Intelligent Design

From ScienceDaily: These new results indicate that the Asian Horned Frogs family may have originated as recently as 77 million years ago in contrast to 100-126 mya as previously estimated, and suggest that scientists might have been also overestimating the age of many other families of frogs by up to 35%. The results have completely changed our understanding of how the different Asian Horned Frog species and their species groups are related. Many of the species that look similar, and so were considered to be closely related, were found to be distant relatives of each other, and those that look different were found to be closely related. Paper. (public access) – Stephen Mahony, Nicole M. Foley, S.D. Biju, Emma C. Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Archaeologists found 16 limestone tablets dating to the Aurignacian period, named for the first known people to settle in Europe. The tablets were engraved with pictures of horses, mammoths and aurochs (extinct wild cows). Most notably, the pictures were drawn using a series of dots and lines — or as archaeologists call the technique, pointillism. Modern pointillism was invented in the 1880s by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who developed the technique by using small dots to create the illusion of a larger image. Other artists, including Camille Pissarro and Roy Lichtenstein, followed suit. More. We know we are dealing with stasis in human evolution when we now find ourselves referring to “modern” pointillism. See Read More ›

For the crisis, go here. For the “challenges,” see Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt, and Abraham Loeb at Scientific American: The latest astrophysical measurements, combined with theoretical problems, cast doubt on the long-cherished inflationary theory of the early cosmos and suggest we need new ideas. (paywall) More. We remember when inflation was beyond dispute. It promised naturalists a multiverse. But science is now merely one expression of naturalism, so we can be sure that doubts about inflation will not cause doubts about the multiverse. See also: Crisis in cosmology: Universe expanding too fast? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From science writer Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, continuing her interview at Huffington Post with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish regarding … their central position on deep evolution, which is that the most recent universal common ancestor (MRUCA) is complex not a simple bacteria and “is the root of eukaryote and akaryote lineages” containing “more than a thousand Superfamilies.” Kurland and Harish think MRUCA represents complex survivors from a now extinct biosphere. On horizontal gene transfer as routine: Charles Kurland: We have to remember there’s only a little background of horizontal gene transfer in bacterial populations. The simple reason is that bacteria eat DNA. So sequences are going in all the time. Most of them get Read More ›

From science writer Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, at Huffington Post: I recently had a three-way phone conversation with Swedish deep evolution investigators Charles Kurland and Ajith Harish about their phylogenomic Tree of Life (ToL) based on protein structure, which shows that we are descended from a “complex” ancestor — MRUCA (most recent universal common ancestor) — not a simple bacteria. Kurland and Harish think a ToL paradigm shift may be in order. What’s more, Kurland and Harish figure that MRUCA was not the first ancestor, but represents complex survivors of a now-extinct biosphere. The findings of Kurland and Harish challenge not only mainstream ToL perspectives, but also those of endosymbiosis hypothesis fans, as well as the “HGT industry” Read More ›

From Kelly Rae Chi at Nature: n 2004, oncologist Gideon Rechavi at Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues compared all the human genomic DNA sequences then available with their corresponding messenger RNAs — the molecules that carry the information needed to make a protein from a gene. They were looking for signs that one of the nucleotide building blocks in the RNA sequence, called adenosine (A), had changed to another building block called inosine (I). This ‘A-to-I editing’ can alter a protein’s coding sequence, and, in humans, is crucial for keeping the innate immune response in check. “It sounds simple, but in real life it was really complicated,” Rechavi recalls. “Several groups had tried it before and failed” Read More ›

From Joy Pullmann at Federalist: College science classes are hostile to women and minorities because they use the scientific method, which assumes people can find reliable truths about the natural world through careful and sustained experimentation, concludes a recent dissertation by a doctoral candidate at the University of North Dakota. Laura Parson, a student in the university’s education department, reviewed eight science class syllabi at a “Midwest public university” and said she discovered in them a hidden hostility to women and minorities: … Instead of promoting the idea that knowledge is constructed by the student and dynamic, subject to change as it would in a more feminist view of knowledge, the syllabi reinforce the larger male-dominant view of knowledge as Read More ›

An unexpectedly level-headed discussion from Tom Mahony at RealClearScience: Ironically, true believers often moralize about the importance of facts and insist they’re the only ones who are “reality based.” However, in practice, they confuse facts with assumptions, beliefs, conjecture, and opinion. If you take an incorrect assumption, assume it as fact, and extrapolate from that assumption, even if the logic of the extrapolation is sound, the whole idea is wrong because the foundational assumption is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. Yet, since true believers mistake their incorrect assumption for fact, and tout their impeccable extrapolation, you’re the kook. This is what passes for logic in the true-believer community. True believers haunt any subject: science, religion, health, history, economics, politics. The Read More ›

From Robin Nixon, Elizabeth Peterson and Karen Rowan (October 2016) at LiveScience: 25 Medical Myths that Just Won’t Go Away Despite what you may have heard, drinking eight glasses of water a day isn’t the key to good health. Also, neglecting to wear a coat on a cold day won’t make you sick. And — you might want to sit down for this — pregnancy doesn’t last nine months. Health-related myths are often repeated as fact, even though any diligent Google search will reveal the truth behind these fallacies. Here are 26 of the most common medical myths, debunked.More. Hmmm. Some women distinctly recall pregnancy lasting a year and a half. 😉 No, but seriously, while it’s good to read Read More ›

Dover cleared the decks for critical discussion of Darwinism and design by getting school board micro-politics out of it. Fuller studies ID as a social movement in science. We hear some colleagues don’t like his views much. See also: Dover all over White cliffs. Dover: Creationism invades Europe The Dover case, John West, and intelligent design Steve Fuller: Humans will merge with AI and Steve Fuller’s Dissent over Descent Follow UD News at Twitter!

We didn’t realize it was still legal to say so. From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: Countries in the EU, including the UK, are throwing away money by subsidising the burning of wood for energy, according to an independent report. While burning some forms of wood waste can indeed reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in practice the growing use of wood energy in the EU is increasing rather than reducing emissions, the new report concludes. Overall, burning wood for energy is much worse in climate terms than burning gas or even coal, but loopholes in the way emissions are counted are concealing the damage being done. More. Report.* The Times was going on about this too: Chopping down trees and transporting Read More ›

From astrophysicist Paul Sutter at LiveScience: 1) What we now call science, philosophy and theology were all mixed up together. 2) Early (proto-)scientists made claims and arguments that would sound totally bananas today. I’ll leave Copernicus’ motivations to another article, but he did indeed publish a book in 1543 detailing his new cosmology with the sun at the center of the universe. While it did have some advantages over the en vogue geocentric model (like neatly explaining the precession of planetary orbits and requiring fewer circles-within-circles), it did have weaknesses (how, exactly, does something like the Earth move?), and the reaction among the literate community — including the Catholic clergy — was neither hostile nor supportive. At the time, the Read More ›

Here’s my new article at Design Disquisitions. Enjoy: In the next two (potentially three) articles I’ll be taking an in-depth look at an excellent paper written by Jeffrey Koperski, a philosopher of science at Saginaw Valley State University. Koperski has written about ID in several publications (1), which I highly recommend, and he takes a balanced and sensible approach to this topic. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t accept ID, but takes a constructively critical stance, so his work is well worth engaging with. As one can tell from the title of the paper, Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Goods Ones(2), Koperski critically analyses two common criticisms of ID, suggesting that they are highly dubious lines of argument. He then Read More ›

From Cassandra Willyard at Nature: At the time, biologists were getting excited about the epigenome — the broad array of chemical marks that decorate DNA and its protein scaffold. These marks act like a chemical notation, telling the cell which genes to express and which to keep silent. As such, the epigenome helps to explain how cells with identical DNA can develop into the multitude of specialized types that make up different tissues. The marks help cells in the heart, for example, maintain their identity and not turn into neurons or fat cells. Misplaced epigenetic marks are often found in cancerous cells. Why didn’t it happen sooner?: The governing rule of molecular biology – the central dogma – holds that Read More ›