Contrary to what some scientists have asserted previously (see here and here), there’s no good evidence that humans were responsible for the extinctions of around 90 giant animal species that once roamed Australia – including the Diprotodon pictured above, a hippopotamus-sized giant wombat that roamed Australia until 46,000 years ago. In fact, most of these species had already disappeared by the time people arrived. That’s the conclusion reached by an international team of scientists in a major review of the available evidence, and published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (abstract here). The study concludes that climate change, rather than overhunting by the first human beings to settle in Australia, was what brought about the demise Read More ›

Slate.com is all upset that repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008 was was rejected yet again in a 3-2 vote in the State Senate. 19 year old Rice University Student Zack Kopplin has been leading the charge to get this “outrage” done away with once and for all, with help from the usual suspects. What’s interesting to note is the reason that one Senator, Elbert Guillory, D-Obelousas, who essentially cast the deciding vote, gave for his vote against repeal. Sen. Elbert Guillory, D-Opelousas, said he had reservations with repealing the act after a spiritual healer correctly diagnosed a specific medical ailment he had. He said he thought repealing the act could “lock the door on being able Read More ›

Could proteins have developed naturally on Earth, without any intelligent guidance? The late astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) thought not, and one can immediately grasp why, just by looking at the picture above, which shows the protein hexokinase, with much smaller molecules of ATP and the simplest sugar, glucose, shown in the top right corner for comparison (image courtesy of Tim Vickers and Wikipedia). Briefly, Hoyle argued that since a protein is typically made up of at least 100 or so amino acids, of which there are 20 kinds, the number of possible amino acid sequences of length 100 is astronomically large. Among these, the proportion that are able to fold up and perform a biologically useful task as proteins Read More ›

In recent decades biologists have discovered that organisms possess a variety of adaptation mechanisms far more sophisticated than ever imagined. Some of these mechanisms are regulatory in that they influence which genes are used at a given time. Other mechanisms change the genes themselves by mutating the DNA sequences. These adaptive mutations respond to the current environmental challenge and such findings contradict contemporary evolution’s view that mutations are blind to need and are preserved only by the action of natural selection. Now, new research suggests yet another adaptive mutation mechanism.  Read more

The following excerpt is taken from an Associated Press report by Melinda Deslatte, which was published in thetowntalk.com on May 1, 2013: A Louisiana law that allows public school science teachers to use supplemental materials in their classrooms will remain on the books, despite criticism that it’s a back-door way to teach creationism. The Senate Education Committee voted 3-2 Wednesday against the proposal by Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act, in what has become an annual debate before the panel. House Bill 26, which was sponsored by Senator Karen Peterson, was an attempt to repeal the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act. By deferring the legislation, the senators effectively killed it in committee. The Read More ›

For decades, physicists have been struggling to reconcile two very different pictures of the world: the classical view, which sees the world as being made up of discrete, well-defined objects; and the quantum view, in which things don’t have sharp boundaries but are blurred in space and time. Now, Professor Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, suggests that the attempt to reconcile the two pictures within a unified theory may be a futile quest. Both pictures of reality, he believes, are true within their own respective domains. There’s an upside to this duality: “The classical universe and the quantum universe could then live together in peaceful coexistence,” writes Dyson, in a short essay Read More ›

When nineteenth century evolutionist Andrew Dickson White constructed a false history of science, casting evolutionists as the latest in a long history of heroic truth seekers who faced religious intolerance and opposition at every turn, he set in motion a powerful genre that would be difficult to stop. From White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom to the mythical Inherit the Wind, a fictional account of the famous 1925 Monkey Trial that evolutionists use to indoctrinate students such as Judge Jones, to today’s pundits and even President Obama, the false Warfare Thesis, which pits religion against science, is too powerful and alluring to allow the truth to get in the way. And so it is no surprise that with all the Read More ›

If you look at the news headlines over at Science Daily for May 3, 2013, you’ll immediately see that their top story is: “Monkey Math: Baboons Understand Numbers.” Which, to put it quite bluntly, is pure poppycock. The full title of the story linked to reads: Monkey Math: Baboons Show Brain’s Ability to Understand Numbers, which is equally misleading. The Science Daily news story is reprinted from a press release provided by the University of Rochester, a private research university in Rochester, New York, USA. The story’s opening paragraph makes the sensationalistic claim that olive baboons possess “the ability to understand numbers”: Opposing thumbs, expressive faces, complex social systems: it’s hard to miss the similarities between apes and humans. Now Read More ›

Sixty years have passed since Watson and Crick unveiled the structure of the DNA double helix and tentatively explained how it encodes hereditary information. The Central Dogma of genetics soon followed: that “DNA makes RNA makes protein” makes cells and organisms. Once this “River out of Eden” was flowing, the story of life was deemed to be essentially understood. Genes were considered to provide the blueprint of life and the task of filling in the details had begun. The blueprint motif was prominent in media coverage of the Human Genome project – any who questioned its veracity were regarded as subverting science. But is the consensus position robust? At least one commentator (Philip Ball in Nature) is prepared to say Read More ›

An 11.9 million-year-old ape fossil discovered in Catalonia, Spain, in 2002, and subsequently given the name Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, lived around the time when the great apes first appeared, according to Dr. Ashley Hammond, a University of Missouri anatomical expert who examined the creature’s pelvis and co-authored a recent study describing its morphology. Science Daily has a report on the study by Hammond et al., which is entitled, Middle Miocene Pierolapithecus provides a first glimpse into early hominid pelvic morphology, and which is due for publication in the Journal of Human Evolution later this year. Non-scientist readers who would like to know more about the fossil ape might like to read Victoria Woollaston’s report in The Daily Mail, here: it’s refreshingly Read More ›

In answering yet another round of G’s talking points on design theory and those of us who advocate it, I have outlined a summary of design thinking and its links onward to debates on theology,  that I think is worth being  somewhat adapted, expanded and headlined. With your indulgence: _______________ >> The epistemological warrant for origins science is no mystery, as Meyer and others have summarised. {Let me clip from an earlier post  in the same thread: Let me give you an example of a genuine test (reported in Wiki’s article on the Infinite Monkeys theorem), on very easy terms, random document generation, as I have cited many times: One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according Read More ›

It is remotely possible that Joel Lehman’s and Kenneth Stanley’s new paper on evolvability might have some useful, practical application. Perhaps it could help in designing better self-learning systems. Or maybe it could lead to improved training software. I certainly hope it leads to something useful because I paid for it—me and my fellow taxpayers. Unfortunately the paper appears to be yet another waste of taxpayer’s hard earned money in support of the unscientific, religiously-driven belief that the entire world of biology, and everything else for that matter, arose by itself.  Read more

A new paper in Nature is reporting that “Altogether, in a [Saccharomyces] genome containing only 6,000 open reading frames (ORFs), we detected over 1.88 million unique transcript isoforms (TIFs) (or 776,874 supported by at least two sequencing reads…).” They detected 26 major TIFs (mTIFs) and 48 TIFs in total per open reading frame, and “estimate a maximum of 100 mTIFs (or 500 TIFs) per gene.” And you thought yeast was simple? Read the paper for yourself here.

Jerry Coyne has infiltrated a heretofore secret ID operation at Ball State University. Since the secret is now out and in the hands of the Darwinists, I may as well report on it. Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana, is a public university (i.e., part of the state university system). … The course is taught by Eric Hedin, an assistant professor at Ball State’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. In one of its guises it’s an “honors” course, “Inquiries in the Physical Sciences,” which fulfills the science requirement for students as part of the University Core Curriculum: Science Course at Ball State University Look at the ID sympathetic bibliography: Bibliography of the Syllabus Coyne sounds the battle cry: This has Read More ›

This year marks the centenary of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace, sometimes portrayed as “Darwin’s goad”. However, as Andrew Berry argues, Wallace should be remembered as a “visionary scientist in his own right, a daring explorer and a passionate socialist”. He was awarded the Order of Merit, the highest honour that could be given by the British monarch to a civilian. He has left a – “- huge scientific legacy, which ranged from discovering natural selection to defining the term species, and from founding the field of evolutionary biogeography to pioneering the study of comparative natural history.” (page 162) For more, go here. Here’s the punchline: Whilst Berry is willing to respect Wallace’s integrity in departing from Darwin in Read More ›