NASA Science News for Dec. 17, 2010Northern winter is beginning in a special way. On Dec. 21st, the winter solstice, a lunar eclipse will be visible across all of North America. The luster will be a bit “off” on Dec. 21st, the first day of northern winter, when the full Moon passes almost dead-center through Earth’s shadow. For 72 minutes of eerie totality, an amber light will play across the snows of North America, throwing landscapes into an unusual state of ruddy shadow. The eclipse begins on Tuesday morning, Dec. 21st, at 1:33 am EST (Monday, Dec. 20th, at 10:33 pm PST). At that time, Earth’s shadow will appear as a dark-red bite at the edge of the lunar disk. Read More ›

I have often found that the best refutations of arguments for atheism are written by atheists. Raymond Tallis is a splendid example of this rule. In an article entitled “Why I am an atheist,” in Philosophy Now, May/June 2009, 73:47-48 (click here or here to read online), he manages to slay no less than three arguments for atheism, before advancing two much better arguments of his own. Interestingly, however, some of the best online refutations of Tallis’s own arguments for atheism have been written by …. you guessed it, atheists.

The relevance of all this to Intelligent Design should be obvious. Arguments for Intelligent Design are based not only on the existence of complex specified information in living organisms, but also on the fine-tuning of the cosmos. If there were a cosmic Creator, then it would have to be a God of some sort. But if there were compelling or even strong arguments against the existence of God, they would also be arguments against at least the cosmic version of Intelligent Design.

Without further ado, let’s have a look at what Tallis calls the bad arguments for atheism. Read More ›

Sure, in any direction consistent with an outmoded materialism. And how sweeping grandeur in that vision of life is entailed? There’s no need to formally revisit the Modern Synthesis, argues Douglas Futuyma, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, because evolutionary theory is flexible enough to incorporate well-substantiated new ideas as they arise. “I think the evolutionary synthesis has already been extending itself almost continually for the last few decades,” he says. “I’m not saying that there’s nothing interesting [in the Extended Synthesis]. I just think the self-conscious labeling of it as a new point of view or a challenge to the old, most people don’t buy.” Most dare not buy any new approaches. Read More ›

Proteins consist of hundreds of amino acids attached to each other like train cars, and when they fold up they consistently find the same three dimensional shape. Like a necklace that magically falls into the same shape every time it is dropped onto a table, the consistency of protein folding once seemed like a paradox. For there is an astronomical number of shapes the protein could possibly take on. How does it find the same one so consistently, and so quickly? The answer has interesting implications for evolution.  Read more

You thought I was kidding, did you? Nope. A friend advises me that some reviewer or other baptized Darwinist Michael Ruse as a “practicing Anglican” (= Episcopalian):

New Biological Books History, Philosophy, And Ethics of Biology

Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science

By Michael Ruse. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. $30.00. viii + 264 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0-521-75594-8. 2010.

Elof Axel Carlson

Biochemistry & Cell Biology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York

The author is a philosopher and ardent supporter of evolution by natural selection. He also is a practicing Anglican. His book is an exploration of the conflicts between a scientific worldview (one that excludes supernatural interpretations in matters concerning science) and a religious worldview (one that very much embraces faith, the supernatural, and the central tenets of his Anglican faith). …

So is Ruse also among the prophets?

Well, Ruse apparently sent his kids to “Anglican tradition” schools when he taught in Canada. But in Canada, that’s mainly a way of keeping them from hanging out with Crystal Meth at tax-supported OD High.

In fairness, it doesn’t take much belief or effort these days to be a “practicing Anglican”, but unless Ruse has a big announcement in store, I’m calling this as just another effort to baptize Darwinism, a la Theodosius Dobzhansky, to gain support among adherents of other religions.

I wonder if the airbrush error will make it onto the ‘Net …

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist: Read More ›

Evolution is, as evolutionists like to say, absolutely necessary to do science. Darwin’s theory, in one version or another, is the underlying framework that guides our research. Nothing in biology makes sense, evolutionists like to repeat, except in the light of evolution. But in fact evolution is constantly upended. We are continually finding special cases, anomalies and exceptions, and evolution is more of a confusing patchwork of “On Tuesday’s it looks like this” than a useful theory. Consider just one example from this steady stream of failed expectations: sex determination in chickens.  Read more

You’d better order this one for yourself. It’s the long-delayed outcome of the Nature of Nature conference, which got intelligent design theorists Bill Dembski and Bruce Gordon’s Polanyi Center at Baptist Baylor University shut down.* It features top guns on both sides of the controversy: Unmatched in its breadth and scope, The Nature of Nature brings together some of the most influential scientists, scholars, and public intellectuals—including three Nobel laureates—across a wide spectrum of disciplines and schools of thought. Here they grapple with a perennial question that has been made all the more pressing by recent advances in the natural sciences: Is the fundamental explanatory principle of the universe, life, and self-conscious awareness to be found in inanimate matter or Read More ›

defending his recent paper. Mike Behe’s reply (excerpt): Yes, complex gain-of-FCT events would not be expected to occur, but simple GOF’s would. Yet they didn’t show up. Professor Coyne then proceeds to put words in my mouth: What [Be]he’s saying is this: “Yes, gain of FCTs could, and likely is, more important in nature than seen in these short-term experiments. But my conclusions are limited to these types of short-term lab studies.” No, that is not what I was saying at all. I was saying that, no matter what causes gain-of-FCT events to sporadically arise in nature (and I of course think the more complex ones likely resulted from deliberate intelligent design), short-term Darwinian evolution will be dominated by loss-of-FCT, which Read More ›

Sometimes a negative result in science is just as useful as a positive one. I believe that applies to Intelligent Design as well. Today I’m going to talk about a structure found in birds, which may or may not have been designed. Not being a biologist, I’d like to hear readers’ opinions before I make up my mind.

There are structures found in Nature which were obviously designed. I blogged recently about one recently in my post, The video that proves Intelligent Design: the ATP synthase enzyme. You can watch the 86-second video here.

There are also many structures in Nature which, we can confidently assume, were not designed. In his book, The Edge of Evolution (Free Press, 2007, pp. 78-80), Professor Michael Behe makes a convincing case that the antifreeze proteins found in Antarctic fish can be accounted for in terms of Darwinian evolution. No need to invoke design here.

And then there are the head scratchers that leave us all wondering. One such example is the syrinx. That’s the name for the vocal organ of birds, which enables them to produce sounds, despite the fact that they lack the vocal chords possessed by mammals. The syrinx comes in varying degrees of complexity, and the Australian lyrebird, which possesses an extraordinary ability to mimic sounds, has the most complex syrinx of any bird. How good is it? If you want to find out, I suggest that you click on this Absolutely Amazing BBC link and watch the two videos of the Superb lyrebird (the larger of the two species of lyrebird). One of these videos features the naturalist David Attenborough. And if you click here, you can also listen to Chook, a male lyrebird at Adelaide Zoo, imitating the sound of construction equipment. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the lyrebird’s ability for mimicry:
Read More ›

I once collected and cataloged the various arguments for evolution. It is fascinating to see smart people constructing elaborate schemes for the unlikely. One of the subtle, yet no less bizarre, arguments is the use of vitalism as a null hypothesis, a variation of which the brilliant physicist Ard Louis constructed recently. First, here’s what I wrote about this a year and half ago:  Read more

“This study reports evidence consistent with the ‘deliberate fraud’ hypothesis. The results suggest that papers retracted because of data fabrication or falsification represent a calculated effort to deceive.”:

Med Ethics doi:10.1136/jme.2010.038125Research ethics

Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?

R Grant Steen
Correspondence to
R Grant Steen, Medical Communications Consultants LLC, 103 Van Doren Place, Chapel Hill, NC 27517, USA; g_steen_medicc@yahoo.com
Received 31 May 2010
Revised 29 July 2010
Accepted 13 August 2010
Published Online First 15 November 2010
Abstract
Background Papers retracted for fraud (data fabrication or data falsification) may represent a deliberate effort to deceive, a motivation fundamentally different from papers retracted for error. It is hypothesised that fraudulent authors target journals with a high impact f actor (IF), have other fraudulent publications, diffuse responsibility across many co-authors, delay retracting fraudulent papers and publish from countries with a weak research infrastructure.

Methods All 788 English language research papers retracted from the PubMed database between 2000 and 2010 were evaluated. Data pertinent to each retracted paper were abstracted from the paper and the reasons for retraction were derived from the retraction notice and dichoto mised as fraud or error. Data for each retracted article were entered in an Excel spreadsheet for analysis.

Results Journal IF was higher for fraudulent papers (p<0.001). Roughly 53% of fraudulent papers were written by a first author who had written other retracted papers (‘repeat offender’), whereas only 18% of erroneous papers were written by a repeat offender (?=88.40 ; p<0.0001). Fraudulent papers had more authors (p<0.001) and were retracted more slowly than erroneous papers (p<0.005). Surprisingly, there was significantly more fraud than error among retracted papers from the USA (?2=8.71; p<0.05) compared with the rest of the world.

Conclusions This study reports evidence consistent with the ‘deliberate fraud’ hypothesis. The results suggest that papers retracted because of data fabrication or falsification represent a calculated effort to deceive. It is inferred that such behaviour is neither naï ve, feckless nor inadvertent.

For comments go here “The highest number of retracted papers were written by US first authors (260), accounting for a third of the total. One in three of these was attributed to fraud.”, or here (An excellent example of either crappy science reporting or crappy science …), for the view that it’s all a bum rap.

One site also offers a number of articles on the shortcomings of peer review. Also an article on self-plagiarism and one on self-plagiarism and bogus authorship. Read More ›

A Vivisection of the ev Computer Organism: Identifying Sources of Active Information George Montañez, Winston Ewert, William Dembski, Robert Marks   Abstract ev is an evolutionary search algorithm proposed to simulate biological evolution. As such, researchers have claimed that it demonstrates that a blind, unguided search is able to generate new information. However, analysis shows that any non-trivial computer search needs to exploit one or more sources of knowledge to make the search successful. Search algorithms mine active information from these resources, with some search algorithms performing better than others. We illustrate these principles in the analysis of ev. The sources of knowledge in ev include a Hamming oracle and a perceptron structure that predisposes the search towards its target. Read More ›

My Salvo 15 Deprogram column: LUCY SPEAKS Evolutionary Psychology Is Now Taking Your Questions When Britain’s Guardian newspaper first introduced its “evolutionary” agony aunt (advice columnist in America) in 2009—to honor 150 years of the culture birthed with Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of Species—I thought, “Aha! a send-up, to be sure.” I was wrong, but in fairness, when the evolutionary psychologist speaks, even an expert can’t always tell. No spoof. The Guardian burbled proudly about Carole Jahme, author of Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and Evolution and winner of the Wellcome Trust Award for Communication of Science to the Public. For the 2009 Darwin bicentennial celebrations, Jahme, who holds an M.A. in evolutionary psychology, put together Read More ›

New research shows that when presented with a barrier, ants don’t just turn around and follow the scent back the way they came. Instead, they perform an advanced search:  Read more