Category: Intelligent Design
Yes, the placebo effect is real, and it may be getting stronger
| November 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
At Mind Matters: The fact that you may start to get better if you believe you are receiving treatment is one of the best-attested facts in medicine. A drug licensed for use must demonstrate greater effectiveness than a placebo (a capsule of sugar or an inert substance, perhaps) in clinical trials. That standard does not […]
Convergent evolution: Psychology Association says killer whales share personality traits with humans, chimps
| November 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Convergent evolution, Intelligent Design |
Using a five-factor test. Convergent evolution is cited: Researchers found that the personality traits of killer whales were similar to those of both humans and chimpanzees but more similar to chimpanzees. Killer whales were similar to chimpanzees and humans for the extraversion factor (e.g., playful, gregarious and sociable). Killer whales and chimpanzees also shared a […]
Whatta headline! Early man was “total mean girl”
| November 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
William von Hippel, an evolutionary psychologist promoting a book, explains how we got here: Social connection and its middle-school messiness assured our survival — more than harnessing fire or developing opposable thumbs. Von Hippel writes that a series of “social leaps” — or movements forward in the way we connect with our fellow man — […]
Is human evolution happening faster than ever?
| November 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Killer quote: “Realising evolution doesn’t only happen by natural selection makes it clear the process isn’t likely to ever stop.” So says an evolutionary geneticist: We measure the speed of gene evolution by comparing human DNA with that of other species, which also allows us to determine which genes are fast-evolving in humans alone. One […]
Does time exist and do we experience it?
| November 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics |
That’s a perhaps surprisingly contentious topic among theoretical physicists: You see, whether time flows forward, or doesn’t flow at all, or moves back and forth, our resulting subjective experience would be identical in all cases: we would always find ourselves in an experiential snapshot extending smoothly backwards in memory and forwards in expectation, just like […]
Jonathan McLatchie and Gunter Bechly on conflicting evidence re common ancestry
| November 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design |
See also: Paleontologist Gunter Bechly live tonight on what the fossil record really tells us about common ancestry
The term “mechanome” is catching on, but slowly
| November 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design |
At her blog, Suzan Mazur interviews neuroscientist Medha Pathak on the recent Mechanome in Action symposium she chaired at UC-Irvine. Pathak “is currently a professor of physiology and biophysics at UCI and heads the Pathak Lab’s investigation there into “how mechanical forces modulate neural stem cell fate in development and repair.” Suzan Mazur: If you […]
Devolution: African elephants survive by shedding their tusks
| November 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
A classic in devolution, actually. In Mozambique, it is estimated that 90% of the elephants have been slaughtered for ivory to finance a civil war that ended in 1992. But tuskless elephants seem more likely to survive: Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a […]
Researchers: Ribosome translational system dates back to earliest Earth
| November 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From ScienceDaily: So audacious was Marcus Bray’s experiment that even he feared it would fail. In the system inside cells that translates genetic code into life, he replaced about 1,000 essential linchpins with primitive substitutes to see if the translational system would survive and function. It seemed impossible, yet it worked swimmingly, and Bray had […]
PBS’s American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Eugenics etc, Intelligent Design |
A friend writes to recommend it: American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen and I have watched many hundreds of them. As the movie documents, it started with Darwin, then moved on to Galton who spent his life developing the science of eugenics, then the American eugenics […]
John Sanford on claims about brand new nylonase genes
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
Recently, we noted that John Sanford was speaking at NIH on human health and mutations. Philip Cunningham writes to mention a 2017 paper by Sanford and S. T. Cordova, Nylonase Genes and Proteins – Distribution, Conservation, and Possible Origins on whether the ba cteria that digest nylon evolved new genes: We began this work hoping […]
Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne denounces Michael Behe’s forthcoming book unread
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Cell biology, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Of course, just now, one suspects that it is mainly the editors in Frisco who have pored over it. But now, Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne tells us,l Michael Behe, author of the intelligent-design (ID) creationist books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution, has a new book coming out next […]
New life form more different from others “than animals are from fungi”
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
Hemimastigotes: Like animals, plants, fungi and ameobas — but unlike bacteria — hemimastigotes have complex cells with mini-organs called organelles, making them part of the “domain” of organisms called eukaryotes rather than bacteria or archaea. About 10 species of hemimastigotes have been described over more than 100 years. But up until now, no one had […]
You are conscious? But so what? Maybe your coffee mug is too
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
A survey of materialist (naturalist) theories of consciousness would require you to keep an open mind on the topic. At Mind Matters, In an academic article, Kastrup identified the available materialist options, as he sees them. Picture, if you will, you, an amoeba, and a coffee mug. How much does each of you participate in […]
There will be cyborgs on Mars! says well-known astronomer
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
From Sir Martin Rees at NBC: AI apocalypse is certainly in the air. Elon Musk, Henry Kissinger, and the late Stephen Hawking have all predicted an AI doomsday. Industry professionals’ doubt and disparagement don’t seem to register with the media in the same way. Rees, who is former president of the Royal Society, goes further, […]
Huge study shows yeasts evolve by reducing their complexity
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Not by adding to it. Everyone seems to be talking about devolution (“reductive evolution”) these days. From ScienceDaily: “This is the first large genome project like this that actually looks at hundreds of different eukaryotic species, not different individuals or isolates of the same species,” says Chris Todd Hittinger, a UW-Madison genetics professor and one […]
Brendan Dixon: Even the skeptical Deep Learning researcher left out one AI myth
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Readers may remember Dixon from the time MIT tried building a universal moral machine. Here are some of his thoughts on one overlooked aspect of the “superintelligent AI” myth: [Google AI researcher] Francois Chollet is right to recognize that we, like all animals, come pre-wired. Young deer stand, leap, and run within hours of birth. […]
Study: Neanderthals did not live more violently than other ancient peoples
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From a study of over 200 skulls: Males suffered the bulk of harmful head knocks, whether they were Neandertals or ancient humans, the scientists report online November 14 in Nature. “Our results suggest that Neandertal lifestyles were not more dangerous than those of early modern Europeans,” Harvati says. Bruce Bower, “Skull damage suggests Neandertals led no […]
What algorithms can’t figure out and why
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Mind, Naturalism |
Jonathan Bartlett, Research and Education Director of the Blyth Institute, asks, Who needs wisdom? if We’ve got algorithms! ? In our increasingly digital society, the algorithm seems set to replace wisdom in human reasoning. While we are seeing some pushback against the movement to “algorithmicize” everything, few lay out explicitly the limitations as well as […]
When Peer-Reviewers Are Really Political Fanboys
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
Climate contrarian uncovers scientific error, upends major ocean warming study “The findings of the … paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts […]
