Neural tissue preservation in a Cambrian arthropod
Palaeontologists have been developing some highly sophisticated tools for analysing fossil specimens. Of particular interest are techniques that probe the details of soft tissue preservation. In the research considered here, the 30 mm specimen was found at the Chengjiang lagerstatte locality in southwest China. It had large, claw-like appendages on its head and many jointed legs. It is assigned to the arthropods and thought to be a probable extinct chelicerate. It is referred to as one of the megacherian (meaning “great hand”) species with the genus name Alalcomenaeus. To analyse the soft tissues, a 3-D model of the specimen was produced using a CT-scanner and, at the same time, an X-ray microscope documented the distribution of selected chemical elements. In Read More ›
How the Mediocrity Principle invented life on other planets
UCLA introduces evolutionary medicine to fight depression
Trimming the human evolutionary tree into a telephone pole?
Bowling with God: The Problem of Theistic Evolution
Did the prehistoric Denisovans cross Wallace’s Line?
The Darwinist and the computer programmer
Actually the available hardware computing power is enormous and the software technologies are very sophisticated and powerful. Given the above fortunate situation about the technological advance of informatics, many phenomena and processes in many fields are successfully computer simulated. Routinely airplane pilots and astronauts learn their job in dedicated simulators, and complex processes, as weather forecast and atomic explosions, are simulated on computers. Question: why Darwinian unguided evolution hasn’t been yet computer simulated? I wonder why evolutionists haven’t yet simulated it, so to prove us that Darwinism works. As known, experiments of evolution in vitro failed, then maybe experiments in silico would work. Why don’t evolutionists show us in a computer the development of new biological complexity by simulating random Read More ›
Nutritionist admits in The Scientist: Much nutrition research is “fatally flawed,” “willfully fraudulent” pseudoscience
Time to retire superstition in science
A second question for neo-Darwinists, on the age of the Earth
Here’s a question for neo-Darwinists: “If someone could prove to you that the Earth was ten or even one hundred times younger than the currently accepted figure of 4.54 billion years, would you give up your belief in evolution by natural selection? Or putting it another way, what’s the youngest age that you, as a Darwinian evolutionist, would accept for the age of the Earth? How low would you go?” In my previous post, A hypothetical question for neo-Darwinists, on the age of the earth, I challenged neo-Darwinian evolutionists to provide an estimate (to the nearest order of magnitude) of how much time it should take for evolution by natural selection to generate complex life-forms like ourselves from the earliest Read More ›
Never mind Scientific American is into Satan, a New York Times columnist is into ghosts
Stale, leftover Halloween candy: Scientific American on … Satan
Thomas Nagel reviews an evolutionary psychology book on morality
Evil and Suffering Have No Internal Logic
We have been going through a rough patch lately, and this morning I had news of the passing of a friend. My heart is aching and this morning one of my friends related a story I have heard several times about Corrie ten Boom and the “fleas in the barracks.” For those who have not heard the story, Corrie’s family helped Jews escape from Nazi occupied Holland. They were exposed and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp, and she was the only member of her family to survive. After the war she wrote a book, The Hiding Place, about her experience in which she tells a story about how she hated the fleas in the barracks. Her sister Betsie told Read More ›