Intelligent Design

Readers may remember that late last year, Canada’s governor-general got some attention for ridiculing Canadians who do not think that life is random process. The Prime Minister supported her, though her job is essentially to speak on behalf of the Queen, who apparently does not support such views: Can you believe that still today in learned society, in houses of government, unfortunately… we are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process. From Christopher Graney at the Vatican Observatory Foundation Blog: Stuff happens? Apparently both my students and the governor have somehow been taught that randomness is just part Read More ›

Reader Terry Scambray published an op-ed recently in the Fresno Bee (January 19, 2018) and has given us permission to reprint his original text. Words are like knives; they become dull with use until eventually they can’t dissect and divide reality with any precision. And certainly there is no more overused and abused word than “fascism.” A Short Explanation Benito Mussolini, originally a communist, a revolutionary socialist, realized that the communist slogan, “Workers of the world unite” was a myth. For he understood that love of country, patriotism, had more appeal than “international socialism.” So he invented “national socialism,” calling it “fascism” which he defined as: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” When WWI Read More ›

Nature does not make jumps. That old canon of natural history, as Darwin called it, goes back centuries and was heartily endorsed and adopted by evolutionary theory. Here are representative quotes from Origin, 1st edition, explaining important this doctrine was to Darwin:  Read more

In response to growing disquiet with the concept of a multiverse, voiced by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel assures us at Forbes: In short, it’s the idea that our Universe, and all that’s contained within it, is just one small region of a larger existence that includes many similar, and possibly many different, Universes like our own. On the one hand, if our current theories of physics are true, the Multiverse absolutely must exist. But on the other hand, as Sabine Hossenfelder rightly points out, it’s unlikely to teach us anything useful. … Writing in NPR, Sabine Hossenfelder is right to criticize that approach, stating, “Just because a theory is falsifiable doesn’t mean it’s scientific.” But just because Read More ›

Bookmark this for the next airhead invasion of your local Great Ideas discussion group. Further to “Theoretical physicist: Multiverse not based on sound science reasoning,”more from Sabine Hossenfelder at BackRe(action): Eternal inflation is an extrapolation of inflation, which is an extrapolation of the concordance model, which is an extrapolation of the present-day universe back in time. Eternal inflation, like inflation, works by inventing a new field (the “inflaton”) that no one has ever seen because we are told it vanished long ago. Eternal inflation is a story about the quantum fluctuations of the now-vanished field and what these fluctuations did to gravity, which no one really knows, but that’s the game. There is little evidence for inflation, and zero evidence Read More ›

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) needs a new name, says spokesperson. From Calla Cofield at Space.com: At a recent meeting of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Astrobiology Science Strategy for the Search for Life in the Universe, held here at the University of California, Irvine, Tarter explained that the phrase “search for extraterrestrial intelligence” generates an incorrect perception of what scientists in this field are actually doing. A more appropriate title for the field, she said, would be “the search for technosignatures,” or signs of technology created by intelligent alien civilizations. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens] At this point, she verges on parody: Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media, on a new book, Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (J. B.Stump, ed), Opponents of intelligent design (ID) usually dismiss the theory as unscientific, an attempt at smuggling religion into science through a back door. They slam it as a “god of the gaps” argument — inserting God into questions where science has not yet found a persuasive answer. In a new book, former geophysicist and author Stephen C. Meyer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, explained why intelligent design is not a “god of the gaps” argument, but a viable scientific theory. “The theory of intelligent design, unlike creationism, is not based upon the Bible,” Meyer wrote in Four Views Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A large international research team, led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University and including Rolf Quam from Binghamton University, State University of New York, has discovered the earliest modern human fossil ever found outside of Africa. The finding suggests that modern humans left the continent at least 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. “Misliya is an exciting discovery,” says Rolf Quam, Binghamton University anthropology professor and a coauthor of the study. “It provides the clearest evidence yet that our ancestors first migrated out of Africa much earlier than we previously believed. It also means that modern humans were potentially meeting and interacting during a longer period of time with other archaic human groups, providing more opportunity for Read More ›

Responding to “Theoretical physicist: Multiverse not based on sound science reasoning,” Edward Sisson offers some thoughts, from his training and experience as a lawyer: The “multiverse” proposal is just a way to escape the entire field of mathematical statistics. Yet our legal system relies on mathematical statistics in making one category of its most important decisions, profoundly affecting the lives of individuals: convictions of serious crimes using DNA statistics evidence to identify the one individual on planet earth who could have been present at the scene of a crime, by leaving DNA evidence. The DNA found at the crime scene is analyzed, and then a statistical analysis done, leading to the conclusion that there is a “one in X billion Read More ›

From Laura Sanders at ScienceNews: Somewhere in the brain is a storage device for memories What is the physical basis of memory? Somehow, memories get etched into cells, forming a physical trace that researchers call an “engram.” But the nature of these stable, specific imprints is a mystery. Today, McConnell’s memory transfer episode has largely faded from scientific conversation. But developmental biologist Michael Levin of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and a handful of other researchers wonder if McConnell was onto something. They have begun revisiting those historical experiments in the ongoing hunt for the engram. Applying powerful tools to the engram search, scientists are already challenging some widely held ideas about how memories are stored in the brain. New Read More ›

I wonder what you make of this “Keeling Curve.” I especially wonder what you make of the inset–which can be seen to oscillate on the actual graph of this ‘curve’ below the inset. This might be a very teachable moment. I await your brilliant responses.

From Sarah Sloat at Inverse: To fully grasp how we evolved to become modern humans, scientists argue that we need to better understand our ancient ancestors’ brains. Adult human brains today are large and globular, but whether ancient human brains looked like that when our species first emerged has been subject to much speculation. In a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology announced that the earliest Homo sapiens did not have globular brains like we have today. Instead, their brains had a shape intermediate between that of Homo erectus and that of the Neanderthals, both of which were somewhat more elongated horizontally. The brain, the authors write, gradually became globular over Read More ›

From Bret Stetka at Scientific American: A study that compares us with other primates finds a brain region linked to social behavior that may offer a biological explanation for why humans, not chimps, produced Shakespeare, Gandhi and Einstein Something is going wrong already if we think that the difference between human beings and gorillas is measured by extreme outliers. Raghanti and Lovejoy believe the human brain’s neurochemical profile was shaped by natural selection due to the various reproductive and survival benefits it conferred. Our evolving chemical signature, they suggest, allowed us to outcompete other apes and early hominins, referring to the numerous humanlike species that arose after our split with chimpanzees over six million years ago. The team speculates humans’ Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Science Today: AIVA [a music generation program] can combine musicals styles — that of, say, Bach and Beethoven, if you feed it enough of those two composers’ works. What such a program can’t do is innovate, says Dr. Marks. It can’t strike out in a new direction of its own, put Bach together with Beethoven and come up with…Stravinsky. Such a leap would be uncomputable, therefore permanently beyond the reach of even the most cleverly designed artificial intelligence. Marks explains the Lovelace test which, unlike the better-known Turing test, focuses precisely on this hard limit to what computer algorithms can do. AI cannot, in this sense, truly create. That indicates an impassable border Read More ›

The opportunity is open and it is time to seize the day. So, I think a comment in a discussion with GP and Dionisio should be headlined: >>My observation is those who are closed minded, indoctrinated and hostile will simply flare up in anger at anything that threatens their favoured evolutionary materialistic scientism or their comfortable fellow-traveller views calibrated not to get them in hot water with the domineering atheists. The issue then is, how well cultured they are. The cultured play at subtle rhetorical games pivoting on evasions and how could you concern trolling which provide more or less respectable “good cop” cover. Then come the “bad cops” who try to run riot, bully, intimidate, slander and stalk. I Read More ›