Darwinism

He writes to say, I have just posted the first in a series of blogs dealing with evolution and Christianity in which I will examine two models, the neo-darwinian model and the intelligent design model, in terms of mutually incompatible, testable, and falsifiable predictions. I hope to post one every week or two and keep each one very short, but meaty. Here is the link to the first one. I still can’t believe that, apart from US politics, we are still having this conversation about Darwin. Follow UD News at Twitter!

We wondered: I’d like to focus on a small part of the dispute, as it nicely summarizes the New Atheist’s ability to deal with atheism’s morality problem. Coyne provides the following quote from Robbins: Nietzsche’s atheism is far from exultant—he is not crowing about the death of God, much as he despises Christianity. He understands how much has been lost, how much there is to lose. . . . Nietzsche realized that the Enlightenment project to reconstruct morality from rational principles simply retained the character of Christian ethics without providing the foundational authority if the latter. Dispensing with his fantasy of the Übermensch, we are left with his dark diagnosis. To paraphrase the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, our moral vocabulary Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The silvery fish, roughly the size of a large automobile tire, is known from oceans around the world and dwells hundreds of feet beneath the surface in chilly, dimly lit waters. It swims by rapidly flapping its large, red pectoral fins like wings through the water. Fish that typically inhabit such cold depths tend to be slow and sluggish, conserving energy by ambushing prey instead of chasing it. But the opah’s constant flapping of its fins heats its body, speeding its metabolism, movement and reaction times, scientists report in the journal Science. That warm-blooded advantage turns the opah into a high-performance predator that swims faster, reacts more quickly and sees more sharply, said fisheries biologist Nicholas Wegner of Read More ›

New atheism is the basis of schoolbook Darwinism, of course. And it turns out, Massimo Pigliucci, the defender of falsifiability, is not a fan of the new atheist cult: The Harris-Chomsky exchange, in my mind, summarizes a lot of what I find unpleasant about SAM: a community who worships celebrities who are often intellectual dilettantes, or at the very least have a tendency to talk about things of which they manifestly know very little; an ugly undertone of in-your-face confrontation and I’m-smarter-than-you-because-I-agree-with [insert your favorite New Atheist or equivalent]; loud proclamations about following reason and evidence wherever they may lead, accompanied by a degree of groupthink and unwillingness to change one’s mind that is trumped only by religious fundamentalists; and, Read More ›

Friend Kirk Durston offers a five-part series on the corruption of 21st century science here: Part I: Should you have blind faith in what science has become today? This post will be the first in a series dealing with the corruption of 21st century science. As a scientist, I am increasingly appalled and even, just this past week, shocked at what is passing as 21st century science. It has become a mix of good science, bad science, creative story-telling, science fiction, scientism (atheism dressed up as science), citation-bias, huge media announcements followed by quiet retractions, massaging the data, exaggeration for funding purposes, and outright fraud all rolled up into what I refer to as 21st century science. In some disciplines, Read More ›

Scolds science writer John Farrell at Aeon: The Vatican still refuses to endorse evolutionary theory- – setting a billion believers at odds with modern science He; right, you know. We Catholics haven’t done near enough for the Other Billion — who belive in Darwin and in every a-crock-alypse going, especially the ones that prevent poor countries from getting where we are.  (Ifyou are even legally reading this, you are better off than most.) More from Farrell: Many in the Roman Catholic hierarchy agreed, but for different reasons. Teilhard incurred the particular displeasure of Rome because he suggested that the Bible’s account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and their Fall from grace as the ultimate origin and 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 ›

We received a tip that a new Princeton book, Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation by Yale’s Gunter P. Wagner (not to be confused with Andreas Wagner) is both through and balanced: Günter Wagner, one of the preeminent researchers in the field, argues that homology, or character identity, can be explained through the historical continuity of character identity networks—that is, the gene regulatory networks that enable differential gene expression. He shows how character identity is independent of the form and function of the character itself because the same network can activate different effector genes and thus control the development of different shapes, sizes, and qualities of the character. Demonstrating how this theoretical model can provide a foundation for understanding the evolutionary Read More ›

The following post was generated by UD’s just-acquired, state-of-the-art news reporting app, Earlier Than Thought TM 😉 From the BBC: Scientists in China have described a new species of early bird, from two fossils with intact plumage dating to 130 million years ago. Based on the age of the surrounding rocks, this is the earliest known member of the clade that produced today’s birds: Ornithuromorpha. It pushes back the branching-out of this evolutionary group by at least five million years. … The little bird appears to have been a wader, capable of nimble flight. … previously the earliest known Ornithuromorph was 125 million years old. More. Here’s the abstract: Ornithuromorpha is the most inclusive clade containing extant birds but not the 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 ›

… his fight for Darwin-only schools in Louisiana. If so that’s significant, because the media party is sure backing him. Their ignorance and prejudice is his strength. Get a load of the cream puff interview at I09: We last spoke with Kopplin in early 2013. Since then, he has continued to campaign tirelessly against the act. He’s penned editorials for outlets like The Guardian, been profiled by the New York Times and Washington Post, and appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. In short, he has had an intercontinental soapbox. In late April, he testified before the Louisiana Senate Education Committee in support of a bill repealing the act. During his testimony, he presented evidence in support of the 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 ›