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Spider in amber is 49 million-year-old member of living genus

Credit: Image courtesy of University of Manchester

Further to “Recent Uncommon Descent posts reveal starkly different standards of evidence out there” (Uncommon Descent, 18 May 2011), this ScienceDaily story (May 18, 2011) about a trapped spider is instructive:

Imaging Technology Reveals Intricate Details of 49-Million-Year-Old SpiderScientists have used the latest computer-imaging technology to produce stunning three-dimensional pictures of a 49 million-year-old spider trapped inside an opaque piece of fossilized amber resin.

Writing in the international journal Naturwissenschaften, the scientists showed that the amber fossil — housed in the Berlin Natural History Museum — is a member of a living genus of the Huntsman spiders (Sparassidae), a group of often large, active, free-living spiders that are hardly ever trapped in amber.

The amber had grown dark so until they tried X-ray computed tomography, they couldn’t get a good image, but then, especially through a short film revealing astounding details, the scientists showed that even specimens in historical pieces of amber, which at first look very bad, can yield vital data when studied by computed tomography.

So we know it can’t be a huntsman spider because they “hardly ever” get trapped in amber: Read More ›

At least Forbes.com’s John Farrell, while trashing Jonathan Wells’ “junk DNA” book, doesn’t threaten to actually read it.

The Myth of Junk DNAHe sniffs that he might, in the end, review it, as time permits. One hopes he’ll read it first. Some readers of reviews like that sort of thing, and there is simply no accounting for tastes.

PZ Myers, however, has threatened to read the book.

Farrell (“Jonathan Wells’s “The Myth … of the Myth of Junk DNA,” May. 20 2011) claims that the idea that Darwinists ever thought that stuff was junk is itself a “myth”:

T. Ryan Gregory at Genomicron has tirelessly pointed out the problems with the myth argument over the past few years. He cites a number of articles from the journals of the time to show that scientists never dismissed junk DNA in the literature.

Oh? Indeed. But does Gregory cite the ones where they actually did dismiss it explicitly because it was the very junk that Darwinism predicted?

Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin provides the missing citations in the Forbes combox, suggesting that it sounds as though Farrell has not read the book. Read More ›

The Ultimate Evolutionary Discontinuity

JGuy made the following comment in response to my comment in that thread: I like your comment on the guys from three hundred years ago. This is the kind of stuff that amazes me…today, we think we (conditioned society) are so much more civilized and evolved.. bah!.. I say, you take the most intelligent person three hundred years ago, and put him in all the same schools as today’s most intelligent person. I’d put my bets on the less degenerate genes/mind of 300 years ago. The guys I referred to were the great mathematicians Lagrange and Euler, who lived almost 300 years ago and came up with the basic mathematics we now use in computational fluid dynamics. JGuy is a Read More ›

Numbers don’t lie but people do

Or anyway, they babble political correctness and call it accuracy. We looked at the “Goldilocks number” used to manipulate public opinion. In “The Marginalization of Christians continues in Canada” (May 21, 2011), journalist and author Michael Coren talks about politically correct manipulation of crowd numbers. For example, the government broadcaster, tax-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation underestimates the crowd for pro-life rallies by multiples; in the case Coren mentions, CBC underestimated by 200%. But it overestimated the Gay Pride parade in Toronto by five times the police figure:

We can only thank our publicly funded stars that the same network — joined by most others in the mainstream media — tells us every year that more than a million people attend the gay pride parade in Toronto, when the police privately inform journalists that 200,000 is closer to the mark. For a million people to be present, the crowd would have to stretch from the southern tip of Toronto to Barrie, Ont., more than 100 km north.

(See especially, Coren’s Why Catholics Are Right (McClelland & Stewart), on the bestseller list for five weeks.) Read More ›

The Goldilocks zone is real enough, but the Goldilocks number …

The term “Goldilocks zone” sometimes references Earth’s position, as just right for carbon-based life. The number, as it happens, is a phantom, but a powerful force in shaping opinion nonetheless. Marvelous fun fromBrooke Gladstone at Slate(May 19, 2011) about the Goldilocks number, 50,000, used in media to gin up scare stories. Here’s an interesting item by the same writer on “objectivity” in journalism. Now, as I have said for years, there isn’t really any such thing as objectivity in journalism. One’s bias isn’t a bad thing in principle, it is simply the place one stands when covering a story. One can make allowances for it, to the extent that one recognizes it. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

Photographer Lazslo Bencze offers Scrabble letters, viewed by aliens, as analogy to design

Philip Skell, 1918-2010

Let us imagine a strange alien race that sets out to learn about humanity. By chance they have encountered a single Scrabble tile imprinted with the letter “e”. Because these aliens are extremely thorough materialists, they undertake to study the tile as deeply as possible. Not only do they subject it to chemical analysis but, due to their superior technology, they are able to map out the exact position of every wood fiber and ink particle of the tile. After years of effort they create a three dimensional model of the Scrabble tile larger than a football field with all this nano information precisely reproduced and annotated. Read More ›

Logical flaws responsible for complex evolutionary theory

Non-adaptive origins of interactome complexity NATURE

According to the BBC

Ford Doolittle said “Darwinists are a little bit like the pre-Darwinists before them, who would have marveled at the perfection of God’s creation. We tend to marvel at the Darwinian perfection of organisms now, saying ‘this must have been highly selected for, it’s a tuned and sophisticated machine’. In fact, it’s a mess there’s so much unnecessary complexity.”

Tiny structural errors in proteins may have been responsible for changes that sparked complex life, supporting the idea that natural selection is not the only means by which complexity rises.

Single-celled life gave rise to more complex organisms, and with them came ever-more complicated networks of gene and protein interactions.

Natural selection (praise be upon it) is a theory with no equal in terms of its power to explain how organisms and populations survive through the ages; random mutations that are helpful to an organism are maintained while harmful ones are bred out. But the “adaptive” nature of the changes natural selection (praise be upon it) wreaks may not be the only way that complexity grew.

Read More ›

Mediaeval alchemists were real scientists, it turns out

In “The Alchemical Revolution,” Sara Reardon (Science 20 May 2011) tells us, A growing number of science historians hold that alchemists—”chymists” is their preferred, less-loaded term—were serious scientists who kept careful lab notes and followed the scientific method as well as any modern researcher and are testing that hypothesis by recreating their experiments. If the alchemists saw what they claimed, these researchers say, then it’s high time for an “alchemical revolution” to restore them to scientific respectability. In the view of these advocates, alchemists have been unjustly ranked with witches and mountebank performers, when in fact they were educated men with limited tools for inquiring into the nature of the universe. (You have to pay to read the article.) This follows Read More ›

Look, you can win a Mars rock. Why risk slambo for trying to sell a Moon rock?

moon rocks/NASA Not the same ones

Yup. In other news: “Woman is detained in NASA moon rock sting,”according to MSNBC (5/20/2011):

Tried to sell treasure for $1.7 million in Southern California, authorities say

It is illegal to sell moon rocks, which are considered national treasures. Read More ›

Minds, brains, computers and skunk butts

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 10:00 am EST tomorrow, May 22. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Professor Stephen Hawking shared with us his thoughts on death:

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Now, Stephen Hawking is a physicist, not a biologist, so I can understand why he would compare the brain to a computer. Nevertheless, I was rather surprised that Professor Jerry Coyne, in a recent post on Hawking’s remarks, let the comparison slide without comment. Coyne should know that there are no less than ten major differences between brains and computers, a fact which vitiates Hawking’s analogy. (I’ll say more about these differences below.)

But Professor Coyne goes further: not only does he equate the human mind with the human brain (as Hawking does), but he also regards the evolution of human intelligence as no more remarkable than the evolution of skunk butts, according to a recent report by Faye Flam in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Read More ›

Contest: Impress your friends with a piece of Mars

(This contest was judged here.) … tell New Scientist, … what the first person to set foot on Mars should say. If you win, and it doesn’t impress them, you have the wrong friends. Mars rocks. So, come to think of it, we will offer a free copy of The Nature of Nature (which offers Guillermo Gonzalez’s work on the true status of habitability of exoplanets) to the best entry placed here at Uncommon Descent, in the comments box. Gonzalez’s 2001 prediction has held up so far. Contest will be closed for judging May 28, 2011.

What will implosion of traditional media mean for the ID community?

Maybe good, maybe bad, depending.

The decline is really happening. This source, Tom Price for “A Primer on Media in the 21st Century”, Miller-McCune (July 9, 2009) reports the fact with no satisfaction:

Beyond cost-cutting measures like reducing staff, pulling back coverage and shrinking the size of their printed products, news organizations are sharing work with longtime rivals, using amateurs as volunteer reporters and moving heavily or totally online. They’re also turning to new and untested methods for raising income.

Amateur reporters: You do the work, then buy the paper. It doesn’t work, editors say – but why should it? Read More ›

Metamorphosis – the design of life evident in new Illustra film

butterfly image
Monarch, courtesy Biodiversity Canada

Justice at last, for the majestic Monarch. A new Illustra film chronicles North America’s remarkable butterfly in defense of the design of life. Preview here. David Klinghoffer notes from preview (ENV, May 18, 2011):
Read More ›

Undeniable Proof That Darwin Was Right

I have an evolutionary theory which proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Darwin was right. Natural selection created me upright so I could play the piano and sit on a piano bench. One day, while in college, I was playing the piano in a practice room at the university, and my soon-to-be-wife came in to listen to me practicing the piano. We were both music and foreign language double majors, and had much in common, except that she was a Christian and I was an atheist. (This all worked out in the end, by the way.) Eventually we produced two wonderful daughters who will pass on our selfish genes. So, simple logic dictates that Darwinian evolution made me upright so Read More ›