Intelligent Design

From ScienceDaily: Bacteria possess the ability to take up DNA from their environment, a skill that enables them to acquire new genes for antibiotic resistance or to escape the immune response. Scientists have now mapped the core set of genes that are consistently controlled during DNA uptake in strep bacteria, and they hope the finding will allow them to cut off the microbes’ ability to survive what doctors and nature can throw at them. It’ll be interesting to see who wins this one, man or bug. HGT gives bacteria a vast library of existing solutions. Earlier studies of competence had pointed to more than 300 active genes. The new study identifies only 83 genes in 29 regions of the strep Read More ›

Scientists have discovered that the tiny, single cells show the hallmarks of intelligence. At Phys.Org they report on a study conducted by a Belgian and French team. Here’s a snippet from Phys.Org: A slime made up of independent, single cells, they found, can “learn” to avoid irritants despite having no central nervous system. “Tantalizing results suggest that the hallmarks for learning can occur at the level of single cells,” the team wrote in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Further: The team wanted to see whether an organism without a nervous system could similarly “learn” from experience and change its behaviour accordingly. They chose a very humble life form indeed—Physarum polycephalum, also known as Read More ›

Via Jonathan McLatchie, ID theorist Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box and Edge of Evolution is going to be presenting an interactive online webinar on May 7th (8pm GMT / 3pm Eastern / 2pm Central / 12noon Pacific) to my group, the Apologetics Academy (http://www.apologetics-academy.org). Behe will present on the biochemical evidence for design for approximately 1 hour and then field questions from the floor. YouTube to be posted later. More info here. Your time? Global clock face. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: A new study suggests that ravens can be as clever as chimpanzees, despite having much smaller brains, indicating that rather than the size of the brain, the neuronal density and the structure of the birds’ brains play an important role in terms of their intelligence. … The large-scale study concluded that great apes performed the best, and that absolute brain size appeared to be key when it comes to intelligence. However, they didn’t conduct the cylinder test on corvid birds. (For some reason, humans were not tested for the ability to get food out of the end of a tube instead of striking at the middle… ) Can Kabadayi, together with researchers from the University of Oxford, UK Read More ›

The response to Barry’s recent post, How Did Mathematics Come to be Woven Into the Fabric of Reality? pretty much lays bare the issues: “Why is the universe we live in connected by an unreasonably beautiful, elegant and effective mathematical structure?” The naturalist says we just evolved to see the world as making sense, but don’t really know. Defending Darwin means that much to him … At 73, I noted, Aleta at 81: Sorry, that won’t work. Either man is observing something that underlies the universe and working within those given results or mathematics is an adaptation for survival (it could be completely irrational and is only tangentially related to how the universe works). The second position saves naturalism (and Read More ›

From Deborah Berry at The Conversation: In 2012, the biopharmaceutical company Amgen reported that it had been unable to reproduce 47 of 53 “landmark” cancer papers. For confidentiality reasons, however, the company did not release which papers it could not replicate and thus did not provide details about how it repeated the experiments. As with the psychology studies, this leaves the possibility that Amgen got different results because the experiments were not performed the same way as the original study. It opens the door to doubt about which result – the first or the repeat test – was correct. Several initiatives are addressing this problem in multiple disciplines. Science Exchange; the Center for Open Science, a group dedicated to “openness, integrity Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The researchers discovered a traveling spike generator that appears to move across the hippocampus — a part of the brain mainly associated with memory — and change direction, while generating brain waves. The generator itself, however, produces no electrical signal. “In epilepsy, we’ve thought the focus of seizures is fixed and, in severe cases, that part of the brain is surgically removed,” said Dominique Durand, Elmer Lincoln Lindseth Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Case School of Engineering and leader of the study. “But if the focus, or source, of seizures moves — as we’ve described — that’s problematic.” … The team is also trying to understand what these non-synaptic events do and whether they are relevant to processing Read More ›

We all learned pi in school in the context of circles.  Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  It is an irrational number approximated by 3.14. It turns out that pi shows up all over the place, not just in circles.  Here is just one instance.  Take a piece of paper and a stick.  Draw several lines along the paper so that the lines are the length of the stick from each other.  Then randomly drop the stick on the paper.  The probability that the stick will land so that it cuts a line is exactly 2/pi, or about 64%.  If one were to perform millions of trials, one could use the results to perform a Read More ›

So says Sam Kriss at Wired: Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it.More. We think Tyson should have stuck to a winning formula. He seems to be everywhere saying everything. The multiverse, the computer sim, the Inquisition vs. Bruno, global warming… See also: Tyson bombshell: Universe likely just computer sim … See what we mean? Follow UD News at Twitter!

BioLogos? They’re Christians for Darwin, or evolution or something, but for sure not for ID or anything. At Hump of the Camel, Jon Garvey, a retired British physician and theologian, notes that BioLogos writers accuse ID folk of heretical or bad theology by thinking of God as a designer. But, he says, their own theological leanings are much further from classical Christian orthodoxy than anything written by ID folk: But I felt I had to comment on a recent thread on BioLogos, in which the argument is made that Intelligent Design implies that God is merely one amongst a number of possible designers, whereas God is, in fact, not to be compared with any other agent. … I would not Read More ›

Recently, we’ve seen some rather abrupt shifts: The Royal Society is suddenly rethinking the importance of Darwinism in evolution—which will have huge ramifications even if they lose heart and flee the scene. It’s enough that they even considered such grave apostasy. For most people who grew up in the English-speaking world, evolution (indeed, all of biology) is Darwinism. The American Darwin-in-the-schools lobby, for example, has no similar interest in horizontal gene transfer, hybridization, epigenetics, or other ways evolution can happen. No one is suing the school board over chromosome doubling or getting their pants in a knot over convergence. But then these demonstrated ways evolution can happen do not add up to a grand naturalist scheme either. It’s more like Read More ›

The problem with epigenetic mechanisms is that they respond to future, unforeseen, environmental challenges. They don’t work in the present, and so even if random mutations somehow created such mechanisms, they would not be selected for. In other words, epigenetic mechanisms contradict evolutionary theory—there is no fitness improvement at the time of origin by random mutations, so there is no selection. Nor do evolutionists have an explanation for this—they don’t even try. Consider a paper discussing a particular epigenetic mechanism subtitled: “The Evolution of a Complex Epigenetic Pathway in Flowering Plants.”  Read more

From this 2005 interview: “Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society Read More ›

One thing we can all agree on is that the infamous finches on the Galápagos Islands are a classic icon of evolution. The difference is that evolutionists are playing the fool. Ever since Darwin wondered aloud that if the different types of finches he saw on the Galápagos Islands were not merely variants of a species, but in fact different species, then it “would undermine the stability of species,” and therefore the finches (and everything else) must have spontaneously arisen, evolutionists’ dullness has been embarrassing. Like the co-worker who reveals his ignorance as he rambles on about his pet peeve, evolutionists’ positivistic proclamations about the finches reveal an astonishing level of ignorance.  Read more

From Kirk Durston at Contemplations: There are countless people who use the following rationale to justify why there was no need for an intelligent creator behind life – evolution has had a near-infinite number of trials in which to create the full diversity of life, including its molecular machines, molecular computers, and digitally encoded genomes. Here, we will take an opportunity to examine these points more closely. In other scientific disciplines, the first step one must take before figuring out a solution, is to establish the boundary conditions within which a problem must be solved. Since we should require the same standard of scientific rigour from evolutionary biology, let us calculate an extreme upper limit for the total number of Read More ›