Okay, you say, enough about Neanderthals. Just one more thing for now: From Andrew Lawler at Science: A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans. The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an Read More ›

Yes, four eyes. From Gunter Bechly at ENST: Based on two fragmentary fossils, Smith et al. (2018) just described the new monitor lizard Saniwa ensidens from the 49 million year old Bridger Formation in Wyoming. Both known specimens surprisingly had four eyes! Additional to the normal pair of lateral lens eyes, and the usual parietal third eye of lizards, this new species actually had a forth pineal eye like a lamprey. Not a single other jawed vertebrate has something remotely like this, even though this fossil lizard is the closest relative of the modern monitor lizard genus Varanus and thus deeply nested within modern land vertebrates. What? This sounds almost too weird to be true. Yet since the article was Read More ›

From George Dvorsky at Gizmodo: New research published today in Scientific Reports suggests important differences in cognitive and neural function between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals led to differences in behavior that may have resulted in the conditions under which anatomically modern humans succeeded and Neanderthals failed some 45,000 years ago. To reach this conclusion—and in one of the first studies of its kind—scientists conducted a comparative analysis of Neanderthal and early modern human skulls to infer brain function. But because no other archaeological evidence was provided to bolster the case, and because the shape and size of brains cannot be definitively tied to cognitive capacity and behavior, the question of what caused Neanderthal extinction remains very much unsettled. However, many Read More ›

From Peter Dockrill at Science Alert: For the first time, scientists have identified the existence of a new DNA structure never before seen in living cells. The discovery of what’s described as a ‘twisted knot’ of DNA in living cells confirms our complex genetic code is crafted with more intricate symmetry than just the double helix structure everybody associates with DNA – and the forms these molecular variants take affect how our biology functions. “When most of us think of DNA, we think of the double helix,” says antibody therapeutics researcher Daniel Christ from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia. “This new research reminds us that totally different DNA structures exist – and could well be important for Read More ›

From Kirk Durston at P2C-Change: So what progress has science made over the past 60 years? I just counted the number of papers and articles on the origin of life I have filed on my computer—54, and that is only a small sampling of what is out there. Reviewing this collection, the news is not good … we are still working on a plausible, reproducible process for the first step. A recent review paper provides a current summary… “The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that Read More ›

Frank Turek, apologetics expert and cultural commentator, best known for I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist: Morality: Reason: God of the Gaps: Hat tip: Kenneth Francis.

From Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution is true, on mathematician and Darwin skeptic David Berlinski. I’m not sure how David Berlinski manages to make a living, but he does live in Paris, which ain’t cheap. Although he’s a Senior Fellow with the ID Creationist Discovery Institute, that can’t pay much, and his science books, including A Tour of the Calculus (1995), The Advent of the Algorithm (2000), Newton’s Gift (2000), and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (2005), can’t bring in that much dosh. (As Wikipedia notes, “Berlinski’s books have received mixed reviews.”) However, his 2009 book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions remains at #41 on Amazon, a remarkable spot, but explained of course Read More ›

From Jonah Goldberg at Townhall: China made it official: By 2020, the government will fully implement a “social credit score” system that will use artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to monitor, reward and punish virtually every kind of activity based upon ideological criteria — chiefly, loyalty to the state. It doesn’t take a science-fiction writer to imagine where these trends can go. Right now, the decisions made about the rebellious driver and little Alfie are being made by humans. But will that always be the case? AI systems can send people to jail and make decisions about withholding care quite easily. Just ask the Chinese. Indeed, the humans making these decisions are just following the legal and bureaucratic equivalent Read More ›

From Tom Woodward at Themelios, in a review of Richard Weikart’s Death of Humanity: there is throughout the book a proper sense of what I call “deep-shock” to see what these secular thinkers have actually said in writing. Many of the vignettes and quotes from secular crusaders moved me, stopping me in my mental tracks. These shocks were hammer blows of reality—wake up calls that prompted me to jot my reaction and resolve on the margins of many pages. One shock, from US Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was especially stunning. Holmes, in commenting on a recently published book he had read, said, “[I] think morality a sort of higher politeness, that stands between us and the ultimate Read More ›

Douglas Axe here: The Power of Common Science (Ep. 153) Guest: Dr. Douglas Axe, Author of “Undeniable” Undeniable. See also: Undeniable: Darwinians stage manage evidence against their view into near oblivion Doug Axe vs Keith Fox: Is design in nature undeniable? and Andrew McDiarmid podcast with Doug Axe, author of Undeniable, “on the Design Intuition and a New Biology” Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

Rachel Gross’ recent article about evolutionist’s public outreach contains several misconceptions that are, unfortunately, all too common. Perhaps most obvious is the mythological Warfare Thesis that Gross and her evolutionary protagonists heavily rely on. Plumbing the depths of ignorance, Gross writes:  read more

From Evolution News: Moreover, the article by Rachel Gross spills the beans about something we knew already: that the real goal of most evolution educators isn’t simply to start a conversation about evolution. Rather, the aim is conversion, that is, convincing the public to “accept” evolution. Note these unusually candid admissions about the true goals of Darwin educators: “Acceptance is my goal,” says Jamie Jensen, an associate professor who teaches undergraduate biology at Brigham Young University. Nearly all Jensen’s students identify as Mormon. “By the end of Biology 101, they can answer all the questions really well, but they don’t believe a word I say,” she says. “If they don’t accept it as being real, then they’re not willing to Read More ›

Recently, Darwinist philosopher Michael Ruse spoke on this theme at the Oxford Brookes Philosophy Public Lectures: Christianity and Darwinism have very different understandings of the nature and causes of war. However, beneath the surfaces, there are some surprising similarities, not the least a debt to Saint Augustine’s claims about original sin. This talk uncovers these and other pertinent facts, arguing that we are not dealing with a religion versus science debate but more a religion versus religion debate. Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. More. The lecture follows on his 2016 book, Darwinism as Religion. Ruse has always been honest about that. For example, in 2000, he wrote: “Evolution is promoted by its Read More ›

From Josephine Livingstone at New Republic, reviewing Michael E. Hobart’s The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide, In a new book called The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide, Michael E. Hobart offers a new twist on a huge old metanarrative: the death of God. Something or other happened in Renaissance Europe, the story goes, and it eventually distanced scientists from religion. Hobart locates this great shift in the field of mathematics. Other historians have given credit to experimenters who pioneered the scientific method, or astronomers like Galileo or Kepler, but Hobart claims that Renaissance mathematics is distinct from its medieval predecessor because it reconceived numeracy as a tool for describing the quantities of things into Read More ›

From Skye C. Cleary and Massimo Pigliucci at Aeon: A strange thing is happening in modern philosophy: many philosophers don’t seem to believe that there is such a thing as human nature. What makes this strange is that, not only does the new attitude run counter to much of the history of philosophy, but – despite loud claims to the contrary – it also goes against the findings of modern science. This has serious consequences, ranging from the way in which we see ourselves and our place in the cosmos to what sort of philosophy of life we might adopt. Our aim here is to discuss the issue of human nature in light of contemporary biology, and then explore how Read More ›