Intelligent Design

Atheist philosopher John Gray has written an unflinchingly honest article in the Guardian, titled, What scares the new atheists. It’s an excellent piece, and I warmly recommend it to readers. A few revealing quotes convey the tenor of the article: In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former Soviet Union. Many rival moralities and political systems – most of them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to assert a basis in science. All Read More ›

It is cheerleading for a worldview, one that permits, even encourages, fiction to stand in for fact. In Scientists Create Methane-Based Life: Science Reporting Stoops to a New Low, Eric Anderson recounts a claim for life on Saturnian moon Titan: Researchers have finally developed a new “life form.” And a methane-based one at that. Now at this point, a few red flags should have been raised in the mind of anyone who is passingly familiar with origin of life research. Indeed, there should be a whole field of red flags waving and snapping smartly in the wind like the Hammer and Sickle on a frigid Moscow (or Titan) morning. Our pulse racing at the news, we scarcely get to the Read More ›

Readers may remember science writer Philip Ball, who described the many worlds multiverse as a fantasy, verging on nihilism. At Prospect Magazine, he narrates the string theory showdown: One of the key predictions specific to string theory is that the three dimensions of space (up-down, left-right and front-back, say) and the one dimension of space (past-future) are not all there is to the fabric of reality. String theory insisted that there are in fact not four but ten dimensions of spacetime—and Witten’s M-theory added one more. We don’t see these dimensions because they are “compactified:” in effect rolled up and hidden away, much as the three-dimensional form of a hosepipe looks like a one-dimensional strand from far enough away. Proposing Read More ›

A friend wrote to ask because he came across a 2001 paper, Entropy and Self-Organization in Multi-Agent Systems by H. Van Dyke Parunak and Sven Brueckner Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2001), 124-130: Emergent self-organization in multi-agent systems appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. This paradox has been explained in terms of a coupling between the macro level that hosts self-organization (and an apparent reduction in entropy), and the micro level (where random processes greatly increase entropy). Metaphorically, the micro level serves as an entropy “sink,” permitting overall system entropy to increase while sequestering this increase from the interactions where selforganization is desired. We make this metaphor precise by constructing a simple example of Read More ›

From The Guardian: How hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals Forty thousand years ago in Europe our ancestors formed a crucial and lasting alliance that enabled us to finish off our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals Modern humans formed an alliance with wolves soon after we entered Europe, argues Shipman. We tamed some and the dogs we bred from them were then used to chase prey and to drive off rival carnivores, including lions and leopards, that tried to steal the meat. … “Even if you brought down a bison, within minutes other carnivores would have been lining up to attack you and steal your prey,” said Shipman. The answer, she argues, was the creation of the human-wolf alliance. Read More ›

Really small: The snapshots may not look like much, but they’re revealing a lot about lifeforms at this extremely miniscule size. For one thing, their metabolisms are so minimal that they likely depend on resources from other bacteria to stay alive. While there’s still a lot that remains a mystery (it’s not certain what half of the genes do), this up-close imagery could eventually fill in a lot of blanks in biology — it’s clear that there’s a world of unusual organisms that have gone largely unnoticed. Engadget Note: If they depend on other bacteria for resources, they probably aren’t going to help much with origin of life studies. They might well be devolved from more metabolically endowed free-living organisms. Read More ›

MicroRNAs are short RNA molecules that regulate gene expression, for example, by binding to messenger RNA molecules which otherwise would code for a protein at a ribosome. MicroRNAs were first discovered in the 1990s but a full understanding of their numbers and distribution across different tissue types has been slow in coming. Increasingly MicroRNAs are understood to be lineage-specific and a new studyfurther confirms this. lineage-specific structures are the antithesis of evolution and its expected common descent pattern. Instead, structures appear in a few species, or even in just a single species, and are nowhere else to be found. Biology, as John Ray found three centuries ago, is full of unique solutions.  Read more

Explained by chemist Addy Pross of Ben-Gurion University, author of What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford, 2012): Despite the widespread view that Darwinian Evolution has been able to explain the emergence of biological complexity that is not the case….But Darwinian theory does not deal with the question how [life] was able to come into being. The troublesome question still in search of an answer is: how did a system capable of evolving come about in the first place. Darwinian theory is a biological theory and therefore deals with biological systems, whereas the Origin of Life problem is a chemical problem. (page 8) Significantly, Darwin himself explicitly avoided the origin of life question, recognizing that within the existing state Read More ›

The term refers to the fact that many features of cells simply cannot be the product of Darwinian evolution (a point that is slowly being conceded now). Trying to rectify some known functions of cells with explicitly Darwinian evolution is just a time sink. Some say, of course, that the idea of irreducible complexity (IR) arose from creationist literature (also here.) Seriously, the term has so far been traced to Templets and the explanation of complex patterns (Cambridge U Press, 1986) by theoretical biologist Michael J. Katz. “Irreducible complexity” appears as an index entry in Katz’s book, and set forth as follows: In the natural world, there are many pattern-assembly systems for which there is no simple explanation. There are useful scientific Read More ›

In her new book, The Origin of Life Circus, journalist Suzan Mazur interviewed Larry Krauss because he is the “gatekeeper” of the late Harry Lonsdale’s prize for promising research into the origin of life (Lonsdale, a chemist, proceeded from a chemical and Darwinian view). Readers may call Krauss from John Lennox replies to Larry Krauss’s claim that Higgs boson “arguably more relevant than God”, Christian cosmologist Don Page calls out Larry Krauss on “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, and Celeb atheists Dawkins and Grayling don’t want to debate apologist Craig because … maybe a reason is now emerging … Larry Krauss! (As Krauss tells it, Craig is “disingenuous,” and he “shocked” Larry Krauss in a recent debate.) Incidentally, for Read More ›

Evolution is not merely a theory about biology. It is a much broader movement, tracing back to the Epicureans, that is more of a worldview than a particular theory. Of course evolution calls for a strictly naturalistic origins narrative. But it also has its own world view. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the so-called Warfare Thesis. Simply put, the idea is that naturalism is the pinnacle of scientific progress and that anyone who questions the dogma that the world arose spontaneously must be driven by nonscientific, religious motives. Hence there is a war between religion and science as scientists inexorably uncover new truths which the pious resist and oppose where they can. The Warfare Thesis can be traced Read More ›

At one time, everyone knew what a gene was. It was one of those little beads on our chromosomes that determined whether we would be tall or short, fat or thin, smart or stupid. Or else didn’t, if we favoured the “environment” hypothesis. The trouble is, in the age of genome mapping, ENCODE, epigenetics, it’s all more fuzzy and more like real life at the same time. One friend suggested that “a gene is a functional unit of heritable information.” Perhaps it need not be a nucleotide. But for the term “gene” to be meaningful, the information must be in principle heritable, whatever the physical medium is. Meanwhile, there is Gerstein et al., “What is a gene, post-ENCODE? History and Read More ›

Voytek at Five Books: As a scientist, I really do believe the scientific method is quite powerful for explaining the world but — at least for the foreseeable future — it is not very good at discussing the human condition. So I think the strength of the arts and the humanities is its ways of discussing the human experience and I hoped to pick up on this in my book choices. The Master and Margarita ?isn’t exactly a scientific book. When you’re looking at how people interact, the suffering, the pain, strife, love and all those crazy things, neuroscience doesn’t really have answers about that. That’s what we’re getting at in the introduction to our book. A neuroscience of love, for Read More ›

From EMBO Rep. 2005 Sep; 6(9): 808–810. Jon Turney: Genes are no longer what they used to be. Once the powerful determinants of our biological and evolutionary fate, their central importance is now gradually being chipped away. At first glance, this may just sound like an interesting puzzle for scientists: How can the gene be placed correctly in the larger context of biology? But it also creates an important challenge when it comes to communicating genetics to the public: How can the role of genes in disease and health be explained to a public who put their faith in biology’s ability to improve their lives? There is no doubt that the effort to map and sequence entire genomes in order Read More ›

From LiveScience, ‘Big Brain’ Gene Found in Humans, Not Chimps A single gene may have paved the way for the rise of human intelligence by dramatically increasing the number of brain cells found in a key brain region. This gene seems to be uniquely human: It is found in modern-day humans, Neanderthals and another branch of extinct humans called Denisovans, but not in chimpanzees. If it is that simple, one could try inserting such material into various life forms, and see if they get any smarter: Then the team inserted and expressed (turned on) this DNA snippet in the brains of mice. Though mice normally have a tiny, smooth neocortex, the mice with the gene insertion grew what looked like Read More ›