For those interested in attending, the AM-Nat Conference Schedule has been posted. If you want to find more detail about any of the talks, you can find them on the summary page.
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Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, offers thoughts on Saturday’s debate in Toronto: Lamoureux’s role in the debate was largely to offer a robotic rolodex of tired cliché’s (e.g., “I find the evidence for evolution overwhelming, there is no debate on that,” and “biology only makes sense in light of evolution”). Among them was the classic, “show me one tooth in the Cambrian, and we’ll turn all the science upside-down.” Of course, we have good reason to doubt that he would be true to his ultimatum. After all, we didn’t think evolution could account for the massive diversification of animal life seen in a 5-8 million year sliver of the Cambrian period, Read More ›

From New Scientist: … That brings to the fore areas that are not part of the canon of evolutionary theory: epigenetics, for example, which studies how organisms are affected by changes in the ways in which genes are expressed, rather than in the genes themselves. Attempts to incorporate such elements into evolutionary theory have not always been welcomed, however. That is understandable, given how successful the theory has been without them. Occam’s razor applies: do not add complications unless they are absolutely necessary. But another motivating factor is undoubtedly the fear that if scientists themselves are seen to suggest that even small details of the theory of evolution could be improved upon, its detractors will seize upon them with avidity. Read More ›

A reader writes, to share this brief remembrance of Dr. Hughes  in Infection, Genetics and Evolution. Here’s a reminiscence from a friend as well: No one was exempt from his devastating critiques—friends, scientists, religious leaders. Jerry Coyne twice had the splendid misfortune of addressing topics better understood by Hughes, and from a conflicting point of view, resulting in chains of blogs, columns, and book reviews (for example, see “Faith, Fact, and False Dichotomies“). However, erroneous claims only seemed to bother him when tied to some metaphysical agenda, such as Coyne’s atheism. Conflict on other matters, such as hostile reviews of his work overturning well-accepted bird phylogenies, prompted easy resignation: “Oh well, I tried.” When it came to outlandish claims about evolution, Hughes Read More ›

But then we would need to replace a lot of science journalists. From Michael Schulson at Pacific Standard: Last May, when This American Life acknowledged that it had run a 23-minute-long segment premised on a fraudulent scientific study, America’s most respected radio journalists did something strange: They declined to apologize for the error. “Our original story was based on what was known at the time,” host Ira Glass explained in a blog post. “Obviously the facts have changed.” It was a funny admission. Journalists typically don’t say that “facts change”; it is a journalist’s job to define and publicize facts. When a reporter gets hoodwinked by a source, she does not imply that something in the fabric of reality has Read More ›

John Farrell’s article, It’s Time To Retire ‘Theistic Evolution’ (Forbes magazine, March 19, 2016), cites three prominent Catholic thinkers who reject the term “theistic evolution.” But what Farrell overlooks is that these Catholics hold wildly divergent views on the simple question of whether living things were designed by God. Edward Feser insists that they were, and Stacy Trasancos apparently agrees; Ken Miller says they were not – which puts him in the same camp as Jesuit astronomer George Coyne and Catholic theologian John Haught, two outspoken defenders of evolution who were not cited in Farrell’s article. However, the clear teaching of the Catholic Church is that humans and other living things were designed by God. What I find astonishing is Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers discover sophisticated alarm signaling in a primitive insect Many insect species respond to danger by producing chemical alarm signals, or alarm pheromones, to inform others. In a recent study, investigators found that their alarm may be even be context dependent. The researchers discovered that larvae of the Western Flower Thrips produce an alarm pheromone whose composition of 2 chemicals, decyl acetate and dodecyl acetate, varies with the level of danger they face. When pheromone is excreted with a predator present but not attacking, the percentage of dodecyl acetate increases, whereas when a predator does attack, the percentage of dodecyl acetate is low. “This type of communication was so far only known from vocal alarm calling in mammals, Read More ›

Quite expectedly, the Krauss vs Meyer debate got off to a poor start. Krauss has a few go-to moves during a debate and most of them were on full display in his opening remarks (one can hardly call them arguments). He opened with an ill-informed and misrepresentative attack on the Discovery Institute and on the person, character and honesty of Stephen Meyer himself. During his diatribe, Krauss informed the audience that Meyer and his ideas are not worth debating and that Meyer himself is something of a dishonest marketing man for Intelligent Design. And what exactly is Krauss’ justification for this claim? Well, you see, several years ago, at a school board hearing in Ohio, Krauss, having failed to inform Read More ›

In a comment over at Sandwalk Larry writes: Bill says, But the point is moot. ID is not a scientific endeavor. Never has been. It’s a political movement with a social agenda to inject religion into American public schools. Simple as that. The debate took place in Canada where we allow the teaching of religion in public schools. None of us give a damn about the American Constitution. We’re interesting in knowing whether the science is valid or not. If the Intelligent Design proponents have legitimate complaints about evolution and if they have good scientific arguments in favor of design then those ideas should be taught in Canadian schools in spite of what some judge in Pennsylvania said ten years Read More ›

  From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Erica Klarreich at Quanta has the story of a surprising new result about prime numbers from Kannan Soundararajan and Rober Lemke Oliver. They have found that, given a prime number with a certain last digit, there are different probability for the last digit of the next one (among the various possibilities). This violates usual assumptions that such things are in some sense “random”, indicating just how subtle this “randomness” is. More. From Klarreich at Quanta: Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that Read More ›

Late this evening Darwin’s God broke into Lawrence Krauss’ much coveted private playlist. This was a major breakthrough, and Read more

From Retraction Watch, interviewing John Ioannidis, John Ioannidis is perhaps best known for a 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” One of the most highly cited researchers in the world, Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford, has built a career in the field of meta-research. Earlier this month, he published a heartfelt and provocative essay in the the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology titled “Evidence-Based Medicine Has Been Hijacked: A Report to David Sackett.” In it, he carries on a conversation begun in 2004 with Sackett, who died last May and was widely considered the father of evidence-based medicine. We asked Ioannidis to expand on his comments in the essay, including why he believes he is a “failure.” Retraction Read More ›

The developing pattern of terrorist attacks in the West continues. Looks like a bombing at an airport and a metro station in Brussels after a terrorist mastermind was captured Friday last. It seems so far, 26 dead, dozens wounded. The airport bombing may be a suicide bombing. Sky News, live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y60wDzZt8yg Heads up. END

From ScienceDaily: For decades, physicists have been working on the theory that dark matter is light and therefore interacts weakly with ordinary matter. This means that the particles are capable of being produced in colliders. This theory’s dark particles are called weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs), and they are theorized to have been created in an inconceivably large number shortly after the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. “But since no experiments have ever seen even a trace of a WIMP, it could be that we should look for a heavier dark particle that interacts only by gravity and thus would be impossible to detect directly,” says Martin Sloth. Sloth and his colleagues call their version of such a Read More ›

From the BBC: Why there might be many more universes besides our own … The fundamental constants of the laws of physics seem bizarrely fine-tuned to the values needed for life to exist. … For example, if the strength of the electromagnetic force were just a little different, atoms would not be stable. Just a 4% change would prevent all nuclear fusion in stars, the process that makes the carbon atoms our bodies are largely made of. … This has made some people suspect the hand of God. Yet an inflationary multiverse, in which all conceivable physical laws operate somewhere, offers an alternative explanation.More. So there it is. Brits pay taxes for this, believing it is some kind of science. Read More ›