Intelligent Design

Peter Atkins, author of Atkins’ Physical Chemistry (11th edition, 2017) and Conjuring the Universe (2018), divides the Big Questions into two classes: One class consists of invented questions that are often based on unwarranted extrapolations of human experience. They typically include questions of purpose and worries about the annihilation of the self, such as Why are we here? and What are the attributes of the soul? They are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence. Thus, as there is no evidence for the Universe having a purpose, there is no point in trying to establish its purpose or to explore the consequences of that purported purpose. As there is no evidence for the existence of a soul (except in a metaphorical Read More ›

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor  gets mail: Andrew Berry, the Harvard biologist who conducts a Darwin pilgrimage each year for undergraduates to Darwin-related sites in England, responds to my recent post about the cult-like reverence in which many Darwinists hold all things Darwin. Berry: I agree with [Egnor] it is indeed fetishization of All Things Darwin/Wallace (And More) that those of us interested in the history of science indulge in (and my program promotes). This is the reason first editions of The Origin sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. We admire Darwin and his colleagues, and enjoy the opportunity to feel in some way closer to the events and the people that we’re interested in by visiting sites etc associated with them, just Read More ›

 So thinks theistic evolutionist Joshua Swamidass at Biologos. It turns out that evolutionary theory is indispensable to understanding cancer. The link I offered above leverages evolution for just this purpose. … From this body of work, we can see the evolution of new functions (new information!), neutral theory, and the effectiveness of obtuse metrics like Ks/Ka ratios. It would hard to imagine rejecting evolution of species without somehow forgetting everything we have learned about the evolution of cancer. Jonathan Wells thinks otherwise: A rough analogy would be to compare the rusting of steel with the smelting of iron ore. We see the same chemical pattern, namely, the inter-conversion of iron and iron oxide. Rusting converts iron to iron oxide, and Read More ›

Here, Aug. 26 at 8:42 PM EDT on C-SPAN 2 Richard Weikart is the author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life and Hitler’s Religion: The twisted beliefs that drove the Reich See also: Richard Weikart on the anti-Semitic burst in evolutionary psychology Richard Weikart on Why social science does not need evolutionary theory From a review of Weikart’s Death of Humanity: One stunning factoid Weikart vs Darwin on the value of human life Video: Richard Weikart on his book, The Death of Humanity, and Darwinism Weikart on how Darwinism helped fascist agendas

Consider this item on the recent find of the remains of a girl from 90,000 years ago: The discovery of the first-known offspring of parents from two different hominin species took scientists by surprise. While evidence has been pointing to interbreeding among the ancestor species of modern humans, the direct link is being hailed as a significant finding.Kevin Kelleher, “A Neanderthal Mom and a Denisovan Dad: 90,000-Year-Old Bone Fragment Reveals Startling Human Hybrid” at Fortune “Species” “hybrid” “interbreeding”? What kind of talk is this about humans getting together? Yet it is everywhere. A reader wrote to ask, I’m not an expert on how ancient human species were defined, but I would assume that the authors aren’t using the biological species Read More ›

Here’s a definition of exaptation: a trait, feature, or structure of an organism or taxonomic group that takes on a function when none previously existed or that differs from its original function which had been derived by evolution. – Merriam-Webster In other words, a feature that once served one purpose now serves another. How is that not intelligent? The earliest ancestors of turtles likely evolved shells not for protection, but to serve as platforms for burrowing underground. Legs seem neatly adapted for locomotion on land, but leg-like limbs were present in a 375-million-year-old fish known as Tiktaalik, and were likely used for propping the fish up in shallow water. There are exaptations in genes, too. A gene called Distal-less controls coloration on Read More ›

  The latest entry in the hot-weather laziness debate, which started as, Did homo erectus die out because he was lazy and technologically conservative? A new large-data study of fossil and extant bivalves and gastropods in the Atlantic Ocean suggests laziness might be a fruitful strategy for survival of individuals, species and even communities of species. The results have just been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by a research team based at the University of Kansas. Looking at a period of roughly 5 million years from the mid-Pliocene to the present, the researchers analyzed 299 species’ metabolic rates—or, the amount of energy the organisms need to live their daily lives—and found higher metabolic rates were a Read More ›

An anthropologist asks: Now go even further back in time to the 17th or 18th century. The number of folks on average living then who could have contributed to your genetic endowment is so large (more than 1,000), and their possible genetic contribution so small (about 0.098 percent for 10 generations back), it would be smoke and mirrors to assert claims about who they were in person. In fact, most of these people left no trace of themselves in your genome. In short, while it can be hard to get your head around the statistics involved, go back more than a few thousand years and you are genealogically related to almost everyone on Earth. Genetically speaking, however, very few of these Read More ›

Though he helped develop it. Recently, a problem has arisen round efforts to create a synthetic cell.  Gerald Joyce, now of the Salk Institute, helped NASA come up with a very widely used definition of life, “Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.” But, as medicl historian Rebecca Wilbanks explains at Aeon, In 2009, after decades of work, Joyce’s group published a paper in which they described an RNA molecule that could catalyse its own synthesis reaction to make more copies of itself. This chemical system met Joyce’s definition of life. But nobody wanted to claim that it was alive. We’d certainly have heard about it if they had. But Joyce no longer seems satisfied with that definition. For Read More ›

For all practical purposes. From the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog BackRe(Action) According to Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, the universe goes through an infinite series of “aeons,” each of which starts with a phase resembling a big bang, then forming galactic structures as usual, then cooling down as stars die. In the end the only thing that’s left are evaporating black holes and thinly dispersed radiation. Penrose then conjectures a slight change to particle physics that allows him to attach the end of one aeon to the beginning of another, and everything starts anew with the next bang. This match between one aeon’s end and another’s beginning necessitates the introduction of a new Read More ›

The Progressive’ war on science reality continues apace.  From healthline.com: Many individuals don’t see body parts as having a gender — people have a gender. And as a result, the notion that a penis is exclusively a male body part and a vulva is exclusively a female body part is inaccurate.

Recently, we reported on one of those Darwinian morality tales, according to which homo erectus died out because he was lazy, compared to the rest of us. Ann Gauger, pointed out that the broader picture (timelines, for example) does not suggest that Homo erectus was lazy. And now we learn, “The inference that laziness typifies Homo erectus and that such a failing might have hastened their extinction is moronic,” says Neil Roach, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University. “This is a solid study with interesting results that do contribute significantly to our field, and unfortunately, the press release does exactly the opposite.” Roach makes his point emphatically, and with good reason—there’s a lot of evidence pointing to H. erectus as Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: There are a couple of key features that make a turtle a turtle: its shell, for one, but also its toothless beak. A newly-discovered fossil turtle that lived 228 million years ago is shedding light on how modern turtles developed these traits. It had a beak, but while its body was Frisbee-shaped, its wide ribs hadn’t grown to form a shell like we see in turtles today. “This creature was over six feet long, it had a strange disc-like body and a long tail, and the anterior part of its jaws developed into this strange beak,” says Olivier Rieppel, a paleontologist at Chicago’s Field Museum and one of the authors of a new paper in Nature. “It probably Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Together with their sister group the Neanderthals, Denisovans are the closest extinct relatives of currently living humans. “We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together,” says Viviane Slon, researcher at the MPI-EVA and one of three first authors of the study. “But I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups.” Well, it’s lucky for sure, but it’s the sort of thing we might expect to exist. We just want our team, institution, or country to get the credit. Analyses of the genome also revealed that the Denisovan father had at least one Neanderthal ancestor further back in his family tree. “So Read More ›

ID is a proposition that, first, it is reasonable to inquire scientifically as to whether certain features of the world of life and/or the physical cosmos can or do show observable signs of design. To which, the answer has long since been given, e.g. by the well known OoL researcher Orgel in a significant 1973 book: >>living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack Read More ›