You mean the same way that  ghosts in the barn loft are hard to find? From Evolution News & Views: Charles Darwin’s idea that an unguided natural process led to all the beauty and diversity of the world, including its Undeniable appearance of design, guides scientific thinking to this day. But what if his signature mechanism — natural selection — cannot be measured? Without measurement, a theory reduces to anecdote. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences threatens to do that, at least in regard to “the evolution of human body form.” The implications go far beyond human physiology. Consider limb length. Say you want to deduce how natural selection has affected the dimensions of Read More ›

From Fuz Rana at Poached Egg: Generally speaking, the reaction to my book The Cell’s Design has been positive. But there have been a few reviews that were less than stellar. Perhaps the most critical of all was a review written by microbiologist Frank Steiner for the Reports of the National Center for Science Education. After careful reflection, I have come to conclude that many of the issues Steiner has with The Cell’s Design are unsubstantial and largely unfounded. Nevertheless, one point he raised has some merit. Fortunately, a recent discovery by researchers from Germany about the structure of the enzyme F1-F0-ATPase helps address Steiner’s point—and in doing so, actually strengthens my argument for the intelligent design of biochemical systems. Read More ›

Over at WEIT, Professor Jerry Coyne has put up three interesting posts during the past few days, with questions for his readers relating to free will, the irrationality of belief in Divine revelation, and climate skepticism. I’d like to briefly respond to his questions. Free will In a post titled, Once again with free will: a question for readers (August 16, 2016), Professor Coyne laments the persistence of popular belief in libertarian free will – the view that whenever I make a choice, I could have chosen otherwise, otherwise my choice would not be free. Professor Coyne contrasts this view (which he calls view A) with the hard determinist view (called view B), which he espouses. On this view, the Read More ›

From Kelsey Houston-Edwards at PBS: The difference between Lithium-6 and Lithium-7 might not seem like much, but it is poking holes in our understanding of how atoms formed during the Big Bang. … Fortunately, there’s one possible explanation for the discrepancy that hasn’t been ruled out yet—lithium is created and destroyed inside stars. It’s possible that scientists accurately predicted how much 6Li was produced during the Big Bang, and the rest was created later in stars. But for now, lithium is challenging our understanding of the Big Bang, big time. More: See also: National Geographic on the Big Bang “lithium shortage” Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Penny Sarchet at New Scientist: Rather than springing into existence just once in some chemically blessed primordial pond, life may have had many origins. It could have got going over and over again in many different forms for hundreds of thousands of years, only becoming what we see today when everything else was wiped out it in Earth’s first ever mass extinction. In its earliest days on the planet, life as we know it might not have been alone. More. And it is not happening all around us now because … Oh wait! That is a Boltzmann brain floating above the inkjet printer… Is the Boltzmann brain a protected species? I better find out. Note: One could subscribe to Read More ›

The question of whether methodological naturalism is an idea worth holding onto in science has been one that the ID camp, as a whole, is not unified on. Some think that methodological naturalism is a perfectly valid way to define science, and that ID fits nicely within that scope. Others think that methodological naturalism is just philosophical baggage hitching a free ride and should be discarded.
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From ScienceDaily: “Our study suggests that high-frequency hearing may have preceded the emergence of echolocation,” says Morgan Churchill of New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, New York. Churchill and his colleagues made their discovery in studies of a new fossil whale species (Echovenator sandersi) found in a drainage ditch in South Carolina. The researchers CT scanned the ancient whale’s remarkably complete fossilized ear and compared it to those of two hippos and 23 fossil and living whales. Those analyses uncovered many features found today in dolphins, which can hear at ultrasonic frequencies.More. Paper. (paywall) – Churchill et al. The Origin of High-Frequency Hearing in Whales. Current Biology, 2016 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.06.004 File under: It all just suddenly happened for Read More ›

From Kirk Durston, in response to Ethan Siegel at Forbes, “Humanity May Be Alone In The Universe” (an unusual commonsensical approach to the question of extraterrestrial civilizations) at Contemplations: From a materialistic, evolutionary perspective, our technologically advanced civilization is almost certainly unique in the universe. Indeed, if the origin of life is so improbable that we should not even be here, then it seems we are faced with an interesting choice. The first option is to grant Koonin’s theory that we won a lottery against mind-staggering odds, requiring a near infinite number of unseen, untestable universes. The second option arises out of our observation that the universe and this particular planet seem to be incredibly fine-tuned to support life. It Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Schizophrenia poses an evolutionary enigma. The disorder has existed throughout recorded human history and persists despite its severe effects on thought and behavior, and its reduced rates of producing offspring. A new study may help explain why-comparing genetic information of Neanderthals to modern humans, the researchers found evidence for an association between genetic risk for schizophrenia and markers of human evolution.… “Our findings suggest that schizophrenia vulnerability rose after the divergence of modern humans from Neanderthals,” said Andreassen, “and thus support the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a by-product of the complex evolution of the human brain.” More. Paper. (public access) – Saurabh Srinivasan, Francesco Bettella, Morten Mattingsdal, Yunpeng Wang, Aree Witoelar, Andrew J. Schork, Wesley K. Thompson, Verena Read More ›

Seversky wrote: The psychopath may decide that he is morally justified in satisfying his appetite for rape and murder but all his potential victims are equally justified in deciding that they don’t want to be actual victims. Given that the potential victims greatly outnumber the psychopaths the will of the majority is likely to prevail. What’s wrong with that? The Nazis may have believed that they were morally justified in believing that the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and mentally disabled were corrupting society and should be exterminated. If they had been asked, those groups would almost certainly have disagreed, as would at least part of the German people. As did much of the rest of the world. The Nazi regime was Read More ›

From : Nori Satoh, a researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, has identified what he sees as the moment the notochord, and hence the chordate lineage, was born. “I have proposed that the occurrence of tadpole-like larvae is a key event that caused the evolution of chordates,” he explains. Early in life, many deuterostomes pass through a larval stage. But while acorn worm or sea urchin larvae might swim about by rhythmically moving tiny hair-like structures – cilia – on their bodies, chordate larvae have a tail that they beat. “The notochord is the supporting organ of the beating tail,” says Satoh.More. Yeah, just happened. How? August. See also: The highly engineered transition to vertebrates: Read More ›

From at Arunas Radzvilavicius at RealClearScience: A study published last month in Nature Microbiology suggests the last common ancestor of all living cells fed on hydrogen gas in a hot iron-rich environment, much like that within the vents. Advocates of the conventional theory have been sceptical that these findings should change our view of the origins of life. But the hydrothermal vent hypothesis, which is often described as exotic and controversial, explains how living cells evolved the ability to obtain energy, in a way that just wouldn’t have been possible in a primordial soup.More. In short, we have contradictory explanations but the vents are back in the news: See also: Hydrothermal vents spout life again at New Scientist Hydrothermal vent Read More ›

Abstract: In 1912, palaeontologist Arthur Smith Woodward and amateur antiquarian and solicitor Charles Dawson announced the discovery of a fossil that supposedly provided a link between apes and humans: Eoanthropus dawsoni (Dawson’s dawn man). The publication generated huge interest from scientists and the general public. However, ‘Piltdown man’s’ initial celebrity has long been overshadowed by its subsequent infamy as one of the most famous scientific frauds in history. Our re-evaluation of the Piltdown fossils using the latest scientific methods (DNA analyses, high-precision measurements, spectroscopy and virtual anthropology) shows that it is highly likely that a single orang-utan specimen and at least two human specimens were used to create the fake fossils. The modus operandi was found consistent throughout the assemblage Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: “For decades, we’ve known of four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces,” Feng added. “If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter.” … … The Hungarians detected tantalizing evidence of a previously unknown particle just 30 times heavier than an electron — a result they published early this year. More. It would make a heck of a sci fi film See also: Dark matter skeptics wanted Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Sean Martin at  UK Express: Lead researcher Dr Sam Parnia said: “Contrary to perception, death is not a specific moment but a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs and brain to cease functioning. “If attempts are made to reverse this process, it is referred to as ‘cardiac arrest’; however, if these attempts do not succeed it is called ‘death’.” Of the 2,060 patients from Austria, the US and the UK interviewed for the study who had survived cardiac arrest, almost 40 per cent said that they recall some form of awareness after being pronounced clinically dead. More. Natural death is usually a process, so such a finding should not seem surprising. Read More ›