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Intelligent Design

Researchers: Spiders use the same cues as vertebrates in distinguishing living vs. non-living things

Researchers: Complex vision evolved independently in vertebrates and arthropods and so the ability to distinguish living from non-living motion using the relative positioning of the joints has most likely arisen convergently in the two groups of animals. Read More ›

But the war IS actually on logic … and that’s the point

John West: "Reading the rest of her article I realized she simply didn’t know how to frame a proper comparison. She actually was attempting to malign those who support intelligent design, not those who tried to create panic over it. Apparently neither she nor her editor is particularly good with logic." But that’s the point. The whole enterprise is a war on logic. It's like the war on math and the war on science. And there is a sophisticated public for that now. Read More ›

A hint as to how unicellular life forms grew to be multicellular?

Margaret Helder comments on the study: "Lots of algae exhibit clumping together in groups. This is not the definition of multicellularity. There are quite a number of colonial relatives of Chlamydomonas, for example like Eudorina, Pandorina and Volvox. They are not evolving into anything." Read More ›

At Oscillations: Michael Ruse’s attempted takedown of evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin (but read the story!)

Ruse appears to have been a relentless enforcer of Darwinian orthodoxy behind the scenes, including a blistering attack on philosopher Jerry Fodor, who questioned it. Read More ›

Historian Richard Weikart on acceptance of Darwinian evolution and racism …

Richard Weikart: I have done a good deal of research on this topic, and as it turns out, the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy. Read More ›

Is panpsychism replacing materialism?

Panpsychism, in the form of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), is a much more serious competitor to dualism and idealism than materialism could hope to be. Panpsychists are not trying to claim that consciousness is merely an illusion. They may be wrong but they aren't ridiculous. Read More ›

At Evolution News and Science Today: The casual racism of Charles Darwin

Shedinger calls Allison Hopper’s piece in Scientific American, “startlingly vacuous,” which raises — once again — the question of why on earth the mag published it. It’s not as if there is no scholarship on the topic of Darwin and racism. Did the editors not want to address that scholarship? Well, we can’t read minds but we can make some reasonable guesses. How about: Create a big uproar and hope everyone will focus on that and not on the topic at hand? Shedinger also notes perceptively, “One does not become racist because of the view one holds on human origins. One becomes racist for other complex reasons and then reads that racism back into whatever view on human origins you hold.” Read More ›

At PJ Media: A response to religious claims made in Scientific American’s “denial of evolution is white supremacy” piece

Bolyard: “I’m not here to debate the hows and whys of creationism. I’ll point you to Answers in Genesis for that. But I want to point out a couple of shameless strawmen in Hopper’s piece that discredit everything else she writes in this piece.” Of course. Hopper was almost certainly making it up as she went along, trusting that few readers had read or spent much time on the relevant literature. Read More ›