From Spetner’s The Evolution Revolution (2014): The nonrandom evolutionary hypothesis (NREH) I am suggesting is a paradigm very different from the random mutation of the NDT. I am suggesting an evolutionary process in which individuals evolve, as opposed to the neo-Darwinian process, which purportedly acts on populations. Stress can induce epigenetic changes in an organism, changes that can activate a set of latent genes in both its somatic cells and its gametes. An organism will ooften undergo stress if its environment changes significantly. The stress may then induce genetic rearrangements, which may turn ON some hitherto latent, or cryptic, genes. These latent genes may elicit a response in the organism that is adaptive to the new environment. The response is Read More ›

And yet, will we ever come to an end of discussion and talk if we think we must always reply to replies? For replies come from those who either cannot understand what is said to them, or are so stubborn and contentious that they refuse to give in even if they do understand. Augustine of Hippo, City of God

… literary Darwinism is dead. And took a proponent down with it. From Chronicle of Higher Education Review, we learn, Survival of the Fittest in the English Department: Jonathan Gottschall tried to save literary studies. Instead he ruined his career. Which sounds terrible. Until we find out why: The story of how things went so wrong for a promising young scholar is one of disciplinary politics, contentious methodological debates, and the respective statures of the sciences and the humanities. Above all it is the story of how brash literary Darwinists and evolutionary theorists attempted to “save” English departments — by forcing them to adopt scientific methodology — and were, on the whole, repelled. There is nothing scientific whatever about evolutionary psychology, and Read More ›

From chemistry site Compound Interest: The vast majority of people will get their science news from online news site articles, and rarely delve into the research that the article is based on. Personally, I think it’s therefore important that people are capable of spotting bad scientific methods, or realising when articles are being economical with the conclusions drawn from research, and that’s what this graphic aims to do. Note that this is not a comprehensive overview, nor is it implied that the presence of one of the points noted automatically means that the research should be disregarded. This is merely intended to provide a rough guide to things to be alert to when either reading science articles or evaluating research. Read More ›

Should know better. In an article defending consensus science, physicist Ethan Siegel opines, Think about evolution, for example. Many people still rally against it, claiming that it’s impossible. Yet evolution was the consensus position that led to the discovery of genetics, and genetics itself was the consensus that allowed us to discover DNA, the “code” behind genetics, inherited traits and evolution. Actually, modern genetics started with Gregor Mendel who was as oblivious to Darwin’s work as Darwin was to his. The triumph of Darwinism has distorted genetics, such that horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and convergence were for many decades routinely underresearched. Scientists scrambled for evidence of the great wonders of accumulated information supposedly performed by Darwin’s natural selection acting on Read More ›

They never predicted it, then they denied it could be heritable, and then they denied it could cause lasting change. “It” in this case is epigenetics and in spite of being wrong, wrong and wrong again, and in spite of the fact that there is no scientific explanation for how epigenetics could have evolved, evolutionists nonetheless insist that it, in fact, must have evolved. Evolution loses every battle but claims to win the war. All of this became abundantly clear this past week when the finding of a new epigenetic signal was announced:  Read  more

For some years now I have argued that when it comes to explaining the existence of consciousness (subjective self-awareness), materialists have nothing interesting to say, that their so-called explanation amounts to nothing more than “poof! It happened.” See here, here and here. I was gratified to learn in a recent exchange that Elizabeth Liddle agrees with me at least at a certain level. In various places in that exchange she wrote: Certainly an emergent property must be explained in terms of the system; and clearly an explanation must be “systematic” in the sense of specifying a cascade of mechanisms. . . . “[Emergent” is] simply a word to denote the idea that when a whole has properties of a whole Read More ›

In a paywalled Wall Street Journal story, theory of mind researcher Alison Gopnik informs us that “Young children develop the concept of free will in the short period between ages 4 and 6.” Here’s a free copy from her site: Along with Tamar Kushnir and Nadia Chernyak at Cornell University and Henry Wellman at the University of Michigan, my lab at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to see what children age 4 and 6 think about free will. The children had no difficulty understanding the first sense of free will: They said that Johnny could walk through the doorway, or not, if the door was open, but he couldn’t go through a closed door. But the 4-year-olds didn’t Read More ›

The new atheists have been holding out on us lately. On the other hand, someone told us about this Raw Story item: Professional atheist Sam Harris looks like an idiot in this email exchange with Noam Chomsky My, my. What do readers think? Is it no longer cool to be a new atheist? Follow UD News at Twitter! Search Uncommon Descent for similar topics, under the Donate button.  

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air advises us all as to what a scientist’s wife thinks God must do to kep is ratings high: I can only imagine how eager you all are to redefine God in a radically new and empowering way, and your various church and temple leaders will doubtless be looking forward to the upcoming lightening of their workload. But how exactly are we to structure this new god for the 21st century? Well, Ms. Abrams has five helpful bullet points which don’t so much involve who God is, but who He can not possibly be. These are characteristics of a God that can’t be real: God existed before the universe. God created the universe. God knows everything. Read More ›

From Physics Today: Brace yourself for the possibility that you will not like how the science writers depict you or your science. Unflattering portrayals and missing the real point of the science are among the top complaints we hear from researchers, and most senior scientists we know have felt burned at one time or another by a story in the mainstream press that discussed their work. Science reporters may focus on elements you deem unimportant, even trivial. They may quote an outside expert who challenges your work—or an activist or politician who questions why we are spending money on your research in the first place. You have no control over where they take the story, and you probably won’t have Read More ›

Science, like all disciplines today, is coming under heavy demands for censorship. People who used to be called dissenters or dissidents are now “denialists.” In short there is One Right Answer, to which no research not sponsored by an Establishment can add. But the history of science progress feature a grand parade of witnesses called by Counsel for the Defense. As a matter of fact, the likely outcome of the current mood is stagnation. Most new insights that proved valid were hotly contested, along with a lot of stuff that fell by the wayside. But very often no one knows for sure.* Paul Driessen writes, Brandeis disinvited Ayan Hirsi Ali, because her views on women’s rights might offend some Muslim Read More ›

Further to Build your own worm (and bring your own dirt too), from Ann Gauger at Evolution News & Views: offers, The white space in evolutionary thinking. When certain biologists discuss the early stages of life there is a tendency to think too vaguely. They see a biological wonder before them and they tell a story about how it might have come to be. They may even draw a picture to explain what they mean. Indeed, the story seems plausible enough, until you zoom in to look at the details. I don’t mean to demean the intelligence of these biologists. It’s just that it appears they haven’t considered things as completely as they should. Like a cartoon drawing, the basic Read More ›

We didn’t think so, but just for the record: From the Edge: One of the things that I’ve always done is not make a clear separation between books that are aimed at popularizing, books that are aimed at explaining things to other people, and books that explain things to myself, or explain things to my scientific colleagues. I think the separation between doing science and popularizing science has been overdone. And I have found that the exercise of explaining to other people, which I suppose I’ve been fairly successful at, is greatly helped by the fact that I first have to explain it to myself. And explaining it to myself … the biomorph program, which I originally wrote to explain Read More ›

A reader thinks so, and submits the YouTube below as evidence, noting: The man is not as compelling a speaker as he is a writer, nevertheless he as a materialist is questioning an aspect of materialism. And as thoughtful materialists question aspects of materialism, I think it good that we take note and understand what they are saying. Thomas Nagel‘s (2012) Mind & Cosmos : Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False was well worth reading, as also was Rupert Sheldrake‘s (2013) Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. Lee Smolin, like Sheldrake, proposes a kind of cosmic natural selection whereby the laws of physics evolve, and thus he eschews what he calls “timeless truths.” Read More ›