http://www.nature.com/news/evolution-of-darwin-s-finches-tracked-at-genetic-level-1.19795

“But their still Finches! Checkmate Evolutionists!”

Or some similar comment. But whatever. Still a very cool study.

Charles Darwin in his book the Descent of Man (chap12) insisted that womewn were clearly biologically intellectually inferior to men. He said if you compare the accomplishments of men verses women the women not only lose but show the common average must be very inferior of women relative to men.

He said this was not from society but from biology.

In fact he used this case as a typical case in the evidences he listed in his book to show how mankind etc had acquired the traits we have. Not from god but merely steps along the way while evolving .

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If anyone wants to join us, we are doing an online preview for a conference on Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism. For the preview session, Dr. Sam Rakover is giving a talk on Methodological Dualism in Psychology. Connection information is at the link below.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/am-nat-conference-preview-session-tomorrow/

Quoting Dembski:

My own sense is that vaccines pulled the trigger in our son John’s case. At the very least, I would thus have liked to see Tribeca allow Vaxxed to be shown and its content to be freely discussed.

• Tribeca Film Festival cancels the film Vaxxed

Somehow, I am not surprised.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/cu/cumenu.htm

From 1972.

http://time.com/4278611/vermont-shumlin-marijuana-legalization/

From yesterday.

No Andrew Wakefield  Ha.  Wakefield finally gets all the respect he’s due.  Which is none.

ht: Kavin Senapathy:

“Disgraced former gastroenterologist and researcher Andrew Wakefield, known for a fraudulent 1998 paper linking the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism, directs the movie” [Vaxxed]

After initially inviting a showing of the anti-vax propaganda, Robert de Niro and the Tribeca Film Festival team decided to drop the quacks from the schedule.

Not surprisingly, Wakefield – whose livelihood depends solely on speaking fees and book sales to the anti-vax community – is quick to whine about “totalitarian censorship”.  He cries, “We were denied due process”. 

As Senapathy responds:

“Due process? Due process clauses in the 5th and 14th amendments to the United States Constitution only apply when government is involved. This isn’t a court of law, and Andrew Wakefield doesn’t deserve such considerations for his anti-vaccine propaganda film. He doesn’t deserve a platform to spread anti-vaccine disinformation, after widespread panic in the wake of his fraudulent paper led to a sharp drop in vaccination rates and thousands of preventable deaths and counting from vaccine preventable disease.

In the meantime, there have been a whopping zero casesof autism caused by vaccines.”

 

“The reason a bike lock works,” explains Meyer, “is that there are vastly more ways of arranging those numeric characters that will keep the lock closed than there are that will open the lock.”

Most bicycle locks have four dials with ten digits. So for a thief to steal the bike, he would have to guess correctly from among 10,000 possible combinations. No easy task.

But what about DNA? Well, in experiments Axe conducted at Cambridge, he found that for a DNA sequence generating a short protein just 150 amino acids in length, for every 1 workable arrangement of amino acids, there are 10 to the 77th possible unworkable amino acid arrangements. Using the bicycle lock analogy, that’s a lock with 77 dials containing 10 digits.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/10/eric_metaxas_on_1100261.html

I believe this is what Mung has been talking about. I asked Mung: Continue reading →

Link

Can it be established using the tools of modern science that evolution is guided and has purpose and that the only tinkerer is not just blind uncaring indifferent forces and collisions?

If so, how?

If not what does that mean for ID, if anything?

People want to know what happens if ID wins. What scientific research will ID spawn?

That’s easy- for starters there are all of those questions that get asked by any design inference- the who, what, how, when, where and why- all valid research venues given ID. There’s plenty there to keep scientists busy for decades, if not longer.

With respect to biology we would set out to find that something else, the something else besides chemistry and physics that makes living organisms what they are.

With respect to SETI we would use the findings from “The Privileged Planet” to find any other technologically capable civilizations and habitable planets.

So far from being a scientific dead-end ID would spawn new research that will keep us busy for some time.

“Intentionality” is a philosophical term for “aboutness”. A movie review is about a movie, and the sentence “Trump is a narcissist” is about Trump. Your thoughts concerning today’s breakfast are about today’s breakfast. Each of these is about something else, so each exhibits intentionality.

How do these things acquire their aboutness? “Trump is a narcissist” isn’t inherently about the man who bears the name “Donald Trump”.  Had Trump’s family retained their Germanic surname, Drumpf, then “Trump is a narcissist” would no longer be about the man we call “the Donald”. The intentionality of the sentence is derivative; that is, it derives from the pre-existing convention of referring to a particular man as “Donald Trump”.

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Can money buy happiness?  These people, waiting for hours to buy lottery tickets, seem to think so, or at least are willing to test the hypothesis (turn off your sound — the commentary is annoying):

What does science say?  The short answer is that money can buy happiness, at least up to a point.  The long answer is quite complicated.

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Recent discussions of genetic algorithms here and Dave Thomas’ evisceration of Winston Ewert’s review of several genetic algorithms at The Panda’s Thumb prompted me to dust off my notes and ev implementation.

Introduction

In the spring of 1984, Thomas Schneider submitted his Ph.D thesis demonstrating that the information content of DNA binding sites closely approximates the information required to identify the sites in the genome. In the week between submitting his thesis and defending it, he wrote a software simulation to confirm that the behavior he observed in biological organisms could arise from a subset of known evolutionary mechanisms. Specifically, starting from a completely random population, he used only point mutations and simple fitness-based selection to create the next generation.

The function of ev is to explain and model an observation about natural systems.
— Thomas D. Schneider

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In his endless pursuit of that wascally Weasel, Mung made the following silly claim:

GAs are often used to demonstrate “the power of cumulative selection.” Given small population sizes drift ought to dominate yet in GAs drift does not dominate.

That is clearly false, but for the benefit of Mung (and his cousin Elmer) I have modified my Weasel program to incorporate both drift and selection.  They can now see for themselves that small population sizes are insufficient to guarantee that drift dominates selection.

The code is here. Compile it under Linux using “gcc -std=gnu99 -lm weasel.c -o weasel”.

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My favorite subject-specific journal is Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE).  This journal publishes on topics primarily related to molecular evolution and evolutionary genomics, which are among my favorite subjects in biology. I’m happy to report that the latest issue of MBE is out today, and there are lots of great articles that I think will be of interest to folks here, many of which are open-access.

I sadly don’t have time to write up any of these articles, but I thought it might be useful to “sample” a few in case any any of you would like to read and discuss them.  Here are a handful that seem particularly interesting:

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Cross-posted from UD: The Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference is doing a design contest with a cash prize.

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Paul Nelson, Evolution, or design ? I transcribed it for who is too lazy to see the video, but its worth to watch, a great speech:

Thanks to another reader, I have gotten a copy of McDonald’s actual paper. Reading it, I wonder how many of the Discovery Institute authors have actually read it. How many have just taken what one of their fellows said previously and done what most 10th grade students do for research papers (i.e. change a few words in an attempt to avoid plagiarism).

By adding their own interpretation of the prior authors work (using secondary sources instead of primary sources), quite a bit of error has crept in. I’m sure it’s just a bit of error, we all know that no creationist would say something that wasn’t true, especially if he is quoting an actual scientist’s paper.
No, I can’t do it, that level of sarcasm is too much for me. These people are liars. Either they are directly lying in order to make someone appear to say something that they actually didn’t or they are the worst researchers ever and shouldn’t be allowed to write non-fiction. Which is it creationists?

It was not merely Judge John E. Jones who ruled against teaching “intelligent design” (ID), a thinly veiled surrogate for “creation science,” in public schools. The citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania, exercised the power of the ballot to ensure that their city did not appeal Kitzmiller. If the case had reached the Supreme Court of the United States, the justices possibly would have split 5-4 in favor of allowing public schools to teach ID.

Today ID lost its prospect of winning in the Supreme Court: Justice Antonin Scalia, Known For Biting Dissents, Dies At 79. As noted in the Wikipedia article on Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), in which the court nailed shut the coffin of creation science,

Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, dissented, accepting the Act’s stated purpose of “protecting academic freedom” as a sincere and legitimate secular purpose. They construed the term “academic freedom” to refer to “students’ freedom from indoctrination”, in this case their freedom “to decide for themselves how life began, based upon a fair and balanced presentation of the scientific evidence”.

Has quite a familiar ring, doesn’t it? The rhetoric of the ID movement was designed by a law professor, Phillip Johnson, to suit a creationism-friendly judge of the Law of the Land. This is indeed a sad day for ID, which already had acquired a moribund pallor.