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Discussion here. Kicked off here: Well, this has been an interesting discussion! Much thanks to BA77 for useful background info. Recommended. Some respondents also attempted to interject the claim that ID does not have a valid research program (RDFish?) First, whether any intellectual enterprise has a “valid” research program isn’t a reasonable question unless the public is being asked to buy in (public funding, legislation, curricula, etc.). Private parties should be free to spend their money on any not-obviously criminal enterprise they wish. Is it valid to spend (waste?) money on the search for ET? Origin of life? In the absence of useful answers, that must remain an open question. My own view (O’Leary for News) favors spending a certain Read More ›

Darwinian evolution is not a valid research program I do not have a cat entered in the fight, so I don’t really care that much. But look at this post, and the ensuing comments, and ask yourself, why should any of Darwin’s followers’ rubbish be publicly funded? If you were an investor, would you invest? Note: Your money, not the government’s (= other people’s) Follow UD News at Twitter!

If you listen to Darwinblather, you’d never think to ask. (As the rest of us face the road ahead. Yes, it is all as out of touch as it sounds.) Meanwhile: BEACON Researchers at Work: The Origin of a Species? [D]espite all the fantastic work done since Darwin’s day, speciation is still mysterious. Speciation is complex, multifaceted, tricky to study, and, most importantly, hard to “catch in the act.” It would help if we had a model system in which we could study speciation in fine detail as it occurs, examine and manipulate the processes involved, and to do so over a humanly reasonable time scale. More. In short, no one knows. But courts and governments demand public funding for Read More ›

In his The Evolution Revolution, Lee Spetner has collected a number of Dawkins squawks in favour of natural selection (the fittest at any given time survive) as a mystical explanation for everything that happens on the only planet we know of that has life, for sure: One cannot honestly say evolution in the sense of Common Descent is a scientific theory, despite the Darwinists’ hyperbolic statements about evolution — the kinds of statements no scientist would think of making in another field. RichardDawkins wrote about evolution (Dawkins 2009) It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur Read More ›

A friend kindly linked us to a Reason feature on the alternative medicine “racket:” Behind the dubious medical claims of Dr. Mehmet Oz and Deepak Chopra is a decades-long strategy to promote alternative medicine to the American public. Twenty-three years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began to investigate a wide variety of unconventional medical practices from around the world. Five-and-a-half billion dollars later, the NIH has found no cures for disease. But it has succeeded in bringing every kind of quackery—from faith healing to homeopathy—out of the shadows and into the heart of the American medical establishment. … The OAM’s stated mission was to investigate the medical value of alternative therapies. Despite its minuscule budget, its mandate was Read More ›

From Scientific American, we learn that we mustn’t be too hasty: How Do We Fix the Liberal Slant in Social Psychology? Not by adding more conservative voices, but by subtracting out bias Ah, how convenient. One does not need to add voices that might provide a check/balance effect. There is no way of “subtracting out bias”; bias is where people stand when they gather information. The normal way of ensuring fairness is to add more voices to the discussion, something author Piercarlo Valdesolo is clearly not anxious to do. Fine. The smelly little social psych clique will continue to brew more scandals. When people start fancy-dancing like this—when we ask them to just be honest—we know something is up. Let’s Read More ›

Here: Two theorists recently proposed a way to find evidence for an idea famous for being untestable: string theory. It involves looking for particles that were around 14 billion years ago, when a very tiny universe hit a growth spurt that used 15 billion times more energy than a collision in the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists can’t crank the LHC up that high, not even close. But they could possibly observe evidence of these particles through cosmological studies, with the right technological advances. More. All such claim fly in the face of the main point: If everything is true somewhere, tests are meaningless. Tests belong in universes where only some things are true, not a multiverse where everything is. But Read More ›

From Nature: An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor Here’s the abstract: Neanderthals are thought to have disappeared in Europe approximately 39,000–41,000 years ago but they have contributed 1–3% of the DNA of present-day people in Eurasia1. Here we analyse DNA from a 37,000–42,000-year-old2 modern human from Pestera cu Oase, Romania. Although the specimen contains small amounts of human DNA, we use an enrichment strategy to isolate sites that are informative about its relationship to Neanderthals and present-day humans. We find that on the order of 6–9% of the genome of the Oase individual is derived from Neanderthals, more than any other modern human sequenced to date. Three chromosomal segments of Neanderthal ancestry are over 50 Read More ›

Further to The toaster oven origin of life theory (But if it was this simple, why isn’t it happening all the time on Earth, favoured for such ventures? There is a taxpayer born every minute in some places): From New Scientist: Watery time capsule hints at how life got started on early Earth Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and her team discovered the water a few years ago oozing from rocky fractures 2 kilometres below the surface at the Kidd mine near Timmins in Ontario. The water, which is about 1.5 billion years old, appears to show no signs of life – an extremely rare find. … Her team has previously found a wealth Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Subatomic particles could defy standard model? The researchers looked at B meson decays, processes that produce lighter particles, including two types of leptons: the tau lepton and the muon. Unlike their stable lepton cousin, the electron, tau leptons and muons are highly unstable and quickly decay within a fraction of a second. According to a Standard Model concept called “lepton universality,” which assumes that leptons are treated equally by all fundamental forces, the decay to the tau lepton and the muon should both happen at the same rate, once corrected for their mass difference. However, the team found a small, but notable, difference in the predicted rates of decay, suggesting that as-yet undiscovered forces or particles could be Read More ›

From Nautilus: The Dawn of Life in a $5 Toaster Oven God might just as well have begun with a toaster oven. A few years ago at a yard sale, Nicholas Hud spotted a good candidate: A vintage General Electric model, chrome-plated with wood-grain panels, nestled in an old yellowed box, practically unused. The perfect appliance for cooking up the chemical precursors of life, he thought. He bought it for $5. Trivia: In Canada, he could have got it “As Is” for $2. At home in his basement, with the help of his college-age son, he cut a rectangular hole in the oven’s backside, through which an automated sliding table (recycled from an old document scanner) could move a tray Read More ›

Apparently, Moran called Gauger “delusional,” for asking “What if people stopped believing in Darwin?” She suggests, Well, textbooks would change, for one. And a newfound humility might briefly sweep the halls of academic biology. Biology students might feel free to express their opinions on origins. The world would see a new flush of academic freedom. Guess what? It’s happening right now, but it’s happening slowly, not overnight. That’s because more and more people are recognizing that evolutionary biology’s explanatory power is inversely proportional to its rigor. Yet there is still an enormous amount of pushback from people strongly invested in the Darwinian story. Pushback? Sounds like the street outside, actually. (Hint: If one is not looking for Darwinism, one hardly sees Read More ›

 From Wood’s Hole: Ancient rocks harbored microbial life deep below the seafloor, reports a team of scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Virginia Tech, and the University of Bremen. This new evidence was contained in drilled rock samples of Earth’s mantle – thrust by tectonic forces to the seafloor during the Early Cretaceous period. The new study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The discovery confirms a long-standing hypothesis that interactions between mantle rocks and seawater can create potential for life even in hard rocks deep below the ocean floor. The fossilized microbes are likely the same as those found at the active Lost City hydrothermal field, providing potentially important clues about Read More ›

Every so often, we run posts linking to people speculating about what happened before the Big Bang. Pop science mag New Scientist offers to tell us the latest speculations, if we will but sign up eventually to pay something like US$22-$49 to discover, According to the big bang theory – our best explanation for why space is expanding – everything exploded from nothing about 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmologists have been able to wind things back to within a tiny fraction of a second of this moment. But now they’re stuck. Of course, any further attempt at discovery means assuming that 1) a Big Bang happened 2) anything at all happened before the Big Bang 3) our brains are shaped Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Key molecular process in brain is different in males and females For 20 years, Woolley actively avoided studying sex differences in the brain until her own data showed her that differences between females and males were real. Her discovery, reported in 2012, that estrogens decreased inhibitory synaptic transmission in the brains of female rats but not in males, changed her thinking. … “We don’t know whether this finding will translate to humans or not,” Woolley said, “but right now people who are investigating endocannabinoids in humans probably are not aware that manipulating these molecules could have different effects in males and females.” That’s especially important if one is seeking medical treatment for a disease. “Being a scientist is Read More ›