25May 2020 by Post

Behe Vindicated Again: Sherpas Climb Everest Easier, Because Darwin Devolves

altitude, brown bears, climbing, Daisheng Song, Darwin Devolves, Darwinism, Evolution, genes, genetic information, genome, Han Chinese, hemoglobin, Himalayas, Intelligent Design, interfertility, loss of function, lowlanders, Michael Behe, Mount Everest, mount improbable, natural selection, Nepalese, oxygen, Phd2, PNAS, polar bears, positive selection, seal meat, Sherpa, super-athletes, Tibetans, Wikipedia
How can Tibetans survive high altitudes that leave lowlanders gasping? The answer is found in broken genes. A new paper on the Tibetan genome vindicates what Michael Behe said in Darwin Devolves: evolution breaks things, but sometimes, like in the case of polar bears, the result can allow organisms to thrive in specific environments. Yes, this follows on the heels of last week’s Behe vindication; see here. A team of 16 scientists, writing in PNAS, sought to understand the genetic basis for Tibetan high-altitude adaptation in more detail. Tibetans and Nepalese, many of whom serve as guides for lowlanders wanting to conquer Mount Everest, routinely carry heavy burdens at altitudes above 14,000 feet, the average elevation on the Tibetan plateau. In its entry on Sherpa people, Wikipedia notes, Many Sherpa…
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24May 2020 by Post

Doctor’s Diary: Fear Is a Gift from Our Designer

compassion, coronavirus, courage, emotions, fear, Gavin de Becker, Intelligent Design, joy, Love, murder hornets, pain, pandemic, parking structure, patients, physicians, sweat, The Gift of Fear, yellow jackets
Editor’s note: Dr. Simmons is the author most recently of Are We Here to Re-Create Ourselves? He is a Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. As a physician, I have cared for many patients who were fearful. Often with good reason, but not always. Might fear actually be a purposeful design? Might it be present to protect a person? One might liken fear to pain, which is a similar gift. How would we have survived as a species if running bare-footed across sharp rocks or being stung by an irritated hive of yellow jackets (or murder hornets!) didn’t hurt? Without pain how would a child learn not to touch a hot stove? Or, pull away immediately to lessen the damage? In 1997, Gavin de Becker authored The Gift of…
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22May 2020 by Post

Zombie History — Using Galileo to Whack Intelligent Design

Alison Abbott, Andrew Dickson White, Catholic Church, Christianity, climate change, creationism, Discovery Institute, Faith & Science, Galileo Affair, Galileo and the Science Deniers, Galileo Galilei, Heresy, historicity, Inquisition, Intelligent Design, John William Draper, Jonathan Wells, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Mario Livio, Michael Keas, Nature (journal), Nicolaus Copernicus, public schools, religion, science denialism, science deniers, Tychonian model, Unbelievable?, Urban VIII, Warfare Thesis, Zombie Science
A useful myth is hard to put down. The Galileo myth gives a premiere illustration. Ever since John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White fostered the “warfare thesis” of “science vs religion” in the late 19th century, appealing to the Galileo affair as the example par excellence, historians have had little luck convincing the scientific establishment that their version of the Galileo story is flawed. Fortunately, we have the new book by Michael Keas to help set the story straight: Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion. Keas traces the development of the warfare thesis through the 19th century. Despite being largely discredited by historians, the warfare thesis lives on into our time. For instance, Mario Livio has a new book out, Galileo and the…
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19May 2020 by Post

Book Excerpt: A Factory That Builds Factories That Build Factories That…

abiogenesis, bacteria, Charles Darwin, Darwinian evolution, early Earth, factories, Gerald F. Joyce, Harvard University, Holy Grail, Intelligent Design, Jack Szostak, Joseph Hooker, Max Schultze, metabolic pathways, molecules, National Public Radio, natural selection, origin of life, Oxford University, protoplasm, random mutations, Richard Dawkins, self-replication, The Origin of Species, The Selfish Gene
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the the new book from Discovery Institute Press, Evolution & Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. Eric H. Anderson is a lawyer, software engineering executive, and writer on intelligent design. Nobel Prize recipient and Harvard origin-of-life researcher Jack Szostak once remarked, “In my lab, we’re interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth…. You want something that can grow and divide and, most importantly, exhibit Darwinian evolution.”1 Another noted origin-of-life researcher, Gerald F. Joyce, says much the same thing. When asked about the idea that chemicals might have come together on the early Earth to form something that could copy itself, Joyce responded, “That’s what we and others are interested in because that’s sort of, you know, the…
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15May 2020 by Post

Just-in-Time Delivery in Living Cells

Amazon, cardiovascular disease, cell's, coronavirus, cryo-electron microscope, delivery, endosomes, enzymes, FedEx, HSPG, Intelligent Design, Lauren Jackson, lipoprotein lipase, LPL, male haploid genome, Max Planck Institute, NEDD8, nexins, PNAS, ribosomes, SDC1, sex, shipping, sperm, Structure (journal), syndecan-1, trash, triglycerides, truckers, U.C. San Diego, U.S. Postal Service, ubiquitin, UPS, Vanderbilt University, vesicles
During the coronavirus crisis, truckers have played an essential role in getting masks, medicines, and equipment to hospitals that were overwhelmed, and food to the grocery stores to prevent a starvation crisis as people obeyed stay-at-home orders. Some of the truckers drove long all-night shifts to meet the critical demand. Non-essential deliveries of goods from retail merchants like Amazon continued mostly uninterrupted, too.  Human delivery systems rely on distributed storage. Cells know all about this. A cell is a large place, like a city to the molecules inside; it is inefficient to store needed cargoes far from their work sites. Within the cell, highways of microtubules grow in the directions that cargo carriers like kinesins need them. Some new discoveries show that additional mechanisms supplement those well-known processes to provide…
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14May 2020 by Post

COVID-19, Random Mutations, and Aristotle’s Matrix of Design

Andrew McDiarmid, Aristotle, bodies, coronavirus, COVID-19, Evolution News, ID The Future, Intelligent Design, Medicine, Michael Egnor, mutations, neurosurgeon, philosophy, Podcast, purpose, random events, viruses
On a new episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid speaks with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor about Dr. Egnor’s recent Evolution News article, “The Coronavirus Demonstrates How Evolution Presupposes Intelligent Design.” Download the podcast or listen to it here. Egnor notes that the coronavirus and other viruses are not, strictly speaking, considered living things, even if they depend on living hosts for their continued existence. Egnor also discusses the role of random mutations in viruses and draws upon Aristotle to argue that these and other random events only occur, and have their meaning, against a backdrop of purpose and design — in this case, the designed systems, the bodies, that viruses invade.  Image: Aristotle, by Francesco Hayez (1811) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. The post COVID-19, Random Mutations, and Aristotle’s Matrix of Design…
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11May 2020 by Post

In Biology, Intelligent Designs that Amaze, Amuse, and Entertain

Alticini, An Uplifting Story, bottlenose dolphins, catapult, dandelions, Darwinism, dolphins, Evolution, fish stocks, flea beetle, flea beetles, Francis Collins, Illustra Media, infrared cameras, infrared radiation, Intelligent Design, International Society for Photonics and Optics, Keith Moorad, killer whales, leaf beetles, Lehigh University, Life Sciences, Michael Behe, National Institutes of Health, night vision goggles, origami, parachute, Pensoft, PNAS, toothed whales, U.S. Navy, Zookeys
A parade of amazing designs from the living world has passed through these pages over the years, and it shows no sign of stopping. Here are some entertaining examples from recent news. Jump Like a Flea, Beetle Flea beetles, or Alticini, are high-jump champions among the coleopterans (beetles) in the insect world. There are some 9,900 species of flea beetles, a “hyper-diverse group” that inhabits environments from deserts to rainforests all over the world. The Pensoft blog shows a picture of one, saying, “Exceptional catapulting jump mechanism in a tiny beetle could be applied in robotic limbs.”  The fascinating and highly efficient jumping mechanism in flea beetles is described in a new research article in the open-access journal Zookeys. Despite having been known since 1929, the explosive jump — which is also the reason behind the colloquial name of this…
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08May 2020 by Post

Why Building Animals Is Hard

cats, Center for Science & Culture, comments, development, Discovery Institute, evo-devo, Evolution, Intelligent Design, lectures, memories, Summer Seminars, Zoom
While out lecturing around the country — in May 2020, just a fond memory; only my cats hear me lecture in person now, everyone else tunes in on Zoom — I’m often asked, “So what are the Discovery Institute Summer Seminars like, anyway?” You can see for yourself by going here. This lecture represents material I have presented for the past few years, under the heading of “evo-devo,” or “evolution and development.” I am revamping my evo-devo lectures from top to bottom, so making this talk available to anyone interested will take nothing away from future Summer Seminar students. Comments welcome — please send them to cscinfo@discovery.org, and I will take them seriously. Photo credit: Wolfgang Hasselmann via Unsplash. The post Why Building Animals Is Hard appeared first on Evolution News.
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08May 2020 by Post

Stephen Meyer, Eric Metaxas: Gain and Loss and the Origin of Life

abiogenesis, Adolf Hitler, agnosticism, Atheism, Brian Miller, Charles Thaxton, Darwin's Doubt, Douglas Axe, Eric Metaxas, Evolution, Günter Bechly, Intelligent Design, James Tour, Jews, materialism, Nazi Germany, origin of life, Petra Moser, Richard Sternberg, Roger Olsen, Stanford University, Stephen Meyer, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, United States, Ur-text, Walter Bradley
Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany “revolutionized U.S. science and innovation,” as Stanford University historian Petra Moser and others have pointed out. Hitler’s loss was our gain. Something not entirely dissimilar is the case in the history of the intelligent design movement and its own revolution. On his radio show today, Eric Metaxas talked with Darwin’s Doubt author Stephen Meyer about the reissue of the expanded version of the Ur-text of intelligent design, a 35th anniversary edition of The Mystery of Life’s Origin. Dr. Meyer contributed a new chapter, as did James Tour, Brian Miller, and other scientists who have come to doubt purely materialist accounts of how the first life arose. Steve points out to Eric that “Some of our very best scientists are refugees from top-level institutions in the mainstream science establishment.”…
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06May 2020 by Post

Message from the Molecules — They Say “Intelligent Design”

biology, chauvinism, Chemistry, computer engineering, cosmology, Darwin's Black Box, Evolution, Foresight (book), Intelligent Design, Marcos Eberlin, mass spectrometry, mathematics, Michael Behe, molecules, Nobel laureates, physics
Biology, cosmology, physics, mathematics, computer engineering, chemistry… You could have an interesting argument among proponents of intelligent design about which field of science will ultimately clinch the argument for ID. Famed chemist Marcos Eberlin claims the honor will go to chemistry. Chauvinism, you say? Perhaps. You could take that up with the three Nobel laureates who endorsed his recent book, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. “The molecules speak for themselves,” says Dr. Eberlin here. “The molecules will speak louder and louder and louder and finally we will have to surrender to the message that the molecules are sending to us. They say clearly, ‘Intelligent design is the source of life.’” Eberlin’s specific field is mass spectrometry, which, as he has explained to me, is the powerful…
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