Here: Evolutionary Science ‘Stuck’ on Wrong Track, Situation ‘Out of Control’ … František Baluška, a native of Slovakia, is founder and editor-in-chief of two scientific journals, Plant Signaling & Behavior and Communicative & Integrative Biology (Landes Bioscience, publisher) where more of his provocative thinking can be found. Freedom in science is crucial, he says, and we need “open-minded” journals. A decade ago Baluška began organizing international conferences on plant neurobiology as well. His thinking about “plant intelligence” has been partly inspired by Lynn Margulis, specifically her paper “The Conscious Cell.” The theme of plant intelligence was more recently explored in a magazine article by Michael Pollan in which Baluška is cited as well as Darwin’s 1880 observation that the plant Read More ›

I sometimes despair of even the possibility of rational discourse with the ID opponents who post regularly on these pages. In this post I will try to give you a template for rational, logical discourse using my last post as an example. Before I do that, I will give you a couple of hints about the basics. All arguments rest on premises. Here is the classic: 1. All men are mortal 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Socrates is mortal. In order to refute an argument you must do one of two things: Show that it is invalid or show that is unsound. “Invalid” means the conclusion does not logically flow from the premises. In other words, an invalid argument Read More ›

From Eurekalert: The team, led by UA astronomer Peter A. Milne, discovered that type Ia supernovae, which have been considered so uniform that cosmologists have used them as cosmic “beacons” to plumb the depths of the universe, actually fall into different populations. The findings are analogous to sampling a selection of 100-watt light bulbs at the hardware store and discovering that they vary in brightness. “We found that the differences are not random, but lead to separating Ia supernovae into two groups, where the group that is in the minority near us are in the majority at large distances — and thus when the universe was younger,” said Milne, an associate astronomer with the UA’s Department of Astronomy and Steward Read More ›

And Mae-Wan Ho: Ho’s lucubrations on evolutionary biology, as revealed in an interview she gave to Suzan Mazur at PuffHo, are just as bad. The piece, “Mae-Wan Ho: No boundary really between epigenetic and genetic”, is replete with misstatements, errors, and distortions on the part of both interviewer and subject. Mazur, as you may recall, is a gonzo journalist driven by one Big Obsession: modern evolutionary biology is wrong and she’s going to show how rotten it really is. Mazur tried to win renown by reporting on the infamous “Altenburg 16,” a group of biologists who convened a meeting in Austria, originally intending to debunk the Modern Synthesis, but later retracted their claws and claimed only to “extend” the synthesis. Read More ›

New York Times commentator David Brooks, who wrote one of the worst novels imaginable, based on evolutionary psychology (PZ Myers seems to agree with me on this), allows us to know that he is paid to be a narcissistic blowhard. He has one thing down right: He made sure they paid him. Yes, okay, okay, otherwise a narcissistic blowhard. But why must the world keep getting bulletins about it? From the Guardian review of his book length lecture, The Road to Character: The Road to Character feels like an abrupt plunge that goes far deeper. Though not explicitly religious, Brooks’s language evokes theology: for example, he doesn’t shirk from using the word “sin”, not in a scolding sense, but to refer Read More ›

Here: As Scruton notes: “Moral relativism clears the ground for a new kind of absolutism. The emerging curriculum in the humanities is in fact far more censorious, in crucial matters, than the one that it strives to replace.” But this isn’t just about the handful of protests the student clubs get up to. The problem has leaked into all of the humanities – the once sacred home for all forms of inquiry. It’s about dismantling anything connected to the past, anything that suggests we can learn from the people who came before us: “The Marxist theory of ideology, or some feminist, poststructuralist, or Foucauldian descendent of it, will be summoned in proof of the view that the precious achievements of Read More ›

A sendup of science journals How’s That Again? From the Los Angeles Times: In the muddy sediments beneath the deep sea, scientists have found ancient communities of bacteria that have remained virtually unchanged for 2.3 billion years. Researchers say these microscopic organisms are an example of “extreme evolutionary stasis” and represent the greatest lack of evolution ever seen. They may also, paradoxically, prove that Darwin’s theory of evolution is true. ? JPD At least some authors are suspected of ID links No problem. The Dumbdown police will be there shortly. Wherever is “there” these days… Follow UD News at Twitter!

In my last post I challenged materialists to answer the following challenge: Materialist premises lead ineluctably to the following conclusions. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal preferences can be reduced to the impulses caused by the electro-chemical processes of each person’s brain. My challenge to materialists was to show how any of the conclusions I’ve reached based on materialist premises are not in fact compelled by those premises. RDFish responded with a comment you can read for yourself (comment 23), the gist of which was “normal people agree that evil things are evil.” RDFish’s response Read More ›

History prof Richard Weikart reviews Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth: “While I was reading Nancy Pearcey’s new book, Finding Truth, a professor at the state university where I teach circulated a news item about a politician seeking to alter the university’s goals. Instead of facilitating “the search for truth,” the university under this plan would commit itself to meeting “the state’s work-force needs.” I remarked to this professor and other colleagues that many academics had already eliminated “the search for truth.” In the ensuing e-mail conversation, several professors rejected the idea that there is any universal truth, and one professor even described the whole concept of a “search for truth” as incoherent. … The fourth principle involves examining the worldview for Read More ›

Saves time. Here: As a physics professor working in a secular university in Australia, and publishing in scientific journals, and knowing the importance of communicating one’s science to the wider community, I have had many opportunities to see how the system works. Outside of the experts in your field the details do not matter, but a good story does. As an illustration of this let me relate a story from early 2013. At that time I published a cosmology paper,3 which included an interesting concept. I found that using an alternative cosmology in a finite bounded expanding universe, with a unique centre and an edge, one could get the same physical description of the large-scale structure of the universe, which Read More ›

Had to happen: The theory of “intelligent design” holds that the universe and living beings are so complex that they must have been created by an “intelligent” force typically identified as a deity. Conservative Christian opponents of teaching evolution have advocated that “intelligent design” be taught as an alternative. Perzanoski in a phone interview Tuesday dismissed the basis for the complaint. “We categorically deny we were teaching anything about creationism,” he said, adding that many of the allegations “transpired from a discussion [Sullivan] had with the kids” during which they asked him about his personal beliefs. Also: Superintendent Paul Perzanoski denied the ACLU’s allegation and said the 26-year veteran teacher was just responding to a question from a student who Read More ›

Mark Frank apparently no longer wants to play. So I will throw the question I asked him open to any of the other materialists who post here. Imagine the following exchange: Barry: Mr. Materialist, is it possible to imagine a universe in which torturing an infant to death for personal pleasure is actually an affirmatively good thing? Mr. Materialist: The answer to your question is that my metaphysics compel me to say that the phrase “affirmatively good thing” is all but meaningless in the sense you are using it. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal Read More ›

So says New Scientist: Once the fragments had been pieced together, the skeleton was declared to be of the species Australopithecus afarensis. But the skeleton became known as Lucy, inspired by a Beatles song that blasted out of a cassette player as the researchers celebrated their discovery that evening. Forty years later, thanks to its age and completeness, Lucy remains an important specimen. It shows, for instance, that our distant ancestors began to walk upright on two legs long before they developed big brains. It’s no surprise, then, that replicas of the skeleton are on display at museums across the world. But when Gary Sawyer and Mike Smith at the American Museum of Natural History in New York recently began Read More ›

… we wouldn’t find this?: From ScienceDaily: “In addition to being incredibly small in overall size, this jaw has a mixture of traits that combine typical modern human anatomy, such as the presence of a protruding chin, with traits that are more common of our archaic ancestors like Neandertals — for example, very thick bone to hold the molars in place,” said University of Illinois anthropology professor Laura Shackelford, who led the study with anthropologist Fabrice Demeter, of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. This combination of archaic and modern human traits is not unusual, Shackelford said. … Not unusual? For sure not, if you have ever taken the bus or train between Toronto and Ottawa (Canada). In Read More ›

Here. Smarter than you think but maybe not as smart as they do.