People got unseasonably lucky  (Texas lottery div). Questions were raised here.  Someone good with numbers tried studying it a couple years back. But now this: Abstract:  Some people have all the luck. We look at the Florida Lottery records of winners of prizes worth $600 or more. Some individuals claimed large numbers of prizes. Were they lucky, or up to something? We distinguish the “plausibly lucky” from the “implausibly lucky” by solving optimization problems that take into account the particular games each gambler won, where plausibility is determined by finding the minimum expenditure so that if every Florida resident spent that much, the chance that any of them would win as often as the gambler did would still be less than one in a Read More ›

Choc biscuits this way please. Government to reincarnate Dalai Lama? From an atheist people’s republic: Get this: Atheistic China Claims ‘Right to Reincarnate’ Dalai Lama Look, we dunno except local EMS worldwide should help anyone screaming and fainting: China’s Communist Party is officially atheist, but that has not stopped it from making some impassioned claims on the afterlife. Some of the strongest language at this week’s annual national congress has been reserved for the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader. The fury is over his claim in recent interviews that he may not be reincarnated, ending the Dalai Lama’s seven-century lineage. His comments undercut Beijing’s plans to pick a China-friendly successor to the Dalai Lama after he dies. Can Read More ›

That’s, like, weird. From Wired: As she gathered more and more data on different populations of the birds around the island, Langin had a revelation: The birds, members of one single species, had split into two varieties in different habitats. Island scrub jays living in oak forests have shorter bills, good for cracking acorns. Their counterparts in pine forests have longer bills, which seem better adapted to prying open pine cones. That may not appear to be something you’d consider a “revelation,” but it really is—if you believe in evolution. Ever since Darwin and his famous finches, biologists have thought that in order for a species to diverge into two new species, the two populations had to be physically isolated. Read More ›

Here: We live in a world of chance and opportunity. But how much is truly random – and how much are we in control of our destinies? This special looks at how, through basic quantum and evolutionary processes, chance shapes us from the bottom up – and how we attempt to influence and understand it in our everyday lives. At least the ultimate pop sci tabloid writers are clear about what they think. Follow UD News at Twitter!

In the Pearcey book excerpt thread, I just had an exchange of views with VS on the nature of design that led to a comment at no 67 which I think is worth headlining. As, it seems that meaning of key terms such as design is now a focal issue: ________________ >> This caught my eye, per how one slice of a cake has in it all the key ingredients: KF [cf 50 supra]: when the investigations tell us (a) that FSCO/I is a strong sign of design as cause VS: You forget I think that a non intelligent directed configurations are also a form of design. This seems a rather new-speak-esque conflation and — with all due respect — Read More ›

Mark Frank: “Evolution does not select for specific beliefs.” Of course not Mark, if by “evolution” you mean materialist Neo-Darwinian evolution. This is the case for the simple reason that if materialism is true, “beliefs” as they are commonly understood do not exist. They are an illusion, mere “folk psychology” according to Dennett.

Here at Evolution News & Views: Another claim we hear, from celebrity skeptic Michael Shermer for example, is that science — and he of course includes Darwinian mechanisms for evolution in that category — is objective knowledge that will save us from superstition. But in the United States, a 2007-2008 Baylor University survey reported that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead and astrology (Ch. 15, “Credulity: Who Believes in Bigfoot”). They found that self-identified theological liberals and irreligious people were far more likely to believe in such things than other Americans. More.

From Phys.org: Many animals, including humans, acquired essential ‘foreign’ genes from microorganisms co-habiting their environment in ancient times, according to research published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study challenges conventional views that animal evolution relies solely on genes passed down through ancestral lines, suggesting that, at least in some lineages, the process is still ongoing. The transfer of genes between organisms living in the same environment is known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT). It is well known in single-celled organisms and thought to be an important process that explains how quickly bacteria evolve, for example, resistance to antibiotics. Lead author Alastair Crisp from the University of Cambridge, UK, said: “This is the first study to show how Read More ›

In new species emergence and diversity, according to From ScienceDaily: For the massive meta-study effort, researchers painstakingly assembled data from 2,274 molecular studies, with 96 percent published in the last decade. They built new computer algorithms and tools to synthesize this largest collection of evolutionary peer-reviewed species diversity timelines published to date to produce this Time Tree of Life. The study also challenges the conventional view of adaptation being the principal force driving species diversification, but rather, underscores the importance of random genetic events and geographic isolation in speciation, taking about 2 million years on average for a new species to emerge onto the scene. “This finding shows that speciation is more clock-like than people have thought,” said Hedges. “Taken Read More ›

[Someone kindly tweeted: WDNR is satirical entertainment website & not a source of news –worldnewsdailyreport.com/disclaimer/ Back to work.] And it isn’t even April 1? Ran March 8 at World News Daily: The English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, surprised the scientific community last week when he announced during a speech at the University of Cambridge that he believed that “some form of intelligence” was actually behind the creation of the Universe. Presenting himself before students at the University of Cambridge, the world-famous scientist declared that his years of research on the creation of the cosmos have led him to isolate a strange scientific factor which he says is in many ways contrary to the universal laws of physics. Personal reasons Read More ›

Remember the recent claim that wolves helped current humans kill off Neanderthals, presumably because the Neanderthals were too stupid to tame and keep such animals, as others had done. The lowly Neanderthals, it seems, have outsmarted a lot of academics in recent years. Just when it was safe to pontificate that Neanderthals couldn’t do art, there was the “bombshell” discovery of Neanderthal art. So here at the elite and highly sophisticated offices of UD News, we just said, wait till some Neanderthal excavation turns up an apparent ritual hunting dog burial. Okay, not so lucky yet, but it turns out that Neanderthals wore eagle talons as jewellery: A few raptor talons and feathers — also bearing hints of use as Read More ›

And why it might not really matter in the long run As Jonathan Wells, author of author of The Myth of Junk DNA , tells it at Evolution News & Views(March 9): Berkman and Plutzer’s findings were reported in the March 6 issue of Science. The report was accompanied by a photo of a biology classroom, with the caption “Poorly prepared science teachers often leave U.S. high school students with a shaky grounding in evolution.” In the foreground of the photo are several copies of the textbook being used in the classroom: Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph Levine’s widely used “elephant cover” book, Biology. I have a copy of the 2000 “elephant cover” textbook, which features (1) a drawing of Read More ›

Over the past day or so, following a News post, the self referential incoherences of evolutionary materialism have been coming under the microscope here at UD. In the course of such, the indefatigable (but often “misunderestimated”) BA77 has again struck gold. As in per famed eccentric and insightful mystic, William Blake, Tiger, tiger, burning bright . . . And, how could we honour BA77 without a vid? So . . (While we are at it, Eye of the Tiger, vid + lyrics.) Well worth headlining: _______________ BA77: >>I like the nuance that Dr. Pearcey draws out. It is not only that, under materialistic premises, our perceptions may be false, it is also that, under materialistic premises, free will, consciouness and Read More ›

In this post the UD News Desk quotes from Nancy Pearcey’s new book concerning evolutionary epistemology: An example of self-referential absurdity is a theory called evolutionary epistemology, a naturalistic approach that applies evolution to the process of knowing. The theory proposes that the human mind is a product of natural selection. The implication is that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value. Piotr thinks he has a cogent response to this: Does she believe “the ideas in our minds” are innate, or what? At best, it could be argued that the human mind has been shaped by natural selection in such a way that it can produce ideas which help us to Read More ›

We’ve done enough science news for one afternoon, so here is a scrap of total nonsense from our fave, PZ Myers at the Free Thought blogs: Do these big name universities intentionally inculcate obtuseness, or do they select for neo-reactionary thinkers? Case in point: Steven Pinker promoting Christina Hoff Sommers. What is this? Is he hoping that the flaming bigots of #gamergate will anoint him as Based Harvard Prof? It is impossible to take that hack Sommers seriously, unless you like that she supports your anti-feminist biases. While we mop up and stock up here at UD News, you can check this spit war between Darwin’s followers for yourself. Hey, you might be paying both of their salaries, hard to Read More ›