Intelligent Design

Over at PhysOrg they have a story about how certain bacteria, when under stress conditions, shut themselves down and put themselves into a persistent state. They do it by modifying the chemicals involved in t-RNA. No, it’s not a “point mutation”—which is tauted as an icon of Darwinian evolution, but the utilization of an “alternate genetic code.” IOW, it’s regulated and ‘directed,’ and is ready-at-hand when needed. So, with this new information, the whole story of bacterial resistance now needs to be rethought. And, guess what, instead of pointing to “point mutations” (no pun intended), it points rather to “design.” Oh, those poor Darwinists/evolutionists. Another day; another bad day for Darwinism. From the press release: Dedon suspects that other families Read More ›

This one, at his blog: I don’t like to nitpick much any more, but their post is exceptionally misleading. The “latest” is not that Homo naledi just fell into the Dinaledi chamber. I never said that, so let me elaborate. … The bones did not just fall into the Dinaledi chamber. I feel quite confident in affirming the original hypothesis that complete Homo naledi bodies were intentionally placed in the Dinaledi chamber, and I expect future research will continue to support this hypothesis.More. For the record, we did not think Dr. Wood thought that the bones just fell in. But the paper he critiques (which posits that the bones were not placed in the cave intentionally) would seem to leave Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: And so now our own focus shifts north in England, up the M11 to Cambridge University where the “Beyond Materialism: Biology for the 21st Century” conference opens at Hughes Hall on Saturday at 9 am. This gathering will feature scientists and scholars from U.S., U.K., Israel, Germany, and Sweden, plus leading advocates of intelligent design well known to readers of Evolution News, including Stephen Meyer, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, and Paul Nelson. If you found the RS meeting less provocative than you might have expected, join us tomorrow morning for a full day of challenging and candid discussion. Find the full program here, along with registration information. More. Darwin demolition: Someone’s gotta do Read More ›

From Michael Skinner at Aeon: Darwin’s theory that natural selection drives evolution is incomplete without input from evolution’s anti-hero: Lamarck If sneers had weight, the Darwinian sneers against Lamarck over the last century or so would have crushed the Royal Society building to rubble. Let’s remember that when we hear bafflegab PR about how nothing has changed. When we read stuff like this, a lot of things have changed. One problem with Darwin’s theory is that, while species do evolve more adaptive traits (called phenotypes by biologists), the rate of random DNA sequence mutation turns out to be too slow to explain many of the changes observed. Scientists, well-aware of the issue, have proposed a variety of genetic mechanisms to Read More ›

From anthropologist Todd Wood at his blog: First up, in a surprisingly speculative paper in the South African Journal of Science, Wits professor Francis Thackeray proposed that the bones of H. naledi had lichen stains on them from exposure to light. If correct, the resting of the bones on the surface would imply that the bodies of H. naledi were not intentionally deposited in the Dinaledi chamber but just fell in there. I say this was speculative, since Thackeray’s argument (as I understood it) was based on visual similarity of some stains on the bones to stains on some rocks that might have been made by lichens. More. Colleagues say no, the stains are not consistent with lichen growth in Read More ›

From a Nature editorial: Do the academics of the Internet age still communicate as stiffly as their colleagues did at the time of the Apollo programme? Or, heaven forbid, has some scruffy informality crept into scholarly discourse? Yes, and no, according to an illuminating new analysis. Formal language is largely intact, the study finds, give or take a mildly more tolerant attitude to split infinitives and initial conjunctions. Yet there has been an explosion in the use of the first-person pronouns in academic papers by biologists. What, we wondered, is that all about? Ah, at last, a question UD News can answer with confidence: It’s “all about me.” The traditional scientist preferred an anonymous style out of a sense of Read More ›

Equally false. From Rik Smits at the Scientist, commenting on ethologist Frans de Waal’s recent book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?: The essential burden of science is to replace dogma, sentiment, and superstition with an as-far-as-we-now-know theory based on verifiable facts, all the while striving for objectivity. Yet, in his work, de Waal replaces one dogma—the Cartesian/behaviorist stance that animals are mere oblivious response machines—with another. Following “Charles Darwin’s well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind,” de Waal notes that there is no fundamental difference between man and beast—not even mentally. The problem is not the idea, it is that de Waal posits this Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Life took hold on land at least as early as 3.2 billion years ago, suggests a study. The team studied ancient rock formations from South Africa’s Barberton greenstone belt. These rocks are some of the oldest known on Earth, with their formation dating back to 3.5 billion years. … These rocks are some of the oldest known on Earth, with their formation dating back to 3.5 billion years. In a layer that has been dated at 3.22 billion years old, tiny grains of the iron sulfide mineral pyrite were discovered that show telltale signs of microbial activity. Paper. (paywall) – Sami Nabhan, Michael Wiedenbeck, Ralf Milke, Christoph Heubeck. Biogenic overgrowth on detrital pyrite in ca. 3.2 Ga Archean Read More ›

Why? Doesn’t that speak poorly of the powers of the scientific method? From Jeff Tollefson, Lauren Morello& Sara Reardon at Nature: Republican businessman and reality-television star Donald Trump will be the United States’ next president. Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on 8 November. “Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “The consequences are going to be very, very severe.” Trump has questioned the science underlying climate change — at one point suggesting that it was a Chinese hoax Read More ›

An illusion like consciousness, right? Okay, never mind, let’s hear the solution. From Brian Koberlein at Forbes: What if the effects of gravity aren’t due to some fundamental force, but are rather an emergent effect due to other fundamental interactions? A new paper proposes just that, and if correct it could also explain the effects of dark matter. An anthropic force acts like gravity. Entropic gravity is an interesting idea, and it would explain why gravity is so difficult to bring into the fold of quantum physics, but it’s not without its problems. For one, since entropic gravity predicts exactly the same gravitational behavior as general relativity, there’s no experimental way to distinguish it as a better theory. There are Read More ›

From Berit Brogaard at Psychology Today: A new volume of papers on panpsychism edited by philosophers Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla just appeared with Oxford University Press. It features paper by prominent philosophers David Chalmers, Galen Strawson and Brian McLaughlin, among many others. According to the traditional version of panpsychism, everything around you is conscious: the chair your are sitting on, the rock you use as a doorstopper at home and the thick hurricane-safe windows in your office. Panpsychism literally means that particular kinds of psychological states are embedded in everything. An alternative to the traditional view is the view that everything around you has a form of rudimentary consciousness. More. Brogaard suggests, “…we can imagine that there is qualitative Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It’s the ultimate chicken-or-egg conundrum: What was the “mother” molecule that led to the formation of life? And how did it replicate itself? One prominent school of thought proposes that RNA is the answer to the first question. Now, in ACS Central Science, researchers in this camp demonstrate RNA has more flexibility in how it recognizes itself than previously believed. The finding might change how we picture the first chemical steps towards replication and life. Today, plants, animals and other organisms reproduce by making copies of their DNA with the help of enzymes and then passing the copies onto the next generation. This is possible because genetic material is made of building blocks — or bases A, T, Read More ›

From physicist Rob Sheldon, our physics colour commentator, on what’s wrong with the latest new theory of consciousness. That’s the one by Anil Seth that walloped through here quite recently, namely, Researcher: Never mind the “hard problem of consciousness”: The real one is… “Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind” Sheldon: The key point in this article is in this sentence: But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). Restating it, Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer, Britside, at Evolution News & Views: Our biologist friend writes of yesterday’s session: Some opposing views were aired in the morning sessions, with polite but pointed disagreement between Drs. Sonia Sultan and Russell Lande on the subject of phenotypic plasticity. It is clear that opinion is divided in the room. Some applause for bolder statements was quickly quashed, the audience having been warned at the beginning that boos and cheers were not acceptable. More. We all know that science is best represented by unquestioning deference to dogma, even in the face of growing contradictions with reality. Right? He describes the meeting as tense. How about “tense but timid”? We’ve all been through that at some time in Read More ›

Darwinian Christian racism? Election years bring dangerous creatures from the shadows From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: Just recently, one Russell Kirk (probably a pseudonym*) blind-copied me on a post to “oxfordchristia” to advise me that Many younger Bible-centered conservative Christians have declared war on Christian Cultural Marxism. At first I thought, well, if young Christians want to live, they had better learn the difference between friends and foes, between life and death. But then, What is human biodiversity? Many younger, high IQ Christians have become very interested in human biodiversity. Modern studies in population genetics are showing that there are many differences in human populations. For example, Europeans about 8,000 years ago developed genes lactose tolerance that Read More ›