Intelligent Design

From BEC CREW at ScienceAlert: Researchers have discovered that the lungs play a far more complex role in mammalian bodies than we thought, with new evidence revealing that they don’t just facilitate respiration – they also play a key role in blood production. In experiments involving mice, the team found that they produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating to the majority of platelets in the animals’ circulation. This goes against the decades-long assumption that bone marrow produces all of our blood components. More. W|e are expected to believe that that all just happened by natural selection acting on random mutations and that no source of information is required. Sure. The article in Nature. Abstract: Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: A strange radio signal that seemed to emanate from a small nearby star probably came from Earth-orbiting satellites, astronomers say. Late last week, researchers announced that, on May 12, the 1,000-foot-wide (305 meters) Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico detected a bizarre radio signal in the vicinity of Ross 128, a red dwarf star that lies just 11 light-years from Earth. The signal was theoretically consistent with a transmission from an alien civilization, the astronomers said, though they stressed that hypothesis was “at the bottom of many other explanations.” More. Coffee: Not really. Psychologically, aliens were at the top of the list. And they are much more fun than any other explanation even if they Read More ›

One of the things that I find interesting from a design perspective is the existence of adaptive systems that don’t presently help them out. That is, they may have cellular response systems which help them in all sorts of scenarios which an ordinary individual is not subject to.
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From Kayla Lattimore and Julie Depenbrock at NPR: Algebra is one of the biggest hurdles to getting a high school or college degree — particularly for students of color and first-generation undergrads. It is also the single most failed course in community colleges across the country. So if you’re not a STEM major (science, technology, engineering, math), why even study algebra? That’s the argument Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California community college system, made today in an interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel. … Oakley is among a growing number of educators who view intermediate algebra as an obstacle to students obtaining their credentials — particularly in fields that require no higher level math skills. More. Hmmm. If we dropped Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: While it is accepted that humans appeared in Africa some 200,000 years ago, scientists in recent years have placed the approximate date of human settlement in Australia further and further back in time, as part of ongoing questions about the timing, the routes and the means of migration out of Africa. Now, a team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the University of Washington, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years ago — more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. A paper published July 20 in the journal Nature describes dating techniques and artifact finds at Madjedbebe, a longtime site of archaeological research, that Read More ›

No, not Atlantis, which has contributed so much to world fantasy literature. There is, in fact, a sort of lost continent, Zealandia. From Tia Ghose at LiveScience: The lost continent, which is mostly submerged, with all of New Zealand and a few islands peeking out from the water, is about half the size of Australia. By drilling deep into its crust or upper layer, the new scientific expedition could provide clues about how the diving of one of Earth’s plates beneath another, a process called subduction, fueled the growth of a volcano chain and this lost continent in the Pacific Ocean 50 million years ago. The new expedition could also reveal how that Earth-altering event changed ocean currents and the Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: String theory, which took root in the 1970s, proposes that “all objects in our universe are composed of vibrating filaments (strings) and membranes (branes) of energy.” That’s the ultimate Cool. It unites general relativity (the physics of the very big) with quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) in one grand unified Theory of Everything, turning current conflicts into harmony. But string theory offers more. It can undergird the concept of a multiverse: There are more universes than particles in our known universe. Which mean that the theory must be true or we must act as if it is true irrespective of evidence—or at least people must be made to believe Read More ›

News recently brought to our attention an article by Tom Rudelius in which he asserts that Occam’s razor does not militate against the existence of the multiverse.  Rudelius writes: The other argument against the multiverse that I find unconvincing is an appeal to Occam’s razor: it is absurd, some would argue, to hypothesize an infinite number of other universes just to explain our own. It is simplest to assume that only one universe exists. Incidentally, atheists will often say the same thing about God, claiming that it is simpler to assume that just the natural universe exists rather than postulate a complicated entity like God to explain fine-tuning. The problem with both of these arguments is that Occam’s razor does Read More ›

Moshe Averick, author of Nonsense of a High Order , writing at Algemeiner, asks us to picture scientists receiving a Morse code message from outer space, purportedly sent by aliens offering a cure for cancer. Will they respond by claiming that there must be some explanation for the message other than an intelligence?: Imagine further that the following exchange then takes place between two SETI scientists: – “Hold on, stop the party! How do you know the source is an intelligent alien life form, maybe there is some naturalistic unguided process that is the source of these transmissions?” – (Incredulously) “What unguided, naturalistic process do you know of that can produce intelligible Morse code messages?!” – “Aha! The Argument from Read More ›

From biologist and computer scientist Arend Hintze at LiveScience: We have some time – somewhere between 50 and 250 years, depending on how fast AI develops. As a species we can come together and come up with a good answer for why a superintelligence shouldn’t just wipe us out. But that will be hard: Saying we embrace diversity and actually doing it are two different things – as are saying we want to save the planet and successfully doing so. We all, individually and as a society, need to prepare for that nightmare scenario, using the time we have left to demonstrate why our creations should let us continue to exist. Or we can decide to believe that it will Read More ›

For whatever reason, I have been receiving a spate of journal articles written by high-maintenance academic welfare recipients on how to Really Fix the people who doubt Darwin. David Klinghoffer, editor at Evolution News and Views, noticed something I wrote here at UD and offers: Skeptics are now social deviants. The journal Sociological Perspectives offers this from Joshua C. Tom of the University of Virginia: Scientific communities maintain respected authority on matters related to the natural world; however, there are instances where significant portions of the population hold beliefs contrary to the scientific consensus. These beliefs have generally been studied as the product of scientific illiteracy. This project reframes the issue as one of social deviance from the consensus of scientific Read More ›

It ought to be so simple, right? Planet of the Apes and all that. From Colin Barras at BBC: It is true that, today, some researchers have a well-thought-through idea of what the LCA looked like and how it behaved. The trouble is that other researchers have equally well-reasoned models that suggest an LCA that looked and behaved in a completely different way. And that puts the research community in a bit of a quandary. In principle, fossilised remains of the LCA might come to light any time. They might even be discovered this very year. But because there is so little agreement on what the LCA should look like, researchers will interpret the fossils differently. “It’s a problem that Read More ›

As asked by Don Lincoln, Senior Scientist, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory at Space.com, acknowledging the difficulties: However, in a paper released in June, scientists have given dark matter models a significant boost. Not only does the new work reproduce the successes of earlier predictions of the dark matter model, it also reproduces the Tully-Fisher relation. The new paper is a “semi-analytic” model, which means that it is a combination of analytic equations and simulation. It simulates the clumping of dark matter in the early universe that may have seeded galaxy formation but also includes the interaction of ordinary matter, including such things as the infall of ordinary matter into another celestial body due to its gravitational pull, star formation and Read More ›

At Science, we learn that researchers think that sunlight might have given life on Earth the needed jolt to produce life: A new study suggests that the iron-and-sulfur clusters at the heart of many life-critical enzymes could have been floating around Earth’s primordial seas some 4 billion years ago, produced by nothing more than primitive biomolecules, iron salts, and a previously unknown ingredient—ultraviolet (UV) light. … To find out whether iron-sulfur clusters were a core ingredient for life from the start—or whether the first organisms got along fine without them—Mansy and his team recreated the conditions of early Earth in their lab. University of Trento biochemist Claudia Bonfio removed oxygen and mixed together a brew of iron and glutathione, a Read More ›

New Scientist’s Scare of the Month: From Timothy Revell at New Scientist: Mathematicians around the world are rushing to check millennia of calculations, as the Australian prime minister Malcom Turnbull has explained that their discoveries aren’t as concrete as we thought. “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” said Turnbull. Turnbull’s comments came as he proposed a new law to force tech companies to give security services access to encrypted messages. Apps like WhatsApp currently prevent any snoopers from reading your messages using end-to-end encryption, jumbling it up in such a way that only the recipient can de-jumble it.More. What he really means is that his government Read More ›