Intelligent Design

In response to: Math prof: Be careful what we do with infinity. Weird things can happen: “Some weird things are like 1 = 0, not just weird, but undesirable. So we try to build our mathematical ideas to avoid those. But other weird things don’t contradict logic, they just contradict normal life,” a reader writes, Indeed, when you introduce ‘infinity’ into your equation, one of the (far worse than “weird” or “undesirable”) results you get is that 1=0 , which is a logical contradiction/impossibility (which is to say, utterly impossible). Or, to put this another way, you can “prove” anything with a false premise. And, this “result” that 1=0 is one more way we can know that the age of Read More ›

The first video release from the AM-Nat Biology conference is now available! In this video, Salvador Cordova talks about the possibility that many things that are commonly considered errors in biology actually have identifiable purposes. Cordova confronts what is both a theological and a scientific critique of design, and shows its limitations. As Sal points out at the beginning of this video, this talk was a special request of mine. Sal has posted on these topics here on UD, but I thought they got less attention than they should, as I think they are really important concepts. If you are interested in the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism series, you should pick up our book, Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Read More ›

A literary essay from David Randall at First Things: Yet three notable works of science fiction do address themselves to the power of that old promise against the secular infinitudes of time and space: Cordwainer Smith’s “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” (1964), John Morressy’s The Mansions of Space (1983), and R. A. Lafferty’s Past Master (1968). These novels share a Christian preoccupation—a theological preoccupation—with the survival of faith threatened sometimes by oblivion, sometimes by annihilation, and sometimes indeed by the gates of hell. The three fables vary on an important particular. The survival of faith may or may not be identical with the survival of the Church—and the difference between broadly Christian and specifically Catholic science fiction may be Read More ›

No, we hadn’t heard of it either. At Cerebral Faith, Christian apologist Evan Minton explains, Recently, William Lane Craig debated atheist Michael Nugent in Ireland on the existence of God. One of the arguments that Dr. Craig employed was The Fine Tuning Argument for design. I’m going to assume that readers of this article already have some familiarity with the fine tuning, so in case you’re new to the God debate, or this website, or apologetics in general, I discuss The Fine Tuning Argument in this blog post here. In response to the Fine Tuning Argument, Nugent said the following: “Theists believe that this God fine tuned the physical constants of the universe to allow life. But while these constants Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Former NBA player Shaquille O’Neal can likely see that a basketball is round, but the newly proclaimed “flat-Earther” can’t seem to say the same for the planet. In a podcast that aired Feb. 27, the basketball legend announced that the Earth is flat, saying that when he drives from Florida to California, “it’s flat to me.” But there are countless ways that show the Earth isn’t flat, but round. (To be specific, it’s an “irregularly shaped ellipsoid,” according to the National Ocean Service.) Before we dive into the science, here is what O’Neal said, as sports reporter Ben Rohrbach first reported. … More. Box office? Okay, now we see: It feels flat to him. But Read More ›

From Laura Gegel at LiveScience: Human cannibals likely took a big bite out of their fellow humans about 10,000 years ago, according to a study that examined prehistoric bones with scratch and bite marks on them. The bones, discovered in the Santa Maria Caves (Coves de Santa Maria) in Alicante, Spain, may be the first instance of cannibalism in the western European Mediterranean region dating to the Mesolithic period, the researchers said. (The Mesolithic period last from about 10,200 to 8,000 years ago on the Iberian Peninsula. “Mesolithic” means middle stone, and it’s between the Paleolithic, or old stone, and Neolithic, or new stone, periods.) … However, it’s unclear if this cannibalism was performed because of hunger or rather some Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Paper. (paywall)Our genome is made up of 6,000 million pieces of DNA that combine four “flavors”: A, C, G and T (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine). It is our Alphabet. But to this base we must add some regulation, just like the spelling and grammar of that alphabet: this is what we call Epigenetics. “In epigenetics, there there are “accents,” called DNA methylation, which means having a C or a methyl-C. The first one usually means that a gene is expressed and active, while the second one implies that a gene is silent and inactive. Our DNA “speaks” when it produces another molecule called RNA (Ribonucleic Acid). Until very recently, it was believed that this molecule was only Read More ›

Much useful information/links/sources from Jonathan Latham at CounterPunch: As early as the death of Charles Darwin (1882) it was said that his thought (which for the most part meant Huxley’s interpretations) could be found “under a hundred disguises in works on law and history, in political speeches and religious discourses…if we try to think ourselves away from it we must think ourselves entirely away from our age” (John Morley, 1882, cited in Desmond 1998) Thus the belief system that humans are controlled by an internal master molecule has become woven into myriad areas of social thought. It is far beyond the scope of this article to describe the consequences of genetic determinism at either the personal or the societal level Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have described the 3D structure of the genome in the extremely small bacteria Mycoplasma pneumoniae. They discovered previously unknown arrangements of DNA within this tiny bacteria, which are also found in larger cells. Their findings suggest that this type of organization is a universal feature of living cells. DNA contains the instructions for life, encoded within genes. Within all cells, DNA is organised into very long lengths known as chromosomes. In animal and plant cells these are double-ended, like pieces of string or shoelaces, but in bacteria they are circular. Whether stringy or circular, these long chromosomes must be organised and packaged inside a cell so that the genes can be switched on or off when they Read More ›

Could vertebrates once have relied on a different mechanism for developing neurons in the gut? From ScienceDaily: Lamprey are slimy, parasitic eel-like fish, one of only two existing species of vertebrates that have no jaw. While many would be repulsed by these creatures, lamprey are exciting to biologists because they are so primitive, retaining many characteristics similar to their ancient ancestors and thus offering answers to some of life’s biggest evolutionary questions. … “We were interested in the origins of lamprey gut neurons because in other vertebrates they arise from a particular embryonic cell type, called neural crest cells,” says Stephen Green, postdoctoral scholar in biology and biological engineering and co-first author on the paper. “We knew that lamprey have Read More ›

We’ve yet find any dark matter, let alone dark energy, actually but Luke Barnes notes at Nautilus: Our cosmic environment is the result of a delicate balance of cosmic forces—gravity and pressure, cooling and heating, expansion and collapse. The final product, when all these pushes and pulls come into balance, is our Milky Way galaxy, where stars form in a rotating disk of gas and a diffuse halo of dark matter. … Even prior to the observational confirmation of dark energy, Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, had wrestled with the theoretical overestimate and suggested a remarkable solution. He noted that the amount of vacuum energy can vary from place to place, depending on how all the different fields in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: When an individual cell needs to move somewhere, it manages just fine on its own. It extends protrusions from its leading edge and retracts the trailing edge to scoot itself along, without having to worry about what the other cells around it are doing. But when cells are joined together in a sheet of tissue, or epithelium, they have to coordinate their movements with their neighbors. It’s like walking by yourself versus navigating a crowded room. To push through the crowd, you have to communicate with others by talking (“Pardon me”) or tapping them on the shoulder. Cells do the same thing, but instead of verbal cues and hand gestures, they use proteins to signal to each other. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: More than a century of theory about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs has been turned on its head following the publication of new research from scientists at the University of Cambridge and Natural History Museum in London. Their work suggests that the family groupings need to be rearranged, re-defined and re-named and also that dinosaurs may have originated in the northern hemisphere rather than the southern, as current thinking goes. For 130 years palaeontologists have been working with a classification system in which dinosaur species have been placed in to two distinct categories: Ornithischia and Saurischia. But now, after careful analysis of dozens of fossil skeletons and tens of thousands of anatomical characters, the researchers have concluded that Read More ›

Researchers suggest so based on studies of early fossil rabbit and horse types. From ScienceDaily: More than 50 million years ago, when the Earth experienced a series of extreme global warming events, early mammals responded by shrinking in size. While this mammalian dwarfism has previously been linked to the largest of these events, new research has found that this evolutionary process can happen in smaller, so-called hyperthermals, indicating an important pattern that could help shape an understanding of underlying effects of current human-caused climate change. … Researchers propose that the body change could have been an evolutionary response to create a more efficient way to reduce body heat. A smaller body size would allow the animals to cool down faster. Read More ›

Challenges fundamentals of echinoderm evolution. From ScienceDaily: Echinoderms are among the marine invertebrates that suffered the most severe losses at the end-Permian extinction. At least that was the consensus until a team of European paleontologists — Ben Thuy, Hans Hagdorn, and Andy S. Gale — cast a critical eye on some poorly studied Triassic echinoderm fossils. The fossils turned out to belong to groups that supposedly went extinct by the end of the Paleozoic. Some ancient echinoids, ophiuroids, and asteroids had slipped the bottleneck and coexisted with the ancestors of modern-day sea urchins, brittle stars, sand dollars, and relatives, for many millions of years. These echinoderm hangovers occurred almost worldwide and had spread into a wide range of paleo-environments by Read More ›