I was out doing errands today, and what do you know? The Toronto city parking pay kiosks in my neighbourhood were plastered with signs advertising, “Intelligent Design: War on Science”, and a whole bunch of other stuff we should supposedly all rush down to see at the Brunswick Theatre. Yeah really. Intelligent design’s war on science? How about: Creeps’ war on public property? That’s more like it! If anyone catches these people, they should be made to remove all that stuff at their own trouble and expense. If they can’t afford regular advertising, that’s most likely because their cause isn’t popular. Unpopularity does not give them a right to deface public property. Or am I whistling down the wind here? Read More ›

Here are some animations of the machinery of living cells, which I have encountered from various sources and put in alphabetical order for convenience. You might want to bookmark the file, as I plan to add to it, Read More ›

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has won the Templeton Prize: Taylor has long objected to what many social scientists take for granted, namely that the rational movement that began in the Enlightenment renders such notions as morality and spirituality as simply quaint anachronisms in the age of reason. That narrow, reductive sociological approach, he says, wrongly denies the full account of how and why humans strive for meaning which, in turn, makes it impossible to solve the world’s most intractable problems ranging from mob violence to racism to war. “The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimensions can be remarkable,” Taylor said in remarks prepared for the news conference. “This is the more damaging in that Read More ›

O’Leary looks at the spate of anti-God books and other promotions for the new Church of Atheism, and suspects that atheism was way more fun in the days when it was just a quiet, Godless Sunday at home.

Now, the church – as we all know – is the weak point of any religion. And when all you’ve got is a church – and remember, these people are supposed to be “beyond” belief – well, to me, that sounds a bit like getting married and finding out that you have no spouse but two mothers-in-law … and more too, if you want them!

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In this video, a rabbit somewhere in Texas chases a big snake up a tree.

Recently, a house cat also chased a bear up a tree. (You have to scroll way way down to see a vigilant ginger cat at the bottom of the tree.)

One of the many reasons I have little use for evo psycho is that animal behavior is often not at all predictable. It may be difficult to say what behavior enabled a given animal to become an ancestor, and therefore what may be encoded in genes. And genuine common ancestors may be rare. Read More ›

My inbox is full of stuff about Darwin Day, apparently tomorrow. Looking at the photos fronting the Darwin Day site, I get the feeling that the old boy contracted a spiritual disease of some kind early in life that ate at his vitals. But hey, don’t believe me. Look carefully at the portraits/photos and judge the matter for yourself. Read More ›

Australian ID critic Robyn Williams recently interviewed Melbourne neuroscientist John Reid, who is also a self-proclaimed expert in overpopulation and how to deal with it. Eric Pianka was the talk of this blog last year for recommending Ebola as the instrument of choice for reducing the world’s population by 90 percent (use UD’s search feature on his name). It seems that Eric and John need to pool their talents. In case you haven’t met, Eric, meet John; John, meet Eric. There, I’ve done my good deed for the day.

For a taste of where John Reid is going, consider:

[H]umanity has been all too compliant with the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The precepts of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam represent the quintessential perversion of the human mind. They must be abandoned and the notion of the sanctity of human life must be subjugated to the greater sanctity of all life on Earth.

Here is the full transcript: Read More ›

The 1/29/07 issue of Time Magazine is captioned “Mind & Body Special Issue”, and starts out with a discussion of the brain’s geography, an endeavor well studied and categorized by now, but which is far overshadowed by the mystery of ‘consciousness’, often tagged as the ‘ghost within the neural machine’. Steven Pinker writes the centerpiece article, “The mystery of consciousness”, and indeed, consciousness is the centerpiece of the mystery regarding life itself.

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Check out my new blog on the neuroscience issues that border on the intelligent design controversy, the Mindful Hack: First two stories: 1. Blindness: Spiritual blindness worse than physical? 2. Sigmund Freud … fallen so far and so fast?   Note: The Post-Darwinist will continue as before, and I will continue to contribute to this and all blogs I am not locked out of. Mindful Hack tracks my latest co-authored book, The Spiritual Brain (co-authored with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard), currently in copy editing.

Bench science, like book editing, is independent of content under normal circumstances.

But as Thomas Kuhn points out in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms determine what counts as evidence.

Mark what follows:

If materialism is assumed to be true and Darwinism is the creation story of materialism, then Darwinism is the best available explanation for the history of life.

So Darwinism is treated as true.

I am NOT saying that that follows logically.

Materialism could be true but its orthodox creation story could be untrue at the same time. Some other materialist story could better account for the evidence, for example. Read More ›

At Vere loqui, Martin Cothran notes that Richard Dawkins’The God Delusion, provides ammunition to ID advocates.

ID theorists are familiar with the accusation that ID is both unfalsifiable and anyway, already falsified. (The fact that the two claims can be maintained comfortably at once illustrates the extent to which materialism and Darwinism function as ideologies. In general, all arguments in support of an ideology, even contradictory ones, feel good to the ideologue. He attacks others for not supporting his view even when his view is literally incomprehensible.)

Dawkins will have none of that, however. He wants to be consistent. He accuses the National Center for Science Education of being the “Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists,” because it misguidedly appeases religious people by insisting that ID is not science (and therefore the religious people should ignore ID in favor of Darwinism). Dawkins would prefer that NCSE attack the religious people’s beliefs. Read More ›

The most well-known recorded clash between non-biologists and biologists over evolutionary theory was at Wistar 1966 :

a handful of mathematicians and biologists were chattering over a picnic lunch organized by the physicist, Victor Weisskopf, who is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Read More ›

Myers says: Once upon a time, I was one of those nerds who hung around Radio Shack and played about with LEDs and resistors and capacitors; I know how to solder and I took my first old 8-bit computer apart and put it back together again with “improvements.” In grad school I was in a neuroscience department, so I know about electrodes and ground wires and FETs and amplifiers and stimulators. Here’s something else I know: those generic components in this picture don’t do much on their own. You can work out the electrical properties of each piece, but a radio or computer or stereo is much, much more than a catalog of components or a parts list. Electronics geeks Read More ›

Study: MicroRNA fine-tunes brain synapses BOSTON, Jan. 18 (UPI) — Scientists at Children’s Hospital Boston say they’ve found the first evidence that microRNAs have a role in the functioning of synapses in the brain. http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20060118-21395400-bc-us-synapses.xml The researchers believe microRNAs fine-tune cognitive function, and may be relevant to mental retardation and autism. The scientists explained that non-coding regions of the genome — those that don’t have instructions for building proteins — are now known to include important elements that regulate gene activity. Among such elements are microRNAs — tiny, recently discovered RNA molecules that suppress gene expression. Increasing evidence indicates a role for microRNAs in the developing nervous system, and the Children’s Hospital Boston researchers have demonstrated that one microRNA affects Read More ›

Denunciations of Intelligent Design by professional societies are now common coin: the American Association for the Advancement of Science (see here), the American Institute of Physics (see here and here), and the Society for Neuroscience (see here) are cases in point. But what happens when a professional society gears up to denounce ID and its members don’t go along for the ride?

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