Design inference

From Salk Institute: LA JOLLA–When tweaking its architecture, the adult brain works like a sculptor–starting with more than it needs so it can carve away the excess to achieve the perfect design. That’s the conclusion of a new study that tracked developing cells in an adult mouse brain in real time. New brain cells began with a period of overgrowth, sending out a plethora of neuronal branches, before the brain pruned back the connections. The observation, described May 2, 2016 in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that new cells in the adult brain have more in common with those in the embryonic brain than scientists previously thought and could have implications for understanding diseases including autism, intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia. “We were Read More ›

Recently, we’ve seen some rather abrupt shifts: The Royal Society is suddenly rethinking the importance of Darwinism in evolution—which will have huge ramifications even if they lose heart and flee the scene. It’s enough that they even considered such grave apostasy. For most people who grew up in the English-speaking world, evolution (indeed, all of biology) is Darwinism. The American Darwin-in-the-schools lobby, for example, has no similar interest in horizontal gene transfer, hybridization, epigenetics, or other ways evolution can happen. No one is suing the school board over chromosome doubling or getting their pants in a knot over convergence. But then these demonstrated ways evolution can happen do not add up to a grand naturalist scheme either. It’s more like Read More ›

Kevin Loria tells us at Business Insider: Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks there’s a ‘very high’ chance the universe is just a simulation … So at this year’s 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History, which addressed the question of whether the universe is a simulation, the answers from some panelists may be more comforting than the responses from others. Physicist Lisa Randall, for example, said that she thought the odds that the universe isn’t “real” are so low as to be “effectively zero. But on the other hand, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was hosting the debate, said that he thinks the likelihood of the universe being a simulation “may be very high.” … “And Read More ›

Riffing off Barry Arrington’s comment in Funny Shaped Rocks and the Design Inference, “It is amusing to watch some scientists insist on design inferences with respect to a relatively simple specification, while others refuse to countenance even the bare possibility of the same inference for a far more complex and intricate specification”: One thing that has always intrigued me is the way Why THEY Must Be Out There is supposed to be a question in science. There is no evidence that they are out there. The usual argument we hear is that it simply isn’t possible that we are alone. Well, excuse me, it is at least possible that we are alone. Each century They never call, They never write Read More ›

Raising Arizona is one of my favorite movies.  It is chock-a-block with hilarious throw away lines like this one: Which brings me to Costa Rica.  Apparently, there are several hundred round stones that archaeologists are certain were designed.  This is from the Wiki entry. The stone spheres (or stone balls) of Costa Rica are an assortment of over three hundred petrospheres in Costa Rica, located on the Diquís Delta and on Isla del Caño. Locally, they are known as Las Bolas(literally The Balls). The spheres are commonly attributed to the extinct Diquís culture and are sometimes referred to as the Diquís Spheres. They are the best-known stone sculptures of the Isthmo-Colombian area. They are thought to have been placed in Read More ›

When someone asks “Do you believe in evolution?” they probably want a short answer, and don’t have the patience to listen to a 15-minute lecture on the different meanings of “evolution” and how you stand on each. So how do you answer this trick question? Here’s a very short answer that works for me: Yes, I believe in the evolution of life, and I believe in the evolution of automobiles. Optionally, to make sure they get the point, you could add “but I don’t believe either could have happened without design.” It is actually a pretty good analogy, see my April 2,2015 post at ENV, In Biology as in Technology, Similarities Do Not Prove Absence of Intelligent Design

Random Darwinian processes originate a variety of different programs for getting rid of cells no longer needed. From ScienceDaily: Some cells are meant to live, and some are meant to die. The linker cell of Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm that is a favored model organism for biologists, is among those destined for termination. This cell helps determine the shape of the gonad in male worms–and then it dies, after two days, just as the worms are transitioning from larvae into adults. This programmed cell death is a normal part of the animal’s development, yet the genetic and molecular mechanisms underpinning it have not been worked out. Scientists in Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Developmental Genetics, headed by Shai Shaham, had Read More ›

Recently, we noted a claim that nature prefers hexagons, but a reader has written in to say that nature prefers squares. He adduces in evidence: Science published an interesting paper last year about the fact that the square shape of the seahorse tail creates a robust, rigid, yet flexible tail, more so than the typical circular/cylindrical shape you see in animal tails. Explanation: Most animals and plants approximate a cylinder in shape, and where junctions occur (as with branches of trees or limbs on animals), those corners are “faired,” meaning smoothly curved so that one surface grades into the next (1). When living organisms deviate from the norm, there’s usually a good biomechanical reason: a clue to some specific problem Read More ›

From Jonathan McClatchie: Here is the recording of my recent debate at Monash University in South Africa with agnostic philosopher Charles Villet, on “Does God Exist?” It includes quite a bit of ID material. More. Follow UD News at Twitter!

In the comments box at Miller’s Mendacity, Barry Arrington asks It is getting to the point that refuting the nonsense is almost beside the point. No one believes it, least of all those who say they do. As you’ve been saying for some time now, the really interesting story here is the psychological story. Why do people profess belief in the obviously false? Okay: Why do people profess belief in the obviously false? A couple notes: – The belief that randomness produces information (central to Darwinism) is obviously false. It’s never been demonstrated because it can’t be. It is assumed. It is assumed for the same reasons as the existence of a multiverse or a naturalist explanation for consciousness are assumed. Read More ›

Says Philip Ball at Nautilus: The ancient Greek philosopher Pappus of Alexandria thought that the bees must be endowed with “a certain geometrical forethought.” And who could have given them this wisdom, but God? According to William Kirby in 1852, bees are “Heaven-instructed mathematicians.” Charles Darwin wasn’t so sure, and he conducted experiments to establish whether bees are able to build perfect honeycombs using nothing but evolved and inherited instincts, as his theory of evolution would imply. More. Note how in pop science culture, a simple question like Why hexagons? turns into a hymn of praise to Darwin vs. others. You know, the author of the single greatest idea anyone ever had. Incidentally, this kind of thing is what makes Read More ›

From Salk Institute: LA JOLLA—By adolescence, your brain already contains most of the neurons that you’ll have for the rest of your life. But a few regions continue to grow new nerve cells—and require the services of cellular sentinels, specialized immune cells that keep the brain safe by getting rid of dead or dysfunctional cells. Now, Salk scientists have uncovered the surprising extent to which both dying and dead neurons are cleared away, and have identified specific cellular switches that are key to this process. … “It appears as though a significant fraction of cell death in neurogenic regions is not due to intrinsic death of the cells but rather is a result of the microglia themselves, which are killing Read More ›

Statisticians interviewed for Five-Thirty-Eight think so: It may sound crazy to get indignant over a scientific term that few lay people have even heard of, but the consequences matter. The misuse of the p-value can drive bad science (there was no disagreement over that), and the consensus project was spurred by a growing worry that in some scientific fields, p-values have become a litmus test for deciding which studies are worthy of publication. As a result, research that produces p-values that surpass an arbitrary threshold are more likely to be published, while studies with greater or equal scientific importance may remain in the file drawer, unseen by the scientific community. More. P-values? From Rob Sheldon The “p-value” is a Fisher Read More ›

American philosopher Bill Vallicella responds to the claim that design in nature is a form of circular reasoning: It would be circular to try to explain complexity in terms of complexity. But it is not circular to explain one form of complexity in terms of another. The complexity that needs to be explained is the complexity that seems to have been designed. To invoke a crude analogy, it is not the complexity of a pile of rocks that needs personal explanation, but the complexity of a cairn, a pile of rocks whose assembly shows that they mark the trail. Now I cannot account for a pile of rock’s being a cairn by invoking natural processes; I need to invoke an Read More ›

We asked physicist Rob Sheldon: “Front-loading” is something I picture as an elaborate “Rube Goldberg” machine. Here’s a sampling of real-life front-loading by brilliant engineers with too much time on their hands. Okay, if engineers could do that, couldn’t God make the flagellum out of spare parts by a properly front-loaded machine? I think the answer here is “yes”. But of course that begs the question, “doesn’t the machine show much more design than the thing it makes?” Of course. But our goal wasn’t to minimize design effort, our goal was to create a “front-loaded” machine, which is what was asked. Now we have another problem. Isn’t the “front-loading machine” a lot more fragile than the thing it made, the Read More ›