Of course, it was put there by a Canadian poet.

Recently we learned that “An original piece of “living poetry” has been created in a lab in Canada.” Christian Bok encoded some of his verse into a DNA strip and got it inserted into an E.coli bacterium:

Dr Bok used cryptography to embed his poem into the genetics of the bacterium, devising a chemical alphabet in which each letter is represented by a specific triplet of nucleotides. So, for example, the nucleotide sequence “ATA” codes for the letter “y” and GTG stands for the letter “n”.

– Rachael Buchanan, “Poet writes verse in bug’s genes and receives reply”, BBC News (28 April 2011).

Better: Read More ›

WORLD GETTING CRAZIER, HE SAYS. IN A FEW HUNDRED YEARS THE WHOLE EARTH WILL BE OUT OF ITS MIND London Aug.1. The vision of a mad world and an era of lunacy was prophesied by Dr Forbes Winslow yesterday while expressing his dissent from the statement made at the Eugenics Congress by Dr Mott that increase in lunacy is more apparent than real. Dr. Winslow said: “There will be more lunatics in the world than sane people three hundred years hence. This prophecy is based on the present rate of the growth of lunacy revealed by recent returns. We are rapidly approaching a mad world. In every part othe world civilization is advancing and so insanity is bound to advance. Read More ›

                      Now it may be argued that Darwin’s hostility to Christianity is beside the point. Shouldn’t a scientific theory be judged on its own merits, rather than on the motives and psychology of its progenitor? Yes, of course – if the theory is truly scientific and confirmed by empiricl observation. Isaac newton was as strange as they come; as John Maynard Keynes pointed out., Newton’s private philosophical notebooks make one think of an ancient Babylonian magician. Bit Newton’s scientific theories were rigorously formulated. They can be tested ands shown to be true for most of material reality. But anideology dressed up as a science is a different matter. Theories like Read More ›

A late 2010 cosmology book features cosmologist Paul Davies as editor. Davies is known for a number of reflections on extraterrestrials.

Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics

“This is the anthology we have been waiting for … seminal papers deal with matter through the history of Greek thought, seventeenth-century materialism and twentieth-century dematerialism, the need for a new scientific world view in the light of the quantum nature of the universe, and the storage and transmission of information in biological systems with the new knowledge of their genomes and development … Philosophers, theologians and scientists all have their say, wrestling with the theme of God as the ultimate informational and structuring principle in the universe.”

Professor Sir Brian Heap, St Edmund’s College, President, European Academies Science Advisory Board, German Academy of Sciences Read More ›

In this UD post Ken Miller is quoted as saying: “The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question.” No, ID says, You haven’t answered the most fundamental question about evolution: the origin of biological information. In fact, the mechanism you propose as an answer to that question is — logically (the challenge of producing functionally integrated machinery in a step-by-tiny-step process with each step being both functional and progressively advantageous), mathematically (the huge improbabilities created by combinatorial explosion), and empirically (Behe’s demonstration in the field of the severe limits of random mutation and natural selection) — inadequate to the task. In addition, ID theory Read More ›

From the Max Planck Institute, we learn (April 21, 2011): Despite being closely related to the lyre-leaved rock cress, the thale cress has a considerably smaller genomeIt would appear reasonable to assume that two closely related plant species would have similar genetic blueprints. However, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, working in cooperation with an international research team have now decoded, for the first time, the entire genome of the lyre-leaved rock cress (Arabidopsis lyrata), a close relative of the thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), the model plant used by geneticists. They discovered that the genome of the lyre-leaved rock cress is fifty percent bigger than that of the thale cress. Moreover, these changes arose over Read More ›

Brown University Catholic biochemist Ken Miller is to receive the Stephen Jay Gould Prize prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution because

Dr. Miller has proved an eloquent and passionate defender of evolution and the scientific method. Dr. Miller received his PhD in Biology from the University of Colorado and taught from 1974 to 1980 at Harvard University. While at Harvard he frequently interacted with and was inspired by Stephen Jay Gould. He first became aware of antievolutionism as a beginning professor at Brown University.

“The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question.“ Read More ›

Because Darwinism requires “fantastic leaps of faith” The Darwinist troll bawling up a storm in his cave about this recent defection may not have heard about the one below: The author worked for ten years as a Senior Research Scientist in the medical and scientific instrument field. The complexity of life came to the forefront during continued research, especially when his research group was involved with recombinant DNA during the late 1970’s. … After several years as an independent consultant in laboratory automation an other computer fields, he began a 20-year career in university teaching, interrupted briefly to earn a second Ph.D. in Computer and information Sciences from the University of Minnesota.Over time, the author began to doubt the natural Read More ›

From PR Underground, neurotheology researcher, physician and author, Andy Newburg explains, how fundamentalists Christians and Atheists share a minority view of God. (PRUnderground, April 27th, 2011)

Join Skeptiko guest host Steve Volk for an interview with Dr. Andy Newburg. A distinguished researcher at Thomas Jefferson University Medical College, and professor in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Newburg discusses his latest book Principles of Neurotheology:

Steve Volk: One thing that’s disappointing to me in these debates between believers and atheists is there’s usually a very narrow conception of God that’s on the table for discussion. It’s the Fundamentalist conception. Read More ›

Here is a current debate on the subject from Cassandra’s Tears and here at Intelligent Reasoning is a comment, if you’d like to weigh in. Many sources think that intelligent design is concerned principally with the plausibility of proposed mechanisms for evolution, not with denying that it occurs. Most ID theorists are skeptical – based on evidence, or in this case lack of it – that certain claimed mechanisms, such as Darwin’s natural selection acting on random mutation, can do all that is claimed for it, or even a tiny fraction. When pigs fly first class, maybe.

Evolution News & Views is reporting on a rather revealing study of Scottish first year students at Glasgow University who doubt Darwinian evolution. In fact, the Times Education Supplement (TES) article reports that “One in 20 first-year biology students at Glasgow University don’t believe in the theory of evolution, according to new research.” The article further reports that, The study, presented at last week’s Edinburgh International Science Festival, at a “Creeping Creationism” seminar run by the Humanist Society, found that 85 per cent of students who reject evolution and 85 per cent of students who accept it were able to identify the definition most closely describing intelligent design (the most recent alternative to Darwinism). And, When asked why they rejected evolution, Read More ›

“Pigs have ‘evolved to love mud'”, Victoria Gill explains (BBC News, 29 April 2011). Dutch researcher Marc Bracke from Wageningen University and Research Centre theorizes that

… the behaviour could have evolved in pigs’ most ancient relatives.”We all evolved from fish, so it could be that this motivation to be in water could be something that was preserved in animals that are able to do so.” Read More ›

Interesting discussion at “Don’t defund SETI, science broadcaster pleads.” Could SETI just merge with ID and study evidence of intelligence in signals along those lines? Otherwise, it could merge with astrobiology units at various universities and restrict itself to looking for evidence of bacterial life in outer space. SETI has always been handicapped by the Saganesque silliness about space aliens, which made it vulnerable to any politician looking for a program he can trim or cut, by making it sound ridiculous. Put another way, the unemployed don’t care if there are space aliens or not. But that would cut the heart out of the mission of a project that, through SETI@home, has assembled vast volunteer computational resources. What a waste. Read More ›

Yes, really.

Recently, in a guest edited issue of philosophy journal Synthese, anti-ID Louisiana U prof Barbara Forrest broomsticked – of all people – Baylor prof Frank Beckwith, framed as an ID supporter. And anyone who keeps up with the issues knows he isn’t. The scandal here is that Forrest is supposed to be a big expert on ID (testified at the Dover show trial), but didn’t seem to know that easily found fact. Synthesedisowned her article, putting a disclaimer on it. Meanwhile, another far better known philosophy prof, Larry Laudan, is outraged at being broomsticked in the same issue of Synthese by Robert Pennock, another anti-ID-for-a-living prof.

A friend just whisked this under my nose:

There is a discussion online about the close dates between Francis Beckwith’s submission to Synthese [in response
to Forrest] and its acceptance. What has not been brought up—if the right information was given—is the submission and acceptance dates of the articles in the evolution/ID issue. It turns out all of the articles in that issue of the journal (except one), including Forrest’s, had the exact same turn-around time as Beckwith’s. So, if Beckwith’s article is problematic for a quick turnaround, then so is virtually the entire issue. Here are the submission and acceptance dates for the articles in question: Read More ›

A friend of Uncommon Descent writes to say that E. O. Wilson abandoning his kin selection theory (group Darwinism vs. the selfish gene) due to lack of evidence has caused quite the little uproar in Britain. He adds, The gist of the responses in Nature seemed to be that Nowak and Wilson did not understand kin selection properly. But didn’t entomologist Wilson invent his theory of human behaviour himself, based on his work with social insects where only the queen lays eggs? So, if the inventor doesn’t “understand” the theory … who could? Wouldn’t whatever others say have to be at least a different theory?  Or are even the abandoned coattails worth hanging on to? Correction: An alert reader has Read More ›