Intelligent Design

From PNAS: Significance: A central debate in cognitive science concerns the nativist hypothesis: the proposal that universal human behaviors are underpinned by strong, domain-specific, innate constraints on cognition. We use a general model of the processes that shape human behavior—learning, culture, and biological evolution—to test the evolutionary plausibility of this hypothesis. A series of analyses shows that culture radically alters the relationship between natural selection and cognition. Culture facilitates rapid biological adaptation yet rules out nativism: Behavioral universals arise that are underpinned by weak biases rather than strong innate constraints. We therefore expect culture to have dramatically shaped the evolution of the human mind, giving us innate predispositions that only weakly constrain our behavior. (public access) More. It’s sometimes hard Read More ›

Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic. has a new book out, The Death of Humanity. Here’s some info from Evolution News & Views: Although Weikart points out the many sources at work in diminishing the centrality humanity in our social and moral relations, one that recurs is Darwinism. This is for good reason. Darwin himself expressed the two foundational sources of the attack on anthropocentrism, an assault that unfortunately “is becoming mainstream in our ‘culture of death’” (4). First is the notion that regard for our special mental attributes is little more than self-centered arrogance. The second, related to the first, is that human beings are really not unique and are, in fact, just another Read More ›

From The Scientist: A longtime consultant to NASA and a member of the scientific advisory committee for Biosphere 2 (the largest-ever enclosed ecosystem), Morowitz was a strong advocate for a theory of emergence of life from chemical and physical principles. In the 1983 McLean v. Arkansas case over teaching creationism in schools, he provided an expert opinion, testifying in front of the court that the creationist view of life’s origins has no basis in science. More. Also: New York Times: Once, when he received a birthday card that assessed a human body’s raw materials at only 97 cents, he recalculated the cost based on synthesized ingredients from a biochemical company catalog and re-evaluated his worth at more than $6 million. Read More ›

When intelligent design is nuts From Phys.org: Lead researcher, Kendy Teng, from the University of Sydney, Australia, said, “Australians are favouring brachycephalic breeds, dogs with shorter and wider heads, such as the Pug and the French bulldog, more than those with longer and thinner heads. Looking at data spanning 28 years, we found that the demand for smaller dogs has increased every year from 1986.” “Veterinarians are concerned about brachycephalic dogs’ welfare, as these breeds commonly suffer from breathing difficulties, skin and eye conditions, and digestive disorders. In New Zealand, brachycephalic breeds are number four of the top five dog breeds considered by veterinarians to be unsuitable for continued breeding due to compromised health and welfare. We expect to see Read More ›

From New Scientist: The ballistics of galactic shrapnel show that the Milky Way has already crashed into its giant neighbour, Andromeda – but if that’s right, physics is wrong Well, if we don’t exist anymore, it doesn’t matter much if physics is wrong, but … A monstrous Milkomeda galaxy? It’s a well-established picture of our galaxy’s cataclysmic future. More controversially, it might also be a vision of its past. More. You have to pay to read the rest. And, aw, we dunno. Predicting the end of all things is by its nature a risky business. The nice thing about New Scientist is that it makes the religious fantasies of some of my neighbours seem normal. See also: The bill arrives Read More ›

From Daily Caller: The research concludes that when people purchase an electric car or install rooftop solar, that decision is often heavily motivated by a desire to appear trendy and fashionable to their peers, which researchers dub as “conspicuous conservation.” Economists previously calculated that car dealerships and manufacturers can charge an extra $7,000 for a Prius, a hybrid car, because of social status bonuses. That’s quite a bit considering the hybrid car starts at $24,200. “Every era produces hucksters trying to sell snake oil,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute who did not take part in the study, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “But the particular type of flimflam Read More ›

  From Nautilus, #1: Our spines are a mess. It’s a wonder we can even walk, says Bruce Latimer, director of the Center for Human Origins at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. When our ancestors walked on all fours, their spines arched, like a bow, to withstand the weight of the organs suspended below. But then we stood up. That threw the system out of whack by 90 degrees, and the spine was forced to become a column. Next, to allow for bipedalism, it curved forward at the lower back. And to keep the head in balance—so that we didn’t all walk around as if doing the limbo—the upper spine curved in the opposite direction. This change put tremendous Read More ›

Recently there has been a spate of newspaper reports extolling Denmark as the world’s happiest country. Secular liberals often point to the Scandinavian countries as an earthly paradise, when compared with what they see as a broken-down, inegalitarian, hyper-religious United States. Are they right? I decided to check out the facts, and here’s what I’ve come up with. My findings, in a nutshell 1. Latin Americans are actually the world’s happiest people; Danes are the world’s most contented people. 2. The success of Sweden and Denmark is due to its social homogeneity and its Protestant work ethic, rather than socialism. 3. Scandinavian societies are egalitarian, but they also tend to stifle individuality. 4. Denmark and Sweden have their own social Read More ›

The Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism Online Conference is holding our second online free preview session this morning, April 4th at 7:30 AM Central Time. Login now to join us! This session is on methodological dualism and multi-explanation frameworks in Psychology by Dr. Sam Rakover, Professor Emeritus at the University of Haifa in Israel.
Read More ›

Ever since Voltaire mythologized the Galileo Affair, Hume’s Philo demolished Cleanthes, and Gibbon blamed pretty much everything on the Christians, evolutionary thinking has had an unbeatable template: The Warfare Thesis. Anyone who opposes or even questions evolution is automatically branded as having religious motives. Religion is at war with science. That claim has failed the test of historiography over and over, but so what? Who cares about history? Certainly not journalists, policy makers, federal judges, textbook authors, and anyone else who matters. But now there is an entirely different, empirical, falsification of the Warfare Thesis, and evolutionists are in full-panic.  Read more

A friend writes to draw attention to this. Skinny: Marcos Eberlin of the University of Campinas, Brazil, has received the 2016 Thomson Medal for outstanding achievement in mass spectrometry. This prize is awarded biennially by the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation, and will be presented at their upcoming meeting in Toronto. Eberlin is said to be the best-known advocate of intelligent design in Brazil. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Your Excellency, I humbly ask you to strike a blow for academic freedom, free speech and religious freedom, by publicly forbidding Marquette University from calling itself a Catholic university henceforth, and by revoking the mandate of theology teachers at Marquette University to teach theology. In this letter, I’d like to explain why I believe these drastic measures are necessary and justifiable. Before I go on, I’d better introduce myself. My name is Vincent Torley, and I’m an Australian Catholic layman (now residing in Japan), with a Ph.D. in philosophy and several other degrees. Thanks to my years of study in an open academic environment where people were free to defend any and every point of view, I have a firm Read More ›

A recent study out of the University of Oregon purports to show the evolutionary pathway of a key protein that helps to control the mitotic spindle, a structure inside the dividing cell that distributes the chromosomes to the daughter cells. In fact the research adds to a growing line of evidence destructive of evolutionary theory. Consider the following findings:  Read more

From ScienceDaily: Their age is estimated to be more than 555 million years old, placing the fossils in the last part of Precambrian times, called the Ediacaran Period. They provide a crucial view of Earth’s earliest evolution of multicellular life, which scientists now think started millions of years earlier than previously thought. … Scientists think that an explosion of animal diversity and complexity began near the start of the Cambrian Period, about 541 million years ago. But Dornbos said this fossil find is the latest example of multicellular life forms appearing in the preceding Ediacaran Period. More. Paper. (public access) As the authors say, this helps us understand more about the history of life. What they don’t say is that Read More ›

UPDATE – updated title to reflect that the conference has already occurred now.
Read More ›