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.
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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.
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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.”
