Intelligent Design

From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: The fish, part of the family Aphyonidae, was caught on camera during an ongoing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) exploration by the ship Okeanos Explorer. … The secretive fish was swimming along a ridge 8,202 feet (2,500 meters) down, according to NOAA. The animal is about 4 inches (10 centimeters) long, with translucent, scale-less skin and eerie, colorless eyes. No fish in the family Aphyonidae has ever been seen alive before. They usually turned up dead in dreding or trawling operations. “There has been a big debate about whether these are pelagic, living up in the water column, or whether they’re associated with the bottom, like this one is,” he said. The observation of Read More ›

 From Richard Webb at New Scientist, a review of four new physics books, noting: In one sense fundamental physics is flowering like never before. In another, it is in one of its deepest funks. The past five years have seen three great experimental advances: the discoveries of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves, as well as the Planck satellite’s meticulous measurements of the cosmic microwave background. But all have served to confirm existing pictures of reality: the standard model of particle physics based on quantum field theory, and the standard cosmological model of a big bang universe rooted in Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity. Yet the deficiencies of those two theories are obvious. Not only do Read More ›

Okay, the universe is flat. From astrophysicist Paul Sutter at Space.com: The universe has all sorts of deformations in space-time where it varies from the perfectly flat. Any place where there’s mass or energy, there’s a corresponding bending of space-time — that’s General Relativity 101. So a couple light beams would naturally collide inside a wandering black hole, or bend along weird angles after encountering a galaxy or two. But average all those small-scale effects out and look at the big picture. When we examine very old light — say, the cosmic microwave background — that has been traveling the universe for more than 13.8 billion years, we get a true sense of the universe’s shape. And the answer, as Read More ›

This item at Evolution News & Views is worth pondering: A journalist working for a national newspaper chain has fabricated a claim about the Texas science standards, and now he and his editor are refusing to correct the record. In late September, three Texas newspapers owned by Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. (CNHI) published an article by reporter John Austin claiming that a science standard adopted by Texas in 2009 authorizes the teaching of “non-scientific explanations.” That claim is false. Austin asserted that conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education in 2009 “inserted language into the high school biology curriculum allowing teachers to introduce non-scientific explanations for such questions as why some creatures suddenly appeared in the fossil record about Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta, on the Dutch theoretical physicist Erik Verlinde, who argues that it doesn’t: he latest attempt to explain away dark matter is a much-discussed proposal by Erik Verlinde, a theoretical physicist at the University of Amsterdam who is known for bold and prescient, if sometimes imperfect, ideas. In a dense 51-page paper posted online on Nov. 7, Verlinde casts gravity as a byproduct of quantum interactions and suggests that the extra gravity attributed to dark matter is an effect of “dark energy” — the background energy woven into the space-time fabric of the universe. To make his case, Verlinde has adopted a radical perspective on the origin of gravity that is currently in vogue among leading Read More ›

There are stories that pop science is bound to tell wrong (you pay/they sneer). Re Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, here’s the skinny: One of them is about “atheist” Fred Hoyle, who was probably more of a panentheist (God is present in everything), according to science historian Michael Flannery: Hoyle is often regarded as a panspermia atheist, and his book The Intelligent Universe (1983) is cited as evidence for this alleged “fact.” Nevertheless, a careful reading of that fascinating book suggests otherwise. While Hoyle did argue for a version of panspermia, he insisted that “The origin of the Universe…requires an intelligence,” and he devoted an entire chapter to this topic. He further stated, “Even after widening the stage for the origin of Read More ›

No embargoes: From Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch: This Thursday, dozens of news outlets will publish stories on the same new study in the journal Science. On Friday, many of those same news outlets will all report on a study in the medical journal the Lancet. These newspapers and magazines will largely talk to the same sources, and many of their stories will be nearly identical. The reason for this synchrony is embargoes — agreements between reporters and sources that the former can have access to information from the latter, but not publish anything until a time the source has determined in advance. Nearly all of the major scientific journals use them and send the studies out to journalists five Read More ›

One would think that the French, having been overrun by a fascist country in 1940, would be especially careful to reign in the fascist impulses of their progressives.  But one would be wrong: In 2014, in conjunction with World Down Syndrome Day (March 21), the Global Down Syndrome Foundation prepared a two-minute video titled “Dear Future Mom” to assuage the anxieties of pregnant women who have learned that they are carrying a Down syndrome baby. More than 7 million people have seen the video online in which one such woman says, “I’m scared: What kind of life will my child have?” Down syndrome children from many nations tell the woman that her child will hug, speak, go to school, tell Read More ›

Whatever the media understand the term “evolution” to mean. Whatever politicians could do about it. Is it a secret hunger for the fascist dominance so well exhibited by one of their heros, H.L. Mencken? From O’Leary for News at Salvo: Recently, Phil Plait informed his shocked readers at Slate of a dreadful secret about Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence: You know anyone picked by Trump to be his running mate almost certainly will have a problem with established science, of course, but it turns out Pence is also a young Earth creationist. And one with a lot of conviction about it, too. In 2002, while a congressman from Indiana, he gave a short speech on the floor of Congress denying Read More ›

. . . that is, the design inference vs. the broader scientific investigation of a world of life and cosmos that are infused with complex, functionally specific information and complex, functional organisation? In the Turing test thread, just now, I raised this issue in responding to GP and SA . . . and I think this is worth headlining: ______________________ >>Perhaps, it is time to look at ID in a micro sense and a macro/general sense — a fashion that is now 100+ years old in the sciences, with Relativity as the leader (as is proper and fitting). The micro theory of ID is focussed on the design inference and its empirical/analytical warrant. This is the core, when can we Read More ›

Evo-Info: Some Things Computers Will Never Do: Nonalgorithmic Creativity and Unknowability: See also: Evolutionary Informatics Lab: A look inside Follow UD News at Twitter!

This time they have climate scientist Roger Pielke in their sites, and even being proved correct did not save him: Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.” . . . I understand why Mr. Podesta—most recently Hillary Clinton’s campaign Read More ›

Our Physicist and Computer Scientist from Russia — and each element of that balance is very relevant — is back, with more.  MOAR, in fact. This time, he tackles the “terror-fitted depths” of thermodynamics and biosemiotics. (NB: Those needing a backgrounder may find an old UD post here and a more recent one here, helpful.) More rich food for thought for the science-hungry masses, red hot off the press: _________________ >>On the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the context of the origin of life Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888) This note was motivated by my discussions with Russian interlocutors. One of UD readers here has asked me to produce a summary of those discussions, which I am happy to do now. I Read More ›

I’ve found that a lot of people who are interested in Intelligent Design are nonetheless unaware of the mathematics behind it. Therefore, I decided to do some videos teaching the basic ideas.
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Not that it helps Darwinism one bit. From ScienceDaily: By studying the evolutionary relationships of the orchid mantis and its distant relatives, the team discovered that females in the orchid mantis lineage increased in size and changed color over their evolutionary history to gain advantage over large pollinating insects, such as bees, as well as the ability to attract them for predation. However, the morphologically dissimilar males are small and camouflaged, enabling them to live a life of predator avoidance and mate finding. The team found that this difference in males and females, termed sexual dimorphism, was likely the result of female predatory success that favored larger and more conspicuously colored individuals. This result challenges the traditional explanation for sexual Read More ›