A friend writes, “The following paper [in Frontiers in Physics] makes ID the basis of a case study in the diffusion of knowledge. Behe and Meyer are prominently featured:” Slow-down or speed-up of inter- and intra-cluster diffusion of controversial knowledge in stubborn communities based on a small world network Here’s the abstract: Diffusion of knowledge is expected to be huge when agents are open minded. The report concerns a more difficult diffusion case when communities are made of stubborn agents. Communities having markedly different opinions are for example the Neocreationist and Intelligent Design Proponents (IDP), on one hand, and the Darwinian Evolution Defenders (DED), on the other hand. The case of knowledge diffusion within such communities is studied here on Read More ›

A friend writes that British novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, is very close to an ID understanding of intelligence and information: A choice, let us remember, is almost more of a negative than a positive. You embrace one thing; but you refuse a thousand. The most liberal profession imprisons many energies and starves many affections. If you are in a bank, you cannot be much upon the sea. You cannot be both a first-rate violinist and a first-rate painter: you must lose in the one art if you persist in following both. – Robert Louis Stevenson, On the Choice of a Profession (1916) Chatto & Windus, pp. Read More ›

As I ponder the ongoing debates over and consequences of a priori evolutionary materialism (especially when dressed up in the lab coat) I am more and more led to think that the issue of responsible freedom tied to rationality and to our inescapably being under moral government is utterly pivotal. An excellent place to begin is with Martin Cothran in ENV back in 2012, as he reflects on Sam Harris’ challenges in addressing responsible freedom: >>The first thing we must get clear about the book is something that Harris himself, given his thesis, must certainly agree with: he had no choice in writing it. But that has little to do with the neurological state of his brain. He operates under Read More ›

When an article begins with the statement that “The theory of evolution by natural selection is among the best established in science,” you know the author won’t be defending that claim but rather will be assuming it as a given. You also know the author, in this case psychology professor Tania Lombrozo at the University of California, Berkeley, is sufficiently distant from evolutionary theory such that facts won’t confuse the message. Even committed evolutionists have long since admitted that natural selection, at best, can only be one of several modes of evolutionary change. In fact biological adaptations we can observe are dominated by rapid, directed change in response to environmental challenges, not slow, random change accumulated via natural selection as Read More ›

A view from alternative medicine and a view from anti-alternative medicine. The row was touched off by the Mayo Clinic offering alternative therapies (linked at sites). One reason this is an unusually difficult problem is that the patient’s view of what is happening is part of what is happening. As great physicists have noted, the mind is real. The placebo effect is one of the most powerful effects in medicine, which is why drugs must be tested against placebo (control group). Not because placebo doesn’t work but precisely because it does. Thoughts welcome. See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away Follow UD News at Twitter!

And too few corresponding insights? Asks an op-ed in The Scientist : I just finished reviewing another mitochondrial genome paper. These days, the mitochondrial genome review requests are arriving faster than I can turn them out. Indeed, in 2014 alone, more than a thousand new mitochondrial genome sequences were deposited in GenBank—an almost 15 percent increase from the previous year. Few would question the utility of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) as a genetic marker. But it is increasingly clear that sequencing mtDNA has become an easy route to peer-reviewed publications; at times, the pursuit of these publications is encumbering journal editors, referees, and the research infrastructure as a whole. Is publishing papers on mitochondrial genomes a relic of the “publish or Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A gene previously suspected of wielding the single greatest genetic influence on human obesity actually has nothing to do with body weight, according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. The work not only overturns a major finding about the genetics of obesity but also provides the first effective ways to analyze “particularly ornery and confusing” parts of the genome, such as the locus of this gene, said the study’s co-senior author, Steven McCarroll, assistant professor of genetics at HMS. He analyzed genome-wide association data collected by the GIANT Consortium and found no association between AMY1 and body mass index, a measure of a person’s weight relative to their height. Read More ›

Further to churches getting sucked into the politicized climate change controversy, chewed up, and spit out: English science journalist Matt Ridley assesses the damage done to science by the frankly political climate science wars here at Quadrant: For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff. Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims Read More ›

Closing off our religion coverage for the week: Further to Pope Francis’ adviser is a science pantheist? (And this in an age when the human mind is widely regarded among the intelligentsia as an illusion, shaped for fitness, not for truth), The Guardian asks, Is science policy a theological matter? The Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ released by Pope Francis last week has generated a wide range of reactions ranging from enthusiastic praise to uneasy criticism. For some, the Pope’s key message was about climate change, for others about the downsides of economic growth, and some saw in it a reconciliation of science and religion. But the Encyclical also lays bare a debate much larger than each of these perspectives, one Read More ›

Odd that: Strange, then, that a self-professed atheist and scientific advisor to the Vatican named Hans Schellnhuber appears to believe in a Mother Earth. … In the Gaia Principle, Mother Earth is alive, and even, some think, aware in some ill-defined, mystical way. The Earth knows man and his activities and, frankly, isn’t too happy with him. This is what we might call “scientific pantheism,” a kind that appeals to atheistic scientists. It is an updated version of the pagan belief that the universe itself is God, that the Earth is at least semi-divine — a real Brother Sun and Sister Water! Mother Earth is immanent in creation and not transcendent, like the Christian God. What’s this have to do Read More ›

In “Hard Truth Against Soft Theory,” Canadian columnist David Warren says, I have been around for some time now, so that the name Paul Ehrlich is familiar to me. I spotted it in media accounts of the latest imposture, in which a “global extinction event” is said to be unfolding, on a scale with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Imagine my non-surprise upon discovering that Ehrlich was among the co-authors. One might actually read the predictions he made in The Population Bomb (1968), or any of his subsequent works, for that matter. Catastrophes he predicted by 1975 have not occurred. The world’s population has doubled, but food production has significantly outstripped this growth, with only modest increases in land under Read More ›

Readers will long be haunted by the memory of the 21-year-old gunman who opened fire earlier this month in a historic, mainly African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine. David Klinghoffer, at Evolution News & Views, offers the following: Dylann Roof’s apparent “manifesto” deals a little with themes of pseudo-scientific racism: Negroes have lower [IQs], lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior. If a scientist publishes a paper on the differences between the races in Western Europe or Americans, he can expect to lose his job. There are personality traits within human families, and within different breeds of cats or dogs, so why not within the Read More ›

Readers may remember philosopher of mind and proponent of direct realism John Searle (John Searle on the two big mistakes philosophers make). Here’s Los Angeles Review of Books on his new book, Seeing Things As They Are There is an external world, and it is full of things: tables, crocodiles, textures, etc. These things and this world exist whether I like it or not: their existence is independent of my beliefs, opinions, or preferences, and hence we say that such an existence — or, to use the technical term, such an ontology — is objective. There is also a subjective world, and it consists of internal states of mind. Such states are not ontologically objective, but subjective: they depend for Read More ›

We are told that the mistletoe species lacks genes found in all other complex organisms. From ScienceDaily: A discovery made during an analysis of a species of mistletoe whose apparent ability to survive without key genes involved in energy production could make it one of the most unusual plants on Earth. … “This loss of genes very likely corresponds to the loss of an entire respiratory complex,” said Jeff Palmer, IU Distinguished Professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Biology, who led the study. “This is something that hasn’t been reported before for any multicellular organism.” The genes that have been lost from V. scurruloideum typically reside in the mitochondrial genomes of plants and animals. Read More ›

Darwin’s finches, we are told, have reached their limits on the Galapagos Islands From ScienceDaily: The evolution of birds on the Galapagos Islands, the cradle of Darwin’s theory of evolution, is a two-speed process. Most bird species are still diversifying, while the famous Darwin’s finches have already reached an equilibrium, in which new species can only appear when an existing one becomes extinct. This finding expands the classical theory on island evolution put forward in the 1960s. What? We haven’t even established how many “species” there are anyway, due to hybridization. Nonetheless, ‘The analysis shows that for the finches, diversity does indeed have a negative effect. There is no more room for new species, unless one of the existing species Read More ›