Intelligent Design

Dust this off, spruce it up and put it in a museum of popular culture: Getting back to evolution, it is amazing that 150 years after the scientific theory was proposed and generally accepted by the scientific community, it is still controversial in many segments of the public. In the US we have made some modest gains, but belief in pure creationism remains high at 38%, with a further 38% believing that life evolved but with God’s help, and only 19% accepting pure evolution. This puts the US near the bottom, only above Turkey. So recent reports of the teaching of evolution being opposed in Turkey is not surprising. It is more so in Israel, as those of Jewish faith Read More ›

In a recent American Spectator article “Evolution—More Certain than Gravity?” I made the point that to not believe in intelligent design, you have to believe that the four fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics on our once-barren planet into encyclopedias and science texts and computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. In a 2017 Physics Essays article “On ‘Compensating’ Entropy Decreases,” I argued that this spectacular increase in order seems to violate the more general statements of the second law of thermodynamics; at least that you cannot dismiss this claim, as is always done, by simply saying, the Earth is an open system and Read More ›

The belief that there is no free will is a much more dangerous myth, he writes, at Mind Matters Today: There are four reasons to affirm the reality of free will against denial by materialist determinists. Two reasons are logical, and two are scientific. … 4. While scientific experiments do not entirely settle the matter, an objective review of the neuroscientific evidence unequivocally supports the existence of free will. The first neuroscientist to map the brains of conscious subjects, Wilder Penfield, noted that there is an immaterial power of volition in the human mind that he could not stimulate with electrodes. The pioneer in the neuroscience of free will was Benjamin Libet, who demonstrated clearly that, while there is an Read More ›

“Africa’s Stone Age was also a Bone Age,” we are told: Ancient Africans took bone tools to a new level around 90,000 years ago by making pointed knives out of animals’ ribs, scientists say. Before then, bone tools served as simpler, general-purpose cutting devices. Members of northern Africa’s Aterian culture, which originated roughly 145,000 years ago, started crafting sharp-tipped bone knives as fish and other seafood increasingly became dietary staples, researchers suggest online October 3 in PLOS ONE…  Bruce Bower, “A 90,000-year-old bone knife hints special tools appeared early in Africa” at Science News Paper. (open access) Meanwhile, the world’s oldest fishing nets (29,000 years ago) may have been discovered in Korea: The 14 stone sinkers were discovered in the Maedun Read More ›

Matti Leisola, author of Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, offers some thoughts on the recent announcement: I am an enzyme bioengineer, so I greeted with enthusiasm Wednesday’s announcement… that part of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to a fellow enzyme bioengineer. She is Frances H. Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech. … There is one point of confusion in descriptions of this year’s prize winners. It’s the talk of “directed evolution.” The Nobel Prize organization itself has encouraged such talk. If it is “directed” by researchers engineering the rates for specific purposes, sorting according to specific goals, it isn’t “evolution” in the usual schoolbook sense at all. It is more like plant breeding. Read More ›

In the story we ran yesterday, “‘Compelling new evidence’ claimed for comets generating phosphates for earliest life,” we noted that our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon thinks that the idea that building blocks of life came from space is plausible and should be demonstrable. He offers his somewhat controversial thesis here: — I’ve argued elsewhere that the presence of cyanobacterial and eukaryotic microfossils on carbonaceous chondrites (comet fragments that land on the Earth), is evidence for ubiquitous cometary transport of life throughout the solar system and galaxy. This makes Darwin’s theory moot, because extraterrestrial transport destroys any “tree of life” that relies only on terrestrial modifications. It may also explain why NASA is adamantly opposed to publishing/acknowledging these discoveries. Every Read More ›

The constant 1/137 may be variable after all. This immutable number determines how stars burn, how chemistry happens and even whether atoms exist at all. Physicist Richard Feynman, who knew a thing or two about it, called it “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding”. Now its mystery is deepening. Controversial hints suggest this number might not be the universal constant we had assumed, instead varying subtly over time and space. Michael Brooks, “There’s a glitch at the edge of the universe that could remake physics” at New Scientist 137 is a prime number and 1/137 is the fine-structure constant: The importance of the constant is that it measures Read More ›

An MIT astronomer is 75% certain that an object previously suspected of being an Intro of exomoon (a moon orbiting an exoplanets) really is that: The first confirmed detection of an exomoon would mark a milestone in exploring planetary systems throughout the Galaxy. It would, among other things, allow scientists to test ideas of moon formation using examples from beyond the Solar System. Teachey’s proposed exomoon is already throwing up some surprises. Evidence suggests the moon is about the size of Neptune, orbiting a planet roughly the size of Jupiter. That would make it unlike anything in the Solar System, where most moons are much smaller than the planets they orbit. “It’s raising new questions about the dynamical processes that Read More ›

Sloan Kettering molecular biologist argues that this may not be semantics. What if that’s what they are actually doing, in effect? One wonders, how would it affect cancer treatment? Abstract: Living organisms must maintain proper regulation including defense and healing. Life-threatening problems may be caused by pathogens or an organism’s own cells’ deficiency or hyperactivity, in cancer or auto-immunity. Life evolved solutions to these problems that can be conceptualized through the lens of information security, which is a well-developed field in computer science. Here I argue that taking an information security view of cell biology is not merely semantics, but useful to explain features of cell signaling and regulation. It also offers a conduit for cross-fertilization of advanced ideas from computer Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Little was known about a key element in the building blocks, phosphates, until now. University of Hawaii at Manoa researchers, in collaboration with colleagues in France and Taiwan, provide compelling new evidence that this component for life was found to be generated in outer space and delivered to Earth in its first one billion years by meteorites or comets. The phosphorus compounds were then incorporated in biomolecules found in cells in living beings on Earth. The breakthrough research is outlined in “An Interstellar Synthesis of Phosphorus Oxoacids,” authored by UH Manoa graduate student Andrew Turner, now assistant professor at the University of Pikeville, and UH Manoa chemistry Professor Ralf Kaiser in the September issue of Nature Communications. … Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: People who think dogs are exceptionally intelligent are barking up the wrong tree, new research shows. Scientists reviewed evidence that compared the brain power of dogs with other domestic animals, other social hunters and other carnivorans (an order including animals such as dogs, wolves, bears, lions and hyenas). The researchers, from the University of Exeter and Canterbury Christ Church University, found the cognitive abilities of dogs were at least matched by several species in each of these groups. The study examined more than 300 papers on the intelligence of dogs and other animals, and found several cases of “over interpretation” in favour of dogs’ abilities. … “They are often compared to chimpanzees and whenever dogs ‘win’, this gets Read More ›

For one thing, they had to cope with injuries inflicted by large wild animals they were hunting: Researchers investigated the skeletal remains of more than 30 individuals where minor and serious injuries were evident, but did not lead to loss of life. The samples displayed several episodes of injury and recovery, suggesting that Neanderthals must have had a well-developed system of care in order to survive. … “We have evidence of healthcare dating back 1.6 million years ago, but we think it probably goes further back than this. We wanted to investigate whether healthcare in Neanderthals was more than a cultural practice; was it something they just did or was it more fundamental to their strategies for survival? “The high level of injury Read More ›

Even the most alert reader may not recall our piece on how gender theory can turn a dog’s life into a, well, dog’s life: Turns out, it may have been another Sokal hoax: Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a Read More ›

This image was famously attached to the Pioneer spacecraft.  The idea was that if extraterrestrials happened upon the craft they would learn something about its designers. After having listened to materialist arguments for many years, I must sadly conclude that NASA failed miserably here, having sent the spacecraft on a fool’s errand.  The materialists have insisted repeatedly in these pages that there are no objective indicia of design on the spacecraft from which an alien could distinguish the craft as a whole — or the image attached to it — from random space debris.  I don’t know about you, but I am outraged that NASA would squander hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds on such an obviously quixotic Read More ›

Michael Denton has a new book out, Children of Light: The astonishing properties of sunlight that made us possible, on the fitness of sunlight for life: In this book, I have described the fitness of the radiation emitted by the Sun for life on Earth: the fitness of the atmosphere to ensure sufficient IR radiation is absorbed to warm the surface of the planet, preventing water from freezing and animating matter for chemical reactions; the fitness of the atmosphere to let through the visible light to the Earth surface to enable photosynthesis which generates the oxygen and reduced carbon fuel necessary to support our “light eating,” energy-demanding lifestyle; and the fitness of the same light for high-acuity vison in beings Read More ›