Intelligent Design

A lot of people still have trouble distinguishing between Intelligent Design and Creationism. This post will hopefully help out.
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Download here. Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt has been a depth marker of sorts. Money-losing Barnes & Noble and private misshelvers tried hard to keep the Cambrian explosion and other information-rich scenes from the history of life stuck in the awful, disgusting goo of the religion-and-science swamp. Yet it stayed near the top in paleontology for many months, and has garnered 700 reviews (as of about 12:25 EST). The average rating of 4.5 stars suggests that Darwin trolls are outnumbered by people who want serious answers to serious questions: — Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) –. This is another sign of Darwin’s weakening hegemony. People who want serious responses are beginning to insist on them. Read More ›

In a recent post titled, Was Jesus a real person? – see what denialism looks like, Professor Larry Moran declares that as far as he knows, “the evidence that Jesus actually existed is not strong and, even more importantly, there’s no independent evidence that he rose from the dead or performed miracles.” Moran is miffed that Dr. James F. Grath, who has a Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, Indianapolis, accused him (and Professor Jerry Coyne) of “denialism” for rejecting mainstream historical scholarship about Jesus and voicing skepticism about whether Jesus really existed. Moran complains: “Is it ‘denialism’ to think that the Biblical Jesus — the one who performed miracles and rose from the dead — Read More ›

Land and sea timing may have differed in the mass die-off 250 million years ago. Never mind theories of consciousness getting rocked, see this on the Permian extinction from ScienceDaily: New evidence gathered from the Karoo Basin in South Africa sheds light on a catastrophic extinction event that occurred more than 250 million years ago and wiped out more than 90 percent of life in Earth’s oceans and about 70 percent of animal species on land. The new evidence derives from a key volcanic ash deposit that the team discovered in rock layers, or strata, that were reported to chronicle the mass extinction. By dating the volcanic ash-bearing deposit, researchers concluded that two phases of this extinction — one on Read More ›

Maybe not: We might just have found evidence of another universe bumping into planet Earth, a scientist has very tentatively suggested. While mapping the cosmic microwave background – the light left over from the early universe – Ranga-Ram Chary found a mysterious glow. Chary, a researcher at Planck’s US data centre in California, was mapping CMB when he spotted the unexpected glow. In his paper, Spectral Variations of the Sky: Constraints on Alternate Universes, he said that while there is a 30% chance the fluctuations are nothing unusual, there is also the possibility they provide evidence of a multiverse. “It could also possibly be due to the collision of our Universe with an alternate Universe whose baryon to photon ratio Read More ›

From bFast, appended to Baffling but undead physics results: Physicists always seem to end up with puzzles: what is dark energy, what is dark matter, what caused the big bang, how big is a proton. I love the honest puzzles that physicists bring to the table. Evolutionary biologists, however, never seem to be puzzled about nuthin’. First life? Don’t know how yet, but its not a problem. Cambrian explosion, wasn’t mutch,a and it had millions of years. Irreducible complexity? No deal, we did this experiment that produced two mutations to produce a single function — after 1/2 million years worth of evolving. HAR1F pulls off 18 mutations, no problem, millions of years. No issues, not problems, no puzzles. Its as Read More ›

Earth still in orbit, last we heard. Recently, I (O’Leary for News) have had skeptical things to say about D. S. Wilson’s Evolution Institute’s anticipated triumphal march for “evolutionary theory” throughout all disciplines in the21st century.* That said, I came across an interesting post on the site by science writer Dan Jones (The Philosopher In The Mirror) standing up to Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne. Coyne wishes to claim that religious belief in general leads to terrorism and that those who offer a more focused inquiry are stooges. In fact, it’s easy to show that Coyne is attacking a strawman. He would have you believe that radicalisation researchers are a bunch of “self-flagellating liberals” who ignore the role of Read More ›

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has written a post mocking an anthropologist for claiming that human beings aren’t apes. Not only is Coyne’s reasoning muddle-headed, but his biology is embarrassingly wrong. Heck, even I could spot his mistakes – and I’m not a scientist. The anthropologist who has had the temerity to declare that humans are not apes is Professor Jonathan Marks, who teaches biological anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In an article on his PopAnth blog titled, Are we apes? No, we are humans, Marks insists that we are related to apes: “indeed,” he writes, “we are closer to a chimpanzee than that chimpanzee is to an orangutan” and “we know Read More ›

It’s possible, says a recent Biology Direct paper: Here’s the abstract: Background: Microbial genetic diversity is often investigated via the comparison of relatively similar 16S molecules through multiple alignments between reference sequences and novel environmental samples using phylogenetic trees, direct BLAST matches, or phylotypes counts. However, are we missing novel lineages in the microbial dark universe by relying on standard phylogenetic and BLAST methods? If so, how can we probe that universe using alternative approaches? We performed a novel type of multi-marker analysis of genetic diversity exploiting the topology of inclusive sequence similarity networks. Results: Our protocol identified 86 ancient gene families, well distributed and rarely transferred across the 3 domains of life, and retrieved their environmental homologs among 10 Read More ›

In science journals: Because of super-specialization, the authors of papers themselves are nowadays often asked to suggest referees for peer review of their own work, but this, of course, leaves an opening for the practice of fraud. In a modern variant on Gogol’s Dead Souls, some scientists have been caught sending their papers for peer review to non-existent reviewers, complete with a curriculum vitae and an e-mail address. The article quotes the author of a blog on scientific research called “Retraction Watch,” who said “This is officially becoming a trend:” an odd way to put it, since either it is a trend or it isn’t, official recognition having nothing to do with it. There are even companies in China, apparently, Read More ›

At the Evolution Institute, UNC Charlotte biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks, who blogs on the cultural significance of Darwinism at Anthropomics, writes, ”Evolutionary Psychology Is Neither”: … It’s presumably better than creationist psychology, but nobody practices creationist psychology – so presumably the word “evolutionary” is doing a bit more work here than it may seem at first blush. Indeed, the word seems to encode, in this context, a series of propositions that most people actually working in human evolution believe to be false, if not ridiculous. Foundationally, where students of human evolution have generally emphasized the adaptability of the human mind, evolutionary psychologists have rather attempted to call attention to the adaptedness of the human mind. From these opposed starting points, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “We now know what the plumage looked like on the tail, and that from the mid-femur down, it had bare skin,” says Aaron van der Reest. This is the first report of such preserved skin forming a web from the femoral shaft to the abdomen, never before seen in non-avian dinosaurs. “Ostriches use bare skin to thermoregulate. Because the plumage on this specimen is virtually identical to that of an ostrich, we can infer that Ornithomimus was likely doing the same thing, using feathered regions on their body to maintain body temperature. It would’ve looked a lot like an ostrich.” In fact, this group of animals–referred to as ornithomimids–is commonly referred to as “ostrich mimics.” The find is Read More ›

Animal mind is a fascinating topic, and I’ll be starting a five-part series on it at Evolution News & Views later this month. Meanwhile, from the world of grumpy cat vids, we learn: A study carried out between the University of Edinburgh and Bronx Zoo compared our beloved domestic cat with its wilder relatives. Compared with the snow leopard, the Scottish wildcat and the African lion, researchers found these larger predators shared similar characteristics of aggression and neurotic behaviour to domestic cats. They needed to do a study to find that out? Dominance, impulsiveness and neurotic behaviour are the most common trait shared between the domestic cat and the wild cat. More. Well, a problem arises when we characterize cats’ Read More ›

It does not take a lot of familiarity to know that a common and widely repeated accusation against ID is that it is “creationism in a cheap tuxedo,” that it tries to smuggle the strictly verboten “supernatural” into scientific thought on origins, and that it is a god-of-the-gaps appeal to ignorance by way of we don’t know what happened so goddidit. In fact, every one of these assertions is false — and in light of easily accessible corrective facts and cogent argument, such are little more than a strawman tactic. (But in a day of widespread, conscience benumbed, en-darkened intellectually blind sociopathic evil where ruthless agit-prop, spin tactics and message dominance too often subvert duties of care to fairness, accuracy, Read More ›

Here. Highly religious Americans are less likely than others to see conflict between faith and science. People’s sense that there generally is a conflict between religion and science seems to have less to do with their own religious beliefs than it does with their perceptions of other people’s beliefs. Less than one-third of Americans polled in the new survey (30%) say their personal religious beliefs conflict with science, while fully two-thirds (68%) say there is no conflict between their own beliefs and science. People’s sense that there generally is a conflict between religion and science seems to have less to do with their own religious beliefs than it does with their perceptions of other people’s beliefs. Less than one-third of Read More ›