As the truth becomes ever more clear, so too the mythology must become ever more powerful. As we learn more, we must deny more. They once said biology was made of simple building blocks, but as this BBC video shows in pixel-level detail, that was just another myth. So now we need a new one. I don’t know what the twenty first century’s origins theory will be, but it will be called evolution. See more
“Avian flight,” a new studyexplains, “is one of the remarkable achievements of vertebrate evolution.” Indeed, there is the “complex biotechnical architecture of avian wings,” the “magic structural wing asymmetries” so important for aeroelastic flight control, and the “extremely precise coordination of the complex wing beat motions, together with a perfect flight guidance and control performance.” Read more
Proteins consist of a long sequence of amino acids and those amino acids are supplied by the so-called transfer RNA, or tRNA, molecules. The tRNA molecules, in turn, are loaded with the right amino acid by the so-called aminoacyl-transfer RNA synthetases, or aaRS, proteins. There are several different versions of aaRS proteins, which load the different tRNA molecules with the different kinds of amino acids. These aaRS proteins hang around the ribosome where proteins are constructed. But as I discussed in the previous post, the lysine aaRS, also known as LysRS, has an interesting dual role. Normally it hangs around the ribosome where it binds to another LysRS to form what is known as a dimer. In this dimer configuration, there is Read More ›
I’d like to thank skeptical philosopher John Loftus for his prompt reply to my post, Detecting the supernatural: Why science doesn’t presuppose methodological naturalism, after all. In his post, which is titled, Heads I Win Tails You Lose: Another Christian Apologist’s Trick, Loftus zeroes in on what he sees as the fatal weaknesses in my argument. Let’s take a look at them. (The image at the top, by the way, is of a humpback whale breaching, courtesy of Whit Welles and Wikipedia.) When discussing biological Intelligent Design, I calculated that by a very generous estimate, there had been perhaps 10,000,000 “acts of intervention” (to use Loftus’ term), during the 4,000 million year history of life on Earth. I also emphasized Read More ›
You’ve seen those amazing multi-purpose kitchen utensils and jackknifes that perform a dozen tasks, but it is all standard fare in biology. From the DNA molecule which stores all kinds of information (you can see examples here, here, hereand here) including overlapping genes, to molecules that fulfill various roles depending on the cellular context and gene sharing, biology is the model of efficiency. Call it multi-purpose design, component reuse, optimization of information density, or whatever, it is one of biology’s biggest unsung feats and last week yet another example was published. Read more
Memo to Eugenie Scott and the National Center for Science Education: the claim that scientists must explain the natural world in terms of natural processes alone, eschewing all supernatural explanations, is now being openly denied by three leading scientists who are also outspoken atheists. I’m referring to physicist Sean Carroll, and biologists Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers, who hold that there are circumstances under which scientists can legitimately infer the existence of supernatural causes. That’s a pretty formidable trio. The NCSE is perfectly free to disown these scientists if it wishes, but I think it would be severely undermining its own credibility if it did so. Let me state at the outset that Intelligent Design, while open to the Read More ›
The twentieth century’s eugenics movement was eventually discarded, but eugenics did not go away entirely. Today eugenics continues, but it is a much more diverse and technologically sophisticated. There are the so-called eugenic abortions where the unborn with higher disease risks are “terminated.” And today’s technology allows for specific embryos, and even genes, to be selected. There seems to be, as Nathaniel Comfort observed this month, a eugenic impulse that drives us to seek a better human race. Underlying such health concerns, however, are the usual less benevolent motivations. In addition to the promised health benefits, Comfort explains that eugenics offers an intellectual thrill, and the profits of genetic biomedicine. Such lures are, explains Comfort, “too great for us to do Read More ›
Nature is, as Tennyson lamented, red in tooth and claw, but Darwinism turned death and bloodshed into a virtue. It is evolution’s natural selection that makes way for the more fit by killing off the less fit. Natural selection did not, indeed it cannot, induce better mutations. But when by chance they luckily arise, then they propagate at the cost of the lesser designs. Spencer’s phrase “the survival of the fittest,” which Darwin adopted, is more optimistic sounding but no less telling. With evolution, death is the engine of progress. Or as Matt Ridley explained today, … Read more
In my previous two posts (see here and here) on feminist atheist Libby Anne’s Love, Joy, Feminism blog, I critiqued her embrace of evolutionary naturalism, and her rejection of the view that the cosmos was designed by an Intelligent Being. I then exposed the deficiencies in her ethical views, which have led her to conclude that human beings do not become persons until the moment of birth, and that abortion should be a woman’s legal right at any time before her baby is born. In my final post, I’m going to address the factual claims that Libby Anne makes in a post that subsequently went viral, entitled, How I lost faith in the pro-life movement. Her opening paragraph immediately grabs Read More ›
Here is a must see video that is well worth the five minutes of your time. It will have you asking, with evolutionist Ed Scholes, “Why?” Read more
Evolutionary thought holds that the universe, the quasars, the galaxies, the solar systems, the planets and moons arose spontaneously by chance events and natural law. How that occurred is uncertain and under scientific investigation. That it occurred is not uncertain, it is a fact. These two different departments of evolutionary thought are disjoint. The fact of evolution does not derive from the particular theories of how it could have happened. It must be that way because there is substantial uncertainty of how it could have happened. Theories of the Solar system evolution, for instance, fall into two broad categories. In the monistic theories, the planets and Sun arise from the same process, such as in Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis. In dualistic Read More ›
A culture’s creation narrative is foundational, for it forms the template for everything else. One of the consequences of evolution—the belief that the world spontaneously arose by itself—is that it underwrites moral relativism, which is not to say there is no right and wrong but rather that right and wrong is something that we decide. And since evolution is true, it is to evolution that we go for our rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaims the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But with evolution there is no such endowment, for there is Read More ›
It’s another rags-to-riches evolutionary story, this time with epigenetics going from dog house to white house. First evolutionists denied epigenetics, then they said epigenetics are inconsequential and now they say epigenetics may be instrumental in, err, the origin of the human brain. That’s quite a turn around. When (i) leading evolutionists such as Jerry Coyneare saying epigenetic characters are not usually inherited past one or two generations and so are not “going to change our concept of evolution,” while (ii) research papers are concluding that epigenetic changes, coordinated with genetic changes, “could play a role in the evolution of the primate brain,” then you know something is wrong. Evolutionists are having to rewrite their story at an ever increasing rate to try to Read More ›
Ideas have consequences. Over the past century evolutionary thought has become dominant in much more than just the historical sciences. Other branches of science as well as education, law, history, public policy and media have increasingly been influenced by the idea that the world arose spontaneously. This tremendous influence of evolutionary thought has consequences that are largely misunderstood. The misconception is that, while there have been some missteps along the way such as in the twentieth century’s eugenics movement, those were both minor and largely behind us now and the greater and lasting consequences of evolution have been positive. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Read more
This morning, I ran across a news item on the “undiscovery” of Sandy Island off Australia: Most explorers dream of discovering uncharted territory, but a team of Australian scientists have done the exact opposite. They have found an island that doesn’t exist. (vid at the linked) This led me to think about the institution of an award for exposing scientific fraud and a NewScientist interview with Shi-min Fang, its first recipient: What prompted you to start challenging dubious pseudoscientific claims in China? In 1998, after eight years studying in the US, I returned to China and was shocked to see it was deluged with pseudosciences, superstitions and scientific misconduct. . . . (This one is disturbing, NS even speaks of Read More ›