Darwinism

Error found in study of first ancient African genome

“Finding that much of Africa has Eurasian ancestry was mistaken.” . . .

Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: February 12 is almost upon us. It will be Darwin Day, anniversary of the great man’s birth, which we call Academic Freedom Day in homage to Darwin’s wise warning that “a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” Yes, by now the fulsome comparisons of Darwin to Lincoln as a “great liberator” should be tumbling down the byteway. Looking back primarily at the year 2015, I see several themes in our coverage of intellectual freedom and threats to it. First, and this is really a perennial, there are those Darwinists whose censorship of ideas consists of spreading a cloud of misinformation. Read More ›

According to computer scientist Leslie Valiant. From John Pavlus at Quanta: Valiant’s self-stated goal is to find “mathematical definitions of learning and evolution which can address all ways in which information can get into systems.” If successful, the resulting “theory of everything” — a phrase Valiant himself uses, only half-jokingly — would literally fuse life science and computer science together. Furthermore, our intuitive definitions of “learning” and “intelligence” would expand to include not only non-organisms, but non-individuals as well. The “wisdom of crowds” would no longer be a mere figure of speech. … How can a theory of learning be applied to a phenomenon like biological evolution? Biology is based on protein expression networks, and as evolution proceeds these networks Read More ›

Teapots bust. From a story at Wired: Twitter Nerd-Fight Reveals a Long, Bizarre Scientific Feud The editorial in the February issue of the scientific journal Cladistics didn’t exactly drop with a bang. Cladistics has around 600 subscribers—almost half of which are libraries or other institutions—and it’s aimed at “scientists working in the research fields of evolution, systematics and integrative biology,” as the journal’s summary says. It’s a journal about building evolutionary trees of life, basically. Important, but harmless, right? … the editors of Cladistics were insisting that anyone trying to build those trees of life had to use a method called parsimony—that, in fact, anyone who didn’t use parsimony wasn’t doing real science. Science Twitter caught fire pretty fast after Read More ›

Closing off our religion coverage for the weekend (now that the weekend is leftover cold burnt toast), here’s a leftist attack on new atheism – and like we said of a previous instance (2014), “If they’ve lost The Nation, they’ve lost everyone.” In a roundup review of various books on the subject by David Hoelscher at Counterpunch: New Atheism, Worse Than You Think there is a frank discussion of the authoritarian scientism it embodies: What is not in doubt is that the New Atheists are, as the philosopher Michael Ruse has lamented “a bloody disaster.” As the scholar Jeffrey Nall asserts “Thinkers such as Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens create a religion that amounts to a monstrous straw-man which they then Read More ›

Before I put the issue with the United Methodist Church and Discovery Institute to rest, I want to make one last comment on the UMC’s Statement on Science and Technology, which I wrote about the other day. One of the most significant assertions in the statement is “We preclude science from making authoritative claims about theological issues and theology from making authoritative claims about scientific issues.” If that sounds vaguely familiar to readers here at Uncommon Descent, it should. It is little more than a restatement of the late Stephen J. Gould’s principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (or NOMA). In essence, NOMA is the idea that Science and Religion occupy different spheres of knowledge and influence and as such are subject Read More ›

Of course not. That would make Earth a dinner plate circled by globes. From Newsweek: Columbus and the Spaniards knew the Earth was round—Columbus’s plans to sail to Asia were questioned because the ocean was thought to be too vast to sail across, not because anyone thought the Earth was flat, Gould writes. Even the religious authorities of the 15th century knew better. So why on Earth have so many schoolchildren been taught otherwise? The fault lies with 19th century writers such as Washington Irving, Jean Letronne and others. Letronne was “an academic of strong anti-religious prejudices… who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On Read More ›

Probably for all the wrong reasons. From UK Independent: Richard Dawkins dropped from science event for tweeting video mocking feminists and Islamists Professor Richard Dawkins has had an invitation to speak at a science event withdrawn by organisers for sharing a “highly offensive” video mocking feminists on Twitter. Dawkins was scheduled to speak at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism which will take place in New York City in May, but on Thursday organisers issued a statement concerning his participation. “The NECSS has withdrawn its invitation to Richard Dawkins to participate at NECSS 2016. We have taken this action in response to Dr. Dawkins’ approving re-tweet of a highly offensive video. More. A joke song satirising the alliance between radical Read More ›

We figure Dawkins’ selfish gene will die after its proponents retire. Look, even New Scientist was last spotted quietly getting off the boat. It doesn’t get worse than that. Oh wait … from a puff piece in Nature: Matt Ridley reassesses Richard Dawkins’s pivotal reframing of evolution, 40 years on. … Books about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivating a wide readership, and those that try to persuade fellow scientists to support a new theory, usually with equations. Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins Read More ›

I’ve already written here about the recent dust-up between the United Methodist Church (UMC)and Discovery Institute. Being involved with this has caused me, as a United Methodist, to take a closer look at some of the official statements of the UMC on science. As regular UD readers will likely know, the church has banned Discovery Institute from exhibiting at the upcoming General Conference. Vince Torley has already written here that probably UMC co-founder John Wesley wouldn’t be welcome at this year’s General Conference, so I won’t rehash that aspect. Rather, I want to take a closer look at the official statements of the UMC on Science to which the Church appealed as rationale for denying Discovery Institute an information table Read More ›

There is a fair bit of confusion out there around three terms: 1. Evolution 2. Common descent 3. Universal common descent The recent announcement of a rethink evolution conference sponsored by the Royal Society in London in November has meant that many people now know about the growing problems with the textbook Darwinism we learned in school. But confusion among terms can turn productive discussions into shouting matches. Here are some conversation pointers that I have found helpful: 1. Evolution: Life forms can alter greatly over generations, and in many cases permanently. At one time, Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation) was the default explanation of evolution (often functioning in place of a plausible explanation). That theory, credited to Read More ›

Here. January 23, 2016, 7:30 pm EST: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #31,015 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #13 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Evolution #16 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Biology #174 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution Book to be released January 26. More than thirty years after his landmark book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), biologist Michael Denton revisits his earlier thesis about the inability of Darwinian evolution to explain the history of life. He argues that there remains “an irresistible consilience of evidence for rejecting Darwinian cumulative selection as the major driving force Read More ›

Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze shares with us a passage from Robert J. Spitzer on the impossibility of infinite past time. He explains, If often happens that infinity is marshaled to prop up the notion that evolution can work via random mutations, no matter how heavily the odds are stacked against that possibility. If the finiteness of our universe limits the effectiveness of randomness in producing wonders, then infinity is offered as the handy solution. Our universe was preceded by an infinite number of other universes which rolled the dice an infinite number of times until finally our own time-bound universe happened to get it “just right.” An infinite number of universes of course entails infinite time, a concept tossed Read More ›

From Pub Med: Evolution by epigenesis: farewell to Darwinism, neo- and otherwise. Follow UD News at Twitter! In the last 25 years, criticism of most theories advanced by Darwin and the neo-Darwinians has increased considerably, and so did their defense. Darwinism has become an ideology, while the most significant theories of Darwin were proven unsupportable. The critics advanced other theories instead of ‘natural selection’ and the survival of the fittest’. ‘Saltatory ontogeny’ and ‘epigenesis’ are such new theories proposed to explain how variations in ontogeny and novelties in evolution are created. They are reviewed again in the present essay that also tries to explain how Darwinians, artificially kept dominant in academia and in granting agencies, are preventing their acceptance. Epigenesis, Read More ›

  Denis Noble is one of the figures behind the upcoming “rethink evolution” meet in November. Here’s one of his lectures: Physiologist Noble doubts Darwinism, and does a good job of identifying problems with the Central Dogma and other stuff* that just hangs around forever. Darwinists say they are phasing it out. But they don’t need to if they can phase out the careers of people who know it is bunk instead. So lots of people want a meeting. *Note: For that matter, there’s Dollo’s Law: That said, patterns we assume to exist may not hold up. A classic evolutionary doctrine, “Dollo’s law,” claims that traits once lost can never be regained. But bone worms, for one example, seem to break this Read More ›