Category: Intelligent Design
J. Scott Turner and the “Giant Crawling Brain”
| September 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
J. Scott Turner, author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, features in a long read about his specialty, termites. For a time, superorganisms were all the rage. The concept dealt neatly with what Charles Darwin had called the “problem” with social insects. Darwin’s theory […]
Researchers: Genes cannot “be read like tea leaves”
| September 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Medicine |
Which make the effects of mutations harder to predict than hoped. Of course, it’s also a blow for genetic determinism. From ScienceDaily: Ever since the decoding of the human genome in 2003, genetic research has been focused heavily on understanding genes so that they could be read like tea leaves to predict an individual’s future […]
New book: Darwin, unlike some of his followers, was an “evolutionary pluralist”
| September 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science |
Now they tell us. But how did his followers get it so wrong? Or were they just funning us all these years? Re Revisiting the Origin of Species: The Other Darwins (Thierry Hoquet, CRC Press, August 13, 2018): Contemporary interest in Darwin rises from a general ideal of what Darwin’s books ought to contain: a […]
Researchers: As soon as macroscopic life evolved, it formed communities
| September 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Ecology, Ediacaran, Intelligent Design |
In short, there was no long, slow, Darwinian development of complex communities. We need a word for this: How about… ecological creationism?
How Darwinism played a role in misreading emotions
| September 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Mind, Psychology |
Efforts to enable machines to read our emotions are hitting a roadblock and, oddly enough, Charles Darwin (1809-1882), founder of popular evolution theory, plays a role in getting it wrong: The world is being flooded with technology designed to monitor our emotions. Amazon’s Alexa is one of many virtual assistants that detect tone and timbre […]
New goal: 66k animal genomes mapped
| September 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Genomics, Intelligent Design, speciation |
Earlier this month, 15 genomes were released. The Vertebrate Genomes Project aims to sequence every extant vertebrate species—there are about 66,000—and to make them of the highest possible value. … “What we thought was a ‘genome’ back [when G10K was launched] really wasn’t suitable for in-depth studies,” G10K cofounder David Haussler, a computational biologist at […]
Plants use flashes of fluorescent light to warn leaves against insects
| September 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Ecology, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: In one video, you can see a hungry caterpillar, first working around a leaf’s edges, approaching the base of the leaf and, with one last bite, severing it from the rest of the plant. Within seconds, a blaze of fluorescent light washes over the other leaves, a signal that they should prepare for […]
Researchers: Fossil record “dramatically distorted”
| September 17, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Using the fossil record to accurately estimate the timing and pace of past mass extinctions is no easy task, and a new study highlights how fossil evidence can produce a misleading picture if not interpreted with care. Florida Museum of Natural History researchers used a series of 130-foot cores drilled from the Po […]
AAAS to introduce new policy for expelling members
| September 17, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Science |
The “Fellow Revocation Policy” was announced by president, Margaret A. Hamburg: The governing body of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, founded 1848, voted Saturday to enact a policy under which an elected AAAS Fellow’s lifetime honor can be revoked for proven scientific misconduct or serious breaches of professional ethics. The AAAS Council […]
Why computer programs that mimic the human brain will continue to underperform
| September 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers a comment on whether simple probabilities can outweigh “deep learning” (as noted earlier here. ) When neural nets [computer programs that mimic the human brain] were all the rage in physics, some 25 years ago, I spoke with the author of a paper who was using neural nets […]
Researcher: A “chemical brain” will solve the hard problem of consciousness
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Origin Of Life |
Because silicon can’t, says chemist: WHEN Lee Cronin was 9 he was given a Sinclair ZX81 computer and a chemistry set. Unlike most children, Cronin imagined how great it would be if the two things could be combined to make a programmable chemical computer. Now 45 and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of […]
Aging has always been with us, say researchers (to no one’s surprise)
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
This group somehow links it to natural selection: A new USC Dornsife study indicates that aging may have originated at the very beginning of the evolution of life, at the same time as the evolution of the first genes. … This could be a game changer for research on longevity and aging. It may also […]
Should atheism be included in religious education?
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Education, Intelligent Design, Religion |
That’s being suggested in Britain: Humanists UK welcomed the recommendation that humanist beliefs and values be taught. In general, the commission’s conclusions were a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to save the academically serious teaching of religious and non-religious worldviews in our schools”, said Andrew Copson. But the Catholic Education Service said the report was “not so much […]
Must Christians believe in the Big Bang theory?
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, theistic evolution |
J. R. Miller offers a reasonable discussion of varieties of Biblical creationism: Maybe you have heard the accusation that biblical creationists are blinded by their ancient theology which forces them to reject the modern “scientific fact” of evolution. But what do people mean by this accusation? What is evolution? Is biblical creation a de facto […]
UChicago Researchers: Those extra dimensions ain’t out there
| September 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Not if you go by results from the gravitational waves collision. While last year’s discovery of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars was earth-shaking, it won’t add extra dimensions to our understanding of the universe—not literal ones, at least. University of Chicago astronomers found no evidence for extra spatial dimensions to the universe based on […]
Making intelligent machines persons hits a few snags
| September 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Earlier this year, over 150 experts in AI, robotics, ethics, and supporting disciplines signed an open letter denouncing the European Parliament’s proposal to make intelligent machines persons. According to Canadian futurist George Dvorsky, the Parliament’s purpose is to hold the machines liable for damages, as a corporation might be: “The EU is understandably worried that […]
Neutron scattering: A window into the development of living cells
| September 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design |
Neutrons can be used to probe living tissues without damaging them (neutron scattering). Suzan Mazur interviews biophysicist John Katsaras, whose specialty is cell membranes, at Oscillations on their implications for studying the origin and development of life forms. Among the fascinating details, Suzan Mazur: Your membranes research revealed that lipids gathered with others of their […]
It’s amazing how much the public believes about neuroscience that is just myth
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Education, Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience |
But maybe it doesn’t matter. For example, as British Psychological Society’s Research Digest’s editor, Christian Jarrett, tells it, Educational neuromyths include the idea that we learn more effectively when taught via our preferred “learning style”, such as auditory or visual or kinesthetic … the claim that we use only 10 per cent of our brains; […]
AI and pop music: Can simple probabilities outperform deep learning?
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Probability |
Haebichan Jung tells us that he built an original pop music-making machine “that could rival deep learning but with simpler solutions.” Deep learning “is a subfield of machine learning concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks.” (Jason Brownlee, Machine Learning Mastery) Jung tells us that he […]
