Intelligent Design

Were we talking nearly $9 million? From beneficiary Evolution Institute: My interest in the EES arose in the aftermath of the Altenberg meeting. It was clear that the notion of an extended synthesis divided the evolutionary biology community, generating both enormous excitement and strong negative responses. However, I held the view that the negativity arose primarily from the absence of a clear rationale for an EES, and the mistaken perception that the EES was a rejection of neo-Darwinism. If it were possible to harness the enthusiasm and new ideas, whilst at the same time circumventing the concerns of more orthodox evolutionists, then the EES could prove a stimulant to the field. Love it! “Mistaken perception that the EES was a Read More ›

Start your day with pasta: Further to Pastafarians not giving up their claim to be a religion, we hear lawyers seeking clients are asking: Do You Have To Accommodate An Employee Who Worships The Flying Spaghetti Monster? JD Supra: Employers are generally aware of their duty to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs. Whether that means rearranging work schedules, permitting modifications to dress codes, permitting prayer breaks, or any number of other alterations, you know that the law requires you to be flexible when it comes to religion. But what if your employee claims he is a “Pastafarian” who worships the Flying Spaghetti Monster? A recent case from Nebraska might shed some light on your religious accommodation obligations. We didn’t say “asking Read More ›

The dinosaurs, we are now told, were dying out before the asteroid hit. From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Manabu Sakamoto from the University of Reading has shown that dinosaur species were going extinct faster than new ones were appearing, for at least 40 million years before the end of the Cretaceous. The dinosaur opera had already been going through a long diminuendo well before the asteroid ushered in its final coda. Many other researchers had looked at the fates of the dinosaurs before that infamous extinction event and suggested that they were already declining. But most of these studies had simply tabulated raw numbers of species from different blocks of time. This approach has problems: the rocks from certain Read More ›

Richard Lindzen, an MIT atmospheric physicist and one of the world’s leading climatologists, summarizes the science behind climate change. Here.  

It is often said that all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. And so it is with epigenetics which evolutionists opposed and blackballed for a century before finally appropriating it as just another mode of evolutionary change. (see here, here, andhere for more discussion of this history of misdirections regarding Lamarckism and epigenetics). Here is an example of evolutionists, after a century of denial and rejection, claiming epigenetics as their own.  Read more

Barbara Drossell is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Darmstadt in Germany.  In this article she talks about the origin of the universe, the fine tuning argument and the implausibility of the multiverse theory. The fine-tuning argument is not proof. It is not science to conclude that God exists because the Universe appears to be finely tuned. But it’s a very convincing philosophical interpretation of the observation of fine-tuning. . . . If you start with the assumption that there is no God, then matter and natural laws are the ultimate reality. Therefore, it is not unnatural to conclude that there is a multiverse. It is always dangerous to attribute motives to other people, but I think Read More ›

But thrive better separately, says philosopher of science Eric Hochstein. From Stud Hist Philos Sci: Abstract There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science regarding how best to interpret the relationship between neuroscience and psychology. It has traditionally been argued that either the two domains will evolve and change over time until they converge on a single unified account of human behaviour, or else that they will continue to work in isolation given that they identify properties and states that exist autonomously from one another (due to the multiple-realizability of psychological states). In this paper, I argue that progress in psychology and neuroscience is contingent on the fact that both of these positions are false. Read More ›

Raising Arizona is one of my favorite movies.  It is chock-a-block with hilarious throw away lines like this one: Which brings me to Costa Rica.  Apparently, there are several hundred round stones that archaeologists are certain were designed.  This is from the Wiki entry. The stone spheres (or stone balls) of Costa Rica are an assortment of over three hundred petrospheres in Costa Rica, located on the Diquís Delta and on Isla del Caño. Locally, they are known as Las Bolas(literally The Balls). The spheres are commonly attributed to the extinct Diquís culture and are sometimes referred to as the Diquís Spheres. They are the best-known stone sculptures of the Isthmo-Colombian area. They are thought to have been placed in Read More ›

Think Aristotelianism went out with Galileo? Think again—teleological language is rampant in the evolution literature because that is how evolutionists think. A new paper in Nature Communications on dietary influences on bird evolution states that …  Read more

I have a hard time getting some materialists to admit that two plus two is infallibly four.  Here, a 5’9″ white guy has a hard time getting college students to admit that he is infallibly not a seven year old, 6’5″ Chinese woman.  

Readers will remember the “science guy”: From Reason: As a taxpayer and voter, the introduction of this extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen… So I can see where people are very concerned about this, and they’re pursuing criminal investigations as well as engaging in discussions like this….That there is a chilling effect on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good. Via Washington Times More. That sort of thing is big in Big Government now. For example, Breitbart London notes the lawfare approach: Now the Attorney General of the US Virgin Islands — some utter nonentity called Claude Earl Walker — has gone a step Read More ›

When someone asks “Do you believe in evolution?” they probably want a short answer, and don’t have the patience to listen to a 15-minute lecture on the different meanings of “evolution” and how you stand on each. So how do you answer this trick question? Here’s a very short answer that works for me: Yes, I believe in the evolution of life, and I believe in the evolution of automobiles. Optionally, to make sure they get the point, you could add “but I don’t believe either could have happened without design.” It is actually a pretty good analogy, see my April 2,2015 post at ENV, In Biology as in Technology, Similarities Do Not Prove Absence of Intelligent Design

Over at PowerlineBlog, there’s a post about the newly released analysis of the diet proposed 40 years ago as the one to lead us to good health. But guess what? It turns out it wasn’t all that good for us. And the data pointing this out didn’t appear until just recently, but, instead, appeared years ago. But why publish data that conflicts with your beloved theory? They include these quotes from the Washington Post: “Incomplete publication has contributed to the overestimation of benefits and underestimation of potential risks” of the special diet, they wrote. But Broste suggested that at least part of the reason for the incomplete publication of the data might have been human nature. The Minnesota investigators had Read More ›

In the original Star Trek pilot entitled “The Cage,” the Enterprise receives a distress signal from a long lost exploration vessel. The signal was transmitted 20 years ago, and the Enterprise responds hoping to find survivors. The landing party arrives at the planet’s surface and, indeed, they find elderly crew members who have carved out a living for themselves on the distant planet. It is a futuristic version of “The Swiss Family Robinson,” but there’s just one problem: It is all an illusion.  Read more

Biophysicist Kirk Durston of Contemplations writes, re Tree of life morphs into … leaf?: I studied that new tree of life for a while. It leaves me wondering how much is empirical observation and how much is conjecture. I would much rather see the imaginary parts removed and only the dots plotted. As one involved in bioinformatics, I know that one must be very careful to avoid ‘fitting’ the dots into a pre-conceived pattern. Would could just as easily (perhaps even more easily) fit the dots into clusters representing the various ‘kinds’ of life. My own perspective is that life should be mapped out in clusters of dots; leave out everything else for which there is no empirical evidence for. Read More ›