 15 genomes were released. The Vertebrate Genomes Project aims to sequence every extant vertebrate species—there are about 66,000—and to make them of the highest possible value. … “What we thought was a ‘genome’ back [when G10K was launched] really wasn’t suitable for in-depth studies,” G10K cofounder David Haussler, a computational biologist at […]
If a conventional evolutionary psychology claim is true, masculinity is “in crisis”?
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
We just tried to pull a Darwinian out of the way of the southbound freight called Progress when here it is rumbling back into town again: This week’s peer-reviewed portrayal of fragile masculinity comes to you from the journal Science Advances, which recently published a depressing new study about online dating. Researchers looked at nearly […]
Darwinian risks all, takes aim at gender theory
| September 12, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary biology, Evolutionary psychology, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
Look, as Barry Arrington noted recently, you can’t even publish research today that suggests that some teen girls believe they are boys mainly because of teen groupthink even though such a conclusion must be obvious to anyone who has spent time with teens. Now, a Darwinian has blundered in front of the overloaded freight train of […]
Human Zoos documentary is now available at Amazon
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, science education |
America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism is now available on DVD: From IMDB: Human Zoos tells the story of how thousands of indigenous peoples were put on public display in America in the early decades of the twentieth century. Often touted as “missing links” between man and apes, these native peoples were harassed, demeaned, and […]
YouTube debate: If Darwin were to examine the evidence today
| September 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Video |
Using modern science. Would his conclusions be the same? Here: The participants are Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson (yes) vs. Dr. Herman Mays (no) The topics are from Jeanson’s book, Replacing Darwin: The NEW Origin of Species “Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson holds a PhD in cell and developmental Biology from Harvard University. He serves as a research biologist, […]
Newly discovered tiny tunnels run from skull to brain
| August 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Medicine, Natural selection |
They may be a shortcut for the immune system. From ScienceDaily: “We always thought that immune cells from our arms and legs traveled via blood to damaged brain tissue. These findings suggest that immune cells may instead be taking a shortcut to rapidly arrive at areas of inflammation,” said Francesca Bosetti, Ph.D., program director at the […]
Horror in Israel: Schools don’t teach much “evolution”
| August 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, science education |
The staff of a national newspaper is shocked and appalled: Biology classes in kindergarten and elementary school do not mention Charles Darwin’s theory that all life evolved from common ancestors, and in middle school it is only alluded to as part of general discussions, the TV report said. Four years ago, the high school curriculum […]
Peter Ward: Epigenetics explains why there are fewer “species” than we think
| August 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Epigenetics, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
Says biologist Peter Ward, because epigenetics changes can account for life forms that have been classified as different species: More and more, biologists are discovering that organisms thought to be different species are, in fact, but one. A recent example is that the formerly accepted two species of giant North American mammoths (the Columbian mammoth […]
Jerry Coyne minimizes the significance of horizontal gene transfer
| August 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design |
As we might expect. Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne offers his thoughts on science writer David Quammen’s new book about Carl Woese, The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life: Quammen is right that the horizontal transfer of genetic information does complicate our effort to understand the evolutionary past, but he goes too far in claiming […]
John Hawks is cool to epigenetics shedding light on evolution
| August 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Epigenetics, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
John Hawks is an anthropologist we’ve often noted here. In his review of palaeobiologist Peter Ward’s LaMarck’s Revenge: How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Evolution’s Past and Present (“Epigenetics upends natural selection and genetic mutation as the sole engines of evolution, and offers startling insights into our future heritable traits.”), Hawks has this to […]
Darwin fan: Yes, it IS “fetishization.” So?
| August 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Religion |
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor gets mail: Andrew Berry, the Harvard biologist who conducts a Darwin pilgrimage each year for undergraduates to Darwin-related sites in England, responds to my recent post about the cult-like reverence in which many Darwinists hold all things Darwin. Berry: I agree with [Egnor] it is indeed fetishization of All Things Darwin/Wallace (And More) that […]
Historian Richard Weikart is on C-Span tonight, on The Death of Humanity and Hitler’s Religion
| August 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Here, Aug. 26 at 8:42 PM EDT on C-SPAN 2 Richard Weikart is the author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life and Hitler’s Religion: The twisted beliefs that drove the Reich See also: Richard Weikart on the anti-Semitic burst in evolutionary psychology Richard Weikart on Why social science does not need […]
Does exaptation show that nature is “not intelligent”?
| August 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Here’s a definition of exaptation: a trait, feature, or structure of an organism or taxonomic group that takes on a function when none previously existed or that differs from its original function which had been derived by evolution. – Merriam-Webster In other words, a feature that once served one purpose now serves another. How is that not […]
Gerald Joyce no longer uses the NASA “must show Darwinian evolution” definition of life
| August 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Natural selection, Origin Of Life |
Though he helped develop it. Recently, a problem has arisen round efforts to create a synthetic cell. Gerald Joyce, now of the Salk Institute, helped NASA come up with a very widely used definition of life, “Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.” But, as medicl historian Rebecca Wilbanks explains at Aeon, In 2009, […]
Neanderthal woman, Denisovan man
| August 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Together with their sister group the Neanderthals, Denisovans are the closest extinct relatives of currently living humans. “We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together,” says Viviane Slon, researcher at the MPI-EVA and one of three first authors of the study. “But I never thought we […]
“Junk DNA” regulates regeneration of tissues and organs
| August 22, 2018 | Posted by News under 'Junk DNA', Darwinism, Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory and the University of Maine have discovered that genetic material in the cell that was previously thought to be “junk” because of its apparent lack of function likely plays a part in regulating genetic circuits responsible for regeneration in highly regenerative animals. … The discovery of these […]
The Peppered Zombie rises at Exeter: Some curious responses
| August 22, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, science education |
A story here yesterday noted the recent attempt at Exeter U to resurrect the idea that the varying prevalence of light and dark moths is a dramatic demonstration of evolution in action. Like its many predecessors, it demonstrates nothing except what we might expect: The more visible moth will be spotted and eaten sooner. But […]
