Here: Theory fails to forbid travelling backwards in time. But practice suggests it might just as well be forbidden. Perhaps that is for the best. If backward time travel were possible, some fool would no doubt try testing the grandfather paradox, another invention of time-travelling fiction writers. In this, a visitor to the past kills his or her grand-father before the conception of the protagonist’s own parent, meaning the protagonist could never have been born, and the murder could not have taken place. The grandfather paradox—the observation that causality cannot work backwards—is probably crucial to an understanding of the arrow of time. It is implicit in explanations that rely on thermodynamics and the like, but has not yet been translated Read More ›

From Nature: How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. Our brains evolved long ago on the African savannah, where jumping to plausible conclusions about the location of ripe fruit or the presence of a predator was a matter of survival. But a smart strategy for evading lions does not necessarily translate well to a modern laboratory, where tenure may be riding on the analysis of terabytes of multidimensional data. In today’s environment, our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a Read More ›

Here. On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin talks with Felipe Aizpún, author of The Fifth Way and Intelligent Design (La quinta vía y el diseño inteligente) and prolific writer on ID and the debate over origins. Aizpún shares how intelligent design is both a scientific and philosophical argument, and discusses Thomist philosophers’ opposition to ID. [20 min approx] Let’s hope Aizpún is more charitable than I’m (O’Leary for News) inclined to be. What with a paradigm shift well under way*, all I can say is, don’t let them get away with claiming afterward that they meant something else. Not after all the supercilious abuse they have handed out to people who are far more likely to be Read More ›

Readers will remember Suzan Mazur, author of Altenberg 16 and The Origin of Life Circus. Her latest is The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin”: Major scientists from a dozen countries present evidence that a paradigm shift is underway or has already taken place, replacing neo-Darwinism (the standard model of evolution based on natural selection following the accumulation of random genetic mutations) with a vastly richer evolutionary synthesis than previously thought possible. The subtitle is owed to the late Carl Woese. See Carl Woese, discoverer of a whole domain of life, regretted not overthrowing Darwin regretted not overthrowing Darwin When you see who is listed on the cover, you will definitely want this book. Follow UD Read More ›

Did we miss this? Johns Hopkins history of medicine prof Nathaniel Comfort offers, in Nature, a decidedly dismissive review of the second volume of Richard Dawkins’ autobiography, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science: A curious stasis underlies Dawkins’s thought. His biomorphs are grounded in 1970s assumptions. Back then, with rare exceptions, each gene specified a protein and each protein was specified by a gene. The genome was a linear text — a parts list or computer program for making an organism —insulated from the environment, with the coding regions interspersed with “junk”. Today’s genome is much more than a script: it is a dynamic, three-dimensional structure, highly responsive to its environment and almost fractally modular. Genes may Read More ›

Over the last several days I’ve been watching StephenB thrash RDFish in this post. Several times SB has asked Fish this question: Is a murderer a different kind of cause than accidental death or is it not? Now obviously Fish is in a pickle, between the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis so to speak.  If he says that a murderer is in the same category of causation as accidental death, he will look like an idiot, because everyone knows they are not.  But if he says they are in different categories, then SB has him right where he wants him, because the next, obvious, question will be: what makes them different?  And the answer to that question is also obvious; death Read More ›

From RealClearScience: Disproved Discoveries That Won Nobel Prizes Including Perhaps the most clear-cut example hearkens all the way back to 1926, when Johannes Fibiger won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for “for his discovery of the Spiroptera carcinoma.” In layman’s terms, he found a tiny parasitic worm that causes cancer. Subsequent research conducted in the decades following his receipt of the award would show that though the worm definitely existed, its cancer-causing abilities were entirely nonexistent. So where did Fibiger go wrong?More. Blogger Ross Pomeroy cites inadequate technology and improper controls, plus no one knew much about cancer back then. One suspects also a desire that cancer be simple, but alas, it isn’t. With so many Nobels awarded, doubtless many Read More ›

Further to What’s happened since Icons of Evolution (2002)? Well, for one thing, Darwin’s textbook finches took a beating (no speciation) From The Evolution Revolution by physicist Lee Spetner: The proximate biochemical signal evoking the change in beak shape [of Galapagos finches] has been discovered to be a protein growth factor Bmp4. The more Bmp4 that is made, the broader and deeper is the bird’s beak. This protein acts as a signal to the development of the craniofacial bones which determines the beak’s shape. If my suggestion is correct that the hormones triggered by environmental inputs affect embryonic development, then those hormones induce these growth factors to form the finch beak….The built-in mechanism of the NREH [Non Random Evolutionary Hypothesis] enables the bird Read More ›

Icons of Evolution (Jonathan Wells, Regnery, 2002) is 13 years old. A friend, forensic engineer Stephen Batzer, summarizes, I think that there are three “show stoppers” since then. 1. That Darwin’s finches are simply races of the same bird. There has been no speciation. 2. That the tree of life is not viable. “It’s a bush!” they respond. Well, then Darwin was wrong, and the model is wrong. If it’s a *bush* it isn’t a *tree*. The Darwinian model is common descent and gradual differentiation. That has been shown to be false, because of #3. 3. ORFAN (Orphan) genes. Where do novel genes come from? If common genes mean common descent, then novel genes mean intervention and an innovator. The Read More ›

Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.” (Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, page 228 (Viking, Penguin Group, 1996, Revised Edition)* On line here. *Also: Bill Gates, with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 188. Wonder what he’d say now. Would he break down and cry, erupt into maniacal laughter, or read Darwin’s Doubt? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Further to: Origin of life research still “abject failure” (Franklin Harold)? The answers will remain murky because the researchers are trying to get information out of matter. Great physicists have said it was the other way around: Here’s the trailer for a new film addressing the problem, The Information Enigma Information drives the development of life. But what is the source of that information? Could it have been produced by an unguided Darwinian process? Or did it require intelligent design? The Information Enigma is a fascinating 21-minute documentary that probes the mystery of biological information, the challenge it poses to orthodox Darwinian theory, and the reason it points to intelligent design. The video features molecular biologist Douglas Axe and Stephen Read More ›

From RealClearScience: The Primordial Soup Was Edible Back in 2005, when I was a first-year microbiology graduate student, I enrolled in a course on bacterial physiology. One of our guest lecturers, Dr. Franklin Harold, was an esteemed researcher in bioenergetics, a field that examines how cells derive and utilize energy. One evening, outside of class, I happened upon Dr. Harold at a seminar, and I asked him a question: “What is your opinion on origin of life research?” He responded, “It has been an abject failure.” Ten years later, it is still difficult to argue with him. True. There is no shortage of theories but Put simply, a field with so many different interpretations is wandering lost in the long Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Ancient alga knew how to survive on land before it left water and evolved into the first plant Up until now it had been assumed that the alga evolved the capability to source essential nutrients for its survival after it arrived on land by forming a close association with a beneficial fungi called arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM), which still exists today and which helps plant roots obtain nutrients and water from soil in exchange for carbon. The previous discovery of 450 million year old fossilised spores similar to the spores of the AM fungi suggests this fungi would have been present in the environment encountered by the first land plants. Remnants of prehistoric fungi have also been found inside Read More ›

Any fair-minded person who read Thomist philosopher Edward Feser’s incisive and crushing refutation of physicist Lawrence Krauss’s article, “Why scientists should be militant atheists,” would have to conclude that New Atheism was on the ropes. But after reading Jerry Coyne’s spirited defense of Krauss, I was reminded of a line from Louisa Alcott’s Little Men: “’Come on, come on, I ain’t thrashed yet!’ cried Emil, who had been down five times, but did not know when he was beaten.” Judging from the comments on his latest post, many of Professor Coyne’s readers seemed to share his view that the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which is based on the contingency of the world, was no better than the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Bacteria in ancient flea may be ancestor of the Black Death About 20 million years ago a single flea became entombed in amber with tiny bacteria attached to it, providing what researchers believe may be the oldest evidence on Earth of a dreaded and historic killer — an ancient strain of the bubonic plague. If indeed the fossil bacteria are related to plague bacteria, Yersinia pestis, the discovery would show that this scourge, which killed more than half the population of Europe in the 14th century, actually had been around for millions of years before that, traveled around much of the world, and predates the human race. Talk about stasis. One wonders what it was doing in the Read More ›