Category: News

The Huffington Post carries an article concerning a recent academic freedom bill in Colorado. It opens by asserting that, A Republican bill that would have paved the way for creationism to be taught in Colorado schools as well as encouraged teachers to deny the science of climate change was killed in committee on Monday, as… more

The UK Guardian reports on Richard Dawkins’ debate last week with Rowan Williams, which you can read about here. more

BBC News Magazine carries an interesting article today about so-called “atheist churches”. It’s an insightful read: An “atheist church” in North London is proving a big hit with non-believers. Does it feel a bit like a new religion? Not many sermons include the message that we are all going to die and there is no… more

Today, the UK Guardian newspaper published a piece about academic freedom bills in Colorado, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma. Readers will not be surprised to learn that the Guardian has seemingly bought into the common myth continuously recycled and promulgated by the NCSE and the Darwin lobby that the bills are “just creationism in disguise”, despite the… more

BBC News reports, Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams will discuss religion on Thursday Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams are to discuss the role of religion at a Cambridge Union debate. Prominent atheist Prof Dawkins and the former Archbishop of Canterbury will discuss whether “religion has no place in the 21st Century” on Thursday. They were… more

From Science Insider, Virtually all books about evolution—along with more than 100 other titles from other fields—have apparently disappeared in recent months from the selection of popular science books for sale by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), the country’s main science funding agency. The missing books have prompted the latest skirmish in… more

From the Biologic Institute blog: What do Han Chinese characters and proteins have in common? Both can be thought of as two- or three-dimensional functional shapes. Change their shapes significantly and you change what they mean or do. For proteins the flow of functional information goes like this:   protein coding sequence ⇒ 3-D structure ⇒… more

An infographic lists a few of what its author considers to be “2012′s biggest moments in science.” These are: Higgs boson discovered. Curiosity lands on Mars. Fetal genome sequencing. Quantum teleportation distance record broken. The discovery of an earth-sized exoplanet “orbiting Alpha Centauri B, one of the stars in the stellar system nearest to our… more

A new paper has just been published in Nature, reporting on the successful use of DNA to store data including Shakespearean sonnets and an MP3 file. Reports the abstract, Digital production, transmission and storage have revolutionized how we access and use information but have also made archiving an increasingly complex task that requires active, continuing maintenance… more

New Scientist carries an interesting article on the subject of ORFan genes (i.e. genes which possess no known homologue): NOT having any family is tough. Often unappreciated and uncomfortably different, orphans have to fight to fit in and battle against the odds to realise their potential. Those who succeed, from Aristotle to Steve Jobs, sometimes… more

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Over at the Biologic Institute’s blog, Douglas Axe has a new blog post on a recent paper in PLoS Biology: Under the heading “Reconstruction of prehistoric DNA refutes criticism on theory of evolution,” an article from Ghent University in Belgium claims a recent scientific paper has rescued evolutionary theory by solving the problem of evolutionary innovation. Considering that innovation is the… more

A new paper has just been published in Advanced Functional Materials, on the use of teeth of teeth belonging to the snail species Cryptochiton stelleri to improve solar cells and batteries. Science Daily reports on the new paper: An assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering is using the teeth of a marine snail… more

The Guardian features an interesting article by Paul Davies: “The secret of life won’t be cooked up in a chemistry lab: Life’s origins may only be explained through a study of its unique management of information.” Davies writes, The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science. How did a non-living mixture… more

Features our own Steve Fuller (although, unfortunately, he doesn’t contribute much to the discussion). Largely another media setup — why does the media always opt to bring on unsophisticated representatives of the Darwin-doubting viewpoint? Where are the molecular biologists who have come to doubt Darwin? more

Evolution News & Views announces the 2013 summer seminar for University students in both the natural and social sciences. Want to spend a free (all-expenses-paid) nine  days in Seattle learning about ID and interacting with top scientists and scholars in the field? Don’t delay; getting applying today! ENV reports, Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture… more

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Carl Woese, world-renowned microbiologist and discoverer of the Archae (the third domain of life), has died at the age of 84, following a battle with Pancreatic cancer. The University of Illinois website reports, Carl R. Woese, who overturned one of the major dogmas of biology with the discovery of Archaea, the third domain of life, passed… more