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And friend James Barham did: The materialist ideology promotes a high degree of conformity in scientific thinking because it is indeed ideological, and materialists are unforgiving towards heretical deviations from this belief system. Over the course of the twentieth century, the atmosphere within biology became increasingly intolerant, at the same time as physics opened up a wider range of possibilities. There are still great limitations on what professional physicists can think, but there is a toleration of alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics, divergent interpretations of cosmology, the question of whether there is one universe or many, and so on. Charles DarwinAnother reason for the greater uniformity of thinking is the professionalization of science. In the nineteenth century, many of the Read More ›

… Discusses intelligent design on the Solid Reasons Morning Radio Show Follow UD News at Twitter!

The person has actually written You are obsessed with whether things are tax-funded or not. I think your reference to tax-funded TV must refer back to your item on the BBC. It is not tax-funded. It is funded by a license fee which is an important distinction. It’s optional (if you don’t have a TV you don’t have to pay it) and it goes straight to the BBC which gives the BBC its independence. So, commenter, lemme get this straight: If I were a Brit, I’d have to fund the Beeb just in order to even have a working TV and get the channels I want? And the money goes straight to the BBC? – which could be using it Read More ›

Here: “I think the term ‘living fossil’ should be retired,” Turner says. “It does little good because it is almost always based on oversimplifications. ‘Living fossils’ often are judged based on some notion of overall morphological similarity. That was the case with crocs. If you squint, these various lineages all sort of look the same, but the details are all different. It ignores how evolution works on multiple levels. I wouldn’t miss it.” Oaks echoes him: “Overall, I think the term hurts more than it helps people’s understanding of evolution. Just because a species looks similar to fossils from many millions of years ago certainly does not mean that it has not evolved. The term ‘living fossil’ is often used Read More ›

From BBC Humans are possibly the weirdest species to have ever lived. We have freakishly big brains that allow us to build complicated gadgets, understand abstract concepts and communicate using language. We are also almost hairless with weak jaws, and struggle to give birth. How did such a bizarre creature evolve? Huh? 1. In a world packed with unusual creatures, what reason have we to assume that humans are “possibly the weirdest species to have ever lived”? Publicly funded broadcasters, like the BBC, can buy this stuff. Whether they could sell it in an open market is another question. 2. “freakishly big brains”? What is the point> of such a claim? Why is it “freaking” to have a big brain when Read More ›

Did we mention Scientific American before? Yes, we did, here, on the Neanderthal mystique (but you have to pay for way too much of it). Now here, we are informed that the purpose of the strange wiring of our eyes is “unveiled.” Wow. Such mystical language. The human eye is optimised to have good colour vision at day and high sensitivity at night. But until recently it seemed as if the cells in the retina were wired the wrong way round, with light travelling through a mass of neurons before it reaches the light-detecting rod and cone cells. New research presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society has uncovered a remarkable vision-enhancing function for this puzzling structure. So, Read More ›

Here: It’s an intriguing area of research, not least because in addition to illuminating the Neandertal mind, such investigations can help reveal what factors allowed anatomically modern humans—our kind—to succeed where other members of the human family failed. Failed? Failed to do what, exactly? AKA: Why Darwinism is headed off a rock cut.

Consensus science. Chronicle still hasn’t released a free version of the bad news about consensus science, but a brief quote may be permissible: While the public remains relatively unaware of the problem, it is now a truism in the scientific establishment that many preclinical biomedical studies, when subjected to additional scrutiny, turn out to be false. Many researchers believe that if scientists set out to reproduce preclinical work published over the past decade, a majority would fail. This, in short, is the reproducibility crisis. The NIH, if it was at first reluctant to consider the problem, is now taking it seriously. This scandal, of course, is where consensus gets us: Everyone is wrong for all the right reasons. Incidentally, we also happened Read More ›

Which doesn’t mean there is no hope or no information. Read on. Further to Origin of life: Is the real story mainly the comments now?, physicist Rob Sheldon writes I had to write just to defend the poor chemist, John D. Sutherland. The problem of making ribose and proteins-a la Miller and Urey, is that the reaction removes a water molecule when making the bond between amino acids–so it only works in a dry environment–on the other hand, the other reactions for making glycine or amino acids need a wet environment. If I recall correctly, the same dichotomy applies to synthesis of RNA, DNA and nucleotides, in which some bonds are broken by water, some are made in water. In Read More ›

Featured in an article, Amid a Sea of False Findings, the NIH Tries Reform? BioLogos is a group that wants Christians to believe in evolution, whatever that means. Today, of course it means Darwinism. Didn’t Templeton give them $$millions? One must pay to read the rest. News doesn’t want to pay because it’d just be the usual blather. Always promising reform but won’t root out causes. End story. See also: John West has updated Darwin Day in America (with Afterword) (read free excerpt, includes Collins) Our culture is witnessing the rise of what could be called totalitarian science, says West. And see the role of BioLogos founder. Question from usual pew sitter: Not how did these people get to be Read More ›

Some science pubs want to survive as trusted sources? This from Real Clear Science: Technically, the headlines are not incorrect. Yet, to me and others, they imply something more radical than what was actually observed. To cut to the chase, an individual photon cannot be observed acting as both a pure particle and wave at the same time. But if you assemble a group of many different photons, you can observe some acting like particles and others acting like waves. Many stories did not make this clear. The researchers who performed the experiment, published in Nature Communications, are on the same wavelength with this assessment. “I also believe that a lot of people are overinterpreting the significance of these data,” senior Read More ›

Here. … Notices of concern regarding papers in Science2, Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS)3,4,5, Journal of Material Chemistry, Polymer Chemistry and Chemical Science have been published in the past few months and now the first retractions of these papers has been coming into effect – one paper in Science2 and three in JACS. Hey, here’s a solution: Just blame creationists. That way no one need ask what’s broken. Maybe one of Darwin’s frat boys in the combox can compose the PR for us. Alternatively keep up with Retraction Watch Follow UD News at Twitter!

What’s really interesting about the latest claim (Science) to have (maybe) solved the origin of life conundrum is the comments. Here’s one: I’m pretty much shocked at the emotionally charged comments. They are simply testing hypotheses for the building-blocks of life and how they were assembled. The intent is not to disprove your god(s) or say ‘haha, we are right.’ … Of course, the commenter is at best mistaken. The reality is that naturalism has gotten nowhere with origin of life and has nowhere to go anyway. The emotional uproar is an outcome of that fact. Nothing will work with origin of life until information is factored in. See also: Suzan Mazur’s interview with an origin of life society president Read More ›

Well, then it sure isn’t “evolution” as National Geographic understands it. This just in from Andreas Wagner at Aeon: How do random DNA changes lead to innovation? Darwin’s concept of natural selection, although crucial to understand evolution, doesn’t help much. The thing is, selection can only spread innovations that already exist. The botanist Hugo de Vries said it best in 1905: ‘Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.’ (Half a century earlier, Darwin had already admitted that calling variations random is just another way of admitting that we don’t know their origins.) A metaphor might help to clarify the problem. Imagine a giant library of books containing all possible Read More ›

About anything except what he thinks? Some of us would be curious to know where he stands on falsifiability?