Category: News
Engineering and the Ultimate Half Price at Amazon
| February 6, 2018 | Posted by johnnyb under Intelligent Design, News, Science |
Several years ago, we held a conference on the interaction between engineering, science, philosophy, and theology. The result of this was a book titled “Engineering and the Ultimate: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Order and Design in Nature and Craft”. It is now available for half price at Amazon if anyone wants to pick up […]
Teach the Controversy: Science Teachers Say “Thank You!”
| October 7, 2017 | Posted by johnnyb under Darwinism, News, Science |
This is old news, but I only just learned about it, and I don’t think it was talked about when it happened. In 2006, the Ouachita Parish (i.e., county) School Board decided to allow a “teach the controversy” approach to science education. After the policy was enacted, the science teachers wrote a letter thanking the […]
Biology prof Bret Weinstein’s persecutors face sanctions from Evergreen State College
| October 3, 2017 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intelligent Design, News |
You know, that non-PC nerd who was warned that it wasn’t safe for him to go back to teach and eventually settled for $500k. From Eric Owens at Daily Caller: School officials at the 4,000-student school received approximately 120 incident reports involving 180 students during the days-long series of protests, reports The Olympian, the main […]
Machine Learning or Curve Fitting?
| August 28, 2017 | Posted by johnnyb under News, Science |
The term “machine learning” has started to be thrown around everywhere. However, I just don’t get excited about it, myself.
Mark Steyn on Richard Dawkins getting dumped at Berkeley
| July 24, 2017 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, News |
Here: Notice how the shriveling of free expression smoothly proceeds to the next diminished staging post: Once upon a time, Berkeley professed to believe in free speech. Then it believed in free speech except for “hate speech”. Now it supports “serious” free speech, but not “hurtful” speech. Well, we live in a world of hurt. […]
The eighth continent?
| July 20, 2017 | Posted by News under General interest, Geology, Intelligent Design, News |
No, not Atlantis, which has contributed so much to world fantasy literature. There is, in fact, a sort of lost continent, Zealandia. From Tia Ghose at LiveScience: The lost continent, which is mostly submerged, with all of New Zealand and a few islands peeking out from the water, is about half the size of Australia. […]
Photosynthesis genes source still unclear
| June 15, 2017 | Posted by News under News, Plants |
From Charles Q. Choi at Inside Science: However, much remains unknown about when and how cyanobacteria evolved oxygenic photosynthesis. “The whole question of the origin of cyanobacteria has long been a mystery because they kind of just appeared out of the tree of life with this very advanced capability to do oxygenic photosynthesis without any […]
Another bunch of reasons we haven’t found space aliens
| June 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, News |
From Ross Pomeroy at Space.com: 10. Nobody is transmitting. Instead, everybody may be listening. That’s basically how it is here on Earth. Apart from a few paltry efforts to broadcast strong signals over a narrow frequency band towards the stars above, we’ve barely made our presence known in the universe. In fact, if aliens have […]
Exposing “gender studies” as a Sokal hoax
| June 8, 2017 | Posted by News under News, Peer review |
“Conceptual penis” as a social construct at Skeptic Reading Room: The publication of our hoax reveals two problems. One relates to the business model of pay-to-publish, open-access journals. The other lies at the heart of academic fields like gender studies. … Our hoax was similar, of course, but it aimed to expose a more troubling […]
Elephant family tree shaken by new discovery
| June 7, 2017 | Posted by News under News, speciation |
From Diana Yates at U Illinois: New research reveals that a species of giant elephant that lived 1.5 million to 100,000 years ago – ranging across Eurasia before it went extinct – is more closely related to today’s African forest elephant than the forest elephant is to its nearest living relative, the African savanna elephant. […]
Could knowing heat of early oceans help us understand life’s origins?
| June 5, 2017 | Posted by News under News, Origin Of Life |
From Charles Q. Choi at LiveScience: We know little about Earth’s surface temperatures for the first 4 billion years or so of its history. This presents a limitation into research of life’s origins on Earth and how it might arise on distant worlds. Now researchers suggest that by resurrecting ancient enzymes they could estimate the […]
Researchers surprised to discover new lymphatic system in brain
| June 3, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Neuroscience, News |
From ScienceDaily: University of Queensland scientists discovered a new type of lymphatic brain “scavenger” cell by studying tropical freshwater zebrafish — which share many of the same cell types and organs as humans. Lead researcher Associate Professor Ben Hogan from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience said the fundamental discovery would help scientists understand how the […]
When is consensus in science based on knowledge and when is it just circling the wagons?
| June 3, 2017 | Posted by News under News, Philosophy, Science |
A friend draws attention to an interesting 2013 article by Boaz Miller in Synthese: Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers […]
Evolutionary Sandbox ID game
| June 3, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, ID, News |
Gotten mixed reviews. See what you think. From Pillbug Zone: In a universe driven by targets, a faceless corporation employs you to create an evolving ecosystem you can never hope to control…
Ecology: Biodiversity moves us beyond counting species
| June 2, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, News, speciation |
From Rachel Cernansky at Nature: Biodiversity moves beyond counting species Ecologists are increasingly looking at how richness of traits — rather than number of species — helps set the health of ecosystems. From the article: Biodiversity, it states, doesn’t have to be just about the number of a species in an ecosystem. Equally important to […]
Darwinism: Misfits do better than theory predicts
| June 2, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Evolutionary biologists have long assumed that when an individual of a species wanders into a different environment than it is adapted to, it will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to natives of the same species which are adapted to that environment. Studying fish in Canada, scientists found the opposite. … Evolutionary theory […]
Darwinism: Kin selection row goes on… and on… now a deafening din
| June 1, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, News, Science |
From ENV: Kin selectionists think that natural selection favors genes of related individuals. The idea, also called inclusive fitness, purports to explain self-sacrifice in animals and humans — why worker ants serve the queen without reproducing themselves, and why humans put themselves in danger for their families. Some of their genes, presumably, will be passed […]
Keep marchin’ marchin’: Newtonian physics is oppressive
| May 31, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, News, Physics, Science |
From Toni Airaksinen at the College Fix: Feminist researcher invents ‘intersectional quantum physics’ to fight ‘oppression’ of Newton: ‘Binary and absolute differences’ are ‘exploitative’ A feminist academic affiliated with the University of Arizona has invented a new theory of “intersectional quantum physics,” and told the world about it in a journal published by Duke University […]
Marchin’ Marchin’: Bill Whittle on Bill Nye and science
| May 31, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, News, Science |
Bill Whittle, an “an American conservative blogger, political commentator, director, screenwriter, editor, pilot, author and the voice of The Common Sense Resistance” offers some entertaining thoughts on the gap between Bill Nye and science as an intellectual enterprise: See also: The war on reality will be waged street by street and Marchin’, marchin’ for Science […]
Bonobos closer to humans than common chimpanzees are?
| May 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: A new study examining the muscular system of bonobos provides firsthand evidence that the rare great ape species may be more closely linked, anatomically, to human ancestors than common chimpanzees. … Scientists believe that modern human and common chimpanzee/bonobo lineages split about 8 million years ago with the two great ape species splitting […]
