From ScienceDaily: Study adds to evidence that viruses are alive Until now, viruses have been difficult to classify, said University of Illinois crop sciences and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, who led the new analysis with graduate student Arshan Nasir. In its latest report, the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses recognized seven orders of viruses, based on their shapes and sizes, genetic structure and means of reproducing. B21″Under this classification, viral families belonging to the same order have likely diverged from a common ancestral virus,” the authors wrote. “However, only 26 (of 104) viral families have been assigned to an order, and the evolutionary relationships of most of them remain unclear.” Part of Read More ›

From Business Insider: We’re all made of heavy atoms forged in the explosions of supermassive stars. This not only connects us to the universe, but highlights the possibility of alien life, explains famed astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson: “These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems — stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.” More. If you believe this, put your affairs in the hands of a trustee.

From BBC News: Rewind to 30,000 years ago. As well as modern humans, three other hominin species were around: the Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia, the Denisovans in Asia, and the “hobbits” from the Indonesian island of Flores. The hobbits could have survived until as recently as 18,000 years ago. They may have been wiped out by a large volcanic eruption, according to geological evidence from the area. Living on one small island will also leave a species more vulnerable to extinction when disaster strikes. We do not know enough about the Denisovans to even ask why they died out. All we have from them is a small finger bone and two teeth. Notice how the BBC story is Read More ›

Part of O’Leary for News ongoing series here. Then there is Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, with its famous exemplar: the peacock’s tail. An illustration may help us see why reasonable persons continue to doubt. Picture a triplex: Tom, a world class cribbage addict in Apartment A, does no work and has no money (apart from social assistance and charity). Dick, in Apartment B, works eight shifts a week in trucking, so has no trouble paying his bills. Harry, formerly in Apartment C, went off and became a multimillionaire (legally) in packaging and shipping for the software industry. Does work alone explain Harry’s success? Did he work a thousand times harder and more often than Dick? Is that even possible? Read More ›

Jeffrey Tayler has written an article in Salon, titled, Make them shut up about God: The right-wing’s religious delusions are killing us—and them, in which he lists some questions he’d ask politicians of faith: Sample questions to be put to pietistic contenders for the White House: What makes you believe in God? Do you hear voices? See visions? Do you believe God answers your prayers? If so, please provide objective evidence. Why is, say, the Bible or the Torah better than the Quran? Does not the eternal hellfire the supposedly merciful Jesus promised sinners epitomize Constitutionally prohibited cruel and unusual punishment? If you consider the Bible a reliable guide for your personal life, may I ask if would you slaughter Read More ›

From UNZ, alternative media: The Jerry Coyne Retirement Jerry Coyne, an eminent evolutionary geneticist and all around public intellectual, is retiring, and has posted a bitter sweet and hopeful farewell letter to his conventional scientific career. For the general public Coyne is probably more famous as a New Atheist, though Coyne is actually a vocal atheist of long standing. His most recent book was on that topic, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible. I’m an atheist, but on the balance I demur form many of his positions in regards to religion and science. More precisely, I am quite willing to defend atheism and dismiss religion, but on philosophical or meta-scientific grounds, not scientific grounds as such. More. Read More ›

From Casey Luskin at Christian Post:: Hominid Hype and Homo Naledi: Did Scientists Really Discover a Human Ancestor? Indeed, just four years ago Australopithecus sediba — also discovered and promoted by Berger — was the transitional form du jure between the australopithecines and our own genus Homo. Yet sediba had a very different set of traits from naledi. If the same researchers now want to advocate Homo naledi as the new “transitional form,” they must radically revise their evolutionary story. Both species been called a “human ancestor,” in recent years, but both claims cannot be true. Another major challenge to claims for Homo naledi as a transitional form is the fact that the age of these newly reported fossils is Read More ›

Over at What’s Wrong with the World, Dr. Lydia McGrew has written a short article that nails the reason why atheists are liable to err on moral matters. The article, titled, Does being an atheist interfere with being moral? (September 22, 2015), identifies metaphysical naturalism (which views the world as the sum total of what can be described by the sciences) as the root of the problem. There is of course no logical reason why atheists are bound to accept this materialistic worldview, but the vast majority of contemporary atheists do, and the ethical theory which they tend to opt for, as a best fit for their metaphysical views, is utilitarianism. On a utilitarian view, there are no radical discontinuities Read More ›

From Should Scientific Truth Be Subjected to a Vote?: Those who promulgate the rhetoric of consensus rightly want to preserve the integrity of science in the eyes of the public. The empirical, precise, and collaborative method of natural science remains – despite the current reproducibility crisis – our most reliable source for knowledge about the natural world. And it often facilitates tremendous technological achievement. No surprise that its practitioners enjoy a high degree of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital.” They ought to. More. Well, yes, but if there is a reproducibility crisis, one would best deal with that before subjecting any decision to a vote. Otherwise, it’s like showing up in court and saying you have no evidence Read More ›

From The Scientist:: The form and function of the ears of modern land vertebrates cannot be understood without knowing how they evolved. Excuse me, excuse me, we can know everything there is to know about hearing today simply from examining life forms today. Darwinism forces on people the belief that they must know about the “evolution” of such a function – somewhat like thinking you have to know a lot about Henry Ford in order to drive or fix a car. Hey! Who pays for this stuff anyway? Meanwhile: Although fish can hear, only amphibians and true land vertebrates—including the aquatic species that descended from them, such as whales and pinnipeds—have dedicated hearing organs. In land vertebrates belonging to the Read More ›

Okay, okay, not directly our thing, but I am just gearing up here again: The False Science of Cryonics No one who has experienced the disbelief of losing a loved one can help but sympathize with someone who pays $80,000 to freeze their brain. But reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the “cryonics” industry. Those who profit from this hope deserve our anger and contempt. More. In case you knew someone who was thinking of doing this. Why not give the $80,000 to a health research outfit? Also: That means the mind is something different from the brain.

Jurisprudence Professor Robert George and bioethicist Patrick Lee have written a devastating take-down of Bill Nye in an article for National Review titled, Back to Science Class for the Science Guy, after Nye published a video on YouTube, claiming to tell us what science says about abortion. As take-downs go, this one is about as good as it gets, and I warmly recommend it to readers. The authors write: …[H]e (Nye) misrepresents the facts from top to bottom in an embarrassingly transparent effort to hijack science in the cause of pro-abortion ideology. The authors’ conclusion is also worth quoting: At several points in his video, Nye expresses frustration with people who don’t share his support for the moral and legal Read More ›

Okay, this is the last thing I (O’Leary for News) have to say on the subject of doctors and evolution, and fitness for public office: Once, about forty years ago, one of my kids was hit on the head by a car. She was taken immediately to the local ER. I flagged down a cruiser to follow. Even in those days, one could get immediate updates by cruiserphone (… so far okay … so far okay … um, check with medical resident … ) So the cops and I rushed through the ER doors. It wasn’t hard to find her; I could hear her screaming from four emergency rooms away. Later, a medical attendant told me to carry her upstairs Read More ›

I passed by and noted a dismissive comment (or a few) regarding US Presidential candidate, retired neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson: CASE A: he’s running for President of the United States of America; he’s a politician who’s put religion and science into his platform. He willingly exposed himself to criticism and does not deserve a pass because he did good things as a surgeon. CASE B: Dr Carson. He is clearly a talented physician, but get him talking about evolution or cosmology and he turns into Ken Ham. Looks like a classic case of willful ignorance to me; he should know better. Is that acceptable for the president of a world power? CASE C: Surgery is to science what carpentry is Read More ›

When John Ray refused to conform to the 1662 Act of Uniformity—aimed mainly at the Puritans—and so was forced to leave his position at Cambridge University, he roamed Europe for three years doing what he loved: observing nature. Ray and his companions were in for a surprise: unfathomable diversity. They found thousands of different kinds of insects, animals and plants. Every place had a different flora and fauna, and with different interactions. Life did not seem to follow the kind of compact formulas Isaac Newton was discovering for the new physics. With the overthrow of Aristotelianism, physics was becoming more parsimonious in line with Occam’s Razor. But biology was headed in the opposite direction. Were all these organic life forms Read More ›