Recently, Philippines president Rodrigo Dutarte threatened to resign if anyone could prove that God exists. It turns out that the great mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) offered a proof of the existence of God. Today, Euler is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. His interests covered almost all aspects of mathematics, from geometry to calculus to trigonometry to algebra to number theory, as well as optics, astronomy, cartography, mechanics, weights and measures and even the theory of music. Much of the notation used by mathematicians today – including e, i, f(x), ∑, and the use of a, b and c as constants and x, y and z as unknowns – was either created, popularized or standardized by Euler. Read More ›

From at ScienceDaily: Self-fertilization is a problem, as it leads to inbreeding. Recognition systems that prevent self-fertilization have evolved to ensure that a plant mates only with a genetically different plant and not with itself. The recognition systems underlying self-incompatibility are found all around us in nature, and can be found in at least 100 plant families and 40% of species. … In plants such as snapdragons and Petunia, when the pollen lands on the stigma, it germinates and starts growing. The stigma, however, contains a toxin (an SRNase) that stops pollen growth. Pollen in turn has a team of genes (F-box genes) that produce antidotes to all toxins except for the toxin produced by the “self” stigma. Therefore, pollen Read More ›

From Chuck Dinerstein at American Council for Science and Health, Many of us feel aging is a natural process, after all, everyone “gets it,” and disease is more of a deviation or aberration of nature. The proponents of aging as disease point out that aging is related to the apparent random degradation of our DNA, that aging serves no evolutionary purpose, and is more a “consequence of evolutionary neglect, not evolutionary intent.” [2] And without an evolutionary role, why consider it natural? Of course, that aging serves no purpose, is a statement made by those with a stake in the outcome, us, and we may be biased in that regard. We may be unaware of aging evolutionary purpose. From a Read More ›

From Bruce Bower at Science News: Excavations at the Gault site, about 64 kilometers north of Austin, produced a range of stone artifacts that date to between around 16,700 and 21,700 years ago, reports a team led by archaeologist Thomas Williams of Texas State University in San Marcos. An analysis of 184 of those finds identified 11 spearpoints unlike any others that have been found at ancient American sites, the scientists conclude July 11 in Science Advances. Researchers have long argued about whether people reached North America before the rise of Clovis culture 13,000 years ago. Evidence from the Gault site joins other recent reports of humans venturing deep into North America far earlier (SN: 6/11/16, p. 8), which would Read More ›

From Hannah Devlin at The Guardian Researchers say it is time to drop the idea that modern humans originated from a single population in a single location ??? Readers, please wear eye protection due to splinters flying from Human Evolution lecterns: The origins of our species have long been traced to east Africa, where the world’s oldest undisputed Homo sapiens fossils were discovered. About 300,000 years ago, the story went, a group of primitive humans there underwent a series of genetic and cultural shifts that set them on a unique evolutionary path that resulted in everyone alive today. However, a team of prominent scientists is now calling for a rewriting of this traditional narrative, based on a comprehensive survey of Read More ›

From Mike Klymkowsky at PLOS: Through his studies on peas, Gregor Mendel was the first to clearly identify some of the rules for the behavior of these inheritable factors using highly stereotyped, and essentially discontinuous traits – a pea was either yellow or green, wrinkled or smooth. Such traits, while they exist in other organisms, are in fact rare – an example of how the scientific exploration of exceptional situations can help understand general processes, but the downside is the promulgation of the idea that genes and traits are somehow discontinuous – that a trait is yes/no, displayed by an organism or not – in contrast to the realities that the link between the two is complex, a reality rarely Read More ›

From Richard Weikart at ENST: Even in cases of behaviors that seem to hinder reproduction, evolutionary psychologists can invent some good-old “just-so story.” E.O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist and the founder of sociobiology, claimed that homosexuality might be selected for, because a homosexual would be able to help siblings have more offspring. Is there any empirical evidence for this? No, but apparently it is the best just-so story he could devise. In a similar fashion Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker asserts that infanticide has biological roots. He claims that ancient humans were picky about which babies they would raise to maturity. According to Pinker, “A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in Read More ›

The “biological species concept” is yet another textbook dead zone. From ScienceDaily: Dr Addisu Mekonnen and colleagues at The University of Oslo, Norway, looked at the genetic diversity of the two populations of Bale monkeys. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA suggested strong genetic differences between the Bale monkeys who lived in continuous forests or fragmented forests. The researchers found that the populations of Bale monkeys were so different from each other that the Bale monkeys from fragmented forests were more similar to vervets and grivets than Bale monkeys from continuous forests. Dr Addisu Mekonnen, corresponding author of the study, explains: “Remarkably, our phylogenetic analysis showed that Bale monkeys in fragmented forests are more closely related to their sister species, vervets and Read More ›

Via Chad at Truth Bomb, quoting Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland, …you can’t get something from nothing…It’s as simple as that. If there were no God, then the history of the entire universe, up until the appearance of living creatures, would be a history of dead matter with no consciousness. You would not have any thoughts, beliefs, feelings, sensations, free actions, choices, or purposes. There would be simply one physical event after another physical event, behaving according to the laws of physics and chemistry…How then, do you get something totally different- conscious, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures- from materials that don’t have that? That’s getting something from nothing! And that’s the main problem…However…if you begin with an infinite mind, then Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Susanne Åkesson, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden, refutes the theory that zebras have striped fur to stay cool in the hot sun. That hypothesis is wrong, she and her colleagues show in a study recently published in Scientific Reports. There has been an ongoing discussion among researchers, dating back to Darwin, on why zebras have their signature black and white stripes. One of several theories is that it keeps them cool in the sunshine. The black stripes get warmer than the white areas, and the theory states that this creates small vortexes when the hotter air above the dark fur meets the cooler air above the white fur. According to the theory these vortexes works as Read More ›

According to the latest research, we learn from ScienceDaily: Earth’s oxygen levels rose and fell more than once hundreds of millions of years before the planetwide success of the Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago, new research from the University of Washington shows. The evidence comes from a new study that indicates a second and much earlier “whiff” of oxygen in Earth’s distant past — in the atmosphere and on the surface of a large stretch of ocean — showing that the oxygenation of the Earth was a complex process of repeated trying and failing over a vast stretch of time. … Now, a team led by Koehler has confirmed a second such appearance of oxygen in Earth’s Read More ›

From physicist Jonathan Link (Director of the Center for Neutrino Physics) at Scientific American: To be fair, the Standard Model of particle physics is a remarkable scientific achievement; the crown jewel of the physics revolution that dominated the 20th century, but in the 21st century its apparent infallibility saps the vitality of the field. That’s why today nearly all of particle physics is focused on finding a crack, any crack, in its relentless edifice. For example, there are dozens of experiments trying to make a direct detection of particle dark matter, long known to cosmology but unknown to particle physics; there are searches for other particles beyond the Standard Model particle with names like axions and magnetic monopoles; a third Read More ›

Canada’s Globe and Mail recently published a horrifying exposé of China’s persecution of religious minorities. Large numbers – researchers estimate the total in the hundreds of thousands – of people have been placed in Chinese facilities known as re-education centres, where they are forcibly indoctrinated. The Globe described the “re-education” experience of one woman: The woman, whose name is not being used by The Globe and Mail for her protection, was put through regular self-criticism sessions.  Part of the content was cultural.  ‘My soul is infected with serious diseases,’ she would repeat.  ‘There is no God.  I don’t believe in God.  I believe in the Communist Party.’ Other content was more explicitly political.  Day after day she would say out Read More ›

From my (O’Leary for News) review of sociologist Steve Fuller’s book, Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game: How ID Foxes Can Beat the Darwinian Lions Fuller clearly finds the foxes more interesting and sympathetic figures than the lions: “The lion rules by focused shows of force, as opposed to the fox’s diverse displays of cunning.” … The usual strategy of the Darwinian lions is to portray the ID foxes as not merely wrong but bad, for example as “liars” for not upholding the current orthodoxy. But, Fuller observes, that strategy can fail when the evidence does not really support the lions as much as they claim: “The dispassionate observer might well conclude that the lion’s extremely loud roar belies its Read More ›

A handy source on the broader view of naturalism (as a bit more elaborate than a dictionary and a tad more credible than Wikipedia) is Encyclopedia Britannica: >>Naturalism, in philosophy, a theory that relates scientific method to philosophy by affirming that all beings and events in the universe (whatever their inherent character may be) are natural. Consequently, all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation. Although naturalism denies the existence of truly supernatural realities, it makes allowance for the supernatural, provided that knowledge of it can be had indirectly—that is, that natural objects be influenced by the so-called supernatural entities in a detectable way . . . . While naturalism has often been equated with materialism, Read More ›