Intelligent Design

So one does not know where information is published, only whether it seems useful? And, above all, whether it survived attempts at replication? It’s good to see so many thinkers putting their heads together about the scandal of peer review. From Nature, Scientists debate the merits of deleting journal names from their publication lists. One UCal biologist, Michael Eisen, has removed the names for his lab’s Web site. Eisen’s move is part of a broader push to assess papers on their own merits. “We have become far too reliant on journal names as a means to evaluate science and scientists,” Eisen said in an interview. After writing about this issue for so long, he “felt it was important to demonstrate Read More ›

Over at The Skeptical Zone, Mikkel “Rumraket” Rasmussen has written a post critical of Dr. Stephen Meyer, titled, Beating a dead horse (Darwin’s Doubt), which is basically a rehash of comments he made on a thread on Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog last year. The author’s aim is to expose Dr. Stephen Meyer’s “extremely shoddy scholarship,” but as we’ll see, Rasmussen’s own research skills leave a lot to be desired. Did Dr. Meyer fail to document his sources? Rasmussen focuses his attack on chapter 10 of Dr. Meyer’s book, “Darwin’s Doubt.” He writes: Having read the book, a recurring phenomenon is that Meyer time and again makes claims without providing any references for them. Take for instance the claim that the Read More ›

Healthy eating is important, but much advice that filters down to the public has not stood the test of time: From columnist Jonah Goldberg: For decades, the government has advised Americans on what they should eat. The advice isn’t just advisory; it drives everything from school lunches and agricultural subsidies to marketing for those bowls of candy we call breakfast cereal. But the science behind this enterprise has always been shaky. In “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” Gary Taubes chronicled how the federal government went all-in for a low-fat, high-carbohydrate food pyramid. The man most responsible, nutritionist and epidemiologist Ancel Keys, was convinced that America’s fat-rich diet explained the rise in heart disease in the U.S. It was a plausible theory, Read More ›

In the fourth video in the “Twelve days of evolution” series produced by PBS and “It’s okay to be smart,” Joe Hanson, Ph.D. (Biology) tells a whopper about the evolution of the eye. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Computer simulations have replayed the process in just 350,000 generations, showing simple light patches can evolve into camera-like eyes in tiny, adaptive steps, 1,829 to be precise. Nature took a little longer than that, but genes, biochemistry, fossils, and anatomy all tell the same story. Eyes are pretty easy to evolve. So easy that nature has done it independently 50 to 100 times. That kind of complexity, rather than overthrowing Darwin’s theory, is proof of its power. Back in Read More ›

The answer to that question will decide what science is. And scientists are asking it now. From Quanta: String theory, the multiverse and other ideas of modern physics are potentially untestable. At a historic meeting in Munich, scientists and philosophers asked: should we trust them anyway? The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of Read More ›

The remarkable “powers” of evolution are now shown to degrade (aka “mutate”) the human genes essential to intelligence.

Remarkably, they found that some of the same genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people were also the same genes that cause impaired cognitive ability and epilepsy when mutated, networks which they called M1 and M3.

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Marc Hauser? See Evilicious. (They are still trying to rehabilitate him after the “monkeys’ intelligence” debacle.) Maybe not. From ScienceDaily: New research suggests that betrayals of trust were the missing link in understanding the rapid spread of our own species around the world. Moral disputes motivated by broken trust and a sense of betrayal became more frequent and motivated early humans to put distance between them and their rivals. … She suggests that as commitments to others became more essential to survival, and human groups ever more motivated to identify and punish those who cheat, the ‘dark’ side of human nature also developed. Moral disputes motivated by broken trust and a sense of betrayal became more frequent and motivated early humans Read More ›

People have been begging me to tell them about this one weird trick to get rid of evolution. But up until now I have been hesitant. It’s almost too easy. Plus, getting rid of evolution would mean not having evolutionists around anymore, and what fun would that be? But now, for a limited time, you too can get rid of evolution with  read more

Recently, Evolution News & Views has been discussing the decade-old Dover case that, in my view, cleared the decks for serious discussions about Darwinism. No surprise, lots more people express doubts, now that the failing American school system is no longer  an issue. West, a director at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (ID Central), writes, It was during the bleak months following Dover that I made one of the biggest decisions of my professional life. Rather than cut and run, I decided to risk everything. Convinced of the critical importance of the intelligent design debate, I gave up my tenured position as a university professor to devote my full energies to Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Read More ›

I once heard an evolution professor insist that all of the biological evidences support and confirm the theory of evolution. Since then I found that this view occupies the consensus position. All of the findings in the life sciences are exactly what we would expect from an evolutionary perspective. You can see it everywhere from textbooks to evolutionary journal papers. A good recent example of this thinking comes from professor Jason Rosenhouse.  Read more

Evolutionists disagree amongst themselves about the theory of evolution but they agree about the fact of evolution. If there is one point of agreement within evolution-dom, it is that evolution is a scientific fact. A few years after Darwin died Joseph Le Conte explained that evolution is a law, not a theory, and it is a law to which every department of natural studies must adhere. It is not merely as certain as gravity, “Nay, it is far more certain.” Similarly, Teilhard de Chardin maintained that “evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow—this is what evolution is.”  Read more

From New Scientist: Parrots use pebble tools to grind up own mineral supplements … They were filmed using pebbles for grinding, thought to be a uniquely human activity – one that allowed our civilisations to extract more nutrition from cereal-based foods. … But the purpose of the behaviour is not yet settled. Although females need the calcium, it was usually males who were caught grinding. Perhaps, they regurgitate the mineral and pass it on to their mate: they are known to do so with food. But why use a tool and not just the beak, anyway? The team suspects that using their beak alone for grinding may be uncomfortable. … “It adds to the rich assortment of tool-related skills in Read More ›

From Physics World: The Physics World 2015 Breakthrough of the Year goes to Jian-Wei Pan and Chaoyang Lu of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, for being the first to achieve the simultaneous quantum teleportation of two inherent properties of a fundamental particle – the photon. Pan and Lu’s team has now simultaneously transferred a photon’s spin (polarization) and its orbital angular momentum (OAM) to another photon some distance away. … Although it is possible to extend Pan’s method to teleport more than two properties simultaneously, this becomes increasingly difficult with each added property – the likely limit is three. To do this would require the ability to experimentally control 10 photons, while the current record Read More ›

Well, “brood care,” really. The embryos were developing inside their eggs under the carapace of the female Waptia. Instead of being dropped somewhere shortly after fertilization and left to whatever fate … From Science Daily: Waptia fieldensis is an early arthropod, belonging to a group of animals that includes lobsters and crayfish. It had a two-part structure covering the front segment of its body near the head, known as a bivalved carapace. Caron and Vannier believe the carapace played a fundamental role in how the creature practised brood care. “Clusters of egg-shaped objects are evident in five of the many specimens we observed, all located on the underside of the carapace and alongside the anterior third of the body,” said Read More ›

Professor Naomi Oreskes, the author of an influential 2004 study titled, Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, has penned a remarkable piece in The Guardian, in which she accuses top climate scientists of “climate denialism,” for publicly declaring that we need to expand nuclear energy to stop global warming, as renewable sources won’t meet our energy needs. “Climate denialism” is a term which smacks of a witch-hunt. But in this case, Professor Oreskes has bitten off more than she can chew. (H/t Eric Worrall, Judith Curry.) Oreskes defies the consensus: most serious reviewers agree with the pro-nuclear scientists whom she criticizes A couple of weeks ago, four leading climate scientists – Dr. James Hansen (professor at Read More ›