No one shut it off? Here: Billions Of Planets In Our Galaxy ‘May Hold Life’ Billions of stars in our galaxy could have as many as three planets orbiting them that could support life. Astronomers used data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope which has already confirmed that 1,000 planets are orbiting stars in the Milky Way – with another 3,000 possibles. The researchers made their claim after calculating the chances of planets orbiting in the “habitable zone” – the region around a star which could contain planets capable of supporting liquid water. Danish researcher Steffen Kjaer Jacobsen, from the University of Copenhagen, said: “According to the statistics and the indications we have, a good share of the planets in the Read More ›

Featured in an article, Amid a Sea of False Findings, the NIH Tries Reform? BioLogos is a group that wants Christians to believe in evolution, whatever that means. Today, of course it means Darwinism. Didn’t Templeton give them $$millions? One must pay to read the rest. News doesn’t want to pay because it’d just be the usual blather. Always promising reform but won’t root out causes. End story. See also: John West has updated Darwin Day in America (with Afterword) (read free excerpt, includes Collins) Our culture is witnessing the rise of what could be called totalitarian science, says West. And see the role of BioLogos founder. Question from usual pew sitter: Not how did these people get to be Read More ›

There are many ID’ers who complain about the AVIDA simulation, and I for the life of me can’t figure out why this is so.
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Here. Suzan Mazur: It’s clear to me from reading your papers that you have issues with neo-Darwinism. Luis Villarreal: The issues first came up when I began looking at quasispecies in the early 1970s. I was a researcher in the lab of the late John Holland, where there was real enthusiasm for studying evolution theory in the context of actual virus measurements, because the whole concept derived from thinking about RNA viruses. I wasn’t interested really in evolutionary theory at a deep level. I was interested in persistence, and for this the Modern Synthesis didn’t seem to be working. I just assumed that the theory didn’t apply or work in the specific situations we were studying involving persistence, such as Read More ›

The following story is from Section 5.1 of my new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition.” For a more scientific version of this story, see my 2013 BIO-Complexity article, “Entropy and Evolution,” which is now Chapter 4. The new Chapter 1 is an article published by Human Events in December 2013. In the current debate between Darwinism and intelligent design, the strongest argument made by Darwinists is this: in every other field of science, naturalism has been spectacularly successful, why should evolutionary biology be so different? Even most scientists who doubt the Darwinist explanation for evolution are confident that science will eventually come up with a more plausible explanation. That’s the Read More ›

Some science pubs want to survive as trusted sources? This from Real Clear Science: Technically, the headlines are not incorrect. Yet, to me and others, they imply something more radical than what was actually observed. To cut to the chase, an individual photon cannot be observed acting as both a pure particle and wave at the same time. But if you assemble a group of many different photons, you can observe some acting like particles and others acting like waves. Many stories did not make this clear. The researchers who performed the experiment, published in Nature Communications, are on the same wavelength with this assessment. “I also believe that a lot of people are overinterpreting the significance of these data,” senior Read More ›

Here. … Notices of concern regarding papers in Science2, Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS)3,4,5, Journal of Material Chemistry, Polymer Chemistry and Chemical Science have been published in the past few months and now the first retractions of these papers has been coming into effect – one paper in Science2 and three in JACS. Hey, here’s a solution: Just blame creationists. That way no one need ask what’s broken. Maybe one of Darwin’s frat boys in the combox can compose the PR for us. Alternatively keep up with Retraction Watch Follow UD News at Twitter!

What’s really interesting about the latest claim (Science) to have (maybe) solved the origin of life conundrum is the comments. Here’s one: I’m pretty much shocked at the emotionally charged comments. They are simply testing hypotheses for the building-blocks of life and how they were assembled. The intent is not to disprove your god(s) or say ‘haha, we are right.’ … Of course, the commenter is at best mistaken. The reality is that naturalism has gotten nowhere with origin of life and has nowhere to go anyway. The emotional uproar is an outcome of that fact. Nothing will work with origin of life until information is factored in. See also: Suzan Mazur’s interview with an origin of life society president Read More ›

Well, then it sure isn’t “evolution” as National Geographic understands it. This just in from Andreas Wagner at Aeon: How do random DNA changes lead to innovation? Darwin’s concept of natural selection, although crucial to understand evolution, doesn’t help much. The thing is, selection can only spread innovations that already exist. The botanist Hugo de Vries said it best in 1905: ‘Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.’ (Half a century earlier, Darwin had already admitted that calling variations random is just another way of admitting that we don’t know their origins.) A metaphor might help to clarify the problem. Imagine a giant library of books containing all possible Read More ›

Recently, Larry Moran critiqued ID’s approach to evolutionary biology. Here I will explain how Larry Moran has misunderstood both ID and modern evolutionary theory.
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Recently on niwrad’s thread we have had a lively discussion about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and its potential application to the question of a materialistic abiogenesis scenario. kairosfocus has followed up with another useful post. In the present thread I provide a high level view of some of the key issues and misconceptions surrounding the 2nd Law arguments. Please note, I do so not as any kind of official spokesperson for intelligent design, but based on my experience debating this issue and my individual thoughts on the matter. My intelligent-design-inclined colleagues may disagree with my assessment, but hopefully I have provided some food for thought and, perhaps, an avenue for more productive discourse in the future. Discussions on this Read More ›

About anything except what he thinks? Some of us would be curious to know where he stands on falsifiability?

The boss here is an American, so he tends to be courteous.   Canadians, like some of his help, were raised on ice hockey, so  … Anyway, in response to Reasonable people doubt science the way we doubt used car dealers, one of Darwin’s wise has responded, Every thing we know is a belief of one sort or another. We believe the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning because that’s what it’s always done. We don’t step off the top off tall buildings without any other means of support because we believe we’ll fall to the ground and be killed. Reasonable people stop believing in vaccines and we start seeing a resurgence of measles or polio. Most of Read More ›

Long suspected: SA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface. Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth and for the search for life, as we know it. “This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish,” said John Grunsfeld, assistant administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. “In its 25 years in orbit, Hubble has made many scientific discoveries in our own solar system. A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life Read More ›

Here: Science is the use of observation to guide thinking about the world to understand it. This grand, idealistic, with-a-big-S Science is not broken. However, much of the actual, concrete with-a-small-s science, i.e. the activity of scientists today, is not good Science. Some aspects of how modern science works go against the principles of Science. For instance, one of the key theories of how Science ought to work is Karl Popper‘s notion of falsifiability. Popper argued that for a theory to be considered scientific, it had to be falsifiable. That is, a theory should make predictions that could be tested and, potentially, proven wrong. An unfalsifiable theory is just not science. A falsifiable theory might be right or wrong – Read More ›