Fred Pearce in the Guardian asks whether Climategate will lead to changes in the way science is reviewed, from peer review to open access review.
‘Climategate’ was PR disaster that could bring healthy reform of peer review – Peer-review was meant to be a safeguard against the publication of bad science but the balance is shifting [...]
One of Charles Darwin’s predictions was that evolution occurs gradually via variations within populations. His friend Thomas H. Huxley was concerned that Darwin had assumed “an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum [nature does not make leaps] so unreservedly.” But Darwin’s theory would have been much less compelling without it. Imagine if evolution [...]
Intellectual hubris drove the Enlightenment project from its beginning, and many Enlightenment thinkers even believed that “reason” was an all-powerful force with which man could unlock all of the secrets of the universe. After millennia of being mired in superstition and tradition man had finally emerged into a new day of unfettered reason boding limitless [...]
You were probably taught in high school biology class that life arose from a primordial soup–the twentieth century’s rendition of Darwin’s “warm little pond.” Most textbooks show pictorial-type drawings of the early earth as a dynamic environment, full of activity. Sunlight is beaming through the clouds with its all important energy-bearing ultra violet rays; rain [...]
Yet another part of the “overwhelming evidence” is pure baloney:
A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility. Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more [...]
I wonder if Richard Dawkins actually knows any watchmaker. No actual horologist would take his notion of the Blind Watchmaker seriously in accounting for complexity, even as an analogy. If the analogy that is used won’t, in and of itself, work, then it doesn’t explain what it intends to illuminate by using it as an [...]
For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a ‘primordial soup’ of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the ’soup’ theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth’s chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the [...]
New research is suggesting yet another twist on how evolution creates itself. The research tells us more about epigenetics, so first we need to review how epigenetics has already falsified much of evolutionary theory. I’ve written this before but it bears repeating. The adaptation of species to environmental pressures would seem like obvious evidence for [...]
The IPCC’s beleaguered climate report faces the prospect of still more errors, as Dutch authorities point out factual inaccuracies about the Netherlands.
Dutch environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart has asked the U.N.’s climate change panel to rethink its assertion that more than half of the Netherlands is below seal level. Dutch authorities explain that, in fact, [...]
“THE RETURN TO RELIGION” from THE WELL AND THE SHALLOWS, by G. K. Chesterton
“IN the days when Huxley and Herbert Spencer and the Victorian agnostics were trumpeting as a final truth the famous hypothesis of Darwin, it seemed to thousands of simple people almost impossible that religion should survive. It is all the more ironic [...]
Fred Pearce in the Guardian writes:
Climate change emails between scientists reveal flaws in peer review
He comments – “A close reading of the hacked emails exposes the real process of science, its jealousies and tribalism”
It is clear that the process of peer review is a far from perfect way to establish truth in science.
I have added [...]
RNA replications have now been discovered to be “essential” to DNA error correction systems. If they are “essential”, how could they arrive by random mutation and “selection”? On what basis does neoDarwinism predict error correction in the first place?
From Intelligent Design, methodology one expects to see evidence of design in complex biochemical systems. From [...]
Professor Steve Fuller is known as a prolific author whose analysis of the scientific enterprise is iconoclastic. He was famously involved as a defense witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005) trial, for which he has received a great deal of flak. The essay cited below provides an explanation of his involvement [...]
Over the years, there has been much interest in the design of running shoes, with product designers building in protection against impacts and other perceived hazards. However, continuing reports of repetitive strain injuries warrant further research and product re-design. The topic has come to the surface recently with a comparison of the forces experienced by [...]
The first two chapters of Origin are on the topic of biological variation. In the first chapter Darwin discusses what breeders had learned (Variation Under Domestication) and the second chapter discusses biological variability in the wild (Variation Under Nature). The two chapters serve as a good summary of what was known at the time, but [...]