Intelligent Design

From ScienceDaily: A team of Japanese researchers led by Homma’s laboratory of Nagoya University have now purified the stator protein MotA from a bacterium found in hot springs (Aquifex aeolicus) and analyzed its three-dimensional structure using electron microscopy mainly in cooperation with Namba’s laboratory of Osaka University. They found that it can form a structure of four MotA molecules (called a tetramer), which differs in shape from the previously predicted complex. The study was recently published in Scientific Reports. The MotA protein spans the bacterial membrane, and has previously been shown to form a tetramer complex with another transmembrane protein, MotB, creating the stator. In this latest work, MotA was expressed and purified from A. aeolicus, and found to be Read More ›

Here. MCDOWELL: What do you consider some of the greatest successes, and also challenges, in the ID movement? DEMBSKI Unlike creationism, with which it is often conflated, intelligent design shifts the discussion of biological origins from a religion vs. science controversy to a science vs. science controversy. This is a success, even if ID’s critics continue to try to claim that it is religion in scientific garb. There are really two strands to ID’s scientific program. There’s the pure information-theoretic side, as represented by the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, and then there’s the molecular biology research side, as represented by the Biologic Institute and its journal Bio-Complexity.[ii] We continue to push the research frontiers forward on both sides. The biggest challenge Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: New findings published in eLife draw connections between some of these pieces, revealing an extensive web of molecular interactions that may ultimately inform the development of new epigenetic drugs for cancer and other diseases. Specifically, the study reveals a mechanism that helps explain how dividing cells pass patterns of epigenetic information called methyl tags to their daughter cells, a crucial part of regulating gene expression across cell generations. Epigenetic tags help tell genes — stretches of DNA that act as biological instruction manuals — when to switch “on” and “off,” ultimately determining cell type and function. DNA methylation, or the addition of methyl tags to DNA, is one of the most well-studied epigenetic signals; errors in this process Read More ›

From Belinda Smith at Cosmos: A Mercury-sized planetary embryo that slammed into Earth around 4.4 billion years ago delivered virtually all of the planet’s carbon, new research suggests. … Unravelling the early Earth’s composition is no easy feat. Billions of years ago, the solar system was a whirling mess of comets, asteroids and proto planets. … One scenario that could yield today’s volatile concentrations was if a carbon-rich Mercury-sized planet with a core full of silicon or sulfur smashed into and was absorbed by Earth. The dynamics of the collision meant the silicon sank straight to Earth’s core while the carbon was mixed with the mantle, ready to be cycled up to the crust and eventually, develop life. More. Two Read More ›

Who knew? From Jan. 25, 1989: After examining climate data extending back nearly 100 years, a team of Government scientists has concluded that there has been no significant change in average temperatures or rainfall in the United States over that entire period. Of course, this is before those same scientists began cooking the books in the service of expanding government power.    

This is an ongoing discussion we are having with Dr. Swamidass over the question of Methodological Naturalism in science. For those who haven’t been keeping up, I posted Dr. Swamidass’s questions to critics of MN to UD a few weeks ago, then posted some of my questions for proponents of MN. Then, my first response to Swamidass’s questions is here, covering the nature of scientific inquiry, and this present post continues to answer Dr. Swamidass’s specific questions. You can find Dr. Swamidass’s original blog post here.

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Painful. Closing our religion coverage for the week (a bit late, as it is the Labour Day weekend) from Rabbi Moshe Averick, in his Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism: Atheists are prepared to deny our very grasp on reality Atheists are prepared to burrow very deep down the materialist rabbit hole in order to avoid any possible confrontation with the spiritual. How deep? Deep enough to cast doubt on our very connection with reality. The skeptic claims that a scientific investigation of the brain leads us to the conclusion that there resides within us a separate “executive self” is an illusion. Leaving totally aside the issue of whether or not that assessment of the Read More ›

Science writer Amanda Gefter concludes at Nautilus: Could it be that something is just what nothing looks like from the inside? If so, our discomfort with nothingness may have been hinting at something profound: It is our human nature that recoils at the notion of nothing, and yet it may also be our limited, human perspective that ultimately solves the paradox. More. Wishful thinking is a good way to get nothing from something. See also: The bill arrives for cosmology’s free lunch Follow UD News at Twitter!

Dr. Joshua Swamidass, a computational biologist from Wash U, recently posted some questions to critics of methodological naturalism like myself, and also explicitly named the AM-Nat (Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism) conferences as an example of those searching for an alternative to methodological naturalism.  After some discussions with Dr. Swamidass, I thought I would take some time to write a response to his questions.  I apologize for the length, but these issues take some time to suss out.  Therefore, this response will be broken into two parts.

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In comments to my last post HeKS absolutely lays waste to two materialists who are trying to punch way above their weight.  First, Pindi spews out the million-times-rebutted claim that there is “no evidence” for the existence of God. Pindi: And its not that I don’t want to believe in something that is god-like and personal. I just don’t see any evidence for it. HeKS responds (not placed in quote box; all that follows is his unless noted otherwise): Oh God, it’s the “there just isn’t any evidence” canard again. I don’t know how atheists can even make this claim with a straight face anymore. Here is a sampling of a few lines of evidence strongly pointing to God’s existence: – Read More ›

Re Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech. From Jerry Coyne at Washington Post: Here Wolfe’s victims are two renowned scholars, Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky, whom he considers the most vocal exponents of the “hardwired” school of language. But Wolfe’s argument ultimately backfires, for the book grossly distorts the theory of evolution, the claims of linguistics and the controversies about their connection. Finally, after misleading the reader for nearly 200 pages, Wolfe proposes his own theory of how language began — a theory far less plausible than the ones he mocks. Using the surgical kit of New Journalism, Wolfe flays Darwin and Chomsky as imperious, self-aggrandizing snobs, each humiliated by a lower-class “clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers.” Read More ›

From Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, at Evolution News & Views : Much of my book is devoted to developing an argument around everyday experience and common sense, a combination I refer to as common science. It seems to me that Darwin’s thinking is quite vulnerable to refutation by common science. After all, selection doesn’t really make anything. It merely chooses among things that have already been made. That’s what the word means. The only kind of selection that gives you clams or snails is the kind you do while ordering dinner at a French restaurant. [Critic] Sharma dismisses such thoughts as childish “pre-theoretical” thinking. One of my book’s themes is that we adults shy away from common-science deductions like Read More ›

This exchange between Phinehas and HeKS brings it out as succinctly as anything I’ve ever seen: Phinehas says: The thing that fascinates me is how atheists are shown to have prodigious faith in something eternal with god-like creative powers [i.e., the multiverse]. It’s almost like they have no issues whatsoever believing in a god, just so long as it doesn’t bear that particular label. HeKS replies: I tend to think that it’s because they don’t want that eternal thing with god-like creative powers to also be personal and have the ability to ground and impose moral values and duties on humans. As the multiverse has demonstrated, atheists have no problem at all with faith in something that is unseen, intangible, Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech Noel Rude (native American specialist) kindly writes to say, re Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: — But maybe we should pause a moment and ask just what the beef is between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky [addressed by Wolfe in detail. – ed.] –as seen by actual linguists. I can tell you what it isn’t. Hardly any linguist would now challenge the fact that language is creative and that there is at present no materialist theory whatsoever to explain this–though of course this fact is seldom mentioned. Language, you see, divides between the physical medium (sound, symbols, words, grammar) and the nonphysical message. The big beef is not about the latter but the former. Chomsky Read More ›

From Reuters: If confirmed as fossilized communities of bacteria known as stromatolites – rather than a freak natural formation – the lumps would pre-date fossils found in Australia as the earliest evidence of life on Earth by 220 million years. “This indicates the Earth was no longer some sort of hell 3.7 billion years ago,” lead author Allen Nutman, of the University of Wollongong, told Reuters of the findings that were published in the journal Nature. More. From Maria Gallucci at Mashable, “This potentially pushes back our understanding of the antiquity of life on Earth, which is really quite astounding,” Abigail Allwood, a research scientist and astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told Mashable. If it is true that Read More ›