Intelligent Design

A new study has found that Trichodesmium or “sea sawdust,” a genus of oceanic bacteria described by Captain Cook in the eighteenth century and so prolific it can be seen from space, has a unique, lineage-specific genome. Less than two-thirds of the genome of this crucial ammonium-producing bacteria codes for proteins. No other such bacteria has such a low value, and conversely such a large percentage of the genome that is non coding. This lineage-specific genome, as one report explains, “defies common evolutionary dogma.”  Read more

Anyone remember Darwin’s finches? The clinch bird for Darwinian evolution? Except that “It’s been observed that the species of Darwin’s finches sometimes hybridise – Peter and Rosemary Grant have seen that during their fieldwork,” Prof Andersson told the BBC. “But it’s difficult to say what the long-term evolutionary significance of that is. What does it contribute?” What it contributes is that one would be hard pressed to show that there is any evolution going on, in the face of this much hybridization. Meanwhile, more surprises: Birds on the Galápagos Islands have developed new eating habits “We met some scepticism when we submitted the manuscript for our article. People simply didn’t believe it was possible. But it is — the birds Read More ›

And they don’t like it: ‘The Principle,’ Delano’s latest film project, challenges the Copernican principle, the notion that humans are just an insignificant speck in the universe. Interviews with cosmologists, in depth studies and surveys will leave viewers wondering whether we are indeed a unique species. Yet, it seems this is exactly what liberal academics and the mainstream media don’t want. Actually, they haven’t seen it, but that wouldn’t matter. Anyway, so of course they engaged in respectful debate, right?: Some specific ways the media targeted the film was by contacting the cast and other people involved in the production and convincing them they had been tricked. “First of all, the actual media assault was the result of an attempt Read More ›

The transformation of science from a method to a metaphysic? In a review of William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, historian Jackson Lears writes (Commonweal): It is a platitude that we cannot defend the humanities without slipping into platitudes. Why is that? Part of the answer involves the corrosive impact of contemporary intellectual fashion. We are besieged by a resurgence of positivist scientism—the transformation of science from a method to a metaphysic, promising precise answers to age-old ultimate questions. Yet while pop-neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, and other defenders of quantifiable certainty have beaten back postmodern philosophical critiques, the postmodern style of ironic detachment has flourished. The recoil from modernist high Read More ›

Like Dracula it can’t really die, as it is culturally needed.* So it just keeps rising from the grave. Evidence is irrelevant. In the context of giving apes human rights instead of protection, we read: We share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees and it has been argued this makes ape experimenters 99% as bad as the Nazis. It has also been argued that the medical benefits obtained from experiments on chimpanzees have been minimal. The chances are that the advancement of medical research would suffer little if the apes were given new rights that protected them from these experimental procedures. Most funding for chimp lab research in the United States was to end immediately in 2011, and the Read More ›

Forty years ago biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant began an ongoing study of the different finch species on the Galápagos Islands. They gathered valuable data and during drought years they observed the finches adapt to the environmental challenges. In particular, the population of medium ground finches, Geospiza fortis, shifted toward a larger beak. This was because the drought left smaller seeds in scarce supply, and so those G. fortis with smaller beaks died off. These initial observations were followed with detailed studies of the changes that took place at the molecular level. The latest such study, published in February of this year, describes how a particular protein affects the embryonic development of the finch’s beak. All of this makes for a good case study Read More ›

The following is a guest post by Aurelio Smith. I have invited him to present a critique of Active Information in a more prominent place at UD so we can have a good discussion of Active Information’s strengths and weaknesses. The rest of this post is his.
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In breaking news, Climate Audit has obtained exclusive information on output from the first runs of Weaver’s “next generation” climate model. These are the first known climate model predictions of the future of human evolution. The results are worrying: Take a look. Serves us all right, presumably. 😉 If you are interested in climate change issues, you might want to note this new book. Note: No more news posting till later this evening. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Skulls used as bowls, the rest discarded. From ScienceDaily: Dr Silvia Bello, from the Natural History Museum’s Department of Earth Sciences, lead researcher of the work said, “The human remains have been the subject of several studies. In a previous analysis, we could determine that the cranial remains had been carefully modified to make skull-cups. During this research, however, we’ve identified a far greater degree of human modification than recorded in earlier. We’ve found undoubting evidence for defleshing, disarticulation, human chewing, crushing of spongy bone, and the cracking of bones to extract marrow.” The presence of human tooth marks on many of the bones provides incontrovertible evidence for cannibalism, the team found. In a wider context, the treatment of the Read More ›

Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, interviews Adrian Bejan, orignator of the constructal law at Huffington Post: I’ve quoted Adrian Bejan numerous times in books and articles about evolution, about academic mafias and peer review, but somehow we never got around to having a full conversation. So I called him recently at Duke University, where he is now J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, to chat about both his constructal law of design in nature — which he considers one of the few laws of physics — as well as his formative years in the 50s and 60s in communist Romania. … Suzan Mazur: There continues to be some debate about which came first in origin Read More ›

Formamide detected in Nebulosa NGC1333/NASA-Spitzer From ScienceDaily: One of science’s greatest challenges is learning about the origin of life and its precursor molecules. Formamide (NH2CHO) is an excellent candidate for helping to search for answers as it contains four essential elements (nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen), and can synthesise amino acids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids and other key compounds for living organisms. However, this molecule is also abundant in space, mainly in molecular clouds or the concentrations of gas and dust where stars are born. This has been confirmed by an international team of researchers, including Spanish investigators, after searching for formamide in ten star-forming regions. “We have detected formamide in five protosuns, which proves that this molecule (in all probability Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The new research, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that structures once thought to be Earth’s oldest microfossils do not compare with younger fossil candidates but have, instead, the character of peculiarly shaped minerals. In 1993, US scientist Bill Schopf described tiny carbon-rich filaments within the 3.46 billion-year-old Apex chert (fine-grained sedimentary rock) from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, which he likened to certain forms of bacteria, including cyanobacteria. The apparent find was controversial but the ensuing debate was hard to resolve until more advanced equipment became available, at which point: Now Dr David Wacey, a Marie Curie Fellow in Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, in collaboration with the late Professor Read More ›

Story here. For the first time in US history, a judge has decreed that a pair of chimpanzees held at a university research facility are covered by the same laws that govern the detention of humans, effectively rendering the animals as legal “people” in the eyes of the law. New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe said that the apes, held at Stony Brook University for research purposes, are covered by a writ of habeas corpus — a basic legal principle that lets people challenge the validity of their detention. The bag of chemicals we call “ape” is in principle no different from the bag of chemicals we call “human.” Justice Douglas famously wanted to extend rights to rocks and Read More ›

So claims writer Mark Strauss at Slate: Ridiculing astrobiologists is a favorite sport at the Discovery Institute, which complains on its news site that “hardly a month goes by lately when the science media fail to breathlessly report the discovery of a new planet, in some star’s ‘habitable zone,’ that might hypothetically be capable of supporting life.” The institute attributes the coverage in part to hype purposefully generated by “organized science” to shake down the government for grant money. But the creationists also see a more sinister agenda than naked greed. They place astrobiologists among the ranks of the “Darwin Brigades” who have always been “eager to undermine human exceptionalism,” since “the alleged ordinariness of the human race was vital Read More ›

David Bentley Hart calls subjective self-awareness the “primordial datum.” It is a fact that cannot not be known. It follows that everyone knows it to be a fact. Denying that it is a fact immediately descends into absurdity. Consider “I deny that I am subjectively self-aware.” Here is a chart of the chemicals that make up the human body: A group of oxygen atoms do not have the capacity to deny a truth claim. I am sure you would agree that the sentence “the oxygen atoms denied truth claim X” is absurd, no matter what X is. What is true for oxygen is also true for the atoms of the other elements of the body, i.e., carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, Read More ›