Intelligent Design

From Cell: A prevailing view among physiologists is that homeostasis evolves to protect organisms from damaging variation in physiological factors. Here, we propose that homeostasis also evolves to minimize noise in physiological channels. Fluctuations in physiological factors constitute inescapable noise that corrupts the transfer of information through physiological systems. We apply information theory to homeostasis to develop two related ideas. First, homeostatic regulation creates quiet physiological backgrounds for the transmission of all kinds of physiological information. Second, the performance of any homeostatic system influences information processing in other homeostatic systems. This dependence implies that multiple homeostatic systems, embedded within individual organisms, should show strongly nonadditive effects. Paper. (public access) – H. Arthur Woods, J. Keaton Wilson, An information hypothesis for Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Our visual attention is drawn to parts of a scene that have meaning, rather than to those that are salient or “stick out,” according to new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. The findings, published Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Human Behavior, overturn the widely-held model of visual attention. “A lot of people will have to rethink things,” said Professor John Henderson, who led the research. “The saliency hypothesis really is the dominant view.” Our eyes we perceive a wide field of view in front of us, but we only focus our attention on a small part of this field. How do we decide where to direct our attention, Read More ›

From Michael Byrne at Motherboard: According to a paper published this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, we might just be wrong about all of this. The accelerating expansion may just be a sort of illusion driven by an incorrect assumption about the nature of the distribution of mass across the universe. As cosmological assumptions go, it’s a big one: The universe will remain, on average, smooth and uniform in all locations and from all perspectives. Maybe not? … “While the remarkable isotropy of the CMB points to an initial state with a very high degree of smoothness, the late epoch Universe encompasses a complex cosmic web of structures,” the paper notes. “It is dominated in Read More ›

From the Virtual Embryo Project: This $3.2 million, 11-year initiative engaged a team led by Dr. Raymond F. Gasser—one of the leading embryologists of the last half century. His team created thousands of restored, digitized, and labeled serial sections from the world’s largest collection of preserved human embryos. They used these serial sections to create animations, fly-throughs, and 3-D reconstructions. More. Think of it as our personal evolutionary history…

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: Now, however, researchers led by Alan Rogers, an anthropologist and population geneticist at the University of Utah, have proposed a new genetic model that may reconcile those differences. It concludes that Neanderthals were more numerous than previous genetic studies often supposed, perhaps finally aligning genomic findings with the larger populations extrapolated from artifacts and fossils. It also fills in more of the Neanderthals’ evolutionary history between when they first separated from our ancestors in Africa and when they began to encounter modern humans again during the latter’s own diaspora. In many respects, Neanderthals may have been much more successful as a species — and more like us — than we have usually credited. … More. Read More ›

From Ferris Jabr at Scientific American: Consciousness, most scientists argue, is not a universal property of all matter in the universe. Rather, consciousness is restricted to a subset of animals with relatively complex brains. The more scientists study animal behavior and brain anatomy, however, the more universal consciousness seems to be. A brain as complex as the human brain is definitely not necessary for consciousness. On July 7 this year, a group of neuroscientists convening at Cambridge University signed a document officially declaring that non-human animals, “including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses” are conscious. Jabr makes a useful distinction between “conscious” and “self-aware.” Self-awareness is supposed to reside in the cerebral cortex, which is much Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: You never know who’s going to turn up at Q&A with Jonathan Wells and John West. The Discovery Institute biologist and political scientist, respectively, answered questions from the audience following a performance of the play Disinherit the Wind in Hollywood, California – which was a pretty interesting event in itself. But then there stands up a biologist from a local university, unidentified, who proceeds to blow everyone away with an account of his experience as a younger man in a formerly Communist country. He explains that under the totalitarian culture of his youth, “Communism was literally welded to Darwinism.” We recorded his remarks and they form a new episode of ID the Read More ›

Abstract: A key innovation for high resolution eyes is a sophisticated lens that precisely focuses light onto photoreceptors. The eyes of holometabolous larvae range from very simple eyes that merely detect light to eyes that are capable of high spatial resolution. Particularly interesting are the bifocal lenses of Thermonectus marmoratus larvae, which differentially focus light on spectrally-distinct retinas. While functional aspects of insect lenses have been relatively well studied, little work has explored their molecular makeup, especially in regard to more complex eye types. To investigate this question, we took a transcriptomic and proteomic approach to identify the major proteins contributing to the principal bifocal lenses of T. marmoratus larvae. Mass spectrometry revealed 10 major lens proteins. Six of these Read More ›

Over the last several days I have been performing a little experiment.  See here and here.  I have quoted several prominent Darwinists for the proposition that natural selection selects for fitness, not for truth.  See the appendix at the end of this post for a sample of some of these quotations.  I think Patricia Churchland puts the proposition most starkly.  Evolution selects for survival and “[t]ruth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Here is the nub of my experiment:  I was testing to see if – given this uncontroversial aspect of the theory – any of the materialists would express even the tiniest, slightest, minutest doubts regarding the truth of their own views.  Several materialist commentators jumped into to Read More ›

Paper. See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide

J. Scott Turner’s new book, Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It here: 1. J. Scott Turner writes, “I have come to believe that there is something presently wrong with how we scientists think about life, its existence, its origins, and its evolution. . . . What’s worse is that being forced to make the choice actually stands in the way of our having a fully coherent theory of life, in all its aspects, most notably its evolution. In other words, this bias is now hindering scientific progress” (p. xi). How does Turner’s claim here strike you? Do you resonate with it at all? Why or why not? 2. Turner describes Read More ›

From Paul Nelson at Evolution News & Views: Seriously: Carroll himself announces this “poetic naturalism as religion” Facebook option on his webpage, without a trace of irony. If we think of religion as the sphere of one’s deepest values – i.e., those bedrock truths and commitments for which we would willingly offer ourselves, and by which we try to order our daily lives – then it is clear that “poetic naturalism” means far more to Carroll than a clever atheistic philosophy with debating tricks to throw naïve theists off-balance. He intends for poetic naturalism to provide a trustworthy guide for living, and his most recent book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself,…is a Read More ›

From What Is Thought? by AI expert Eric B. Baum (2004, pp 226-27): Consciousness has many aspects. We are aware of our world and our sensations. We have a sense of self. We have goals and aspirations. We seem to have free will and moral responsibility. Yet, as I’ve said, the mind is equivalent to a Turing machine. Moreover, we have arisen through evolution and are descended from microbes by a smooth chain of evolution, with more complex mental processes at each stage evolved from the processes at the one before. Where in this process did consciousness enter? Why are we conscious? What is consciousness?” “The conclusion that we do not really have free will, discussed earlier in the context Read More ›

Convergent evolution of mimetic species confounds classification. From ScienceDaily: The scientists discovered numerous cryptic species-two or more species erroneously classified as one species-as well as single species mistakenly described as two or three. Frequently, species discriminated with genetic data are each others’ closest relatives, but can be distinguished by stark genetic differences; this suggests a lack of interbreeding — a hallmark of species distinctiveness. However, in Elymnias, Lohman and his associates found that cryptic species were unrelated to each other and resulted from a novel cause: mimicry. Different species on different islands of the Indo-Australian Archipelago frequently evolved to resemble a single, widespread model species, and different Elymnias species therefore evolved to resemble each other. Lohman and his colleagues conducted Read More ›

From Leah Burrows at Harvard SEAS: Even Charles Darwin, the author of “The Origin of Species”, had a problem with species. “I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties,” Darwin wrote in his seminal 1859 work. His followers have been exploiting the concept ever since, to confuse discussions about evolution with an all-knowing sneer. Indeed, nothing says “Darwin snob” like indifference to the mess that the entire concept of speciation is in. In a paper published in Physics Review E, Tikhonov outlines a framework for rethinking the language of species classification. Classical models of biology start from the assumption that the differences between species are, for the most part, clearly defined, and Read More ›