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Darwinism

Jerry Coyne tells us: Anticreationist book author Twittermobbed, may be de-Wikipedia’d

Get this: "Nobody cares about the facts; an accusation is sufficient." Oh, for heaven's sakes, look on the bright side!: At least we know it's the authentic Twitter mob and not some second-rate substitute like a starving wolf pack... Read More ›

The Intelligent Design Audiopaper Project

I was thinking recently, about how many audiobooks are consumed by people these days. I would guess that the main reason behind this consumption is convenience. Many people just don’t have the time, or don’t create the time, to really sit down and get their head in a book. But I understand that for many, it can also be due to personal preference, financial considerations, lack of space, being visually impaired, or learning difficulties. If non of these issues are barriers, I would always encourage reading (and ideally taking notes), rather than simply listening. On balance, the evidence does suggest that good reading is a much more efficient way of retaining information than listening, on its own. In general, listening Read More ›

At The Scientist: Horizontal gene transfer happens “more often than anyone thought”

Well, of course, anything that horizontal gene transfer did, Darwinian evolution did not do. And if HGT is quite common, it’s going to be much harder to tell what Darwinism actually did. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Can we eliminate the idea of function from the study of life?

The term “function” in life forms is linked historically with the idea that life forms show evidence of design. Therefore, philosopher Emmanuel Ratti and molecular biologist Pierre-Luc Germain argue, biologists shouldn’t use it ... The problem with their position is not that it is opposed to intelligent design theory but that it is in conflict with the self-evident nature of life forms. Read More ›

Domesticated Rice: the Power of Artificial Selection.

I suspect that almost every week there’s at least one article published somewhere that undermines Darwinian theory. Now using the term, ‘Darwinian theory’, might ruffle some people’s feathers. Yet, without Darwinian theory, neo-Darwinism makes no sense; it lacks any intellectual foundation. And, so, here we are inching towards the 200th anniversary of Origin of Species and 21st-Century evolutionary biologists remain saddled with 19th-Century thinking. With that said, this “week’s” article comes from Phys.Org and it offers a newer understanding of rice domestication. We find out that the results of an international collaboration “suggest that the emergence of cultivated rice from wild rice plants is the result of three gene mutations that make the seeds (i.e. the grains of rice) fall Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: What’s hot and what’s not in Darwinblogs

Casey Luskin: We’ve seen a decline in the amount of high quality science writing from blogs like Panda’s Thumb. Some old voices in the Darwin blogosphere have diminished and some new ones have popped up. Jerry Coyne certainly is one of the ones that has really popped up on his very popular blog. Read More ›

Why Darwinism can be taught in schools but not ID

Terry Scambray: Ah, the mantra that Americans are addicted to sugary noble lies about their biological and cultural uniqueness is itself a noble lie that the intelligentsia continually uses against their fellow Americans.  It is repeated, for example, when dreadful events occur like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11, the epithet suggesting that Americans can’t stand the truth so they conjure up fantasies which declutter a complicated, messy world full of loose ends.   Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: The battle over the human mind split two great thinkers

Philosopher Neil Thomas points out how neuroscience today has undermined a purely materialist account of the mind — an unexpected role but that's what happened. Read More ›

Researchers: Steve Gould’s Punk Eek is right; evolution can pause a long time, then happen rapidly

Punctuated equilibrium is what we observe but it isn’t popular. Punk eek makes it even less likely that life develops due to unintelligent random processes. It just does not allow anywhere near enough time. Read More ›