The analysis of 334 species of bat found that in species where the females were promiscuous, the males had evolved larger testes but had relatively small brains. In species, where the females were monogamous, the situation was reversed. Male fidelity appeared to have no influence over testes or brain size.
We now stand on the threshold of the 21st century where enormous challenges face us: staggering poverty, continuing racism, raging wars, pandemics, and the possibility of nuclear annihilation or of the irreversible despoliation of the planet. We cannot afford to approach these problems based on myths, religious or otherwise, however comforting. Religion cannot be our guide. And the alternative is not so metaphysically bleak as some would have us believe. Darwin himself said that there was a “grandeur” in his view of the unity of life. And there is hope in it too, since the scientific view of the world can lead us to a life that might be the envy of the gods, were there any.
Well, it’s because the credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality. An endless, sinusoidal signal—a dead simple tone—is not complex; it’s artificial. Such a tone just doesn’t seem to be generated by natural astrophysical processes. In addition, and unlike other radio emissions produced by the cosmos, such a signal is devoid of the appendages and inefficiencies nature always seems to add—for example, DNA’s junk and redundancy.
And while scientists—who have long been outspoken critics of alternatives to evolution—find themselves again embroiled in a defense of evolution, they have found an unlikely ally in this battle: divinity faculty.
Leading scholars on the issue at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) and other divinity schools say their faculties have almost no proponents of intelligent design.
Standard-sized needles failed to reach the buttock muscle in 23 out of 25 women whose rears were examined after what was supposed to be an intramuscular injection of a drug.
“Just a Theory” also covers the broad arena of science to provide perspective. For example, it discusses how creationism fits with other pseudosciences, such as astrology and homeopathy, showing why none deserves to be called science. While battles continue in the political arena and letters to the editor, the progress of science is guided by specific rules—evolution meets the requirements of those rules; intelligent design and other pseudosciences do not.
Good science does not move forward via political lobbying. Einstein did not insist that relativity be taught in physics class. He argued his case before his peers through scientific publication and through scientific presentations to those peers. He provided testable hypotheses, and when those hypotheses were confirmed by experimentation and observation, his ideas made it into high school physics textbooks. Einstein did not take out a large advertisement in The New York Times stating, “We the undersigned have serious problems with Newtonian gravity.” He did not hire a lawyer to have relativity inserted in high school textbooks. He did not insist on a disclaimer in textbooks that said, “Newtonian gravity is a controversial theory.”
While the Darwin exhibition has been unable to find a business backer—unlike previous exhibitions at the museum—the Creationist Museum near Cincinnati, Ohio, which takes literally the Bible’s account of creation, has recently raised $7 million in donations.
The company says the change is inspired by Utah legislators and the debate here and nationally over whether public school evolution lessons should be balanced with “intelligent design,” or the idea that life is too complex to be explained by Darwin’s theory of evolution alone.
The precise mechanisms by which PT-141 does its job remain unclear, but the rough idea is this: Where Viagra acts on the circulatory system, helping blood flow into the penis, PT-141 goes straight to the brain itself. And there it goes to work, switching on the same neural circuitry that lights up when a person actually, you know, wants to.
On that initial journey Fitzroy had taken four local “savages” from the southernmost tip of the continent, known as Tierra del Fuego, as retribution for the stealing of one of his whaling boats.
[…]
Were it not for the folly of the well-meaning but ultimately misguided Captain Fitzroy, says Mr Nichols, we might today be talking about Wallacism rather than Darwinism.
According to a new Cornell University study, when moviegoers were served stale popcorn in big buckets, they ate 34 percent more than those given the same stale popcorn in medium-sized containers. Tasty food created even larger appetites: Fresh popcorn in large tubs resulted in people eating 45 percent more than those given fresh popcorn in medium-sized containers.
Haymaker
You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy.
You can’t see the point of abstract principles and probably wouldn’t lay down your life for a concept though you might for a friend. Something of a champagne humanist, you admire George Bernard Shaw for his cheerful agnosticism and pursuit of sensual rewards and your Hollywood hero is Marlon Brando, who was beautiful, irascible and aimed for goodness in his own tortured way.
Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.
What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.
“Imagine if we never knew the chimp and knew only the bonobo,” suggests de Waal. “There are never any killing reports by bonobos. Their inter-community relations are very relaxed and they resolve issues with sex. If we knew only bonobos we would have come up with a completely different story about our evolution.”
The Melbourne physiologist Professor Derek Denton pointed out recently that the “knowledge of gravity has not been a strong point in the repertoire of the intelligent designer.”
The drainage holes at the top of our sinuses and the way our guts are attached by a membrane to the backbone are good examples. Both designs are fine for four-legged creatures, but now we have evolved to walk upright, they lead to clogged sinuses and hernias, he says.
Many believe that these and other similar arguments largely take the sting out of the problem of evil. Some think they dispose of the problem altogether. I find them utterly inadequate. The following dialogue is my attempt to convey why.
Snobbery is as woven into the human fabric as the sexual and aggressive impulses it seeks to refine. It’s no accident, then, that Rock Snobbery emerged just as young people started dressing in blue jeans and pretending that social class didn’t matter. Adolescents simply found novel ways—ways more acceptable to their newly egalitarian pretenses—to marginally differentiate themselves from one another. Musical taste was one such method, and for a small but increasingly demented subset of the population (interestingly, almost exclusively boys), having good taste in, and encyclopedic knowledge about, rock music became an almost Ahab-like obsession.
Businesspeople have a lot to learn from the animal world. But there are at least two problems here: one is that they trot out the same tired analogies over and over.
Information is bad for us is because of overcausation. You like the word “because.” You want to know why. When you read a report you always have “because” attached to it. Your brain cannot ingest information unless you stick “because” in it; people won’t pay attention otherwise. That’s why journalists use it. When you read The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, they say the market went up on whatever reason. Oil prices went down, so the market went up. People like that because it gives them some form of story, you see a link between these two events. The thing is, it may work that way, it may not.
The story of the origin of whales is one of evolution’s most fascinating tales and one of the best examples scientists have of natural selection.
As important as research is, it’s all about common sense in the end. If you can’t cool your apartment by leaving the refrigerator open, how’s it keeping all that produce fresh? Think about it. If you can’t really read the world’s great works of literature in only five minutes using a system peddled on TV, how do you explain that gentleman on the infomercial who aces those tests? Would extraterrestrials travel millions of light years just to abduct a non-trustworthy human for their series of intrusive tests? Yes.
Other mammals also experience a mix of REM and non-REM sleep, as do birds. Sleep researchers would like to know whether this pattern existed in the common ancestors of birds and mammals, reptilian animals that lived 310 million years ago. It is also possible that birds and mammals independently evolved this sleep pattern, just as birds and bats independently evolved wings.
A senior soothsayer may also have advised building a new centre of power, as Burma’s kings frequently did in the past. Astrologers play a key role in Burmese life and have prompted some of the strangest and most disastrous episodes in the country’s recent past.
“Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon,” said Reiss. “So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it.”
Egede’s animal had a serpent-like tail that appeared out of the water when the rest of the beast had disappeared. But rather than a tail, Paxton et al say, this was most likely a penis. They present photographs of well-endowed male whales, and also a drawing from Egede’s book, in which we see the sea monster’s serpent-like tail. The latter is remarkably similar to what we see in the photographs.
Villard is paying an $80,000 advance to the creator of a religion designed to make fun of intelligent design.
[…]
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which will codify Pastafarianism, is set to come out on Valentine’s Day.
In the chaotic early history of the solar system, our planet was subject to intense bombardment by meteorites containing simple organic compounds. The young Earth could have also received more complex molecules with enzymatic functions, molecules that were prebiotic but part of a system that was already well on its way to biology. After landing in a suitable habitat on our planet, these molecules could have continued their evolution to living cells. In other words, an intermediate scenario is possible: life could have roots both on Earth and in space.
Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.
Ms Boechler, now a trainee forensics analyst for the Royal Canadian Mounted Corps, concluded in her initial report that a cow standing with its legs straight would require five people to exert the required force to bowl it over.
But there’s a problem with arguing that Jesus came about through cloning or parthenogenesis—he would have been born a girl. In the last few decades science revealed that to be male you need a Y chromosome and the only place you can get one is from a man.
He interspersed humor with examples of basic evidence that support evolution. He noted that numerous vestigial organs and other extraneous features in the human body, such as some muscles, serve no discernible purpose. There are at least 100 vestigial parts in the body, he said. In addition to such well-known examples as the appendix or tonsils, Herreid cited goose bumps and muscles that wiggle the ears or move the scalp, the last of which he wryly demonstrated.
Speculation about extraterrestrial beings is ancient, but “alien abduction” as we know it originated in the 1960s, after a New Hampshire couple named Betty and Barney Hill claimed to have been kidnapped by extraterrestrials. Betty was a fan of movies like Invaders From Mars. Her story inspired a best-selling book, a TV movie, and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Many more people began to report abductions, which in turn led to more books and movies, which led to more people claiming to have been abducted—in a sense, it was Hollywood that had abducted them.
So, will science and religion find common ground, or at least agree to divide the fundamentals into mutually exclusive domains? A great many well-meaning scholars believe that such rapprochement is both possible and desirable. A few disagree, and I am one of them. I think Darwin would have held to the same position. The battle line is, as it has ever been, in biology. The inexorable growth of this science continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion.
It’s well known that much of the organic material from outer space to reach the prebiotic Earth came in the form of flat, sturdy molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. Platts began to see how PAHs could have been energized by solar radiation and self-assembled into stacks in the ancient ocean. Small, flat amino-acid molecules would begin to stick to the outside of this “stack of plates,” and the whole array would begin to look “for all the world like the information-rich genetic sequence of DNA or RNA.” This would have been nothing more than an intriguing, left-field notion if not for the fact that the space between these PAH layers is 0.34 billionths of a meter, which just happens to be precisely the distance between the ladder-like rungs of a DNA or RNA molecule. Somehow—and Platts doesn’t propose exactly how—this interesting but haphazard assemblage of molecules became a coherent vector of biochemical information, broke free of its PAH host and folded over on itself to become a “true pre-RNA genetic molecule.”
The yet-to-be-named species arose after two isolated populations of the green-eyed tree frog reestablished contact less than 8,000 years ago and found that their hybrid offspring were less viable. To avoid hybridizing with the wrong frogs and ensure healthy offspring, one group of females preferentially chose mates from their own lineage. Over several thousand years, this behavior created a reproductively isolated population—essentially a new species—that is unable to mate with either of the original frog populations.
In the magazine’s third annual take on the 10 worst jobs in science, those trying to teach evolution in Kansas classrooms come in at No. 3 on the list, topped only by “human lab rat” test subjects dosed with pesticides and manure inspectors.
Can ID make testable predictions? Not really. If we posit that a given biological system was designed, Rothschild asks, what can we infer about the designer’s abilities? Just “that the designer had the ability to make the design that is under consideration,” says Behe. “Beyond that, we would be extrapolating beyond the evidence.” Does Behe not understand that extrapolating beyond initial evidence is exactly the job of a hypothesis? Does he not grasp the meaninglessness of saying a designer designed things that were designed?
By the rules of our language game, however, the motives of people who distrust (or, frankly, revile) The Bell Curve are instantly suspect, while the motives of people who spend their entire professional lives trying to prove black people are dumber than white people escape all scrutiny. Said researchers often refer to themselves as “race realists,” and, in addition to the Orwellian moniker, they have mastered a host of rhetorical maneuvers meant to clear themselves of the charge of out-and-out racism: They carefully insist that East Asians are smarter even than whites; that estimating any individual’s intelligence by noting his race is impossible; and above all, that the data are the data no matter where they lead, even if into the frenzy of a politically correct backlash.
When The Mail on Sunday put a series of scenarios to Psychic Interactive that were all entirely made up, its psychics were happy to give elaborate responses to each one.
Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, university-educated women are more apt to have low sex drives—48 per cent compared to 31 per cent among high-school graduates. They are also less likely to have orgasms during intercourse.
“It may well be that highly educated women are different from less-educated women in many respects. Maybe they have higher standards … higher expectations and legitimately lower evaluations. They may be living much busier, much more stressful lives,” said William Fisher, a professor of psychology and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Western Ontario who is a co-author of the paper.
The difficulty, at least for the scientifically educated but spiritually malnourished, is not the idea of religion itself, meaning some system of ritualized worship that helps us to make sense, if only symbolically, of the human, natural and supernatural worlds. The difficulty is rather that all the religions on offer are so patently preposterous, if not downright unpleasant.
The textbook used in the ninth grade, for example, says that photography is a form of idolatry. On page 100, it states, “Depicting living creatures, animal or human, whether life-size or on paper or walls is prohibited because it imitates God’s creation.”
[…]
Mohammed Al-Ghannam, an Islamic teacher in an intermediate school, said: “In our school we don’t allow students to draw a whole living creature. They normally draw landscapes of natural scenery without any bird or animal. For example, if one wants to draw a falcon, he draws only the body without the head. Alternatively, he could draw a line between the body and the neck. Drawing a complete bird is not permissible in Islam.”
Jesus was a lunatic. God is not coming to your rescue. He hasn’t come to anyone’s rescue in thousands of years, including Jesus. Mohammed was a power hungry, scam artist and ruthless conqueror. Moses and Abraham were figments of the imagination of some long dead rabbi. He would probably laugh his ass off at all of you who still believe the fairytales he made up thousands of years ago. He probably wouldn’t even believe it if you told him.
Now, however, maleness has hit back, she says. While metrosexuals were obsessed with self-image and lifestyle, the übersexual is politically aware and passionate about real world causes. The metrosexual has women who are his best friends, while the übersexual respects women but retains men as his closest confidants. The metrosexual grooms his hair: the übersexual grooms his mind. The metrosexual reads Vogue and Cosmo, the übersexual the Economist and the New Yorker.
Punjilal, a 75-year-old resident of a village in India’s Madhya Pradesh state had said he would die between 1500 and 1700 local time on Thursday.
Journalists, doctors and TV channels joined thousands of curious locals outside the temple he was sitting in.
But the time came and passed and the fortune teller survived. He now says he will live till he is 90.
Freud and Marx, Einstein and Bohr, Mendelssohn and Mahler. The brothers Gershwin. The brothers Marx. Woody Allen. Bob Dylan. Franz Kafka. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Bobby Fischer. Jews may take tremendous pride in their aristocracy, but we fetishize it at our own peril; to suggest that we’re chosen, rather than that we make our own choices, curdles quickly into a useful argument for anti-Semites who’d love to claim that the objects of their derision are immutable vermin. It can’t be an accident that the most aggressive debunkers of Jewish essentialism, including the participants in this story, are generally Jews themselves. The arguments come in handy when the ugly stuff is trotted out, too.
In the evo-devo view, animals still adapt to their environments by Darwin’s natural selection, but adaptation involves a different kind of genetic change from what biologists used to assume. As a result, evolutionists may need to abandon what Carroll calls their “protein-centric perspective” and look instead to the poorly understood noncoding DNA that sits between genes.
The Simpsons have changed their name to Shamsoon. Bart, the skateboarding, gum-chewing delinquent has become Badr. Homer, his slobbish dad, has become Omar and has given up Duff beer and pork sausages, at least for the duration of Ramadan.
Rothschild suggested that Behe’s definition was so loose that astrology would come under this definition as well. He also pointed out that Behe’s definition of theory was almost identical to the NAS’s definition of a hypothesis. Behe agreed with both assertions.
The exchange prompted laughter from the court, which was packed with local members of the public and the school board.
But now, a bold and bright new theory, proposed by two Evolutionary Biologists, might have yanked the curtain off of biological complexity. This theory accounts for the appearance of the bat’s wing, the human arm, and yes, the eye. And it reveals with elegant simplicity the core processes that have been at work for the last 3 billion years engineering the world as we know it.
But there is another strain in the Biblical tradition that insists on the radical otherness of God, an otherness so complete that even the use of the word “God” as a name for this Other One is forbidden. According to this understanding, God is God precisely in escaping and transcending comprehension by human beings. This can seem to mean that God is simply unknowable. If so, humans are better off not bothering about it. Atheism, agnosticism, or childish anthropomorphism—all the same.
Bouchard has consistently found in many of his studies that intrinsic religiosity—which seems to incorporate a notion of spirituality—is much more likely to be inherited. Extrinsic religiosity tends to be a product of a person’s environment and direct parental influence. Bouchard also found that tendencies towards fundamentalism were also rather more likely to be inherited.
On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly—and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user’s productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind.
Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than successes. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. When life runs smoothly, we’re on autopilot—we’re only in a state of true consciousness when we notice the stone in our shoe.
Caramia © Robert Cooper, 2002
Bob Cooper, a man with an average name who is anything but average, shares the interest in this issue. A North Bay painter, Cooper specializes in realistic, haunting and noble portraits of the great apes: Pongo pygmaeus, Gorilla gorilla, Pan troglodytes. We know them as orangutans, gorillas and chimps. Seated in the spare, industrial San Rafael space where his paintings recently exhibited, Cooper says, “The bonobos remind me most of early humans.”
Everyone needs a little support now and then … even those who aren’t “chosen.”
“Houses are connected by means of magnetic telegraphs that allow people who live far from each other to communicate,” Odoevsky wrote.
Even more interestingly, Odoevsky suggested every household would publish a kind of daily journal or newsletter and distribute it among selected acquaintances, a habit which Russian bloggers immediately recognized as blogging.
While you’re at PubMed, try searching for “bacterial flagella secretion.” One of the resulting papers, by SI Aizawa (2001), reports that some nasty bacteria possess a molecular pump, called a type III secretion system, or TTSS, that injects toxins across cell membranes.
Much to Dr. Behe’s distress, the TTSS is a subset of the bacterial flagellum. That’s right, a part of the supposedly irreducible bacterial “outboard motor” has a biological function!
The woman offers to purify a person’s body or soul as well as provide financial health. She asks that her victims give her large sums of money and then disappears before rendering any services, police said.
Some skeptics have claimed that LB1 was simply a modern human with a condition called microencephaly—an abnormally small brain. But the new finds all came from individuals with the same size bodies as LB1, only about a meter tall. This supports the idea that Homo floresiensis is indeed a species in its own right.
Wallace and Gromit’s creator, Nick Park, said the earthquake in South Asia helped put the loss into perspective.
“Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn’t a big deal,” he said.
“Through this ministry, kids are surrendering their lives to Jesus and developing a deeper relationship with Jesus,” Martin said. “The method of the ministry that we use to bring people is going to change, but the message is going to stay consistent.”
In teaching the lesson about fear, participants in last week’s round were asked to pull a number—between one and three—from a bowl that would indicate how many live Comet goldfish would be swallowed.
Because of his poor health and stick-like physique, he added, neighbors had said he was “born to play a ghost.”
He took to the idea and his reputation began to spread through the myriad islands that make up the Sunderbans.
Surprisingly, not only were a large number of the volunteers oblivious to the switch when ultimately allowed to take a longer look at their choice, they were actually able to gave detailed explanations for why they preferred the face that, indeed, they had actually rejected.
“The dolphin was reinforced for producing a specific rhythm to a specific object,” said Harley. “For example, when we presented him with a ‘Batman’ doll, he received a fish for producing a specific rhythm—in this case, a short sound and then a long one.”
She added, “If you recall the original ‘Batman’ TV series musical intro you’ll probably remember the way they sang ‘Bat-maaaaaaaan.’”
Little-known to most, one of Leonardo’s finest works is not a painting or an invention, but rather something from astronomy: He solved the ancient riddle of Earthshine.
The Bible is true in passages relating to human salvation, they say, but continue: “We should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters.”
“The rapid evolution of coat color in the quagga could be explained by disrupted gene flow because of geographical isolation, an adaptive response to a drier habitat, or a combination of both of the two forces,” said Caccone.
In Tibetan Buddhism, as one karmapa passes away another is reincarnated. Since 1110, the karmapa has been reborn in an unbroken string. His lineage is three centuries older than that of the Dalai Lama. The trouble is there are two claimants to being the 17th karmapa—Ogyen Trinley and Thaye Dorje—each supported by important lamas, or priests, from the Kagyu lineage. The majority of the lamas, the Dalai Lama, and Tibetans inside and outside Tibet have supported Ogyen Trinley. Even Beijing supported his claim as the 17th karmapa, although he fled Tibet in 1999.
But supernaturalism retains its hold on the human imagination. God’s hand is sought in those things we don’t yet fully understand: the big bang, the origin of life, the Cambrian Explosion, and so on. This the God of the gaps. The God of “intelligent design.”
Well, fine. But gaps have a way of being filled. I would hate to think that my faith in God depended on scientists never figuring out exactly how the blood-clotting protein cascade evolved, or how the flagellum of a bacterium evolved, to mention just two of the so-called “irreducibly complex” aspects of life offered as evidence for intelligent design.
Where non-mathematicians find his 11 dimensions hard to conceptualize, so Hawking seems to struggle with the concept of talking about himself in any register outside the factual. His shortest answers are the ones to those questions about feeling. I ask if he thinks it very dumb and sentimental of people to bang on about how his “genius” is related, or even enabled, by his disability, and what he thinks, with reference to The Simpsons, of the part it plays in his cult status. He replies: “The Simpsons appearances were great fun. But I don’t take them too seriously. I think The Simpsons have treated my disability responsibly.”
Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim. Einstein and Feynman both grumbled about the newspaper and radio reporters who invaded their privacy, but both gave the reporters what the public wanted, sharp and witty remarks that would make good headlines. Hawking in his unique way also enjoys the public adulation that his triumph over physical obstacles has earned for him. I will never forget the joyful morning in Tokyo when Hawking went on a tour of the streets in his wheelchair and the Japanese crowds streamed after him, stretching out their hands to touch his chair. Einstein, Hawking, and Feynman shared an ability to break through the barriers that separated them from ordinary people. The public responded to them because they were regular guys, jokers as well as geniuses.
There is no conflict or contradiction between what is recorded in Genesis and what we know about evolution of human beings. Genesis states clearly how Hominoids, then Homo erectus, then Homo sapiens evolved, and their corresponding changes of behavior, feeling and thinking.
This sort of analysis, made by measuring a large set of geometrical images with a device called a laser range scanner, showed that the brain is not a calculating engine, cranking out stimulus features, but a “statistical engine” wired by evolution and a person’s experience to make the best statistical guess about objects in a visual scene, based on how successful those guesses have been in the past.
“So, vision is not about extracting features from a scene; it’s about extracting statistics in the sense of relating the image on your retina to the visually guided behavior that’s worked in the past,” said Purves. “This framework for thinking about vision explains quantitatively—sometimes in amazing detail—what we end up seeing.”
“This is really ridiculous,” scoffed Chen Zhihua, an architect and professor at prestigious Qinghua University in Beijing. “It’s a fake science…. It only makes money for some swindlers.”
Ge Jianxiong, an eminent geography professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, likened feng shui to dregs that have floated up to the surface.
”This shouldn’t be happening,” he said.
The standard illustrations of Einstein’s equation—bombs and power stations—have perpetuated a belief that E = mc² has a special association with nuclear reactions and is thus removed from ordinary activity.
This isn’t true. When you drive your car, E = mc² is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline’s mass into energy, in accord with Einstein’s formula. When you use your MP3 player, E = mc² is at work. As the player drains the battery to produce energy in the form of sound waves, it does so by converting some of the battery’s mass into energy, as dictated by Einstein’s formula. As you read this text, E = mc² is at work. The processes in the eye and brain, underlying perception and thought, rely on chemical reactions that interchange mass and energy, once again in accord with Einstein’s formula.
He found that pathological liars have on average more white matter in their prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is active during lying, and less gray matter than people who are not serial fibbers. White matter enables quick, complex thinking while gray matter mediates inhibitions.
One gorilla used a long stick to test the depth of a pool of water before wading into it. Another used a stick to help search for food and then as a bridge over a muddy puddle.
“This is a truly astounding discovery,” said Thomas Breurer of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Tool usage in wild apes provides us with valuable insights into the evolution of our own species and the abilities of other species.”
To my mind (and many others), the single greatest challenge currently facing our species is reconnecting people with nature. From the standpoint of education, ecology and evolution together provide a robust scientific foundation for telling the big story, the story of ages—that of who we are, how we got here, and our intimate links with nature. We must take up the challenge of unifying and de-mystifying these fundamental concepts. These efforts will contribute directly to reconnecting people with nature, and allow them to foster a renewed sense of place. Particularly if this eco-evolutionary education incorporates outdoor, “natural” laboratories, it will also help to instill that all-important—indeed essential—sense of wonder and passion for the non-human world.
This study wasn’t about subliminal messages, of course. Like many psychological studies, this one was meant to be an allegory. It suggests that under some circumstances people can misattribute the uplifting work that their brains have done to a fictitious external source. Brains strive to provide the best view of things, but because the owners of those brains don’t know this, they are surprised when things seem to turn out for the best. To explain this surprising fact, people sometimes invoke an external source—a subliminal message in the laboratory, God in everyday life.
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”
At least two species of honeybees there, the native Apis cerana and the introduced European honeybee, Apis mellifera, engulf a wasp in a living ball of defenders and heat the predator to death. A new study of heat balling has described a margin of safety for the defending bees, says Tan Ken of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming, China.
Thus, current promoters of “intelligent design” generally accept the power and primacy of natural selection to generate small-scale evolutionary change. (The evolution of antibiotic resistance among bacteria, for example, is beyond dispute.) Ditto for the biochemical and genetic similarity of closely related species. But when it comes to their fundamental belief system, advocates of intelligent design aren’t really very intelligent at all. Or rather, like Brahe, they have checked their intellects at the door, clinging desperately to the illusion that human beings are so special that only a benevolent god could have produced them and, therefore, the material world—like Brahe’s sun and its five planets—must revolve around them.
“But having such a big penis does have one drawback: it seems that coordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body. And this does not seem to have been an isolated incident since two of the eight males that had stranded in the north-east Atlantic before had also accidentally inseminated themselves.
Gerin oil in strong doses can be hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in their heads, or see illusions which seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their reality. An individual who reports high-grade hallucinogenic experiences may be venerated, and even followed as some kind of leader, by others who regard themselves as less fortunate. Such following-pathology can long postdate the leader’s death, and may expand into bizarre psychedelia such as the cannibalistic fantasy of “drinking the blood and eating the flesh” of the leader.
Like religion, ID is a belief. And while many people take their religion as fact, science would go nowhere if it operated that way. Many of the great discoveries—from disease cures to advanced technologies and trips to the Moon—would never have been possible without the rigorous scientific process that carefully distinguishes between belief and testable fact.
Lander’s experiment tested a quirky prediction of evolutionary theory: that a harmful mutation is unlikely to persist if it is serious enough to reduce an individual’s odds of leaving descendants by an amount that is greater than the number one divided by the population of that species.
The rule proved true not only for mice and chimps, Lander said. A new and still unpublished analysis of the canine genome has found that dogs, whose numbers have historically been greater than those of apes but smaller than for mice, have an intermediate number of harmful mutations—again, just as evolution predicts.
But while the comic will be selling in the Gulf, the highly conservative cultures in Saudi Arabia and in other countries there has necessitated cutting the dynamic quartet to … well just two.
Jalila and Aya’s buxom bosoms, silky tresses and made-up faces would not set well with censors.
Sagan passed away nine years ago—but “Cosmos” lives on, along with many of the dangers and all of the promise that he saw a quarter-century ago. Next week, the 13-part documentary series returns to television, digitally remastered and completely retooled with computer graphics reflecting our updated understanding of the cosmos.
Look now at the other side. One intelligent design proponent is quoted in The New York Times saying that “All ideas go through stages—first they’re ignored, then they’re attacked, then they’re accepted.” But surely not all ideas. Early in the 19th century the supposed science of phrenology was first accepted by quite a few, then attacked, and finally completely discredited. Those bumps on peoples’ heads turned out not to signify anything at all. Intelligent design will go the way of phrenology as long as its adherents think of their doctrine to be a science that competes with evolutionary theory.
The novel, which Darnton describes as 90 percent factual, draws heavily from Darwin’s letters and diaries at Cambridge University, where Darnton spent many hours of research.
“But that other 10 percent is a whopper,” he said, a kind of mischievous glee in his voice.
After examining ID’s two main arguments, the answers to the original questions—what does ID offer? And what can ID explain that evolution can’t?—is not much and nothing, leading scientists say.
“The most basic problem [with ID] is that it’s utterly boring,” said William Provine, a science historian at Cornell University in New York. “Everything that’s complicated or interesting about biology has a very simple explanation: ID did it.”
Place a single Cheerio in a bowl of milk and its weight will cause the milk beneath it to dip slightly, forming a dent in the once smooth surface of the milk. A second Cheerio placed into the bowl will form its own dent on the surface of the milk, and if the two Cheerios drift close enough to each other, they will appear to “fall into” one another, as if pulled together by an attractive force.
Cheerios near the edge of the bowl float upwards along the curve of the meniscus to look like they’re clinging the edge of the bowl.
Measured by this standard, ID fails miserably. According to the National Center for Science Education, only one ID article by Stephen Meyers (Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 2004) has passed this test and even then, the journal that published the article promptly retracted it. The journal also put out a statement that said “there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity.”
Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. The World According to Garp is, of course, the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O’Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K Le Guin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
Here is a clearly falsifiable statement. “Every new life form we discover will use these same three polymers.” Anyone can falsify this statement by finding a new species that uses a different polymer than those in the set of three. Also, any new species discovered (hundreds per day) with the same three polymers is further confirmation that we are all descended from a common ancestor.
The couple had decided to have a traditional Hindu marriage while visiting Pushkar town earlier this month in the temple-studded desert state of Rajasthan, The Times of India reported.
But they infuriated the priest as they started to kiss and embrace while he was chanting Vedic hymns.
The priest, along with other Hindu holy men, complained to police, who filed charges against the couple. The court in Pushkar gave its verdict Tuesday.
Using a series of psychophysical experiments, Vishwanath, Girshick and Banks were able to show that the human visual system flexibly adjusts to viewing position such that sitting at the right place isn’t required. The brain makes small adjustments to the image the eyes receive, such that the picture appears the way it is supposed to—even when you look at it from different locations.
My observations helped me see human behavior in an evolutionary light. By this, I mean not just the Darwinian light one hears so much about, but also the apelike way we scratch our heads if conflicted, or the dejected look we get if a friend pays too much attention to someone else.
At the same time, I began to question what I’d been taught about animals: They just follow instinct; they have no inkling of the future; everything they do is selfish. I couldn’t square this with what I was seeing. I lost the ability to generalize about “the chimpanzee” in the same way that no one ever speaks about “the human.” The more I watched, the more my judgments began to resemble those we make about other people, such as this person is kind and friendly, and that one is self-centered. No two chimpanzees are the same.
Unlike the other founders of sociobiology, Trivers was more interested in human than in animal behavior. The founding genius of sociobiology, Bill Hamilton, was a naturalist and romantic who felt himself ill at ease in the modern world, and had a passion for insects, especially wasps. EO Wilson loves ants and arranged his office at Harvard so that there were ant colonies in Perspex all around the walls, and the visitor might think he was inside a gigantic ants’ nest. Wilson added one final chapter on humans to his book Sociobiology almost as an afterthought, though this caused a bitter feud that has divided the Harvard biology faculty to this day. Trivers, however, started his theories from what he could observe of human behavior, and then went looking for genetic causes whose logic would apply across the whole living world.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it, as Jerry Seinfeld might say. But if your moral standard for judging sex acts is the risk of disease, anal is worse than oral. The spin that activists, scholars, and journalists have put on the survey—that abstinence-only sex education is driving teenagers to an epidemic of oral sex—doesn’t hold up. As the survey report notes, data “suggest that there was little or no change (accounting for sampling error) in the proportion of males 15-19 who had ever had heterosexual oral or anal sex between 1995 and 2002.” The more interesting numbers are in the next age bracket up—and the next orifice down.
What does not make sense, however, is the radical disconnect between the dreams of becoming a science superpower, and the grim reality of the mind-numbing superstitions and life-threatening pseudo-sciences that are thriving at all levels of society. Indian scientists may well be the most sought-after workers in the global economy, but many behave as if what they do inside their laboratories has nothing to do with the supernatural and/or spiritual “truths” that pass as “scientific” explanations of natural phenomena in the rest of society. If anything, corporate science and technology is only adding to the ruthlessness of the global capitalist economy, which feeds the existential anxieties that feed on obscurantism.
The findings on oral sex among teens are sure to stir debate over abstinence-only sex education. Supporters of such programs say they have resulted in young people delaying intercourse, but opponents say they also have led young people to substitute other behaviors, especially fellatio and cunnilingus. The new data tend to support this view, showing that nearly one in four virgin teens has engaged in oral sex.
Many teenagers have fully accepted the idea that postponing intercourse is a good thing to do, Brindis said. When they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of intercourse vs. other forms of sex, they decide that they are far more at risk with intercourse, because of possible pregnancy and the greater risk of infection. Teens also consider oral sex more acceptable in their peer group than vaginal sex.
Although I applaud the Dalai Lama for his liberal open-mindedness to science, he still has some things to learn about science. Just because a current theory or philosophy of science fails to account for a phenomenon does not mean that science itself should be abandoned. And any attempt to blend religion with science, no matter how thoughtful and respectful of both traditions, can only lead to the reduction of the deity to the laws and forces of nature. A scientist will inevitably search for how, and by what forces and mechanisms, God or karma operated in the world.
“She won’t mate with her father. But she will mate with her mother’s partner—but only when her mother has switched partners,” said study leader Stephen Rossiter of the Queen Mary, University of London of the female bats.
Some had expected Gillette to bring out a four-bladed razor, perhaps a self-lubricating one. Instead, it jumped to five blades, or six including the trimmer, and will sell Fusion-branded shaving gels and after shave balm.
“There was never a plan to go to four,” he said. said Peter Hoffman, president of Gillette’s blades and razors business, who said Fusion was in the development pipeline for several years.
Instead of snooping for sensitive financial information or secretly taking control of an infected computer, the Trojan horse, called Yusufali-A, monitors Web surfing habits. When it spots an objectionable term such as “sex” or “exhibition” in the browser’s title bar, it hides the Web site and instead pops up a message taken from the Koran, says Gregg Mastoras, a senior security analyst with Sophos.
Anyway, today, after having consulted at length with America’s most intelligentest Creation Scientists, I am proud to present the evidence that both DISPROVES Darwin’s absurd theory of evolution AND will make up the foundation of Intelligent Design Public Education for generations to come!
Evidence Of The Lord’s Brilliant Bioengineering
Yet just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New England, steel was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropologists have long marveled that Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is plentiful in the mountains, yet the Inca used metal for almost nothing useful. But according to Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, Inca metallurgy was as refined as European metallurgy, but it had such different goals that until recently scientists had not even recognized it as a technology.
Talking about group differences does not require any of us to change our politics. For every implication that the Right might seize upon (affirmative-action quotas are ill-conceived), another gives fodder to the Left (innate group differences help rationalize compensatory redistribution by the state). But if we do not need to change our politics, talking about group differences obligates all of us to renew our commitment to the ideal of equality that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Steven Pinker put that ideal in today’s language in The Blank Slate, writing that “Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
What is more than a bit odd, however, is that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution—for example, many fundamentalist Christians—are among the most ardent supporters of the free market. These people accept the natural complexity of the market without qualm, yet they insist that the natural complexity of biological phenomena requires a designer.
Gareth Dyke, a paleontologist of University College Dublin, will tell the BA Festival of Science being held in the city that most such creatures were coated with delicate feathery plumage that could even have been multi-colored. Fossil evidence that such dinosaurs were feathered is now “irrefutable.”
[…]
The feathered finds include an early tyrannosaur, a likely ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex, two small flying dinosaurs and five other predators. Feathers are thought to have evolved first to keep dinosaurs warm and only later as an aid to flight.
Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.
Being poor is seeing how few options you have.
Being poor is running in place.
Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.
He’s also the first robot who will sit down and watch TV with you. Because he’s sensitive to colors, he likes The Simpsons because he likes blue primaries such as Marge Simpson’s hair.
Simon Jenkins, the editor of ShipofFools, said: “There is a lot of talk about religious offence but not enough specific discussion on the boundaries. Ridiculing some religious beliefs, criticizing absurd religious practices and offending religious people was a way of life for Old Testament prophets. It’s not a freedom so much as a responsibility.”
One—and some serious planetary scientists and astronomers back this theory—is that we really could be alone: that life itself is rare and intelligent life probably confined to one planet. Not so, say others: the raw materials for life as we know it are being manufactured by exploding stars and carried by icy comets all over the solar system and—since the Copernican principle says there is nothing special about the Earth—by extension, everywhere. Which brings us back to Fermi. Where is everyone? Life must be common, even if communities are light years apart.
There is no evidence in favor of intelligent design: only alleged gaps in the completeness of the evolutionary account, coupled with the “default” fallacy we have identified. And, while it is inevitably true that there are incompletenesses in evolutionary science, the positive evidence for the fact of evolution is truly massive, made up of hundreds of thousands of mutually corroborating observations. These come from areas such as geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, ethology, biogeography, embryology and—increasingly nowadays—molecular genetics.
“For centuries, humans have equated hairiness with beasts and hairlessness with beauty and femininity,” said Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School who is the author of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. “There’s also an erotic, sexual component to hairlessness because your skin is more sensitive when it’s more exposed. Women today are emulating porn stars who have no pubic hair, and I think men like it.”
What Shaw did was con people, many of them elderly, to invest millions of dollars in a phony real estate scheme. In fact, she used their money to buy warehouses full of Amway products in an effort to become a major distributor.
When the scheme collapsed in 2003 Target 8 Investigators broke the story. It led to a Montcalm County Sheriff’s investigation and the subsequent fraud charges.
In the early ‘90s, he served two years in federal prison for credit card fraud. He was later sued by the Illinois attorney general over an alleged pyramid marketing scheme, and he has tangled twice with the Federal Trade Commission over claims that he made in infomercials for various alternative remedies.
[…]
Trudeau has amassed millions from producing infomercials and from direct sales of products. Promotional materials he used in the mid-‘90s boasted of a net worth of more than $200 million. Today, Trudeau says he does not know how much money he has, but it is “probably a lot.” He said he owned 10 cars and dozens of houses and condominiums around the world.
Dr. Eichler argues that it is important to figure out what that is because a number of human congenital diseases are associated with chromosome rearrangements at these same break points.
“Here you have a beautiful connection,” he said. “The same thing that causes big-scale rearrangement between a human and chimp or a gorilla, these same sites are often the site of deletion associated with diseases.”
“We should accept that most research findings will be refuted. Some will be replicated and validated. The replication process is more important than the first discovery,” Ioannidis says.
Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, “You haven’t explained everything yet,” is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.
Where were these scientific claims in the Qur’an before the discoveries were made? Nowhere, because Muslims did not read any scientific meaning into those vague verses. As for Darwinism, perhaps the writer ought to work harder at distinguishing between scientific literature and the pseudo-scientific folklore sponsored by certain organizations for their own agenda.
According to Gravlox’s theory, when a child loses a baby tooth, an invisible yet very real spirit signifies the event with a shiny coin, often a quarter, deposited under the child’s pillow the next morning—“clear evidence that something is going on. And then, six months later—bingo!—a brand new tooth appears.”
Writes Gravlox, “Traditional medical experts will laugh, of course, but no other explanation is possible other than the existence of an angel of dental design.”
Professor Egger said: “We acknowledge to prove a negative is impossible.
“But good large studies of homeopathy do not show a difference between the placebo and the homeopathic remedy, whereas in the case of conventional medicines you still see an effect.”
There are only religious fanatics who are frightened by knowledge and being responsible for themselves. I did not write this to debate anyone because there is no debate. Alternately repeating, “No it isn’t!” and humming with your ears plugged isn’t a proposition or a rebuttal.
I wrote this to counter popularized ignorant propaganda with evidence and information; information that has been duplicated, tested, and studied by people with doctorates in hard sciences in every country of the world going on 15 decades.
There are organisms with smaller genomes—Mycoplasma genitalium has about 400 genes. But these are all obligate parasites or symbionts, relying on other organisms to do the jobs they have abandoned. Pelagibacter is entirely self-sufficient.
High school driver’s education classes include motor vehicle safety instructions of all kinds: seat belts, defensive driving techniques, covering the break through intersections, the obligatory blood-soaked drunk driving film. But isn’t it also important to teach our nation’s high school students about the increasingly popular belief that angels are grappled onto car bumpers and somehow emit force fields (known as “Cherubic Repulsor Arrays”) which sometimes prevent accidents from happening?
Likewise, the theory of evolution doesn’t detract from our sense of awe and divine humility in the face of the miracle that is life. On the contrary. It’s even more awesome, even more humbling, even more divinely majestic to consider that all this living diversity emerged from something akin to random trial and error. To consider that a rose is a result of such a prosaic process: what a marvel! And to think that trial and error, survival of the fittest, led to the human experience of awe … this, too, is divine. I associate God with my experience of holy wonder, rather than thinking of God as an “intelligent designer” who exists apart from the universe, tinkering with it from afar. Evolution just gives me one more reason to be awestruck.
You can believe in God and evolution as long as you keep the two in separate logic-tight compartments. Belief in God depends on religious faith. Belief in evolution depends on empirical evidence. This is the fundamental difference between religion and science. If you attempt to reconcile religion and science on questions about nature and the universe, and if you push the science to its logical conclusion, you will end up naturalizing the deity, because for any question about nature—the origins of the universe, life, humans, whatever—if your answer is “God did it,” a scientist will ask, “How did God do it?, What forces did God use? What forms of matter and energy were employed in the creation process?” and so forth. The end result of this inquiry can only be natural explanations for all natural phenomena. What place, then, for God?
If we take the president up on his deceptively fair-minded idea of “teaching the argument,” I think we could advance the ball a little further in other directions also. Houses of worship that do not provide space for leaflets and pamphlets favoring evolution (not necessarily Darwinism, which is only one of the theories of evolution and thus another proof of its scientific status) should be denied tax-exempt status and any access to public funding originating in the White House’s “faith-based” initiative.
“I’m kind of embarrassed that I ever got involved with this,” Davidson says.
He was shocked, he says, when he saw the Discovery Institute was calling evolution a “theory in crisis.”
“It’s laughable: There have been millions of experiments over more than a century that support evolution,” he says. “There’s always questions being asked about parts of the theory, as there are with any theory, but there’s no real scientific controversy about it.”
