I had advocated Barry Setterfield’s decaying speed of light model as a possible mechanism for seeing distant starlight on shorter time scales than billions of years. At this time I need to appraise those who have followed my defense of Barry’s theory, that I no longer think Setterfield’s versions of the c-decay are workable as stated. Although we still have potentially anomalous data points in the measurement of the speed of light that could argue for a universal, isotropic decaying speed of light (as reported in Nature), and even though Joao Magueijo, John Barrow, Paul Davies have argued for the possibility that the speed of light was universally faster in the past, I have not been able to resolve difficulties Read More ›

In a previous thread I summarized geneticist Jeff Tomkins findings that demonstrates human DNA is not 98% similar to chimps but more on the order of 70% (and even that is a generous estimate). Tomkins has a book out that goes into the details I sketched out here. More Than a Monkey NOTES: photo credits: Amazon.com

Ran across this Biola video lecture (in course BB ST 450) on scientism in a thread from a few months back, HT BA77 as usual. I think it is well worth pondering: So, thoughts? END

natural selection cannot build any feature in which intermediate steps do not confer a net benefit on the organism. Jerry Coyne as reported in Hopless Matzke contrast this with what Allan Miller said at The Skeptical Zone It is sufficient that NS does not act too strongly against, not that it must act for, a particular change. Allan Miller TSZ Allan Miller says natural selection has to fail for evolution to work I actually agree with Miller to the extent that Miller agrees with Michael Lynch and Mae Wan Ho many genomic features could not have emerged without a near-complete disengagement of the power of natural selection Michael Lynch opening, The Origins of Genome Architecture and a relative lack of Read More ›

The answer appears to be yes (at least for electrical and mechanical means, don’t know for sure about chemical and biological means). A physics professor assigned our class term papers of our choosing. Our goal was to learn something new. I chose to explore the effects of electricity and chemistry on nuclear processes. I thought the professor would take my head off for such a radical claim, so I determined to look at mainstream peer-reviewed literature on the topic. We all had to make presentations of our term papers in class, and the professor had a big smile after I gave mine, he said, “that was the topic of the night!” [The Vodka designation in the title indicates speculative ideas Read More ›