Intelligent Design

From ScienceDaily: They predate the Createous period, moths and butterflies existed earlier than the Cretaceous period, which began 145 million years ago. A team of scientists report on new evidence that primitive moths and butterflies existed during the Jurassic period, approximately 50 million years earlier than the first flowering plants, shedding new light on one of the most confounding cases of co-evolution. … The slides of rock samples drilled in the German countryside included some material that looked familiar to Strother, a Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences researcher at Boston College’s Weston Observatory, who studies the origin and early evolution of land plants. What he saw were features similar to those found in insect wings. The wrinkle was that Read More ›

From Andrew Jones at Evolution News & Science Today,: After many thousands of man-hours of research, and zillions of CPU-hours on borrowed computers, biochemist David Baker of the University of Washington claims we have basically nailed it. “There are subtleties going on in naturally occurring proteins that we still don’t understand,” Dr. Baker said. “But we’ve mostly solved the folding problem.” He thinks that natural proteins are not designed, and so we should be able to do better: “There’s a lot of things that nature has come up with just by randomly bumbling around,” he said. “As we understand more and more of the basic principles, we ought to be able to do far better.” Don’t be fooled. If it’s Read More ›

From sociologist Christian Smith at Chronicle Review: BS is undergraduate “core” curricula that are actually not core course systems but loose sets of distribution requirements, representing uneasy truces between turf-protecting divisions and departments intent on keeping their classes full, which students typically then come to view as impositions to “get out of the way.” BS is the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance. … BS is the ascendant “culture of offense” that shuts down the open exchange of ideas and mutual accountability to reason and argument. It is university Read More ›

From Thomas P. Sheahen at American Thinker: We all learned in elementary school that “you can’t divide by zero.” But what happens when you divide by a number very close to zero, a small fraction? The quotient shoots way up to a very large value. … There are several indices being cited these days that get people’s attention because of the big numbers displayed. But the reality is that those particular big numbers come entirely from having very small denominators when calculating a ratio. Three prominent examples of this mathematical artifact are the feedback effect in global warming models, the “Global Warming Potential,” and the “Happy Planet Index.” Each of these is afflicted by the enormous distortion that results when Read More ›

From Sal Cordova at Creation-Evolution Headlines: Bill Basener and John Sanford recently provided a correction to Fisher’s equations in the FNSF-FTNS (12/22/17) that demonstrated real evolution proceeds toward destruction rather than construction of biological function. It basically flips Fisher’s theorem upside down. Concurrently, and equally comedic, something odd happened at the 37th memorial lecture on January 4, 2018 meant to honor the memory of the late R. A. Fisher. Joe Felsenstein (a National Academy of Science member) condemned Fisher’s work with faint praise. Basically, he criticized Fisher’s famous theorem but tried to do it in a nice way. (After all, this was a memorial lecture intended to honor Fisher’s accomplishments.) As with many eulogies, Felsenstein tried to put as much Read More ›

Further to “Evolutionary informatics has come a long way since a Baylor dean tried to shut down the lab,” Philip Cunningham writes to introduce a new vid, Darwinian Evolution vs. Mathematics, documentary support here. Question: Will post-modernism give Darwinism an extra lease on life, by making clear that mathematics is a tool of oppression anyway? If people feel that Darwinian evolution is culturally right, isn’t that better than good mathematical results? See also: Evolutionary informatics has come a long way since a Baylor dean tried to shut down the lab On Basener and Sanford’s paper falsifying Fisher’s Darwinism theorem: It will be no small thing to make reality matter again and Can science survive long in a post-modern world? It’s Read More ›

On the theory that it might reflect badly on Darwin (2007). The lab moved off campus and continued. Robert Marks II writes to offer updates on the Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics book (Robert J. Marks, William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert, 2017) Podcast: (AI) Robert Crowther “Why Artificial Intelligence Will Never Replace Humanity,” Interview with Robert J Marks, ID the Future, December 18, 2017. Podcast: (AI) Robert Crowther “The Dangers, Limits and Promise of Artificial Intelligence.” Interview with Robert J Marks, ID the Future, January 8, 2018. Book’s site: Evolutionary informatics weds the natural, engineering, and mathematical sciences. Evolutionary informatics studies how evolving systems incorporate, transform, and export information. The Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory explores the conceptual foundations, mathematical development, and Read More ›

In a recent exchange in this post William J. Murray said to frequent commenter Bob O’H: all you (and others) are doing is avoiding the point via wordplay. We all act and expect others to act as if these things are objective and universally binding, the ability to imagine alternate systems notwithstanding. That is precisely correct, as illustrated by my exchange with goodusername in the same post.  First, at comment 12 GUN professed to not even know what the word “right” means: GUN:  “What would it even mean to give a “right” answer to a morality question?” I decided to test this: Barry @ 13: Suppose the following exchange: GUN: Hey, Barry is is evil to torture an infant for Read More ›

From Mindy Weisberger at LiveScience: Three species of raptors — predatory birds with sharp beaks and talons, and keen eyesight — are widely known not only for lurking on the fringes of fires but also for snatching up smoldering grasses or branches and using them to kindle fresh flames, to smoke out mammal and insect prey. … From their reports, a behavioral pattern emerged: Firehawks (also described as kitehawks, chickenhawks and, on several occasions by non-Aboriginals, s—hawks) purposely swiped burning sticks or grasses from smoldering vegetation — or even from human cooking fires — and then made off with the brands and dropped them into unburned areas to set them alight, presumably to drive out more prey. More. Also, from Read More ›

William Voegeli on why liberals don’t care whether the programs they push so relentlessly actually work to reduce suffering: Even where there are no material benefits to addressing, without ever reducing, other people’s suffering, there are vital psychic benefits for those who regard their own compassion as the central virtue that makes them good, decent, and admirable people—people whose sensitivity readily distinguishes them from mean-spirited conservatives. “Pity is about how deeply I can feel,” wrote the late political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain. “And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.” It follows, then, that the answer to the question of how liberals who Read More ›

True, the rumors distract from real science. From Elizabeth Howell at AirSpaceMag: The attention given to such stories has some scientists worried, especially as social media amplifies claims of alien contact over other, more prosaic explanations. “Currently, most SETI-related news seems to be interfering with conventional scientific discoveries, stealing the limelight—without following basic rules of science,” wrote Dutch exoplanet researcher Ignas Snellen of Leiden Observatory, on a Facebook exoplanets discussion group for professional astronomers. Although he has “great respect for SETI scientists,” Leiden wrote, “there is no place for alien civilizations in a scientific discussion on new astrophysical phenomena, in the same way as there is no place for divine intervention as a possible solution. One may view it as Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform: A math education professor at Brooklyn College contends in a recent academic article that “meritocracy” in math classes is a “tool of whiteness.” … To mediate this, Rubel recommends that math teachers incorporate more social justice issues into math lessons, but warns that even “teaching for social justice” can be a “tool of whiteness” if teachers are not sufficiently attuned to the experiences of minority students. This is because even social justice-minded professors may inadvertently hold the “belief that effort is always rewarded, [which corresponds] to various tools of whiteness, like the myths of meritocracy and colorblindness,” Rubel writes. More. It certainly sounds like a roundabout way of saying that getting the right answer Read More ›

Yes, re this recent item (paper, public access), Rob Sheldon, our physics color commentator writes, — I’m no chemist, my last class being Organic Chem in college, but I’ll take a stab at this paper. Like most of these Origin-of-Life papers, the chemistry is awesome, the interpretation, well, a bit pretentious. OOL Theories: Among the favorite materialistic origin stories, there is “DNA-first”, “RNA-first” and “Metabolism-first”. I suppose we might add “protein-first” and “cellwall-first” to the list as well. Once a self-replicating structure of your favorite model was in place, then the magic of natural selection would automatically add wings to your pig, and Voila! OOL. The Problem: that first self-replicating system is a real pain. It has to be simple enough Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: An international group of researchers has discovered a new phenomenon that occurs in identical twins: independent of their identical genes, they share an additional level of molecular similarity that influences their biological characteristics. The researchers propose a mechanism to explain the extra level of similarity and show that it is associated with risk of cancer in adulthood. The results appear in the journal Genome Biology. “The characteristics of an individual depend not only on genes inherited from the parents but also on epigenetics, which refers to molecular mechanisms that determine which genes will be turned on or off in different cell types. If we view one’s DNA as the computer hardware, epigenetics is the software that determines what Read More ›

One of the recurring themes on this blog is moral subjectivism vs moral objectivism. Subjectivists argue that morals are fundamentally subjective in nature – akin to personal preferences, although very strongly felt. Let us agree for the sake of argument that they are not the same as simple preferences like flavors or fashion or colors and exclude that comparison from the conversation. All perceptions of any kind are acquired and processed subjectively. That’s not the question; the question is whether or not it is better, more logical, or even necessary to think and act as if what one is referring to is objective in nature. Even though we all perceive what we call the “outside” world subjectively, I’m sure we’d Read More ›