In another thread, I asked daveS why he was an atheist. He responded: The proposition “there is no god” also appears to me to be consistent with what I observe in the world. When asked what that meant, he expanded: Well, I don’t know of any inconsistencies between this proposition and my observations. For example, I’m not aware of a god blatantly intervening in the world, as some people say happens. I’ve addressed this in the other thread, but this comment is reflective of what a lot of atheists say is a convincing lack of evidence for god: the supposed lack of observed miracles. Atheists think we live in a world that looks like a world without a god. Of course, that’s Read More ›

At SciAm: Many distinguished scientists proclaim that the universe is teeming with life, at least some of it intelligent. Biologist Christian de Duve went so far as to call life “a cosmic imperative.” Yet the science has hardly changed. We are almost as much in the dark today about the pathway from nonlife to life as Charles Darwin was when he wrote, “It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.” There is no doubt that SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—has received a huge fillip from the recent discovery of hundreds of extrasolar planets. Astronomers think there could be billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. Read More ›

Well, Ben Andrew Henry is saying this at The Scientist: When a manuscript goes out for peer review, most medical journals inform their reviewers of the authors’ identities and affiliations, in what’s called a single-blind review. But new research suggests that concealing the identities of authors—double-blind review—could help reduce reviewer bias. In a study published in JAMA this week (September 27), Kanu Okike of Kaiser Moanalua Medical Center in Honolulu and colleagues assigned the same mock manuscript to 119 reviewers for an orthopedic journal. Half of the reviewers were not given the names of the authors, while the other half were told that the paper was written by two past presidents of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons from prestigious Read More ›

From John Timmer at Ars Technica: Somewhere around a million years ago, the climate underwent a transition. Earlier, it was going through glacial cycles every 40,000 years, but it shifted to taking 100,000 years to cycle (this shift is termed the mid-Pleistocene transition). Snyder’s new record shows that the planet was getting slowly but progressively colder for the first million years or so. But by 1.2 million years ago, the cooling trend began to slow down. After it flattened out, the overall global average temperature has remained stable through to the present, even as glacial cycles caused lots of fluctuations around that average. The analysis can’t separate cause and effect, so there are a number of possibilities here. One is Read More ›

We talk to Marcos Eberlin, Thomson Mass Spectrometry Lab, Brazil: 1. Enezio tells me you are interested in the concept of design in nature. Do you relate it to your work in mass spectrometry or to other, larger issues, or both? J. J. Thomson, the father of mass spectrometry—the man who discovered the electron and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906—once said in a paper he published in Nature. As we conquer peak after peak, we see in front of us regions full of interest and beauty, but we do not see our goal, we do not see the horizon; in the distance tower still higher peaks, which will yield to those who ascend them still wider prospects, and deepen the Read More ›

What we know and don’t know about the origin of life Moore’s Law The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore’s Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore’s Law to hold for at least another two decades. – Vangie Beal, Webopedia Further to life being older than Earth, a kind reader draws our Read More ›

From Wayne Rossiter,, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, on the recent claim that time is all in our heads: 1) Don’t a series of events have to pass in order to arrive at a state of the universe in which observers can exist? On atheistic naturalism, doesn’t intelligent life emerge from non-life at one or more places in the cosmos, after some cosmic evolution? If the passage of time is directly related to the experience of the observer, how could time pass leading up to the first observer (or was there no time back there)? 2) What qualifies as an observer? Sure, us (humans). But what/who else? 3) Okay, a third one: If an observer is Read More ›

Reader Ilion Troas kindly writes to say, re the pop science of the week (Time is all in our heads:” “… In other words, if we do experience the future (which we might), we are not able to store the memories about such processes. You can’t go back in time without this information being erased from your brain. By contrast, if you experience the future by using the usual route “past > present > future,” you accumulate memories and entropy grows.” So, whenever a person acquires amnesia, this causes a (slight) decrease in entropy? If a Mad Scientist (TM) induces amnesia to all human beings, might this effect a wholesale rolling-back of entropy? Might this even enable *him* to reverse Read More ›

Lee Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution, responds to a Darwin-in-the-schools lobbyist at Evolution News & Views : In his review, David Levin seems to have set out to perform a hatchet job, and this required dispensing with truth. Before going into that, however, I must describe briefly the major point of my book, which he neglected to address. One would expect a review of a book to include a discussion of its major point. Perhaps he didn’t understand it or else he felt unable to refute it. Either way, he ignored it. The major point of the book is that current evolutionary theory is a failure. It is a failure because it has never been shown that the probabilities Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: An international team of scientists and conservation experts has discovered that the critically-endangered Hawaiian crow, or ‘Alalā, is a highly proficient tool user, according to a paper published today in the scientific journal Nature. … The discovery of a second tool-using crow species finally provides leverage for addressing long-standing questions about the evolution of animal tool behaviour. “As crow species go, the ‘Alalā and the New Caledonian crow are only very distantly related. With their last common ancestor living around 11 million years ago, it seems safe to assume that their tool-using skills arose independently,” explains Rutz. “It is striking that both species evolved on remote tropical islands in the Pacific Ocean that lack woodpeckers and ferocious bird Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Smoking leaves its “footprint” on the human genome in the form of DNA methylation, a process by which cells control gene activity, according to new research in Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, an American Heart Association journal. … “These results are important because methylation, as one of the mechanisms of the regulation of gene expression, affects what genes are turned on, which has implications for the development of smoking-related diseases,” said Stephanie J. London, M.D., Dr.P.H., last author and deputy chief of the Epidemiology Branch at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. “Equally important is our finding that even after someone stops smoking, we still see the effects of smoking Read More ›

Of course. From Robert Lanza, Wake Forest U, at Discover Mag: So if the laws of physics should work just as well for events going forward or going backward in time, then why do we only experience growing older? All our scientific theories tell us that we should be able to experience the future just like we experience the past. The answer is that we observers have memory and can only remember events which we have observed in the past. Quantum mechanical trajectories “future to past” are associated with erasing of memory, since any process which decreases entropy (decline in order) leads to the decrease of entanglement between our memory and observed events. In other words, if we do experience Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Starts with a Bang: By finding graphite deposits in zircons that are 4.1 billion years old, graphite deposits that show this carbon-12 enhancement, we now have evidence that life on Earth goes back at least 90% of Earth’s history, and possibly even longer! After all, finding the remnants of organic matter in a certain location means the organic matter is at least as old as the location it’s buried in, but it could still be even older. This is so early that it might make you think that perhaps this life didn’t originate here on Earth, but that Earth was born with life. And this could really, truly be the case. (Extended argument follows, summation:) If Read More ›

  For a materialist the term “ethics” is empty of objective meaning, and in a post from a couple of years ago I pointed out the absurdity of materialist “bioethics.” After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.  I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” Read More ›

At comment 60 in this thread about self-described atheistic materialists who want portray themselves as being moral yet having no basis by which to be moral in any objective sense, Seversky says in response: “However, it is a choice between able to be good in a way that actually means something and actually matters,…” to whom? That’s always the unspoken part of such a claim. Meaning only exists in the mind of the beholder and something or some one only matters to some one. Believers fell better if they believe that their lives have meaning and matter, which means they need a Creator to whom they matter. Notice that, according to Seversky, meaning is an entirely subective pheonomena. IOW, in Read More ›