Intelligent Design

Over at the Progressive Fascist post, progressives wd400, FierceRoller, rhampton7, and Seversky have emerged as apologists for the attorneys general’s fascist efforts to quash dissent from climate alarmism.  What if the climate research really did amount to securities fraud they ask? I have litigated securities fraud cases for over 25 years.  I know what it takes to make a securities fraud case, and I can tell you that the fascist apologists’ question is like asking, “What if that circle really were square?”  There is a legal standard for what constitutes securities fraud, and the scientific research in question (whether it was disclosed or not) can never meet that standard.  Steve Simpson does a good job of explaining this principle here. Read More ›

In an attempt to frustrate rethinking evolution. From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: Six months after announcing the November 2016 Royal Society evolution meeting on this page and a half dozen or so stories later, over one-third of the seats for the event still remain vacant — and the tickets are free! But that’s easily explained, because the zoologists ultimately decided to “hog” the show. It didn’t have to be so. A lineup of speakers who truly represent the paradigm shift underway in evolution science would have quickly filled up the house. Instead, organizers went with essentially an evo-devo reunion on plasticity and niche construction — rehashed themes of Altenberg! from eight years ago minus most of the stars of Read More ›

From Phil Plait at Slate: I was wrong. I underestimated just how thoroughly the GOP had salted the Earth. Philosophical party planks of climate change denial, anti-evolution, anti-intellectualism, intolerance, and more have made it such that Trump can literally say almost anything, and it hardly affects his popularity.More. Izzatso? Trump was the first candidate in modern history to exploit the fact that no one now cares what legacy media, including Slate, think. When I travel the Toronto-Ottawa rail corridor in Canada, almost everyone is using a handheld to reach whoever or whatever they want anywhere on the planet. That can’t be stuffed back into a bottle. Trump spent almost nothing on publicity, trusting that the full pack cry against him Read More ›

Dr. Ann Gauger argues that the hypothesis of common descent fails to account for the origin of the mammalian placenta, in an ENV article titled, The Placenta Problem (June 17, 2016). As we’ll see, the evidence she puts forward proves precisely the opposite: common descent is the only hypothesis which explains the facts, without resorting to ad hoc suppositions. I’d like to begin with a confession. When I read Dr. Gauger’s article on the origin of the placenta, my first reaction was: “Whoa.” It appeared that Dr. Gauger had made a very strong case against the hypothesis of common descent. But then I did some more reading, and after looking at the evidence which Professor Joshua Swamidass kindly forwarded to Read More ›

From academic librarian Jeffrey Beall here: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. The criteria for determining predatory publishers are here. We hope that tenure and promotion committees can also decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards and/or geocultural locus. We emphasize that journal publishers and journals change in their business and editorial practices over time. This list is kept up-to-date to the best Read More ›

In this next installment from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism (AM-Nat) conference, Salvador Cordova gives us his perspective on epistemology, which he calls “Gambler’s Epistemology,” which intends to be a metaphysically neutral way of analyzing claims based on their costs and payoff possibilities. Cordova shows that naturalism does not have a history of high payoffs, and that the ENCODE and similar projects by the NIH are good gambling bets but have caused consternation for those metaphysically committed to naturalism, which has historically been shown to be impractical.

From Nathaniel Comfort at Nautilus: Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.What most goes against our intuition is that complex structures can be better dissipaters of energy than simpler ones.11 Catalysts help you up an energy hill so that you can drop even further down on the other side. Casting our gaze across the entirety of biological evolution, each organism is such an energy hill. It forms only if it is thermodynamically favored—if by pumping energy uphill to create it, even more energy is released. A lizard, for example, requires more energy to make than a lizard’s-worth of E. coli, but it consumes more energy at a greater rate. A world that contains both lizards Read More ›

From Symmetry (Fermilab/SLAC): According to the Standard Model, the most common decay of the Higgs boson should be a transformation into a pair of bottom quarks. This should happen about 60 percent of the time. The strange thing is, scientists have yet to discover it happening (though they have seen evidence). According to Harvard researcher John Huth, a member of the ATLAS experiment, seeing the Higgs turning into bottom quarks is priority No. 1 for Higgs boson research. “It would behoove us to find the Higgs decaying to bottom quarks because this is the largest interaction,” Huth says, “and it darn well better be there.”More. Good thing no one is trying to stop anyone from doing or publishing research on Read More ›

In plain English, a meeting November 7 – 9 that explores dumping Darwinism in favour of a more-evidence-based approach to evolution From Royal Society: Overview Scientific discussion meeting organised in partnership with the British Academy by Professor Denis Noble CBE FMedSci FRS, Professor Nancy Cartwright, Professor Sir Patrick Bateson FRS, Professor John Dupré and Professor Kevin Laland. Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields have produced calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution, although the issues involved remain hotly contested. This meeting will present these developments and arguments in a form that will encourage cross-disciplinary discussion and, in particular, involve the humanities and social sciences in order to provide further analytical perspectives and explore the social and philosophical Read More ›

In connection with a sale on The Design of Life (Dembski and Wells), an excerpt from Evolution News and Views: The giraffe is an integrated adaptational package whose parts are carefully coordinated with one another. To fit successfully into its environmental niche, the giraffe presumably needed long legs. But in possessing long legs, it also needed a long neck. And to use its long neck, further adaptations were necessary. When a giraffe stands in its normal upright posture, the blood pressure in the neck arteries will be highest at the base of the neck and lowest in the head. The blood pressure generated by the heart must be extremely high to pump blood to the head. This, in turn, requires Read More ›

The Democrats’ platform committee says they have a “Final Draft To Advance Progressive Democratic Values.” Among those progressive values, criminalizing scientific dissent.  A plank calling for criminal prosecution of anyone who dissent’s from “the scientific reality of climate change” was adopted with unanimous consent.  Progressives do not tolerate dissent even from calling for the persecution of dissenters. UPDATE: Predictably, progressives ( wd400 @ comment 3 and rhampton7  @ comment 12) come in and apologize for the brown shirts. No, WD, it is not like the tobacco company cases at all. Those cases were civil cases in which the goal was a civil money judgment against companies that sold products that killed people.  In this case the plank calls for criminal Read More ›

From Eurekalert: A research team under Dr. Bo Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Paleobiology and Stratigraphy in Nanjing (China) worked together with paleontologists from the University of Bonn and other scientists from China, USA, France, and England to examine a total of 35 insects preserved in amber. With the aid of grains of sand, plant residue, wood fibers, dust, or even the lifeless shells of their victims, the larvae achieved camouflage to perfection. Some larvae fashioned a kind of “knight’s armor” from grains of sand, perhaps to protect against spider bites. In order to custom-tailor their “camo”, they have even adapted their limbs for the purpose. The larvae were able to turn their legs about 180 degrees, in Read More ›

Here is a press release via phys.org. They applied “biological evolution” to the history of cars and car makers in order to predict the future of electric car technology. It sort of makes you chuckle. “Cars are exceptionally diverse but also have a detailed history of changes, making them a model system for investigating the evolution of technology,” Gjesfjeld said. The team drew data from 3,575 car models made by 172 different manufacturers, noting the first and last year each was manufactured. “This is similar to when a paleontologist first dates a particular fossil and last sees a particular fossil,” Gjesfjeld said. And a little bit more: Alfaro said applying an evolutionary biology approach worked so well because the automotive Read More ›

This video is from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism 2016 conference held earlier this year. It deals with using non-naturalism in order to improve the quality of machine learning programs using a technique called “imagination sampling.” The results of a limited test run are given.

An anti-ID commenter who goes by MatSpirit has been active in these pages for well over a year, during which time he has posted scores of comments in the comboxes of dozens of OPs.  This particular statement in one of his comments caught my eye: If I understand correctly, the ID story is that some unidentified, undetectable supernatural agent acting at a time and place unknown arranged matter into patterns that are living creatures. *palm forehead* It is just staggering to me that someone can spend so much time and effort debating ID and still not have the first idea about the fundamentals of the theory. I understand what is going on here, of course.  Like many of our opponents Read More ›