Darwinism

Here: But how did Nature become such an essential institution? In Making “Nature,” Melinda Baldwin charts the rich history of this extraordinary publication from its foundation in 1869 to current debates about online publishing and open access. This pioneering study not only tells Nature’s story but also sheds light on much larger questions about the history of science publishing, changes in scientific communication, and shifting notions of “scientific community.” Nature, as Baldwin demonstrates, helped define what science is and what it means to be a scientist. “Changes in scientific communication” now include staying friends with the entire Twittersphere. See: Scientific American may be owned by Nature but it is now run by Twitter Follow UD News at Twitter!

Download here. Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt has been a depth marker of sorts. Money-losing Barnes & Noble and private misshelvers tried hard to keep the Cambrian explosion and other information-rich scenes from the history of life stuck in the awful, disgusting goo of the religion-and-science swamp. Yet it stayed near the top in paleontology for many months, and has garnered 700 reviews (as of about 12:25 EST). The average rating of 4.5 stars suggests that Darwin trolls are outnumbered by people who want serious answers to serious questions: — Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) –. This is another sign of Darwin’s weakening hegemony. People who want serious responses are beginning to insist on them. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Among social insects, why does it pay for workers to help the queen in some situations but then also pay to kill her in others? What explains why some queens get killed and not others, and why kill her at all? One expert explored these questions, and found that by eliminating the queen, a matricidal worker frees the way for workers to lay male eggs. “Workers are assessing the situation in their colony and deciding to revolt against the queen only when the genetic makeup of the colony makes it favorable to do so,” Loope said. “The main advantage is to allow your sister workers to lay male eggs, rather than the queen, who typically stops worker reproduction Read More ›

From bFast, appended to Baffling but undead physics results: Physicists always seem to end up with puzzles: what is dark energy, what is dark matter, what caused the big bang, how big is a proton. I love the honest puzzles that physicists bring to the table. Evolutionary biologists, however, never seem to be puzzled about nuthin’. First life? Don’t know how yet, but its not a problem. Cambrian explosion, wasn’t mutch,a and it had millions of years. Irreducible complexity? No deal, we did this experiment that produced two mutations to produce a single function — after 1/2 million years worth of evolving. HAR1F pulls off 18 mutations, no problem, millions of years. No issues, not problems, no puzzles. Its as Read More ›

Earth still in orbit, last we heard. Recently, I (O’Leary for News) have had skeptical things to say about D. S. Wilson’s Evolution Institute’s anticipated triumphal march for “evolutionary theory” throughout all disciplines in the21st century.* That said, I came across an interesting post on the site by science writer Dan Jones (The Philosopher In The Mirror) standing up to Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne. Coyne wishes to claim that religious belief in general leads to terrorism and that those who offer a more focused inquiry are stooges. In fact, it’s easy to show that Coyne is attacking a strawman. He would have you believe that radicalisation researchers are a bunch of “self-flagellating liberals” who ignore the role of Read More ›

Further to Jonathan Marks on why “evolutionary” “psychology” is neither (Marks: And finally, I can’t shake the feeling that the methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science.): Also from the Evolution Institute, Historians will look back upon the 21st century as a time when the theory of evolution, confined largely to the biological sciences during the 20th century, expanded to include all human-related knowledge. As we approach the 1/6th mark of the 21st century, this intellectual revolution is already in full swing. A sizeable community of scientists, scholars, journalists, and their readers has become fully comfortable with the statement “Nothing about X makes sense except in the light of evolution”, where X Read More ›

Over at The Best Schools, James Barham introduces an updated preface by Pierre van den Berghe, author of an older classsic on the ways academic life subverts honest enquiry: 1. Perhaps the most glaring change facing job-seeking PhD holders is a sharp deterioration in career opportunities and employment conditions. A glut of PhDs in many fields produced a shift from a seller’s to a buyer’s market. When AG appeared in 1970, US academia was approaching the end of its enormous expansion, becoming the juggernaut of world higher education. PhD production continued unabated, but job numbers stagnated or even contracted. Colleges and universities began to restrict tenure-track positions, and created a rapidly growing, semi-nomadic proletariat of instructors and lecturers on one-year, Read More ›

How many lives did Dawkins save, you say?  Carson doesn’t believe in Dawkins’ religion, Darwinian evolution. All doctors should be as ignorant as Carson. As so often, we close our religion coverage for the week with a new atheist: Richard Dawkins on US prez contender Ben Carson: On Dr. Ben Carson specifically Richard Dawkins said, “You just told me all the Republican candidates except one doesn’t believe in evolution, I mean that’s a disgrace. For a senor a very eminent, distinguished doctor, as he is, to say that is even worse. Because of course evolution is the bedrock of biology and biology is the bedrock of medicine. For a distinguished doctor to not understand, I have to use the word Read More ›

A classic in the state of pop science writing today, from Yahoo News: Un-intelligent Design: No Purpose for Vestigial Ear-Wiggling Reflex Around the human ear are tiny, weak muscles that once would have let evolutionary ancestors pivot their ears to and fro. Today, the muscles aren’t capable of moving much — but their reflex action still exists. These muscles are vestigial, meaning they’re remnants of evolution that once had a purpose but no longer do. However, humans may be able to repurpose these useless muscles for their own uses, according to Steven Hackley, a psychologist at the University of Missouri and author of a new review of research on the forgotten muscles in the journal Psychophysiology. For one, these muscles Read More ›

Since this has popped up a lot in the last few weeks, I wanted to repost an old post of mine describing the relationship between ID and Common Descent. I think it is pretty much as relevant now as when I originally posted it almost 6 years ago.
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Darwinians must technically say no, as life is not about anything and does not progress to any purpose. But here are some predictions offered by Michael Ruse, Joseph Graves, Briana Pobiner, Stephen Stearns, and Chris Stringer: The scientists we spoke to uniformly withheld from making specific predictions, but they were all agreed that evolution hasn’t stopped. “It’s definitely happening,” asserts Professor Graves, “but as human beings, we’re not in a lab setting. There are just too many complexities to make a scientifically meaningful prediction.” So evolution is happening, they say. They also say there is no way to know. Follow UD News at Twitter!

The last time we heard from evolutionary psychologist David Barash, he was fronting an anti-ID theory. You’d think he’d have enough trouble at home. In a world where social sciences are racing to the bottom, evolutionary psychology is leading the race. Look, there is a world of science out there, and if these guys would rather spin Tales from the Savannah, what are we supposed to do about it? Too bad if the Large Hadron Collider and the Pluto flyby got in their way. Now we learn from Barash at Aeon: Many scientific findings run counter to common sense and challenge our deepest assumptions about reality: the fact that even the most solid objects are composed at the subatomic level of mostly Read More ›

Nothing to do with the state of the evidence. Still, Ridley’s new evolution book maddens the reviewer: From a New Scientist review of science writer Matt Ridley’s new book, The Evolution of Everything: How a creationist instinct stops us seeing evolution everywhere FOR most of history, humans were instinctive creationists. Faced with the intricate perfection of an eye or a wing, they jumped to the conclusion that it was designed by an intelligent creator, aka God. Then along came Darwin and proved the obvious wrong. The appearance of design is an illusion; biological order arises by slow, undirected trial-and-error coupled with natural selection, aka evolution. Bu the evidence simply isn’t showing that Darwin’s mechanism Darwinism (natural selection acting on random Read More ›

Jonathan McLatchie writes to mention that University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran is hot on the trail again, this time in response to McLatchie’s vid (below) “Is ID a science?” I agree that many ID proponents try to use the science way of knowing to prove that creator gods must have built some complex molecular structures inside modern cells. They try to use evidence and they try to use rational thinking to arrive at logical conclusions. That qualifies as science, in my opinion, even though ID proponents fail to make their case. They don’t have the evidence and their logic is faulty. It’s science but it’s bad science. Lot’s of genuine scientists also publish bad science. Unclear what Dr. Moran Read More ›

Maybe. This vid on intelligent design vs creationism has brought up PZ Myers, as well as Larry Moran, Darwin’s tenure tag team. McLatchie keeps this up and we could organize a Darwin beauty pageant. O’Leary for News will serve coffee and iced cupcakes. Vid: One minute apologist: What is the difference between ID and creationism? See also: Vince Torley’s Larry Moran commits the genetic fallacy Follow UD News at Twitter!