Intelligent Design

Yeah, the dumpster, not the Thrift. Oh, and ID is wrong. From key proponent of junk DNA, University of Houston’s (human genome is mostly junk) Dan Graur, RUBBISH DNA: THE FUNCTIONLESS FRACTION OF THE HUMAN GENOME Abstract: Because genomes are products of natural processes rather than “intelligent design,” all genomes contain functional and nonfunctional parts. The fraction of the genome that has no biological function is called “rubbish DNA.” Rubbish DNA consists of “junk DNA,” i.e., the fraction of the genome on which selection does not operate, and “garbage DNA,” i.e., sequences that lower the fitness of the organism, but exist in the genome because purifying selection is neither omnipotent nor instantaneous. In this chapter, I (1) review the concepts of Read More ›

Rob Sheldon Yesterday Rob Sheldon wrote to us on the “epicycles” of today’s cosmology. (Copernicus used about 27 epicycles 14 centuries after Ptolemy. Since the half-life of an epicycle solution is decreasing rapidly, we may reach 27 within 10 yrs.) That reminded me (O’Leary for News) about something I’d been meaning to get around to asking him. Some Christian ministries see Big Bang theory as a threat and others use it in their apologetics. Is either approach a sound idea? Science is an ever-changing, many-splendored thing. What helps or hurts a given argument could change over time, but what if the message is supposed to be for all time? Over to Sheldon: I along with Stanley Jaki stand somewhere between Read More ›

Millennia ago,epicycles were introduced to astronomy to account for differences between theory and observation, thus saving the theory. Rob Sheldon writes to comment on a recent finding: New theory of secondary inflation expands options for avoiding an excess of dark matter. First, here’s the finding: Physicists suggest a smaller secondary inflationary period in the moments after the Big Bang could account for the abundance of the mysterious matter Standard cosmology — that is, the Big Bang Theory with its early period of exponential growth known as inflation — is the prevailing scientific model for our universe, in which the entirety of space and time ballooned out from a very hot, very dense point into a homogeneous and ever-expanding vastness. This Read More ›

From Pub Med: Evolution by epigenesis: farewell to Darwinism, neo- and otherwise. Follow UD News at Twitter! In the last 25 years, criticism of most theories advanced by Darwin and the neo-Darwinians has increased considerably, and so did their defense. Darwinism has become an ideology, while the most significant theories of Darwin were proven unsupportable. The critics advanced other theories instead of ‘natural selection’ and the survival of the fittest’. ‘Saltatory ontogeny’ and ‘epigenesis’ are such new theories proposed to explain how variations in ontogeny and novelties in evolution are created. They are reviewed again in the present essay that also tries to explain how Darwinians, artificially kept dominant in academia and in granting agencies, are preventing their acceptance. Epigenesis, Read More ›

A friend draws attention to this paywalled paper, noting that—however it tries to wallpaper issues—at least confronts a problem: The conventional claims about how natural selection can simply “gather” information are inadequate. It’s nice wallpaper; there’s probably no wall under it. But there doesn’t need to be. One can say anything one wants about evolution these days and attribute anything at all to it. From Trends and Ecology and Evolution: The theory of evolution links random variation and selection to incremental adaptation. In a different intellectual domain, learning theory links incremental adaptation (e.g., from positive and/or negative reinforcement) to intelligent behaviour. Specifically, learning theory explains how incremental adaptation can acquire knowledge from past experience and use it to direct future Read More ›

From Salk Institute: “This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience,” says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. “We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.” … The Salk team, while building a 3D reconstruction of rat hippocampus tissue (the memory center of the brain), noticed something unusual. In some cases, a single axon from one neuron formed two synapses reaching out to a single dendrite Read More ›

In a few short paragraphs here.  For some reason the phrase “epic smackdown” keeps coming to mind.  

Generally, coal is assumed to have originated in the lignin of Carboniferous forests, but now a new theory has been introduced: From The Economist: The trees of the Carboniferous were not like those of today. Moreover, which types of tree predominated varied over the vast span of time that it covered. One pertinent observation Dr Boyce and his team make is that the peak of coal formation coincided with the dominance of a group called the lycopsids. Yet lycopsid trunks were composed mostly of tissue called periderm, which corresponds to modern bark and contains little lignin. Forests that existed both before and after these lycopsid woods (but before the supposed evolution of lignin-digesting fungi) had many more lignin-rich species in Read More ›

We have had several comments lately about problems with the “captcha” function on comments.  As you might imagine, UD is inundated with spam, and the captcha function is designed to prevent the spammers from accessing the combox. We have decided, however, to ratchet back on the captcha.  Now, you will need to fill in the captcha only when you log in to your user ID.  You will not need to fill it in to post comments. We will try this for a while.  We worry that advanced spammers will take advantage of it, and if that happens we might have to change course.  But for now we will see how this works.

From ScienceDaily: Tweak in gene expression may have helped humans walk upright Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama, have identified a change in gene expression between humans and primates that may have helped give us this edge when it comes to walking upright. And they did it by studying a tiny fish called the threespine stickleback that has evolved radically different skeletal structures to match environments around the world. … The threespine stickleback is remarkable in that it has evolved to have many different body structures to equip it for life in different parts of the world. … ue to changes in the regulatory DNA sequence near this Read More ›

The leadership of the United Methodist Church (but not the majority of its members or pastors, most of us are disgusted by this move) have decided to ban Intelligent Design from their general meeting, see here. They have apparently signed on to the unwritten treaty with materialists which says, basically, we will accept without question anything you claim “science says,” and won’t ever even look for anything in science which supports our faith, just please, please, leave us a little safe corner over here called “faith” and don’t attack us as ignorant for anything we say there. Attack the fundamentalists, they are much more ignorant than we are; in fact, we’ll help you attack them. Does this remind anyone of Read More ›

Suzan Mazur, author of The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” draws attention to a notice of the Royal Society’s upcoming “rethink evolution” meet in the online Progressive Review: Moving beyond Darwin One of the problems with the stubbornly ignorant approach towards evolution by the reactionary right is that the media has reduced the matter to a simplistic debate largely determined by the dumb. But Darwin clearly didn’t have all the answers, and science has moved many miles since his time. One of the few journalists following this story has been Suzan Mazur, whose reports we have published from time to time. Now she’s writing about a conference next November that will undoubtedly give post-Darwinian science Read More ›

This is prompted primarily by a recent post and by the unfortunate realization that some people still do not understand the design inference, despite years of involvement in the debate. Specifically, there was discussion at Barry’s prior post about whether Elizabeth Liddle admits that “biological design inferences” may be valid in principle. Over 200 comments appeared on the prior thread, including a fair amount of back and forth between Barry, Elizabeth and me, all of which may be worth reviewing for those who are interested. However, the primary takeaway from that thread is that we need another back-to-basics primer on intelligent design – specifically, what the design inference is and how it works. Yes, I know regular readers have a great Read More ›

The United Methodist Church (UMC), whose motto is “Open Minds, Open Hearts, Open Doors” has barred Discovery Institute from having an information table in the exhibit hall at their upcoming quadrennial General Conference this May. After submitting an application to be in the exhibit hall per the established process, Discovery Institute was informed that they would not allowed to be present as the Institute’s position on ID was at odds with the UMC’s Statement on Evolution and Intelligent Design which says in part that the UMC opposes “…the introduction of any faith-based theories such as Creationism or Intelligent Design into the science curriculum of our public schools.” It should be readily clear that when this language was drafted back in Read More ›

The recent finding that the DNA packaging technology and structure, known as chromatin, is not limited to eukaryotes but is also present in archaea, and so from an evolutionary perspective must have “evolved before archaea and eukaryotes split apart—more than 2 billion years ago,” is merely the latest in a string of misadventures evolutionists have incurred ever since they stole the histones.  Read more