09Jul 2026 by Post

Re-evaluating Lamarck’s Contribution to Evolutionary Thought

adaptations, biology, conscious purposiveness, determinism, Edmund Ware Sinnott, environment, epigenetics, Eva Jablonka, Evolution, Evolution: The History of an Idea, freedom, George Levine, Georges Cuvier, history, history of science, homeostasis, inheritance, instinctive regulation, J. Scott Turner, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Jerry Coyne, Jessica Riskin, Lamarckism, Laurent Larson, Marion Lamb, Motivation, neo-Darwinian synthesis, personality, Peter J. Bowler, Purpose and Desire, regeneration, Skeptic Magazine, teleology, The Power of Life, Yale University
The rehabilitation of Lamarck and the important work of scholars of the past (i.e., Sinnott) and present (i.e., Turner) suggest an interesting conclusion. Source
Read More
16May 2026 by Post

What Is Consciousness For? Sixteen Theories Take a Crack at the Question

Albert Newen, anole lizards, Antonella Tramacere, Antonio Damasio, Axel Cleeremans, biology, Carlos Montemayor, Catherine Tallon-Baudry, cognition, cognitive science, consciousness, Dogs, Eva Jablonka, Experience, Gianmarco Maldarelli, horses, Jacques Singer, Jonathan Birch, Jonathon D. Crystal, Julio Hechavarria, Kristin Andrews, Krzysztof Dołęga, Lars Chittka, Léa Moncoucy, Lucia Melloni, Maxime Janbon, memory, neuroscience, Neuroscience & Mind, Nicholas Humphrey, Noam Miller, Olga Dyakova, Onur Güntürkün, philosophy, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Royal Society, Sarah Skeels, self-awareness, Simon Alexander Burns Brown, Simona Ginsburg, T.S. Eliot, Yuranny Cabral-Calderin, zoology
It sounds like we do not really know what we are looking for, which will doubtless complicate efforts to find it. Source
Read More
14Aug 2025 by Post

Is Intelligent Design Gaining the Upper Hand?

abiogenesis, biocomplexity, biologists, Case Western Reserve University, credibility, Eva Jablonka, Evolution, Evolution “On Purpose”, Freudian slip, grammar, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity, Jan Spitzer, Journal of Molecular Evolution, methodological naturalism, MIT Press, Nita Sahai, origin of life, Peter Corning, scientific establishment, Scientific Trustworthiness, Simona Ginsburg, teleological, teleology, teleonomic
The underlying dynamic here is one of fear — fear of being associated with a movement one cannot easily dispel through evidence and argument. Source
Read More
06Mar 2020 by Post

Hey, Paul Davies — Your ID is Showing

Barbara McClintock, chaos, cosmology, Discovery Institute, engineers, Eva Jablonka, intelligence, Intelligent Design, James Clerk Maxwell, James Shapiro, John Cairns, Maxwell’s demon, molecular machines, motors, nanotechnology, natural genetic engineering, order, origin of information, origin of life, Paul Davies, Physics, Earth & Space, rotors, Second Law of Thermodynamics, Stephen Meyer, The Demon in the Machine
Editor’s note: Dr. Shedinger is a Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He is the author of a recent book critiquing Darwinian triumphalism, The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms. No better advertisements for intelligent design exist than works written by establishment scientists that unintentionally make design arguments. I can think of few better examples than well-known cosmologist Paul Davies’s recently published book The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (2019). With a nod toward James Clerk Maxwell’s entropy-defying demon, Davies argues that the gulf between physics and biology is completely unbridgeable without some fundamentally new concept. Since living organisms consistently resist the ravages of entropy that all forms of inanimate matter are subject to, there must be some non-physical principle allowing living…
Read More