As we noted here. From media analyst Dan Gainor at Newsbusters: The alt-left are some of the major beneficiaries of this insanity. Top liberal sites like Vice, Buzzfeed, Bustle and even Cosmo push the occult on their young readers. Countless internet sites run horoscopes, as newspapers did before them. But some outlets go a lot farther. Cosmo interviews “certified astrologer John Marchesella,” who claims that Aries folks, “don’t hold grudges. When you think about it, it takes a lot of patience to hold on to resentments.” This is how you know it’s garbage. I’m an Aries. (Other famous Aries are Lady Gaga and Kourtney Kardashian. So I got that goin’ for me.) Over at BuzzFeed, which pretends to be a Read More ›

Against theistic evolutionists who insist that a single human pair is not biologically possible. Recently, British plant geneticist Richard Buggs posted a letter he had sent in May to BioLogos’ Dennis Venema, taking issue with the claim that a population of 10,000 is required, as stated in Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight, Adam and the Genome. Buggs never got an answer and he has since posted further thoughts at Nature: Ecology and Evolution (community): Does genomic evidence make it scientifically impossible that the human lineage could have ever passed through a population bottleneck of just two individuals? This is a question I am asked semi-frequently by religious friends. With my current understanding of the genetic evidence, I can’t state categorically Read More ›

Well, that’s certainly not what Grandma learned about genes and evolution at school. Would it be legal to teach that in the United States? From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: Although there could have been a bit more science presented at the recent D’Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form centenary celebration in Scotland at Dundee and St Andrews universities—-part of a year-long commemoration—-the art and music talks seemed clearly to charm the crowd. It was a small gathering, roughly 100 people, that expanded to 200 for keynote speakers—Evelyn Fox Keller of MIT and Steven Wolfram, CEO of Wolfram Research. She is referring to the public portion of a meeting from whch she was banned, as a journalist, from the science discussion Read More ›

No help for materialism. – Reflecting light off satellite backs up Wheeler’s quantum theory thought experiment – October 26, 2017 – Bob Yirka: Excerpt: Back in the late 1970s, physicist Johan Wheeler tossed around a thought experiment in which he asked what would happen if tests allowed researchers to change parameters after a photon was fired, but before it had reached a sensor for testing—would it somehow alter its behavior mid-course? He also considered the possibilities as light from a distant quasar made its way through space, being lensed by gravity. Was it possible that the light could somehow choose to behave as a wave or a particle depending on what scientists here on Earth did in trying to measure Read More ›

Irreducible complexity. From ScienceDaily: Although bacteria have no sensory organs in the classical sense, they are still masters in perceiving their environment. … Swimming Caulobacter bacteria have a rotating motor in their cell envelope with a long protrusion, the flagellum. The rotation of the flagellum enables the bacteria to move in liquids. Much to the surprise of the researchers, the rotor is also used as a mechano-sensing organ. Motor rotation is powered by proton flow into the cell via ion channels. When swimming cells touch surfaces, the motor is disturbed and the proton flux interrupted. The researchers assume that this is the signal that sparks off the response: The bacterial cell now boosts the synthesis of a second messenger, which Read More ›

From Granville Sewell at Evolution News & Views: Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, who studied mutations for 25 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Köln, Germany, is now retired but still writes often on the topic of Darwinism and intelligent design. He is one of those old-school scientists who believes evidence matters even when it comes to questions of biological origins. … Dr. Lönnig has repeatedly offered examples that defy a gradualist explanation. For example, listen to this interview where he discusses carnivorous plants, whose complicated traps were clearly useless until almost perfect. His discussion of the aquatic bladderwort begins at the 8:30 mark. … Loennig has recently written an article, “Plant Galls and Evolution,” which falsifies Darwinism on Read More ›

Columbia mathematician Peter Woit notes at his blog Not Even Wrong: An article at FQXI on multiverse research they are funding seemed to finally give me an understanding of what this is all about: These are the two conceptually hardest questions in cosmology, according to Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. They go to the core of what it means to exist as a human being making sense of the universe we find ourselves in. And, he adds, unfortunately, there is very little physical knowledge to go on when it comes to working out the answer. Undaunted by the lack of tools to help them, theatrical physicists Eugene Lim of King’s College London, UK, and Read More ›

Every so often a story like this one from Kate Kelland at Reuters provides a backdrop for hand-wringing in science journals along the lines of “Why, why, why doesn’t the public trust science”: Documents seen by Reuters show how a draft of a key section of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) assessment of glyphosate – a report that has prompted international disputes and multi-million-dollar lawsuits – underwent significant changes and deletions before the report was finalised and made public. … One effect of the changes to the draft, reviewed by Reuters in a comparison with the published report, was the removal of multiple scientists’ conclusions that their studies had found no link between glyphosate and cancer in Read More ›

From Dan Samorodnitsky at MassiveSci: This goes for your genome, too. It’s easy to imagine that your genes are clean, orderly, and easily known. Companies like 23andme and Ancestry.com make their bones off this idea, that our building blocks are transparent and readable like a book. But that’s not really what a genome is. Genomes are slap-dash, hodgepodge collections of genes, often in no discernible order. And a lot of it isn’t even the owner’s genes. In the 1950, Barbara McClintock identified “jumping genes,” which could move essentially of their own accord and change the appearance of maize stalks. (That’s a skull-shattering discovery to make, working alone and before the structure of DNA was determined, but because the Nobel Prizes Read More ›

From Andrew Griffin at The Independent: “All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” explained Christian Smorra, the author of a new study conducted at CERN. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is. What is the source of the symmetry break?” The latest possibility was matter and anti-matter’s different magnetism. But new research shows that they are identical in that way too – lending further mystery to the question of why the universe is still around at all. More. Persons who find that this situation seriously interferes with their lifestyle could try complaining to the UN. See also: Read More ›

From Shawna Williams at The Scientist: Ancient fossils reveal how woodless trees got so big: by continuously ripping apart their xylem and knitting it back together. The trees’ woody fibers—namely, xylem, which carries water up the trunk—formed rings in the outer part of the trunk and connected to one another by horizontal strands, says Berry. Soft tissue filled the spaces between the fibrous network. As the trees grew outward, the xylem slowly ripped apart to accommodate the expansion, then knitted itself back together. The cores of the trees were hollow. While the architecture allowed the trees to support their weight as they expanded, they also caused what Stein terms a “structural failure”: the weight bearing down on the tree’s base Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers from the Institute of Population Genetics at Vetmeduni Vienna, using a new and highly specific analysis method, could now provide fresh momentum to help decode the evolutionary dynamics of the Y chromosome. Their study shows that ten times more new genes are transferred onto the Y chromosome in fruit flies than had been previously thought. Some of these new genes even appear to have taken on important functions. … A special surprise for the research team was that four of the 25 newly transferred genes on the Y chromosome have already assumed an important function there. “As these new genes can be found in all individuals of a species, the question arises as to which functions these Read More ›

How about a better question: Are pop science media doomed? No, seriously, from Matthew Cobb, reviewing Jonathan B. Losos’ Improbable Destinies at New Scientist: Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, approaches this through the contrasting views of the late Stephen Jay Gould and University of Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris. Alongside the widespread phenomenon of convergent evolution, life produces many unique forms. The human lineage is one such. But before the reader can conclude that our uniqueness suggests we are the whole point of evolution, Losos plays his trump card: the duck-billed platypus. More. Wow, that’s deep. And it’s also timely, now that a platypus has just been elected Prime Minister of Australia. 😉 Does Cobb’s publishability depend on Read More ›

I often get questions about the immune system, because many in the Darwin lobby point to it as an example of “random mutations”. That is kind of a half-truth, but the full truth is so amazing that it needs to be told more often.
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From ScienceDaily: “More than his loss of a forearm, bad limp and other injuries, his deafness would have made him easy prey for the ubiquitous carnivores in his environment and dependent on other members of his social group for survival,” said Erik Trinkaus, study co-author and professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Fellow Neanderthals did not eat him either, even during hard times. “The debilities of Shanidar 1, and especially his hearing loss, thereby reinforce the basic humanity of these much maligned archaic humans, the Neanderthals,” said Trinkaus, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor. Paper. (public access) – Erik Trinkaus, Sébastien Villotte. External auditory exostoses and hearing loss in the Shanidar 1 Neandertal. PLOS Read More ›