Intelligent Design

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: Where there’s fire there’s often smoke – which might have been bad news for Neanderthals and other ancient hominins. Modern humans carry a genetic mutation that reduces our sensitivity to cancer-causing chemicals found in wood smoke. But Neanderthals and Denisovans apparently lacked the mutation. … The team inserted human and Neanderthal versions of the AHR gene into animal cells in the lab and examined how the cells responded when exposed to these carcinogens. The Neanderthal version proved to be far more likely to cause the production of enzymes that induce a toxic effect. “We were surprised that the differences between the two were so large,” says Perdew. For some compounds there was a 1000-fold Read More ›

Jerry Coyne believes in “science-based determinism” and denies the existence of libertarian free will.  Over at his blog he assures us that he is nevertheless in favor of altering the behavior of other beings (whether dogs or people) through “environmental factors” such as kicks or arguments. He starts off in his OP: you can alter the behavior of a dog by kicking it when it does something you don’t like. (I am NOT recommending this!). After a while the dog, whose onboard computer gets reprogrammed to anticipate pain, will no longer engage in the unwanted behavior. Later in a comment he writes: Reason is no different from a kick: it’s words that people can take on board to see if doing what Read More ›

Video: Blurb at the Amazon page for the book: >>Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the “design intuition”—the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can only be accomplished by someone who has that knowledge. For the ingenious task of inventing life, this knower can only be God. Starting with the hallowed halls of academic science, Axe dismantles the widespread belief that Darwin’s theory of evolution is indisputably true, showing instead that a gaping hole Read More ›

Responding to Turtles: Shells evolved for digging, not protection?, turtle-knowledgeable reader Paul D. Cook kindly writes to say: – I’m not an expert on turtles. My degrees are in fields of engineering that are unrelated to this subject. But we have had turtles as pets for over 20 years. (Cute & affectionate critters. And while not as smart as a cat or dog, God has still packed more into their pea sized brain, than one would expect.) As soon as I read the article, I wondered about some obvious datapoint that might seem to be outliers for this idea. What about turtles such as the snapping turtles, which have far less protection on their undersides than on their backs. And Read More ›

In the current VJT thread on 31 scientists who did not follow methodological naturalism, it has been noteworthy that objectors have studiously avoided addressing the basic warrant for the design inference.  Since this is absolutely pivotal but seems to be widely misunderstood or even dismissed without good reason, it seems useful to summarise this for consideration. This having been done at comment 170 in the thread, it seems further useful to headline it and invite discussion: _________________ >>F/N: It seems advisable to again go back to basics, here, inductive reasoning and why it has significance in scientific work; which then has implications for the design inference. A good point to begin is IEP in its article on induction and deduction Read More ›

Closing our religion coverage for the day, from UTEP mathematician Granville Sewell’s Christianity for Doubters: The idea that a decomposed, dead body could be replaced by a new body someday, somewhere, seems impossible. But to me it seems equally impossible that an ugly caterpillar could enter a tomb and be resurrected as a beautiful new butterfly, and yet a butterfly with many entirely new organs is constructed out of the dissolved and recycled parts of a caterpillar every day in a chrysalis, as the film (p. 47) Metamorphosis documents so magnificently. This film includes photography (through magnetic resonance imaging) of the transformation as it happens within the chrysalis. If you find it impossible to believe in the miracle of resurrection, Read More ›

From Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism: It is my opinion that the reality of the Creator, or the existence of God, is a truth that is quite accessible. Although the ideas that I will present may require careful analysis and contemplation, they are not particularly complicated or difficult. Most can be understood by an intelligent and inquisitive high school senior. This is not necessarily a reflection of an individual’s native intelligence; proper analysis of an abstract or philosophical concept is a skill he or she may never have acquired. Regarding this, I hope I have presented my ideas in a clear enough fashion that newcomers will be able to follow. There is a second Read More ›

From Joanna Masel at Big Questions Online: With the error rate in this example, that could be enough for natural selection to take notice. To see how, imagine you have a permanent, germline mutation that doesn’t affect how well your protein works in normal cases, when it’s transcribed and translated correctly. But the mutation does change the fraction of error-containing variants that work properly, say from 40 percent to 42 percent. That means slightly less work for your cells’ garbage-disposal system and more fitness for you — making you healthier and more likely to survive and reproduce. In other words, this mutation benefits you, evolutionarily speaking. Natural selection doesn’t just judge how well a gene works when its proteins are Read More ›

So he tells the Guardian: Our planet and the human race face multiple challenges. These challenges are global and serious – climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Such pressing issues will require us to collaborate, all of us, with a shared vision and cooperative endeavour to ensure that humanity can survive. We will need to adapt, rethink, refocus and change some of our fundamental assumptions about what we mean by wealth, by possessions, by mine and yours. Just like children, we will have to learn to share. If we fail then the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world Read More ›

The claim that British moths “evolved” because of industrial pollution (microevolution) in recent centuries became an unquestionable truth of Darwin lobby textbooks in recent decades. But there are serious problems with that example (the peppered myth). From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, a note: Note that I do not deny that there are examples of microevolution in action (in fact, I affirm the existence of such examples). I simply point out that this “prized horse” in the evolutionist’s stable—an example that ranks with Darwin’s finches—has serious shortcomings that go unmentioned in the public or in the classroom. In [Darwin defender] JB’s attempt to rescue the sacred cow, he/she completely misses the Read More ›

From Claire M. Fletcher-Flinn at Frontiers in Medicine, reviewing The Logic of Madness: A New Theory of Mental Illness … It is rational behavior in response to a compound misunderstanding of various emotions. The starting point of Blakeway’s theory is a basic algorithm that converts an emotion into an action that optimizes biological fitness. Depending upon the circumstances, an action state is driven by the emotion having the highest calculated value. He divides emotions into four categories, basic survival (e.g., fear, hunger), reproductive (e.g., lust, jealousy), social (e.g., guilt, anger), and strategic (e.g., anxiety, regret). Most of these biologically derived emotions are shared with other animals, especially chimpanzees, although there is the question of whether other animals can perform tactical Read More ›

I have previously remarked on the “Goldilocks” mindset that seems to pervade climate change alarmism.  When it comes to climate we can be certain about one thing — it has been changing constantly for all of history.  Sometimes it has been much warmer than it is now, and sometimes it has been much colder.  Yet central to the climate alarmist narrative is the notion that there was some Goldilocks “just right” moment from which we are currently diverging and our job is to make it stop. Robert Tracinski comments on this phenomenon here:   The problem is that drought is normal in California. It’s normal on a year-to-year basis:Most years are dry, and the state has always relied on the Read More ›

Must be BBC. Must be summer. Last summer, chimpanzees were entering the stone age. This summer, from BBC: An orangutan copying sounds made by researchers offers new clues to how human speech evolved, scientists say. Rocky mimicked more than 500 vowel-like noises, suggesting an ability to control his voice and make new sounds. It had been thought these great apes were unable to do this and, since human speech is a learned behaviour, it could not have originated from them. Study lead Dr Adriano Lameira said this “notion” could now be thrown “into the trash can”. More. The reporter must have got something wrong somewhere. Who says humans learned speech from orangutans? It’s not reported that the orangutan started a Read More ›

From Nature: At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, astronomer Sara Seager has begun to examine 14,000 compounds that are stable enough to exist in a planetary atmosphere. She and her colleagues are winnowing down their initial list of molecules using criteria such as whether there are geophysical ways to send the compound into the atmosphere. “We’re doing a triage process,” says Seager. “We don’t want to miss anything.” The Seattle meeting aims to compile a working list of biosignature gases and their chemical properties. The information will feed into how astronomers analyse data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2018. The telescope will be able to look at only a handful of habitable planets, Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at Discover: In a new paper that could prove explosive, Australian neuropathologists C. V. Dennis and colleagues report that they found very little evidence for adult neurogenesis in humans. … … Dennis et al. don’t quite rule out all neurogenesis in adults. However, the authors say that if human adult neurogenesis takes place, it does so at an extremely low rate: relatively speaking, it’s about 10 times lower than the rate seen in adult rodents.More. In that case, old neurons must be learning new functions because rehabilitation happens all the time. See also: Birds have more neurons than primates do. It’s unclear how neurons relate to intelligence, exactly. Follow UD News at Twitter!