When Peer-Reviewers Are Really Political Fanboys
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
Climate contrarian uncovers scientific error, upends major ocean warming study “The findings of the … paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts […]
John Sanford gives lecture at NIH on mutations and human health
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
Geneticist John Sanford is also the author of Genetic Entropy: and one of the editors of Biological Information: New Perspectives: Proceedings of a Symposium Held May 31 Through June 3, 2011 at Cornell University Note: In a distinctly unsavoury move, devout Darwinians managed to get Biological Information dropped by Springer. It is all the more […]
A peek at Mike Behe’s new book Darwin Devolves
| November 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Books of interest, Darwinism, Evolution |
Here: While Stephen Colbert has called Michael J. Behe the “Father of Intelligent Design,” Behe’s arguments have been called, “close to heretical” by the New York Times Book Review, and Richard Dawkins has publicly taken him to task for his “maverick” views. Wherever he goes, Behe makes waves, but has remained singularly focused on doing […]
Astonishing! A pop science article on fine-tuning that isn’t just plain stupid
| November 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Media, Multiverse, Science |
Get a load of this: More recently, scientists have pointed out that if one tweaks many of the dimensionless physical constants — numbers like pi that are independent of units and simply exist as fundamental ideas — none of the cosmos we see would exist. One of these numbers is omega, the density parameter, which […]
If quantum mechanics were a researcher, she’d be fired
| November 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics |
And have to leave academic science. Factually correct answers do not matter now if they are not politically correct. In a review of Adam Becker’s What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books, 2018), mathematician and physicist Sheldon Lee Glasgow tells us No one can doubt that quantum mechanics is […]
Mystery: Extinct birds as well adapted for flight as surviving modern ones
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction |
But they aren’t the ancestors of the modern ones. They died out, but why? From ScienceDaily: “We know that birds in the early Cretaceous, about 115 to 130 million years ago, were capable of flight but probably not as well adapted for it as modern birds,” said Atterholt, who is now an assistant professor and […]
Physicists: New approach to antimatter offers promising results
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
According to the Standard Model of our universe, beginning with the Big Bang, there is no difference between matter and antimatter (although they annihilate each other on contact). Why then do we see all matter, no antimatter? A group of physicists decided to test a new theory: From ScienceDaily: About ten picoseconds after the Big […]
Plants have developed complex strategies to get ants to help them
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences breaks down the genetic history of 1,700 species of ants and 10,000 plant genera, and the researchers found that the long history of ant and plant co-evolution started with ants foraging on plants and plants later responding by evolving ant-friendly traits. […]
How to Engage in Argumentum ad Gannitum
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
Today I coin a new Latin phrase in honor of our frequent interlocutor daveS. Here it is: Argumentum ad Gannitum – the argument from whining. (“Gannitum” being Latin for “whining”). The argument from whining takes this form: Person A makes an argument supported by logic and evidence that he believes compels a conclusion. Person B, […]
BBC: Chimpanzees show empathy and altruism just like humans
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind |
The BBC has also thought that chimpanzees were entering the Stone Age. And now: Eminent anthropologist Frans de Waal explains that politicians have a lot to learn from how chimpanzees show empathy. “How chimpanzees reveal the roots of human behaviour” at BBC Reality: Chimpanzees don’t seek humans out the way dogs do. In many ways, […]
Making epigenetics (non-Darwinian evolution) instead of genetics destiny
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Epigenetics, Intelligent Design |
It had to happen: Someone making epigenetics stand in for the selfish gene, an all-purpose gene-splain: If epigenetic research utilizing these new technologies will successfully shed some light in disease prevention, diagnosis, and therapy, then the research can expand to study epigenetics related to human behavior and moods. Aggression, violence, adultery, sexual preferences, risk-taking, happiness, […]
Logic & first principles: Analogy, Induction and the power of the principle of identity (with application to the genetic code)
| November 13, 2018 | Posted by kairosfocus under Darwinist rhetorical tactics, Design inference, Epistemology (the study of knowledge and its conditions), Logic and First Principles of right reason, The Design of Life |
One of the commonest objections we meet when we discuss design inferences — especially concerning the genetic code, is that a claim is “just an analogy” (with implied conclusion that analogies are weak or fallacious). This then extends to inductive arguments used. This common error must be corrected and (as will be shown) the principle […]
Neanderthals walked normally, upright, say researchers
| November 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
The skeleton was of a 32-year-old man: Neanderthals walked upright, had spines straighter than those of modern man, would have been strong and sturdy, and breathed deeply from their bell-, not barrel-shaped ribcages, according to a recently published article written by an international team of scientists. Busting open the myth of the arm-dragging, hunched-over caveman, […]
Three new studies “shake up” study of human migrants to North America
| November 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
We used to think the picture was pretty simple but not any more: By sequencing and analyzing 15 ancient genomes found throughout the Americas—six of which were older than 10,000 years—these researchers determined that, around 8,000 years ago, the ancestors of Native Americans were still on the move, migrating away from Mesoamerica (what is today […]
Life forms are not machines and neurons are not neural networks
| November 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Mind |
From Mind Matters: Much popular literature leaves the impression that living organisms are machines or even billions of them linked together. For example, at Medium, we learn, Brains receive input from the outside world, their neurons do something to that input, and create an output. That output may be a thought (I want curry for […]
Is the human mind best seen as a halting oracle?
| November 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Mind |
Eric Holloway explains Jonathan Bartlett’s account of the human mind as a halting oracle: In his paper, “Using Turing oracles in cognitive models of problem-solving” Jonathan Bartlett proposes to model the human mind as a halting oracle. A brief explanation: Computer science pioneer Alan Turing (1912–1954) imagined a universal machine that can copy any other […]
No, life cannot have meaning in a random universe. Next question?
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Intelligent Design, Science, theism |
In an excerpt from his recent book, Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn’t, a psychiatrist explains how we can have meaning even though we don’t: People assume that our human sense of purpose is dependent on the universe having a purpose, and without such purpose they assume […]
Science-based morality: 400 years of failure?
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Ethics, Intelligent Design, Science |
From a review of James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality Can science tell us how we ought to behave? In Science and the Good, a book that crosses the boundaries of history, philosophy, and psychology, sociologist James Davison Hunter and philosopher Paul Nedelisky […]
Atheist historian combats claim that the Church persecuted classical learning
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Atheism, Culture, Education, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science |
A historian draws our attention this post from late 2016, a reflection on the survival of classical learning during the Christian era, in response to “Skep,” an energetic atheist blogger: But the usual way that those who are forced to admit that there were, in fact, many medieval natural philosophers studying all kinds of proto-scientific […]
Moshe Averick: When does a “gap” point beyond conventional science?
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, theism, theistic evolution |
Rabbi Moshe Averick, author of The Confused World of Modern Atheism (Mosaica Press, 2016) addresses the “God of the Gaps” – the claim that the intersections between the material and the immaterial in nature are just “gaps” waiting to be filled in (with special reference to the origin of life): The first thing I would bring […]
