Tales from the Tree Bundle of Seedlings, or maybe best called Web of Life: Traditionally, marine microplankton had been divided similarly to species on land. You had plant-like phytoplankton, such as algae, and animal-like zooplankton that ate the phytoplankton. What Stoecker found was that some of these organisms were somewhere in the middle: They could eat like animals when food was present and photosynthesize like plants in the light. “If you think about it, it can be the best of both worlds,” says marine ecologist Dave A. Caron of the University of Southern California. Today, there’s growing realization that these in-between beasties — dubbed mixotrophs — are not only widespread but also play vital roles in the ecology of the Read More ›

You’ve gotta love Sev’s refreshing honesty. In this post I noted that killing little babies was not uncommon in ancient cultures. And then I asked: [Materialists] say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. If that is so, was it an affirmatively good thing when an ancient pagan killed a baby girl because she was a baby girl instead of a baby boy? Sev’s response: it was an affirmatively good thing for them then but it is certainly not an affirmatively good thing for me now. Who is right? As far as I can see, there is no absolute standard against which to measure it. Read More ›

Philip Cunningham’s vid on calculations of a single protein forming by chance was picked up recently: Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance: “For a protein made from scratch in a prebiotic soup, the odds of finding such globally optimal solutions are infinitesimally small- somewhere between 1 in 10exp140 and 1 in 10exp164 for a 150 amino acid long sequence if we factor in the probabilities of forming peptide bonds and of incorporating only left handed amino acids.” Axe is among the science types involved with a fascinating video entitled “Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance.” It’s just over nine minutes long, but beautifully produced and imminently accessible for those who aren’t already cosmologists, physics Read More ›

In time for Darwin’s birthday February 12: The Dissent statement represents a splash of cold water on the great man. It reads, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” The signers hold professorships or doctorates from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and many other prominent institutions. They are also an increasingly international group. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences are represented. Discovery Institute began taking names of signatories in 2001 in response to frequently heard assertions that there is Read More ›

I have a question for our materialist interlocutors. As Georgi Boorman summarizes in this article, in many ancient cultures killing certain babies was an acceptable, even lauded, practice. Here’s my question: You say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. If that is so, was it an affirmatively good thing when an ancient pagan killed a baby girl because she was a baby girl instead of a baby boy?

Many Singulatarians hold that their soon-to-be-realized technology will be indistinguishable by the rest of us from magic.   Are they serious? Well, in 2005, Kurzweil said that the magical Harry Potter stories “are not unreasonable visions of our world as it will exist only a few decades from now.” when, due to AI, “the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence.”  Keas warns that this type of thing encourages people “to expect the experiential equivalent of occult phenomena.” More. Mike Keas’s new book Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion discusses how AI and ET are merging, to create a religion of futurist magic: See also: Historian: Darwinists Kept The “Flat Earth” Myth Going, To Attack Read More ›

As there seems to be resistance to the point that the world embeds structure and quantity (thus, mathematical features) I think it is useful to provide some simple reminders. The Egyptian rope trick and the 3-4-5 Pythagorean triplet, thus a right angle forced through a numerical relationship (and note the power of the number twelve again): Lego bricks demonstrating the Pythagorean relationship — notice, number theory connexions and the natural interpretation of “squaring”: Also, notice a Mobius strip cutting exercise: In none of these cases is the result dependent on our creating a mathematical model or an axiomatisation. The results are objective, factual, embedded in the world and in fact helped to constrain how Mathematical systems were axiomatised. END In Read More ›