Intelligent Design

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: What If (Almost) Every Gene Affects (Almost) Everything? Three Stanford scientists have proposed a provocative new way of thinking about genetic variants, and how they affect people’s bodies and health. In 1999, a group of scientists scoured the genomes of around 150 pairs of siblings in an attempt to find genes that are involved in autism. They came up empty. They reasoned that this was because the risk of autism is not governed by a small number of powerful genes, which their study would have uncovered. Instead, it’s likely affected by a large number of genes that each have a small effect. Perhaps, they wrote, there might be 15 such genes or more. Two Read More ›

From Hannah Osborne at Newsweek: Scientists studying the brain have discovered that the organ operates on up to 11 different dimensions, creating multiverse-like structures that are “a world we had never imagined.” … Henry Markram, director of Blue Brain Project, said the findings could help explain why the brain is so hard to understand. “The mathematics usually applied to study networks cannot detect the high-dimensional structures and spaces that we now see clearly,” he said. “We found a world that we had never imagined. There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.” More. The structures are Read More ›

Crossway is publishing a mammoth (over 600-page) anthology critiquing theistic evolution , with a wide range of contributors from science to theology. From the publisher: The debate about biological origins continues to be hotly contested within the Christian church. Prominent organizations such as Biologos (USA) and Faraday Institute (UK) insist that Christians must yield to an unassailable scientific consensus in favor of contemporary evolutionary theory and modify traditional biblical ideas about the creation of life accordingly. They promote a view known as “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary creation.” They argue that God used—albeit in an undetectable way—evolutionary mechanisms to produce all forms of life. This book contests this proposal. Featuring two dozen highly credentialed scientists, philosophers, and theologians from Europe and Read More ›

But will it really lead to a hack-free internet? From Lee Billings at Scientific American: In a landmark study, a team of Chinese scientists using an experimental satellite has tested quantum entanglement over unprecedented distances, beaming entangled pairs of photons to three ground stations across China—each separated by more than 1,200 kilometers. The test verifies a mysterious and long-held tenet of quantum theory, and firmly establishes China as the front-runner in a burgeoning “quantum space race” to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network—that is, a potentially unhackable “quantum internet” that would be of immense geopolitical importance. The findings were published Thursday in Science. More. We do not live in the world we think we do. That said, probably, any Read More ›

From the Daily Galaxy: According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the curvature of spacetime was infinite at the big bang. In fact, at this point all mathematical tools fail, and the theory breaks down. However, there remained the notion that perhaps the beginning of the universe could be treated in a simpler manner, and that the infinities of the big bang might be avoided. This has indeed been the hope expressed since the 1980s by the well-known cosmologists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking with their “no-boundary proposal”, and by Alexander Vilenkin with his “tunnelling proposal”. Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam and at the Perimeter Institute in Canada have been able Read More ›

Many critics of intelligent design argue that not only is ID false (or at least unscientific), but that it is basically meaningless. Such lines of criticism come from philosophers such as Sahotra Sarkar and Elliott Sober. They argue that the general concepts that are assumed in ID discussions like ‘design’ and ‘intelligence’ are too primitive and vague to be of any use in a coherent scientific theory. Sarkar in particular claims that ID’s concepts can only be propped up by using analogies inherited by the natural theological tradition, and so cannot be formulated in a non-theological/scientific manner. In this article I have attempted to take a good stab at this objection. Though this article is quite in-depth, it is actually a Read More ›

From Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The organizing committee for the Munich conference was chaired by Richard Dawid, a string theorist turned philosopher who has written a 2013 book, String Theory and the Scientific Method. For a fuller discussion of that book, see the linked blog post. To oversimplify, it makes the case that the proper way to react to string theory unification’s failure according to the conventional understanding of the scientific method is to change our understanding of the scientific method. Much of the Munich conference was devoted to discussing that as an issue in philosophy of science. … Silverstein begins her article explaining how physics at a very high energy scale can in principle Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The existence of agents — beings with intentions and goal-oriented behavior — has long seemed profoundly at odds with the reductionist assumption that all behavior arises from mechanistic interactions between particles. Agency doesn’t exist among the atoms, and so reductionism suggests agents don’t exist at all: that Romeo’s desires and psychological states are not the real causes of his actions, but merely approximate the unknowably complicated causes and effects between the atoms in his brain and surroundings. Hoel’s theory, called “causal emergence,” roundly rejects this reductionist assumption. “Causal emergence is a way of claiming that your agent description is really real,” said Hoel, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University who first proposed the idea with Read More ›

But by now, so what? Apart from political issues (gaining power by manipulating fake science claims), all this stuff would be so long discredited that it would only survive as a branch of the “Cultural Studies Department.”  Anyway,t his stuff: Over 30 years ago, Leonard Martin, Sabine Stepper, and I (Strack et al., 1988) conducted two studies to test the “facial feedback” hypothesis (Darwin, 1872). At the time, the hypothesis itself, namely that facial expressions may affect emotional experiences, was well established and frequently tested (e.g., Leventhal and Mace, 1970; Laird, 1974). However, the underlying mechanism remained largely unexplored. … The resulting “pen study” was meant neither to demonstrate a cute phenomenon nor to identify a powerful intervention to improve Read More ›

From Chase Nelson at Inference Review: ORIGINALLY PROPOSED by Motoo Kimura, Jack King, and Thomas Jukes, the neutral theory of molecular evolution is inherently non-Darwinian.2 Darwinism asserts that natural selection is the driving force of evolutionary change. It is the claim of the neutral theory, on the other hand, that the majority of evolutionary change is due to chance. Each individual in a typical mammal population has two copies of its genome in almost every cell. The exact DNA sequences they contain may differ as the result of mutations, random copying errors in which one nucleotide letter is replaced by another. Other changes can also occur, such as the deletion or duplication of larger DNA segments. The result is genetic Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Fine-tuning of the universe is so unpleasant a subject for materialists that it cannot really become a controversy. The desired evidence favors a random universe, accidentally spilled. Differing points of view on the findings would, of course, be funded by the government. But the randomness would be agreed upon up front. On the other hand, if evidence matters, our universe appears fine-tuned. In the end it is not really an issue about the evidence. Help! we are drowning in evidence! The universe’s expansion speed is said to be just right for life, the Higgs boson seems to be fine-tuned, and Earth has a “unique” iron signature, just as a few examples. This Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at Space.com: 10. Nobody is transmitting. Instead, everybody may be listening. That’s basically how it is here on Earth. Apart from a few paltry efforts to broadcast strong signals over a narrow frequency band towards the stars above, we’ve barely made our presence known in the universe. In fact, if aliens have radio telescopes similar to what we have on Earth, our television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable up to 0.3 light-years away. That distance doesn’t even transcend the farthest reaches of our solar system. 11. Earth is deliberately not being contacted. On Earth, we have policies about contacting indigenous peoples; it’s possible that the same thing could be happening with us. Just like in Read More ›

Denyse recently linked to a presentation by Scott Minnich regarding the bacterial flagellum.  Minnich is probably among the dozen or so leading experts in the world on the bacterial flagellum.  Much of the information in his presentation will be familiar to followers of the issues, but a few points bear further examination. First a couple of bench-science items that jumped out at me: Minnich and his team discovered that DNA has a regulatory function in the form of a temperature switch.  Let me be clear, it is not that DNA codes for some molecular machine that is a temperature switch.  The DNA itself is the switch.  In simple terms, the coding portion that codes for a particular protein is bounded Read More ›

  Here re Controversy of the Ages: Why Christians Should Not Divide Over the Age of the Earth: Second, chapter 9 is worth the price of the whole book. Cabal notes that Christians need to have theological boundaries to protect the faith, but ought to draw them with charity and proper balance between inclusivity and restrictiveness. While he does have some criticisms for Reasons to Believe, the leading OEC organization, since they are committed to biblical inerrancy, he reserves his primary criticism for Answers in Genesis (AiG) and BioLogos. As for AiG, Cabal is concerned that they draw doctrinal lines to narrowly—including such things as a young earth, a flood-shaped geology, Neanderthals, and details about taxonomy in the definition of inerrancy. Read More ›

From Ashley Strickland at CNN: The oldest fossil remains of Homo sapiens, dating back to 300,000 years, have been found at a site in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. This is 100,000 years older than previously discovered fossils of Homo sapiens that have been securely dated. The discovery was presented in a study in the journal Nature on Wednesday. This marks the first discovery of such fossils in north Africa, and widens the “cradle of mankind” to encompass all of Africa, the researchers said. Previous finds were in south or east Africa. The fossils, including a partial skull and a lower jaw, belong to five different individuals including three young adults, an adolescent and a child estimated to be 8 years old. Read More ›