Intelligent Design

Jerry Fodor was one of the Altenberg 16* and author of What Darwin Got Wrong (2010). Correction: Jerry Fodor was interviewed in the book “The Altenberg 16” by Suzan Mazur  (Chapter 3)  but is not one of the 16 scientists that met at Altenberg in 2008. Pos-Darwinista writes to say that Fodor’s page at Rutgers University doesn’t mention What Darwin Got Wrong, co-authored with Massimo Piattelli Palmarini. There is, however, a link to the pdf of a paper, “Against Darwinism,” identified as forthcoming: This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I’ve addressed in print before.  But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was Read More ›

Reddit. From Michael Byrne via Motherboard at Slashdot: “, some 73 percent of posts on Reddit are voted on by users that haven’t actually clicked through to view the content being rated.” Brilliant futures await them as Wikipedia editors, provided they are living on food stamps in Mom’s basement. New media help us understand what old media did by not doing it. See also: ID and Wikipedia as the ultimate post-modern encyclopedia Is social media killing Wikipedia? and Wikipedians diminish another high achiever sympathetic to ID. Yes, there is sometimes useful information in Wikipedia. But one can say that of the supermarket tabloids as well. It’s a question of how likely that is, relative to stuff we can’t evaluate or should avoid, Read More ›

Approx noon EST, Theistic Evolution: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Creationism #13 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Apologetics #46 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Theology From the editorial reviews: — “This volume fills a wide and expanding gap for Christians who continue to struggle with the relationship of evangelical Christianity to the claims of science. Specifically, for those who have rightly rejected the claims of unguided evolution, this book takes on the similar challenge of the possibility of theistic evolution. Scholarly, informative, well-researched, and well-argued, this will be the best place to begin to ferret out reasons for conflict among Christians who take science seriously. I highly recommend this resource.” —K. Scott Oliphint, professor of apologetics and Read More ›

Maybe the arms are an illusion too… From ScienceDaily: Neuroscientists have shown how amputees can learn to control a robotic arm through electrodes implanted in the brain. The research details changes that take place in both sides of the brain used to control the amputated limb and the remaining, intact limb. The results show both areas can create new connections to learn how to control the device, even several years after an amputation. … The researchers worked with three rhesus monkeys who suffered injuries at a young age and had to have an arm amputated to rescue them four, nine and 10 years ago, respectively. Their limbs were not amputated for the purposes of the study. In two of the Read More ›

Most people mistakenly think that Intelligent Design is anti-evolution. That is not correct. To understand Intelligent Design’s criticism of evolution, it is important to pinpoint specifically where we believe evolutionary biology made a wrong turn and why it matters.

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This sort of finding, assuming it holds up, is killing Darwinism. From ScienceDaily: The amount of close and comforting contact between infants and their caregivers can affect children at the molecular level, an effect detectable four years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute. The study showed that children who had been more distressed as infants and had received less physical contact had a molecular profile in their cells that was underdeveloped for their age — pointing to the possibility that they were lagging biologically. “In children, we think slower epigenetic aging might indicate an inability to thrive,” said Michael Kobor, a Professor in the UBC Department of Medical Genetics Read More ›

From Stephanie M. Lee at Buzzfeed: … It’s not the first time Cornell has looked into Wansink: In April, after critics publicly questioned four of Wansink’s papers related to pizza consumption, the university said it had found no scientific misconduct related to those papers. Wansink did not immediately return a request for comment about the investigation. Overall, critics have raised red flags about at least 50 of Wansink’s studies. The high-profile professor has retracted four articles — most recently one last week — and has at least eight corrections published or forthcoming. (That total doesn’t include yet another problematic paper about vegetable-naming that stands to be corrected or withdrawn.) In a November 2016 blog post, Wansink praised a visiting graduate Read More ›

Abstract: Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics sufficient to adequately describe, model and explain the evolution of biological complexity? Detailed parallels have been drawn between statistical thermodynamics and the population-genetic theory of biological evolution. Based on these parallels, we outline new perspectives on biological innovation and major transitions in evolution, and introduce a biological equivalent of thermodynamic potential that reflects the innovation propensity of an evolving population. Deep analogies have been suggested to also exist between the properties of biological entities and processes, and those of frustrated states in physics, such as glasses. Such systems Read More ›

Recently, a claim whistled through the pop science media: Bonobos help strangers without being asked, therefore human are not special. The claim is noteworthy only for the authors’ apparent assumption that most readers don’t realize that many animals help without being asked, provided they have any idea what to do. Usually, they don’t. The animals-are-just-fuzzy-people stuff caters to the growing conviction that humans are not special, — a conviction for which the best excuse would have to be “I never read or think much, I don’t care what happens politically. My big issue is, my dealer has gone to rehab.” Meanwhile, from Penny Spikins at Sapiens: There are, perhaps surprisingly, only two known cases of likely interpersonal violence in the Read More ›

A reluctant physics student wrote to our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon for help recently. What, he asks, is this paper all about: — Journal of High Energy Physics May 2017, 2017:136 Supersymmetric many-body systems from partial symmetries — integrability, localization and scrambling Authors Pramod Padmanabhan, Soo-Jong Rey, Daniel Teixeira, Diego Trancanelli Email author Open AccessRegular Article – Theoretical Physics First Online: 25 May 2017 Abstract Partial symmetries are described by generalized group structures known as symmetric inverse semigroups. We use the algebras arising from these structures to realize supersymmetry in (0+1) dimensions and to build many-body quantum systems on a chain. This construction consists in associating appropriate supercharges to chain sites, in analogy to what is done in spin Read More ›

Via Wuthrich at philosophy of physics blog Taking Up Spacetime, Workshop: “Naturalness, Hierarchy, and Fine-Tuning” Workshop Description: The requirement of naturalness has long served as an influential constraint on model-building in elementary particle physics. Yet there are many ways of understanding what, precisely, this requirement amounts to, from restrictions on the amount of fine-tuning that a model can exhibit, to prohibitions on sensitive dependence between physics at different scales, to the requirement that dimensionless parameters defining the Lagrangian of a theory all be of order one unless protected by a symmetry. This workshop aims to clarify the relationships among these concepts of naturalness and their connection to the hierarchy problem, as well as to assess arguments for and against imposing Read More ›

It ranks right up there with “What is a species?” From Derek J. Skillings at Aeon: Evolution itself is meant to tell us which entities count as individuals. Because natural selection is the engine of evolution, Hull said, we need to account for individuality in terms of what is required for selection. At their most basic, evolutionary individuals are entities that vary among each other, their variability causes variations in fitness, and that variation and fitness is passed along to the next generation. These individuals are also often referred to as ‘units of selection’ because they are the unit upon which the process of natural selection operates. It is the selective pressure over evolutionary time that explains why organisms have Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Duplications of large segments of noncoding [junk] DNA in the human genome may have contributed to the emergence of differences between humans and nonhuman primates, according to results presented at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2017 Annual Meeting in Orlando, Fla. Identifying these duplications, which include regulatory sequences, and their effect on traits and behavior may help scientists explain genetic contributions to human disease. Paulina Carmona-Mora, PhD, who presented the work; Megan Dennis, PhD; and their colleagues at the University of California, Davis, study the history of human-specific duplications (HSDs), segments of DNA longer than 1,000 base pairs that are repeated in humans but not in primates or other animals. In this study, they focused on Read More ›

The 21st century is not turning out at all the way pundits thought. From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Evolution News & Views: It is important to understand the aspects of mind that they do share. They share some motor control, some common sensations, and probably share some aspects of imagination — that is, the ability to reconstruct sensory images (visual, auditory, olfactory, etc.). This sharing of some aspects of the mind, but not others, is remarkably consistent with classical Thomistic dualism. In Thomistic dualism, the human soul is the composite of three powers: vegetative, sensory, and rational. Vegetative powers are what we today call autonomic physiological control — control of heart rate, control of blood pressure, control of growth, reproduction, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Professor Robin Allaby, in Warwick’s School of Life Sciences, has discovered that human crop gathering was so extensive, as long ago as the last Ice Age, that it started to have an effect on the evolution of rice, wheat and barley — triggering the process which turned these plants from wild to domesticated. In Tell Qaramel, an area of modern day northern Syria, the research demonstrates evidence of einkorn being affected up to thirty thousand years ago, and rice has been shown to be affected more than thirteen thousand years ago in South, East and South-East Asia. Furthermore, emmer wheat is proved to have been affected twenty-five thousand years ago in the Southern Levant — and barley in Read More ›