Intelligent Design

Trivia to most of us but, in an era of increased space exploration, something to consider. From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Gravity’s smothering hold on Earth’s inhabitants means that eighty to ninety percent of the mass of current rockets must be taken up by the actual propellant burned to lift the rocket into space! According to Pettit, this means that sitting atop a rocket is more precarious than perching oneself atop a bottle of gasoline. It also means that there isn’t much room for stuff like food, computers, scientific experiments, and astronauts. Despite these drawbacks, we should count ourselves lucky. “If the radius of our planet were larger, there could be a point at which an Earth escaping rocket could Read More ›

From Erica Tennenhouse at New Scientist: Most life forms on Earth lack neurons, and yet they frequently manage to behave in complex ways. Previously, we have chalked this up to innate responses refined over generations, but it is beginning to look as if some of these humble non-neural organisms can actually learn. While that’s left some scientists scratching their heads, others are busy investigating how this ability could offer new approaches to fighting diseases and designing intelligent machines. (paywall) More. As Tennenhouse points out, even slime molds can learn, but they are a collection of individual life forms acting as one. New Scientist is probably looking for some explanation that does not see intelligence as immaterial. But it is immaterial, Read More ›

Older (Ichthus, Fall 2013) but interesting Rudelius is apparently a Christian (“passionate about connecting students to Jesus Christ”): The first bad argument against the multiverse is, as far as I can tell, a simple misunderstanding of conditional probabilities. The argument proceeds by analogy: suppose you are playing a game of poker, and your opponent deals himself four aces three times in a row. By the third time, you realize that he must be cheating, and draw your pistol. “Hold on a minute,” says your opponent, “In this infinite ensemble of worlds, there is an infinite number of poker games going on right now. And in some of these universes I am bound to deal myself four aces three times in Read More ›

Dan Graur is on a crusade against ENCODE – the NIH project that is showing that, at least in general, the entire genome is functional. Unfortunately, his commitment to the neo-Darwinian view of mutations is blinding him.
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Here’s an idea presented at YouTube that got kicked around at an ID-friendly online chips n’ gravy fest: The animal must be able to breed in captivity and must have a social structure in which a human can substitute for an animal. Domesticable animals are rare simply because the combination of necessary features is rare. A human can become the leader of a herd or pack. Note: Domestic cats, like Tom, Dick and Harry (UD editorial assistants) are not herd or pack animals; However, handled by humans early enough, cats tend to put the human in the role of Mommy Cat. That is, they never really grow up. But that hardly matters if they have found a human who will Read More ›

From Dean Burnett at the Guardian: There are competing theories about this, but the point is that most other species’ young can do a lot more of the work when it comes to feeding. Human babies can latch, but not much else, so the mother has to essentially do everything. Sometimes that’s totally fine. Other times it’s like trying to insert a water balloon into a wine bottle. A soft, constantly moving, unfathomably precious wine bottle that eventually grows teeth. And the water balloon is incredibly sensitive. And you have to do this a dozen times a day. Even when you’re meant to be sleeping. It may be natural, but breastfeeding isn’t as easy a process for humans as it Read More ›

From Nathan Cofnas at Weekly Standard: What is really disturbing, though, is that Hawking has flagrantly given up on even the pretense of engaging with actual science. He speaks entirely from authority: I am a scientist. Adopt this political policy that I favor or suffer fire and sulfuric acid. The threatened punishment for noncompliance substitutes sulfuric acid for the regular sulfur (brimstone) that features in old-fashioned religion. As far as the justification for the claim, there is no important difference between this and a religious statement that is supposed to be believed simply because it issues forth from a high priest. That can lead to awkward problems when the promoters of scientism turn out to be less than virtuous. Consider Read More ›

From Abby Olena at the Scientist: For more than 50 years, scientists have taken for granted that all snakes share a ZW sex determination system, in which males have two Z chromosomes and females have one Z and one W. But a study, published today (July 6) in Current Biology, reveals that the Central American boa (Boa imperator) and the Burmese python (Python bivittatus) use an XY sex determination system, which evolved independently in the two species. If a f fundamental change like that could evolve independently, something other than Darwin’s nature “hourly adding up” must be at work. But what? An internalized library of possible solutions, as Lee Spetner suggests? Gamble agrees that the next step is exploring other Read More ›

From Chase Nelson at Inference Review: The typical human gestation times of 38 weeks is, in fact, longer than one would expect for a primate of similar body mass. Instead of arguing for an enlarged brain, then, one might as easily argue for a diminished body mass. Thus, it is in spite of similar periods of gestation that humans are more helpless than other great apes at birth; humans are not born early. Moreover, we wean infants earlier than expected for a primate of our body size, not later. The opposite should be the case if weaning time is a proxy for altriciality, and if the obstetrical hypothesis is correct that altriciality requires more intelligent parents. Fetal development provides additional Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: “Because of the animal’s decomposition, it is difficult to be certain what this animal may have been,” John Hyde, a program leader of fisheries genetics at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, told Live Science in an email. “However, it does resemble a black sea hare (Aplysia vaccaria) that are fairly common in this area.” Sea hares, a group of sea slug species,fall within the class of gastropoda. If the strange animal were a black sea hare, that could explain its large size: A. vaccaria is the largest gastropod in the world — it can weigh as much as 30 lbs. (13.6 kg) and grow as long Read More ›

Don Johnson is the author of Programming of Life and Programming of Life 2: the Earth These vids introduce the ideas.   See also: Don Johnson’s lecture on “Bioinformatics: The Information in Life”

From Carie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’” at Journal Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography: Abstract: An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation Read More ›

With this OP, I am starting a series (I hope) of articles whose purpose is to present interesting proteins which can be of specific relevance to ID theory, for their functional context and evolutionary history. DNA-binding protein SATB1 SATB1 (accession number Q01826) is a very intriguing molecule. Let’s start with some information we can find at Uniprot, a fundamental protein database, about what is known of its function (in the human form): Crucial silencing factor contributing to the initiation of X inactivation mediated by Xist RNA that occurs during embryogenesis and in lymphoma And: Transcriptional repressor controlling nuclear and viral gene expression in a phosphorylated and acetylated status-dependent manner, by binding to matrix attachment regions (MARs) of DNA and inducing a Read More ›

You know, string theory leads to a multiverse. As described by Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: There’s an interview with Nima Arkani-Hamed here. His talk at the recent PASCOS 2017 conference (real title is second slide “What the Hell is Going On?”) gives his take on the current state of HEP, post failure of the LHC to find SUSY. He’s sticking with his 2004 “Split SUSY” as his “Best Bet”. I’d like to think his inspirational ending claiming that the negative LHC results are forcing people to rethink the foundations of the subject, asking again the question “What is QFT?” reflects reality, but not sure I see much of that. More. It has become a cult. It does not need to be Read More ›

Rob Sheldon is our physics color commentator, and he offers some thoughts on the claims made in A SETI hypothesis: We are Them: a) The paper is a sequel to this one: “The WoW! signal of the terrestrial genetic code” In that original paper, the same authors argue that the mapping between nucleotides and amino acids shows peculiar arrangements of high Shannon information, and is therefore a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. As you might guess, the authors took a lot of flak for saying this. This paper is the response. b) This paper tries to argue the opposite direction, that if you were a supremely intelligent person designing the mapping from DNA–>amino acids, how would you go about putting information Read More ›