Stone tools found in Saudi Arabia from 300,000 years ago
| October 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
At the time, Saudi Arabia was a grassy plain with many lakes: Archaeologist Patrick Roberts of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and his colleagues recently discovered a handful of stone tools in a sandy layer of soil beneath the dry traces of a shallow Pleistocene lake at Ti’s al Ghadah, […]
New find extends back our knowledge of earliest identified North Americans
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Artifacts have been found from a group that may have contributed to the later and better known Clovis culture: “We have discovered two previously unknown spearpoint styles that predate Clovis,” says study coauthor and archaeologist Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station. Finding these artifacts in sediment showing a clear progression from stemmed […]
Landmark origin of life conference videos resurface
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus and The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing ‘the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin’, links to some vintage films of origin of life conferences funded by chemist Harry Lonsdale (1932–2014): Before he died Harry Lonsdale sent me a package with his book on politics—Running: Politics, Power, and […]
Fruit fly study casts doubt on the “carbs are bad” neutral evolution theory
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Fruit fly research challenges neutral theory of molecular evolution and suggests one day we may be prescribed diets according to our genes. Fruit fly larvae with a noted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutation showed a pronounced increase in development when eating high carbohydrate diet of banana, but stagnated on a high protein diet of […]
The failed search for an evolutionary morality
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, reviews James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s new book, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality There are many scientific problems with this project. Hunter and Nedelisky, however, only rarely point out the empirical difficulties. (They do […]
Fine-tuning: Is Earth’s magnetic core special too, compared to Mars’s?
| October 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Extraterrestrial life, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
Physicist S. Fred Singer offers some suggestions pertaining to the hunt for life on Mars: 1. Super-rotation of the core Seismic data, taken over a period of several years (Zhang, et al., Science 2005), suggest that the (innermost, solid iron) core is rotating slightly faster than the rest of the Earth, at 0.3-0.5 degrees/yr. We […]
Might snakes provide a way of testing Dawkins’s selfish gene hypothesis?
| October 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
When researchers went to get a look at a cape cobra snake fight, it turned out to be one cobra swallowing another. They named the newly well-fed study animal NN011, otherwise “Hannibal.” Apparently, “Diner, meet Dinner!” is not an uncommon relationship among cape cobras so a study of the details ensued: Snake-eating, they found, was […]
Caterpillar “turns into” a snake
| October 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Design inference |
Larva of a sphinx hawk moth (Hemeroplanes triptolemus). Hat tip: Digg Also: Has anyone done probability calculations (not rhetoric or theorizing) for purely random evolution for this, via natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism)? Follow UD News at Twitter! See also: Orchids with monkey faces and A moth’s wings feature two flies picking at […]
Theodore Dalrymple and Ken Francis on the terror of a materialist atheist’s existence
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
Readers who like essays may be in for a treat. Ken Francis, often hat-tipped here, and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple have written a book as a series of essays, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd: The cultural death of God has created a conundrum for intellectuals. How could a life stripped […]
Larry Krauss cites physics to fight back against sex harassment charges
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Readers will remember celebrity atheist physicist Larry Krauss. We first heard the story about the sexual harassment charges at Buzzfeed in February. Krauss announced his retirement last week but has also offered a lengthy rebuttal to the accusations. Among other things, he says the physics of some of the allegations doesn’t hold up: One piece of […]
J.P. Moreland on Darwinism and “reverse intelligent design”
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion |
Our philosopher-photographer friend Laszlo Bencze sends us some thoughts on J. P. Moreland’s recent book, Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology: – (O’Leary for News) I just finished my reading of this book and I think it’s an excellent analysis of the issues which undergird evolution, namely that science and only […]
Why do Catholic intellectuals claim Thomas Aquinas would cozy up to Darwinism?
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design, theistic evolution |
Especially when it comes to a Darwinian approach to human beings? Man, the universal, does not really exist. According to the late Stanley Jaki, Chesterton* detested Darwinism because “it abolishes forms and all that goes with them, including that deepest kind of ontological form which is the immortal human soul.” And if one does not […]
Jonathan Bartlett: Self-driving vehicles are just around the corner, all right
| October 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind |
On the other side of a vast chasm… The code needed to detect and handle the flow between the situations increases polynomially with the number of driving situations we must address. That is, if we have 2 driving situations, there are 2 possible transitions to account for. If we have 3 driving situations, there are […]
Multiverse proponent Max Tegmark on how AI could run the world
| October 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
In his book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, (2017), MIT physics prof Tegmark offers a science fiction scenario for how AI colossus Prometheus, produced by a group of idealistic programmers, the Omegas, could take over the world. And not only take over the world but make it a bureaucrat’s idea of a […]
If DNA were a computer program…
| October 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Genomics, Intelligent Design |
A computer programmer looks at DNA … and finds it to be “amazing” code. From 2006 through 2017, Dutch entrepreneur and software developer Bert Hubert contributed from time to time to a web page where he listed many of the ways the workings of DNA can be likened to coding decisions by programmers. Some of […]
The early universe was flat to a “suspicious” one part in a million
| October 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Cosmology, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
An “expert voice” astrophysicist explains that the Big Bang is now the “vanilla Big Bang,” which is unpopular because it doesn’t explain all observations: The Big Bang model is our most successful explanation for the history of the universe that we live in, and it’s ridiculously easy to encapsulate its core framework in a single, […]
Stephen Meyer’s approach in Darwin’s Doubt vindicated in recent fruit fly study
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Darwinism, Design inference, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, is thought to be vindicated by a paper published in 2017, “Experimental test and refutation of a classic case of molecular adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster” (Nature Ecology and Evolution). The paper “begins with a perceptive statement about what ought to be required when establishing some genetic evolutionary pathway: Identifying […]
New findings challenge the “neutral” theory of evolution for 95% of human genome
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
The neutral theory of evolution holds that “most variation at the molecular level does not affect fitness and, therefore, the evolutionary fate of genetic variation is best explained by stochastic [random] processes.” From ScienceDaily: However, what scientist Fanny Pouyet and colleagues from the Group of Laurent Excoffier at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and […]
Dollo’s Evolution Law gets hit again: Stripes come and go
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: More than 1200 types of colourful cichlid can be found in the large African lakes Malawi, Victoria and Tanganjika. Not only are they very diverse in colours, they also have numerous colour patterns such as horizontal or vertical stripes. “But that’s not all” explains Axel Meyer, “cichlids are prime examples of evolution. They […]
Soft tissue find shows dinosaurs had birdlike lungs
| October 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Turns out we didn’t need Jurassic Park: The lungs and feathers of a bird that lived 120 million years ago had some of the same characteristics found in today’s birds, researchers reported yesterday (October 18) in PNAS… They examined a sample with scanning electron microscopy and found an extremely subdivided structure much like that enabling […]
