Here’s a new, UK-based blog, The Darwin Deception,
Darwinism as an explanation for life is dead. The final death blow was administered by discoveries about intracellular nanomachinery, which amply satisfy Darwin’s own test of falsification. Dead, but it won’t lie down. …
Dude: Darwinism and a multitude of other dead ideas and popular delusions are crowded so thick, they can’t fall down when they die. Read More ›
Which professional communicators always suspected. The guy who worked with Nim Chimpsky, Herbert Terrace, speaks honestly* about his research here.
The language didn’t materialize. A human baby starts out mostly imitating, then begins to string words together. Nim didn’t learn. His three-sign combinations — such as ‘eat me eat’ or ‘play me Nim’ — were redundant. He imitated signs to get rewards. I published the negative results in 1979 in the journal Science, which had a chilling effect on the field. Read More ›
The Centre for Intelligent Design (C4ID) UK recently announced its 2011 conference on intelligent design. This may be just the right opportunity to increase your understanding of the fast moving centre-stage debate about Darwinism and Intelligent Design and at the same time enjoy a fabulous conference centre, all en-suite, in the Malvern Hills, Worcestershire.
You’ll be engaging with world-class speakers for up to five sessions over the Friday evening and Saturday as they bring the scientific evidence that is making ID an unstoppable movement, world-wide.
If you have been following UD over the past few days you will know Dr Nick Matzke, formerly Public Information Project Director of the US NCSE, has intervened in Dr Cudworth’s thread on the question of evolutionary biology qualifications of leading objectors to design theory.
As a result of this, in the end, even Dr Cudworth has commented on the tangential issue — evolution (especially claimed universal common descent) vs creationism and design theory with the Of Pandas and People book that featured in the Dover Trial as a significant point of contention , most recently here in response to Dr Matzke here.
I think the whole issue is a polarising, distractive side-track.
Why is that? Read More ›
At Ricochet, Claire Berlinski (naughty girl, she is examining the intelligent design controversy as if there was something obvious to know about the universe we live in) says, (June 13, 2011),
What exactly is “political correctness?” Where does this idea come from, historically? What are its effects upon science, government, the public at large? Is it a single thing? How dangerous is it, really?
Depends. Some, who have dealt with PC on the ground, would say to anyone: Are you protected by a bureaucracy? Does your income and social position depend on others being forced to acknowledge you, even though you are useless or destructive to them? Are people expected to bark nonsense that upholds your position, for their own safety?
She adds, Read More ›
In this post, I’m going to assume that the only freedom worth having is libertarian free will: the free will I possess if there are choices that I have made during my life where I could have chosen differently, under identical circumstances. That is, I believe that libertarian free will is incompatible with determinism. By contrast, indeterminism is compatible with the existence of libertarian freedom, but in no way implies it.
There are some people who think that even if your choices are fully determined by your circumstances, they are still free, if you selected them for a reason and if you are capable of being educated to act for better reasons. People who think like that are known as compatibilists. I’m not one of them; I’m an incompatibilist. Specifically, I’m what an agent-causal incompatibilist: I believe that humans have a kind of agency (an ability to act) that cannot be explained in terms of physical events.
Some time ago, I came across The Cogito Model of human freedom, on The Information Philosopher Web site, by Dr. Roddy Doyle. Read More ›
In spite of common sense and the scientific evidence, evolutionists have once again shown that evolution is a miracle worker. A new paper by evolutionists in the world’s leading journal argues that proteins evolved after all, despite just about every shred of evidence mandating otherwise. And just how did evolution do it again? It turns out proteins evolved because they evolved. If only I had thought of that—I could be an evolutionist too. Read more
From (ScienceDaily, July 13, 2011), we learn: “African and Non-African Populations Intermixed Well After Migration out of Africa 60,000 Years Ago, Genome Studies Show”:
Researchers have probed deeper into human evolution by developing an elegant new technique to analyse whole genomes from different populations. One key finding from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute’s study is that African and non-African populations continued to exchange genetic material well after migration out-of-Africa 60,000 years ago. This shows that interbreeding between these groups continued long after the original exodus.
Good to know. But surely no surprise? Isn’t “non-exchange” almost always enforced by law, custom, or taboo? Read More ›
An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as “religious headgear”.
In “Austrian driver’s religious headgear strains credulity” (July 14, 2011), BBC News tells us so
Readers may recall that pastafarianism first surfaced as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a sort of street drama against the idea of design in nature, at Kansas school board hearings. It blossomed into a Web site. Austrian Niko Alm, learning that religious headgear is allowed in official photos claimed that “the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism.”
Given that “the only dogma allowed in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the rejection of dogma,” some think his three-year crusade a protest against the permissible religious headgear policy. Read More ›
All? Some? None?
Clark et al., The Reality of Pervasive Transcription:
Current estimates indicate that only about 1.2% of the mammalian genome codes for amino acids in proteins. However, mounting evidence over the past decade has suggested that the vast majority of the genome is transcribed, well beyond the boundaries of known genes, a phenomenon known as pervasive transcription [1]. Challenging this view, an article published in PLoS Biology by van Bakel et al. concluded that “the genome is not as pervasively transcribed as previously reported” [2] and that the majority of the detected low-level transcription is due to technical artefacts and/or background biological noise. These conclusions attracted considerable publicity [3]–[6]. Here, we present an evaluation of the analysis and conclusions of van Bakel et al. compared to those of others and show that (1) the existence of pervasive transcription is supported by multiple independent techniques; (2) re-analysis of the van Bakel et al. tiling arrays shows that their results are atypical compared to those of ENCODE and lack independent validation; and (3) the RNA sequencing dataset used by van Bakel et al. suffered from insufficient sequencing depth and poor transcript assembly, compromising their ability to detect the less abundant transcripts outside of protein-coding genes. We conclude that the totality of the evidence strongly supports pervasive transcription of mammalian genomes, although the biological significance of many novel coding and noncoding transcripts remains to be explored.
However, van Bakel et al. respond: Read More ›
At Design Matrix, blog for the book of the name, Mike Gene introduces us to the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor:
Earlier I showed you that the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA) was quite modern-like in terms of its nuclear pore complex, mechanisms of transport through this complex, and the entire endomembranous system. Yet the modern-like features do not stop there.
Introns and Spliceosome Read More ›
Regular readers of my posts will be aware that I reject materialism. One of the strongest arguments for materialism, however, is that its alternative, dualism, is untenable. The main problem confronting dualism is the “interaction problem”: how can an immaterial mind, which is completely lacking in physical properties, exert any causal influence on the material world? The idea seems to make no sense at all.
In today’s post, I’m going to examine one argument which attempts to dissolve the interaction problem, and explain why I think the argument does not succeed. (I’ll propose a tentative solution in my next post.) According to the solution put forward by Professor Edward Feser, a well-known philosopher of mind, the interaction problem only arises if you think (as Descartes is supposed to have done) that mind and body are two things, and that the former interacts with the latter in a purely mechanical fashion – as if the mind were like a “spiritual billiard ball” that could somehow set “physical billiard balls” (i.e. neurons in the brain) in motion. (Descartes’ actual views are the subject of some debate, but the picture I’ve outlined here is commonly referred to as Cartesian dualism.) Professor Feser objects strongly to the mechanical conception of causality that has dominated philosophy for the last 300 years, because it completely ignores the directedness (or finality) of causal processes, as well as the forms of causal agents, which make them the kinds of entities they are.
While I share Feser’s view that Cartesian dualism is flawed, I disagree with his claim that Aristotle’s hylemorphic dualism (which views the soul as the form of the body and not as a separate entity) automatically dissolves the interaction problem. I shall argue that while minds do not interact with brains, people can and do interact with their brains in a non-physical manner. (Just to be clear, I’m talking about efficient-causal interaction here: I’m claiming that I can cause the neurons in my brain to move, simply by deciding to raise my arm.) Read More ›
In “Smart lizard solves a problem it’s never seen before” (New Scientist July 2011), Michael Marshall reports,
Clever lizards have worked out how to unplug holes to reach food, suggesting that problem-solving is not the sole preserve of warm-blooded birds and mammals.