BEACON (Bio/computational Evolution in Action CONsortium), based at Michigan State University, has just received a $25M grant from the NSF. For details, go here. Below is the rogues gallery of BEACON consortiates (recognize anyone?): It’s gratifying to see our tax dollars being spent so well.
In “Men developed thicker foreheads and jaws due to fighting, over women” Richard Alleyne, science correspondent for Britain’s Telegraph, who presumably knows better, advises us (14 May 2010):
Winning a mate used to depend only on physical prowess and men with the strongest jawline and thickest skulls were better able to survive onslaughts from love rivals.
That meant that over time all men developed thicker bones in the jaws, around the eyes and on the forehead than women.
You can read the further Darwiniana for yourself here.
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Men evolved manly jawlines and thick brows because they used to fight for women in the past, claim anthropologists
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To dispose of the evidence-based issues first, it is more likely that characteristic male appearance is part of a kit of traits governed by the need for rapid building of muscle mass. Maybe a fuzzy navel was part of that too? Whether governed by design or chance, the kit is the kit, and if you have outdoor plumbing to begin with, you probably got whatever else came with the kit. (If you didn’t, you can always complain to the Manufacturer, though how much good that does is under debate. You might get the usual “I am the Potter, you are the clay,” boilerplate in response.)
The part I want to focus on is the observation of biological anthropologist David Puts of Pennsylvania State University and author of these theories, that “On average men are not all that much bigger than women, only about 15 percent larger. But the average guy is stronger than 99.9 percent of women.” From this he derives his theories.
As I wrote to a friend recently, Read More ›
Pagels and others (like Nei) have argued that the majority of biological features could not have emerged from Darwinian means. If they are right, it stands to reason that if evolution is true, it has to be mostly non-Darwinian. At UD we have explored various non-Darwinian theories of evolution by scientists like Jukes, King, Kimura, Nei, Morgan, Bateson, Davison, and others. There are more names such as : Portmann, Troll, Heikertinger, Goldshmidt, Bertalanffy. Martin also lists Friedrich Nietzsche and Marx as non-Darwinians. Here is the website: http://cadra.wordpress.com/
As everyone knows, life in all its countless instances (organisms) involves internal instructions, as well as processors that run them. Without these instructions, no organism would be able to originate in the first place, let alone develop or survive. The discovery of these instructions – contained in DNA/RNA macromolecules and the molecular machinery that reads and writes them in biological cells – has been hailed as one of the greatest theoretical and experimental breakthroughs of the 20th century. The ID movement claims that these scientific findings have only served to highlight the weaknesses and inconsistencies of the neo-Darwinian theory of macro-evolution, according to which all species have evolved from a common ancestor, as a result of random mutation and natural selection. Read More ›
The University of Chicago has released some videos of the lectures given on Darwin Day 2009: Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago)–Speciation: Problems and Prospects Paul Sereno (University of Chicago)–Dinosaurs: Phylogenetic Reconstruction from Darwin to the Present David Jablonski (University of Chicago)–Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology: The Revitalized Partnership Neil Shubin (University of Chicago)–Great Transformations in Life: Insights from Genes & Fossils Robert J. Richards (University of Chicago)–Darwin’s Biology of Intelligent Design
Biologos has a review of William Dembski’s new book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World by Stephen Ashley Blake, with an introduction by Darrel Falk.
From Falk’s introduction:
My theological background is Wesleyan. Theological scholars in the Wesleyan tradition are rarely troubled by death before the Fall. It’s a non-issue for most Wesleyans, but it is an issue for many evangelicals. In fact, this one concept may be the most significant barrier blocking many evangelicals from accepting an old earth and coming to grips with the reality of evolution. Dembski, in this book, leaves the realm of math and biology. This time he dons his theological hat and lays out a view that ought to generate much conversation among those troubled by death before the Fall.
In “Triumph of Maya,” New English Review (May 10), Mark Antony Signorelli addresses the poverty of current cultural Darwinism, critiquing it from a Hindu perspective:
When I speak here of Darwinism, I am not referring to the scientific theory of evolution as it is currently expounded, which is a matter for scientists to debate; I am referring to the apotheosis of that scientific theory into an all-explanatory, totalizing doctrine, with all sort of implications of a necessarily philosophical purport. This is the true Darwinism to which I refer,[iv] and which has spread like a pestilence through the corridors of Western academia. Of course, in this respect, Darwinism merely displays that positivism, or scientism, which is one of the grand and stupid prejudices of the modern mind, and arguably lies at the root of all the others. The belief that because science has explained some things well, it can explain all things well, and that therefore the only legitimate form of inquiry partakes of scientific methodology, pervades our era, though nobody now so much as pretends to offer a rational defense of such assumptions. On the occasion that such a defense was attempted, it was a crashing failure. The logical positivists, those masters of sterility, gathered amidst the pallor of early twentieth century decadence for the express purpose of restraining men’s thoughts, for all time, to the wholly material and observable. … Clutching this blatantly self-refuting doctrine in their little withered fists, they warned men that henceforth there would be no more metaphysics. These were men who believed that prakriti [material] was all, and who wished to cajole their fellow man into the like conviction, yet their project ended in such a perfect and irremediable failure that their efforts remain as a kind of startling monument to the absurdity of philosophical presumption. And still, the ranks of the academic materialists are filled with haughty men convinced that the general position of the logical positivists, so nakedly erroneous, is a self-evident truth. We still routinely read the claim, made or insinuated by authors whom we are supposed to take seriously, that metaphysics is a passé and useless discipline, as though a complete and systematic explanation of the universe were possible without a metaphysics, any more than a satisfactory account of wages were possible without an economics, or an explanation of tragedy without a poetics. The Darwinians unreflective belief that scientific explanations alone are valid, then, is hardly unique to themselves, but one which they clearly caught from the linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists with whom they rub shoulders in the dining halls and faculty meetings of our desolate universities.
Funny thing, I just got done proofreading an academic article that exactly fits Signorelli’s description.
For one thing, the authors have an itch to argue away consciousness, a sure sign of trouble. Read More ›
Bit late with the coffee wagon, I admit. Other issues to deal with. We are told in the queen of the “National Enquirer” science press that Neanderthals are not the only ‘apes’ humans bred with. Every father on this list wants his daughter to date and later marry a Neanderthal, right? Oh, wait, This just in: Most fathers don’t even want their daughters to date, let alone marry, a guy who plays the guitar in the subway for a living, let alone …like, there was a time when one of a father’s jobs was to check out suitors for his daughters’ hands. Girls can be unduly influenced by romantic issues, but good fathers tend to ask boring stuff like “What Read More ›
Premier Radio’s program “Unbelievable?” with Justin Brierley has hosted a discussion with Oxford mathematician John Lennox and astrophysicist Paul Davies concerning topics from Intelligent Design to extra-terrestrial life, and what the broader philosophical and theological implications are for each. A popular science author, Davies is also the Chair of the SETI post detection task force. His latest book “The Eerie Silence” which marks SETI’s 50th anniversary examines the likelihood of the universe producing life elsewhere. John Lennox is a Christian Mathematician and philosopher. He is the author of “God’s Undertaker: has science buried God?” and has debated Richard Dawkins on several occasions. Davies’ work on the fine tuning of the universe for life has been sympathetic to theism. In this Read More ›
Sal Cordova wonders why we can’t all just get along, after a senior JPL computer system administrator was demoted for loaning co-workers DVDs supporting intelligent design. Well, Sal, here is why we can’t: Darwinists, like Islamists, have the Final Revelation, after which there is no other revelation. No-God will punish all infidels. Of course, in practice, with Darwinists as with Islamists, that means that the fanatic must punish the infidel himself. That makes sense. Both God and No-God can be mighty slow in these matters, and the best way to keep up a fanatical faith is quick vengeance now against any and all dissenters. I wrote to a friend recently on this very topic: Harvard’s Steve Pinker reminds us that Read More ›
There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution
John Bruer
National Science Board, National Science Foundation
Lead Reviewer
What Happened to Evolution at NSB
Way to go National Science Foundation. Say it again!, “There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution.”
Read More ›
Many conceptual and experimental attempts have been made by evolutionists to explain the arise of the huge complexity and organization of nature based on unguided processes, that is without the intervention of an organizing intelligence. Among them I recall those related to chaos theory, evolutionary algorithms, emergent properties, far-from-equilibrium dynamical systems, self-organized criticality (SOC). Here I will briefly focus on SOC, the last on this list though not the recent one. Read More ›
Eight years ago, biochemist Michael Behe wrote this open letter to the prestigious scientific journal, Nature:
Sir-
As a public skeptic of the ability of Darwinian processes to account for complex cellular systems and a proponent of the hypothesis of intelligent design, (1) I often encounter a rebuttal that can be paraphrased as “no designer would have done it that way.” …
If at least some pseudogenes have unsuspected functions, however, might not other biological features that strike us as odd also have functions we have not yet discovered? Might even the backwards wiring of the vertebrate eye serve some useful purpose?
….
Hirotsune et al’s (3) work has forcefully shown that our intuitions about what is functionless in biology are not to be trusted.Sincerely, Michael J. Behe
An Open Letter to Nature
Contrast that with Ken Miller’s now falsified claim in 1994:
the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles.
recent molecular data supports the theory of mutation-driven evolution rather than neo-Darwinism.
Masotoshi Nei
Member National Academy of Sciences
Selectionism and Neutralism
Not only is the notion of Darwinism challenged by ID proponents and creationists, but it is also challenged by non-Darwinian theories of evolution. The competing schools of thought are the Mutationists and the Neutralists. Dawkins describes some of the history of the Mutationists versus the Darwinists:
It is hard to comprehend now but, in the early years of this [20th] century when the phenomenon of mutation was first named, it was not regarded as a necessary part of Darwinian theory but an alternative theory of evolution!
Richard Dawkins
Blindwatchmaker
Darwinism so dominates evolutionary thinking that most presume evolution must proceed under the influence of selection. Not so. In fact the absence of selection is also a mechanism of evolution! In the words of yet another member of the National Academy of Sciences:
many genomic features could not have emerged without a near-complete disengagement of the power of natural selection
Michael Lynch
The Origins of Genome Architecture, intro