Design inference

From ScienceDaily: The ‘bad apples’ of the immune system are also its secret weapon, according to major Australian research published today in the world-leading journal Science. In a world first, scientists from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research have revealed how a population of ‘bad’ antibodies in the immune system — which are usually ‘silenced’ because they can harm the body — can provide crucial protection against invading microbes. The research was carried out in mice. The ‘bad’ antibodies are known to react against the body’s own tissues and can cause autoimmune disease. For this reason, it was once thought that they were discarded by the immune system or that they were made inactive in the long term. However, the Read More ›

From Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True: Templeton wastes $ 630,791 on “biology” research, finally making its anti-evolution agenda explicit The John Templeton Foundation has announced yet another big grant for “biology” research, except that its principal investigators are a theologian (Christopher Southgate) as well as a biologist (Niles Lehman). Click on the screenshot to go to the announcement. As you see, the grant, which just started, will last 32 months, and eat up over half a million dollars: … Relax, people, it is not your tax money anyhow. In other words, because the Templeton foundation doesn’t like competition (although of course Sir John made his money as a mutual fund manager) or nonteleological—i.e., naturalistic—explanations, they have to attack Read More ›

Darn. From Andrew Masterson at Cosmos: This was an exciting find. The separation of dark matter from “normal” visible matter is predicted in cosmology – but only if dark matter interacts with additional forces as well as gravity. The Abell 3827 data seemed to provide a strong indication that this was in fact the case, leading scientists a little bit closer to understanding the nature of the mysterious substance that is estimated to account for 27% of the universe. Alas, in evidence presented to the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science just concluded in the English city of Liverpool, the same group of researchers report that a more recent set of observations have shown that the separation of dark Read More ›

From RJS at Patheos: Ten years ago, when I first started writing on science and faith, Intelligent Design was a hot topic. It was in the news and high on the agenda for many in my local church. Today it has slid into the background, occasionally mentioned, but there are often other fish to fry. Greg Cootsona devotes a case study in his recent book (Mere Science and Christian Faith: Bridging the Divide with Emerging Adults) to the topic of intelligent design but not more than this because it is not one of the major issues for the emerging adults in his target audience.More. Okay, but with respect to the term “emerging adults,” are we talking about Millennials, many of Read More ›

From Nicola Davis at the Guardian: Before being laid, bird eggs form a hard calcium-rich shell with three main layers. While it was already known that these thin from the innermost out as a chick grows in preparation for hatching – with calcium from the shell being incorporated into its skeleton in the process – quite what happens at the molecular scale has been something of a mystery. Now scientists say they have discovered that eggshells have a nanostructure, and that it appears to play a key role in the strength of the shell. “Everybody thinks eggshells are fragile – [when] we’re careful, we ‘walk on eggshells’ – but in fact, for their thinness they are extremely strong, harder than Read More ›

Here at UD, we often have commenters whose remarks are well worth headlining. Here, we have JAD in action, suggesting to GP: “Here is something you might consider as a seed for a future topic for a future OP.” Yup, and even as an embryonic thought, it is well worth posting — a first, rough draft on a big topic: >>The origin of life is like the origin of the universe. It appears to be a singular, non-repeating, highly improbable event which occurred very early in earth’s history. Furthermore, all the clues of how and why it occurred have been lost. But then added to that problem are other problems: how does chemistry create code? What is required to create Read More ›

Saturday 24th February 2018 – 02:30 pm Seems to be up now in EST. Audio:Premier Christian Radio: A bacterial flagellum acts as the outboard motor on a bacteria. But is the complex arrangement of parts that enable it to do its job a result of design or evolution? Michael Behe first opened the debate on the ‘irreducible complexity’ of biochemical machines in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box. Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan McLatchie and theistic evolutionist Keith Fox debate whether Behe’s theory has stood the test of time, the bacterial flagellum and whether ID is a science stopper or theologically helpful. More. Comment: Given that most traditional science greats believed that they lived in a meaningful universe that showed evidence Read More ›

From a review of Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design by Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt, quoted at ENST: After reading Leisola and Witt’s book, it is clear that a paradigm shift is needed in order to explain the origin and diversity of life, from chemical and Darwinian evolution towards a design explanation. This raises the question of whether the research community is willing to follow the evidence and allow such a shift to take place. If not, there is a great risk that the judgement of future generations will be hard. However, such a change will not come easily, since ultimately our worldview is at stake. – Ola Hössjer, Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Stockholm University More. Read More ›

From Robert D. McFadden at the New York Times: Günter Blobel, a molecular biologist who was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering that proteins in any living cell have virtual ZIP codes that guide them to where they can help regulate body tissues, organs and chemistry, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 81. … The mystery Dr. Blobel confronted was how cells control their internal traffic, so that large proteins can get through tightly sealed membranes surrounding their birthplace and then travel to sites within the cell, or even through cell walls on intercellular trips through the body, where they can find specific worksites, called organelles (little organs) and penetrate them to perform assigned tasks. More. Read More ›

So labelled in the first vid below. The reader who sent this clip commented, “As I watched the video in amazement, the thought that those creatures are the result of random Darwinian processes didn’t even cross my mind. Whereas, the thought that God is one incredible artist did cross my mind!” At times, jellyfish almost seem like they are not part of the same world of life forms as ourselves. Not because they are boneless and brainless but because they just seem so different. It feels easier to understand an ant or a squid, even though they are very different. See also: Grand evolution theory for complex animals in ruins; fossil is, in fact, a jellyfish Sponges definitely oldest animals, Read More ›

In “contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model” From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (June, 2018), at Back(Re)Action: Yes, I know the headlines said the LHC would probe string theory, and the LHC would probe supersymmetry. The headlines were wrong. I am sorry they lied to you. But the LHC, despite not finding supersymmetry or extra dimensions or black holes or unparticles or what have you, has taught us an important lesson. That’s because it is clear now that the Higgs mass is not “natural”, in contrast to all the other particle masses in the standard model. That the mass be natural means, roughly speaking, that getting masses from Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media, in support of Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design , including evolutionary creation: Deborah Haarsma, president of BioLogos, argued that the scientific theory of evolution is compatible with biblical creation. She made a clear distinction between Darwinistic evolutionism — which uses evolution to disprove God — and the scientific theory, which does not necessarily have theological implications. “Thus, evolution is not a worldview in opposition to God but a natural mechanism by which God providentially achieves his purposes,” Haarsma wrote. She presented the theory of accommodationism — that God spoke in scripture in a way that the Jews and Christians would understand at the time. God has revealed Himself in two books: Read More ›

One would almost think they were the necrotic mainstream media. From Douglas Axe at ENST, on BioLogos’s Dennis Venema’s critique of his book Undeniable at what sounds like an attempted thugging: First, considering the critical view I take not just of Darwinism but also of the academic echo chamber that, with iron-lung-like artificiality, allows this otherwise dead theory to persist, it should be clear that I wrote primarily for people outside the echo chamber. The exclusion of anyone who fits that description from providing even one of the reviews of my book therefore raises questions about the true intent of the exercise. Second, although I was offered the advantage of having the last word, my response was restricted to about Read More ›

From Oxford University Press, Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, edited by Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupre, – A radical new conception of biology and the metaphysics of the living world – Offers a new kind of process philosophy with a naturalistic grounding – The Introduction provides a state-of-the-art survey to orient readers new to the topic Here’s the abstract from a chapter by Daniel J. Nicholson, “Reconceptualizing the Organism: From Complex Machine to Flowing Stream,” This chapter draws on insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to demonstrate the ontological inadequacy of the machine conception of the organism. The thermodynamic character of living systems underlies the importance of metabolism and calls for the adoption of a processual view, exemplified Read More ›

One of the key ideas and driving assumptions of modern evolutionary materialistic scientism is that mind can be explained on brain without residue. In an extreme form, we can see it in Crick’s the Astonishing Hypothesis (1994): . . . that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing. Philip Johnson, of course, replied the next year, Read More ›