Discovery Institute's Blog, page 199

#10 of Our Top Ten Evolution Stories of 2014: A Stunning New Illustration of Intelligent Design in the Cell

Editor's note: The staff of Evolution News & Views wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year! We'll be on a light reporting schedule as we enjoy some vacation time with family and friends. In the meantime we offer to our wonderful readers a countdown of the past year's Top 10 stories reflecting the most exciting and important developments in the evolution debate, concluding on New Year's Day. Enjoy!

Oh, and by the way, if you haven't finalized your year-end contribution to support the w...

Gilder on Privileged Species, a "Masterpiece" that "Expounds What Is the Most Important Discovery of 20th-Century Science"

Whoa, film and book reviews don't come any more enviable than this. George Gilder (Knowledge and Power, Wealth and Poverty) posts on Facebook about the new documentary from Discovery Institute, Privileged Species, directed by Center for Science & Culture associate director Dr. John West:

Michael Denton at Discovery has just produced a masterpiece of a film on science. It is called Privileged Species. It shows, in rigorous detail, that the universe was created to launch and sustain human life...

Virginia's Questions for Atheist Santa

In a mall in Madison, Wisconsin, five-year-old Virginia hops up on the lap of Atheist Santa, the jolly old elf from the reality-based community.

Atheist Santa reached into his bag and handed Virginia a copy of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, adorned with a green and red bow and a sprig of mistletoe.

Atheist Santa: "Ho-Ho-Ho little girl. Merry Christmas! What do you want for atheist Christmas?"

Virginia: "Actually Atheist Santa, I just want an explanation. My friends told me that atheists s...

In Nature, Two Cosmologists Chide Other Cosmologists for Lack of Testable Evidence

We have frequently criticized some of the crazy ideas emerging from modern cosmology: notions like the multiverse, inflation, Everett's "many-worlds" scenario, and other concoctions that try to escape the overwhelming evidence for design in the universe (namely, cosmic fine-tuning and the stringent requirements for habitability). Now, two leading big-bang cosmologists are joining us in the criticism, in a very high level venue, but for quite different reasons. Here's what George Ellis and Jo...

Court Declares Orangutan "Non-Human Person"!

I have been warningyou and warning you: It takes just one judge, wanting to make history, to kick the props out from under our tottering societal embrace of human exceptionalism.

In Argentina -- next door to Brazil, where a judge was previously poised to grant a writ of habeas corpus to a chimp, when the animal died -- a court has declared an orangutan a "person." From the Reuters story:

An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo can be freed and transferred to a sanctuary after a court recognized...

Paper Suggests Catch 22: Neo-Darwinism Faces Either a Massive Molecular Clock Misfire, or a Major Biogeographical Conundrum

As we've discussed here in the past, molecular clocks are notoriously unreliable indicators of a lineage's evolutionary age. Typically the problem is that the molecular clock is ticking "too fast" and suggests a lineage is older than the fossil record shows. Viewed through a non-Darwinian lens, genes in different organisms seem to be more dissimilar than one would expect under an evolutionary perspective. In other words, there are more informational differences between the organisms than, ac...

Steven Novella Doesn't Trust His Computer One Bit

"Skeptic" Steven Novella, whom I wrote about here earlier, drinks the Artificial Intelligence Kool-Aid. Novella, with my commentary:

The Future Threat of AI

Occasional warnings about artificially intelligent robots taking over the world convulse through the media. There is currently a ripple involving prior interviews with Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. Their names attract attention, and so the issue will provide a media distraction for a day or two.

Artificial Intelligence isn't here yet, beca...

How Sex Is Like Fireworks

The excitement of newly sparked love is often compared, figuratively speaking, to seeing fireworks. That's at the macroscopic level of human interaction. It turns out something no less amazing goes on at the cellular level. Scientists at Northwestern University have now revealed that the union of male and female gametes launches a fireworks show, quite literally. From "Stunning Zinc Fireworks When Egg Meets Sperm":

Sparks literally fly when a sperm and an egg hit it off. The fertilized mammal...

Leading Evolutionary Scientists Admit We Have No Evolutionary Explanation of Human Language

Denyse O'Leary has written here about the difficulty that evolutionary psychology faces in explaining the origin of language. Indeed, back in May, a group of huge names in evolutionary biology, evolutionary anthropology, and evolutionary psychology published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology admitting that in fact we have no explanation for the origin of language. The abstract strikingly states:

Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding ori...

Brains on Fire: Dr. Steven Novella Explains, "The Mind Is the Fire of the Brain&quot

Dr. Steven Novella, clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, has posted two responses to my posts on memory and neuroscience. His first post was scattered, and not worth a reasoned response, but he collects himself in his second post and provides an opportunity for discussion.

Dr. Novella, with my commentary:

As far as I can tell, Egnor has two actual points to make. The first is that memories (or representations of memories -- whatever that means) cannot be stored in the br...