The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The emotional hunger of Darwin-driven science to find new human species (especially, unusually simian ones) has led to an amusing search for terminology to describe minimal differences. The word choices can be fun.

For example, in "Who Were the Denisovans?"(Science, 26 August 2011), Ann Gibbons explains,

Several fossils belonging to a previously unknown type of archaic human were found last summer in a remote cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. The discovery team called them the Denisovans after the cave.

"Type" as in "He's not my type"? As it happens, these people were somebody's type because genome mapping shows that our ancestors "mingled" with these people from 30,000 to 50,000 years ago and - it is thought - provided us with useful immunities. All the rest is shrouded in archaic darkness. A December 22, 2010 National Geographic News article by Ker Than, "New Type of Ancient Human Found—Descendants Live Today?", reveals a similar wrestle with terminology. From Evolution's "new twist": Neanderthal-like "sister group" bred with humans like us,"

A previously unknown kind of human—the Denisovans—likely roamed Asia for thousands of years, probably interbreeding occasionally with humans like you and me, according to a new genetic study.

"Kind", as in "He's not the marrying kind," surely; National Geographic can't mean the creationist idea of "kind." Actually, there is only a girl's finger bone and a large adult tooth to go on as yet, but they point to some possibility that Papua, New Guinea, Islanders inherited DNA from "these prehistoric pairings." The genetic evidence is very recent (2010), and casts an interesting light on the desperation with which many researchers in the last decade have sought to show that Flores man was a separate species, indeed, the "alien from Earth." Or, as one researcher puts it,

"Then these two papers come out, and I won't say they've turned the field on its head, but they certainly support a view that has not been well recognized for years" by geneticists, ...

Which is Darwinspeak for Not What Top People Wanted to Hear. "Interesting and exciting," also used here, often serves the same function, discreetly.

Journalist Ker explains,

The team has been careful not to call Denisovans a new species, opting instead to label them as a Neanderthal "sister group ."

Now they're "group." As in, "His family are an odd group."

One researcher observes,

"We really don't know how to equate differences in genome sequences with the species concept," he said. "You could have two genuine species, whose members cannot interbreed, but whose genomes are very similar.

Can you? Where is the publicity wagon when we really need it? Doesn't that undercut the whole enterprise?

In any event, many have suggested dropping the pretense that Neanderthals are a separate species.

As scientists "produce evidence that Denisovans interbred with modern humans (as did Neanderthals) then the implication is that modern humans, Denisovans and Neanderthals are all subspecies of Homo sapiens," he said.

Translation: The missing link is still missing.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

If we don't want to play by Darwin's rules any more, let's keep in mind that the chief reason for underestimating the Neanderthals was a huge, unmet need for subhuman humans, to be the "missing link." People who could half-reason.

In "Neanderthal survival story revealed in Jersey caves" (BBC News , August 30, 2011), Becky Evans reports,

New investigations at an iconic cave site on the Channel Island of Jersey have led archaeologists to believe the Neanderthals have been widely under-estimated.

"Neanderthals were travelling to Jersey already equipped with good quality flint tools, then reworking them, very, very carefully so as not to waste anything. They were extremely good at recycling."

Neanderthal as new logo for recycling program? They could also be the new logo for authentic feminism because, apparently, women as well as men hunted. That implies that women had some sort of equality (only because, in societies where women do the same jobs as men, they tend to have more equality).

La Cotte's collapsed cave system contains intact ice age sediments spanning a quarter of a million years, revealing a detailed sequence of Neanderthal occupation and occasional abandonment, against a background of changing climate.

It would be interesting to see if and how Neanderthal culture changed.

At La Cotte, we get to see far more than a glimpse of their behaviour, we get to see generation upon generation of Neanderthals returning to the same place under lots of different environmental conditions."

If we don't want to play by Darwin's rules any more, let's keep in mind that the chief reason for underestimating the Neanderthals was a huge, unmet need for subhuman humans, to be the "missing link." People who could half-reason.

Black Africans refused this role, for which they were cast en masse a century ago, leaving the Darwinist to search through the dusty past. Neanderthal man seemed like a good bet, but is not so far working out.

See also: We are all human now, and the missing link is still missing.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, they could hardly be expected to.

Remember the carnivorous plants that ate Darwin?

Alfred Wallace warned Darwin about the problems posed by Utricularia, saying "I feel sure they will be seized on as inexplicable by Natural Selection" and implored him to address these difficulties in a future edition of his book "On the Origin of Species."

Darwin never did.
UD News featured the pitcher plant, which gobbles insects instead of the reverse. Canadian botanist Margaret Helder promptly weighed in with

… some plants … attract, catch and eat aquatic insects, water fleas and young tadpoles, fish fry, tiny worms and very young insect larvae including mosquito wrigglers.

even vertebrates aren't safe from the plants high-intel traps.

German geneticist W.-E. Loennig, who is writing a book on the subject, points out that

many species of Utricularia are not adapted to extremely nitrogen-deficient environments (which is true in fact, for most of the European species).

So they eat bugs because they like them, not because they have to. (?) He has documented the point extensively.

Wallace was right.

Here's an example of oneof his frustrating colloquies with Darwinists:

Barry A. Rice [abbreviated BAR]: "Unfortunately there are very few fossils of carnivorous plants, so so we can only guess how they evolved, and our guesses would probably be wrong. But it is not too hard to develop plausible pathways that evolution could have followed to produce these extraordinary plants."

Comment by W-EL: Concernig the fossil record, see please, pp. 67-71 above: it speaks the language of abrupt appearances of new forms and their constancy in space and time. As BAR himself admitted (see also p. 63 above, footnote 92), the epistemological problem with evolution is that it is almost never "too hard to develop plausible pathways that evolution could have followed…" but "…we just don't know if such theories are right." Oder Prof. V.: 'Plausible Geschichten sind bestenfalls Hypothesen, die testbar sein sollten'.

BAR continues: "For example, a great number of plants have hairy surfaces. Many, such as tomatoes and petunias, are glandular and sticky."

W-EL: See, please pp. 167/168 above for the specified genetical complexities and thus evolutionary problems involved in the origin of apparently simple and glandular trichomes alone. But, of course, these could be used as starting points.

BAR continues: "It is but a small step to the commensal relationships with insects exhibited by Byblis and Drosera."

W-EL: Is this really "but a small step"? So what exactly are the molecular and other steps necessary to produce commensal relationships with insects? (See some of the problems mentioned on p. 133 above, footnote 235.)

BAR continues: "The development of enzyme production would be a further step toward autonomous carnivory."

W-EL: Necessary is the devolopment of the correct acids and enzymes needed in proper amounts at the right place at the right time usually secreted by digestive glands – enormous problems for evolution by accidental mutations and selection.

BAR: "Differential cell growth, which enables plants to lean toward light, could also in time transform passive flypaper plants into active flypapers."

W-EL: Well, how to test this hypothesis for a concrete species? How many molecular steps are really necessary to transform passive flypaper plants into active ones?

BAR: "Did Drosera evolve in this way? Perhaps, perhaps not."

W-EL: There are many scientific reasons to think that the postulated processes to generate carnivorous plants by random micromutations, recombination and selection is very improbable – see the arguments given in my paper here.

BAR: "But the key point is that the pathway is completely plausible."

W-EL: Well, to repeat, "plausible stories need not be true" (Gould).

BAR: "Evolution is a vehicle for change: the biological diversity of the entire planet is its fuel, and mighty aeons mark its journey."

W-EL: The real evolutionary problems seem to be hidden behind a screen of undefined parameters. "The length of time is relevant only when the probabilistic structure of events and changes occurring in this time are also known" (M. Eden). Can really anything – any improbable event – happen on this background? And anyway, then, why are there only so relatively few carnivorous plants (see quotations above, pp. 168, 217) on this entire planet including its mighty aeons of time and hundreds of millions of generations with altogether trillions of individuals? For more information about probabilities and the parameters which have to be considered for these questions, see the links to 8 papers given on p. 25 of http://www.weloennig.de/GiraffaSecondPartEnglish.pdf.)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, this is a turnabout.

In New Scientist, Jo Marchant writes about "Heal thyself: The power of mind over matter." Given that New Scientist has long championed the view that the mind doesn't exist, it rather sounds like "The power of ghosts over haunted country inns."* And in this matter, the writer departs from the PZ Myers dictum that mindfulness is bunkum But we digress.

Promising "A free drug can help treat many disorders with no side effects: our minds," Marchant offers six examples, including

Trials looking at the effects of meditation have mostly been small, but they have suggested a range of benefits. There is some evidence that meditation boosts the immune response in vaccine recipients and people with cancer, protects against a relapse in major depression, soothes skin conditions and even slows the progression of HIV.

Meditation might even slow the ageing process. Telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, get shorter every time a cell divides and so play a role in ageing. Clifford Saron of the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, and colleagues recently showed that levels of an enzyme that builds up telomeres were higher in people who attended a three-month meditation retreat than in a control group (Psychoneuroendocrinology, vol 36, p 664).

Here's the link to the first 4.5 of the 6. They6 want you to subscribe, to read it all conveniently - and if they keep going this way, it may be worthwhile.

In fact, if New Scientist keeps on this way, they will make life difficult for UD News. They were always such a ready source of crackpot cosmologies and psychologies, and fevered Darwin cult crusades, etc. A break from the more demanding coverage of real science news, often welcomed. Well, they're better off with this, and UD News must just find other sources of lighter moments.

*Note: There's a history here: In 2008, New Scientist's Amanda Gefter launched an attack on non-materialist neuroscience, accusing Mario Beauregard (The Spiritual Brain) and Jeff Schwartz (You Are Not Your Brain). They replied, pointing out that their dispute with materialist neuroscience ( = you are your brain, and your brain is just neurons puppeteered by genes) is not mere ideology; they have not found the materialist approach useful in clinical practice. Meanwhile, in 2009, Gefter and New Scientist ended up in a legal clash with Darwin-doubting British M.D. James Le Fanu, over Gefter's characterization of him - and the story was pulled from their site. Here it is. Gefter apparently opined, "If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn't need science in the first place." O'Leary replied, "Well, I think Gefter should try a little common sense, and maybe she wouldn't be in this [legal] mess." Also that Brit libel laws are in dire need of reform. Whatever Geftter said (and who really cares?), Le Fanu should not have been able to cause that kind of trouble to a pop science tabloid.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!
--

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From International Business Times ("Scientists Solve Lager Beer Mystery, Crack Yeast's DNA Code", August 23, 2011), we learn that cracking the DNA of the brewer's yeast used to make lager revealed a hybrid "representing a marriage of species as evolutionarily separate as humans and chickens." (Maybe so, but the technical difficulties attending a "chickman" are doubtless much greater.)

While scientists and brewers have long known that the yeast that gives beer the capacity to ferment at cold temperatures was a hybrid, only one player was known: Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Its partner, which conferred on beer the ability to ferment in the cold, remained a puzzle, as scientists were unable to find it among the 1,000 or so species of yeast known to science.

Now, researchers have identified the wild yeast that, in the age of sail, apparently traveled more than 7,000 miles to those Bavarian caves to make a fortuitous microbial match that today underpins the $250 billion-a-year lager beer industry.

It's been named "Saccharomyces eubayanus."

It would be interesting to know how often hybridization has been the actual source of new characteristics currently attributed to Darwinism.

For example, see also: "Spectacular" instance of interspecies mouse hybrids produces immunity to most poisons

It would be interesting to know how often hybridization has been the actual source of new characteristics currently attributed to Darwinism.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Calling skeptic Peter Woit, of "Not Even Wrong" right this minute:

In "Morgan Freeman Goes From God to Science" ( New York Times, August 26, 2011) Alex Pappademas writes what sounds like a parody of pop science TV - but takes it seriously:

In the hands of a goofier host — and let's face it, anyone other than Freeman would by definition be a goofier host — the series could have been "Ripley's Believe It or Not" with string theory, or a bottomless can of mind-Pringles for freshman-dorm Castanedas. (Representative episode titles include "Does Time Really Exist?" and "Beyond the Darkness"; presumably, the producers are saving "Have You Ever Looked at Your Hand — I Mean, Really Looked at It?" and "No, Seriously, What if Our Whole Reality Is Actually Just a Cat's Dream" for next season.) And given that it's a show about math and particle physics and speculative neuroscience built around interviews with prominent academics, it could also have been as dry and airless as deep space.

Instead, it's the best pop-science TV show since Carl Sagan's "Cosmos: A Personal Journey" — a whirlwind tour of the fourth dimension with a sense of wonder and a sense of humor. And a lot has to do with Freeman. He's one of the show's executive producers, and supposedly a lifelong space buff, but he's also clearly in on the meta-joke of recruiting President God to narrate a show about whether there's a Creator. Can we travel through time? Is our universe just one bubble in a sheet of cosmic Bubble Wrap? Are there aliens? Are we all just Sims? Maybe, Freeman says, in that familiar cracked-leather baritone, and you can't not believe him a little bit.

Yes, you can.

See also: Large Hadron Collider proves physics is really science: Dumps string theory

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here. Ryan Schaffer interviews Leo Behe, who hopes to study philosophy in the fall term:

I'm going to a university this fall to study philosophy. In the future, I hope to write on the subject of religion and why I believe it is both harmful and false.

- ("The Humanist Interview: The son of intelligent design heavyweight Michael Behe discusses his journey to atheism" The Humanist, September/October 2011)

That said, he does not claim that his father forced religion on him. Rather,

I would like everyone to realize that he doesn't have any sort of religious agenda and he's not trying to denigrate science in any way.

Andso ...

Long-held beliefs, especially beliefs developed during childhood, operate on a very deep and basic level of thought—almost subconsciously. These beliefs can exist independently in a perfectly honest and intelligent scientist who is simply doing his part to further theories or ideas that he believes are supported by the scientific data. The best way to progress is through respectful and thoughtful discussion and debate, as it has always been.

More.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At BBC News (August 27, 2011), Pallab Ghosh reports "LHC results put supersymmetry theory 'on the spot'" :

Results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have all but killed the simplest version of an enticing theory of sub-atomic physics.

Researchers failed to find evidence of so-called "supersymmetric" particles, which many physicists had hoped would plug holes in the current theory.

Promising:

"The fact that we haven't seen any evidence of it tells us that either our understanding of it is incomplete, or it's a little different to what we thought - or maybe it doesn't exist at all," he said.

Relax. If you're willing to admit that maybe it doesn't exist at all, you know you are doing physics. You could have been inventing a cosmology to suit yourselves, but we know there really is a cosmos out there if it doesn't do what you expected.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At Mercatornet (August 23, 2011), we are invited to consider whether getting more women involved in floor trading would prevent future collapses. Trouble is,

So now we come to the key question: Is the floor trade world a natural outcome of human behaviour, into which some men and a much smaller proportion of women fit? Yes, probably.

My financial advisor tells me that the market is run by two principle human motives: Greed and fear. Bubbles and their subsequent collapses happen when greed overrides fear. Later, fear restores order and the market starts to recover. Which is to say that crazy markets and their corrections are caused by human nature. It’s hard to change the fundamental reality that a stock market is about people making decisions, wise or foolish.

An Italian proverb puts it like this: Three women and a goose make a market. All the rest follows.
More.

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Canadian botanist Margaret Helder explains about bladderwort (Utricularia, 200 sp.),

... some plants ... attract, catch and eat aquatic insects, water fleas and young tadpoles, fish fry, tiny worms and very young insect larvae including mosquito wrigglers.

We knew they needed nitrogen, and that animals are a good supply, but we didn't know they were into fusion food. So they even eat small vertebrates ... using suction power.

Just how plants evolved to do this has been a 200-year headache. Even Darwin and Wallace knew that their natural selection theory would not really explain it.

More from Helder,

... all Utricularia have a highly unusual structure. They have absolutely no roots, not even as an embryo in the seed. Furthermore it is difficult to distinguish between stem and leaf. Masses of small flowers – either purple or yellow – extend above the surface of the water. It is usually the flowers that one notices first.

And the traps?

he traps are usually oval or egg-shaped bladders. At the front end, a trapdoor guards the entrance. Special cells on the trapdoor surface release nectar and mucilage. These smell so good. Numerous small animals make a point to investigate the source of these pleasant aromas. In so doing, they unintentionally brush one of the prominent trigger hairs projecting from the threshold into their pathway.

After this, things happen awfully quickly. The curious intruder wishes he had stayed far away. A doorstop inside shifts, allowing the trapdoor to swing up and inward. Water gushes inward to fill a vacuum in the trap’s interior. The watery inrushing flood sweeps the hapless victim along into the trap. And the view inside is certainly discouraging. The trapdoor swings firmly shut behind the victim, who cannot now escape. To add insult to injury, the victim’s pitiful struggles stimulate special gland cells on the interior wall. These release digestive juices into the cavity and the victim is digested.

When only the skeletal parts of the meal remain, the trap is re-set.

More.

Either plants are smarter than animals or something is smarter than both. It would be interesting to know if any animal ever evolved a defence against the trap.

Helder also writes,

The time to find these plants in Canada is usually in July when one sees clusters of yellow flowers (like snapdragon blossoms) extending just above the water. Even in marshes near here (not acid at all, actually) one sees these plants in shallow water. When you see the blossoms, you can reach in and grab a nice big clump of the plant. The bladders are obvious.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Or so David Shiga tells us in "Evidence for Mars floods all dried up?" (New Scientist, 22 August 2011):

Kelin Whipple of Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe agrees that lava probably carved the huge channels, such as Kasei Valles (shown). He says the study calls into question the case for huge volumes of water – and possibly an ocean – on ancient Mars.

But Phil Christensen, also at ASU, says clays and fans of sediment still point to the existence of smaller Martian lakes and rivers. These would be better places to search for life, he says, because they would have held water for longer periods than the giant channels, where floods – if there ever were any – would have been fleeting. "Lakes and deltas are probably the places people are going to look for life," he says.

But just use your imagination, and you will discover that lava too can host life.

See also: The Shroud of Turin makes way more sense than water on Mars

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Not So Fast: Lasting Evolutionary Change Takes About One Million Years, Researchers Find" (ScienceDaily, Aug. 22, 2011), we learn:

In research that will help address a long-running debate and apparent contradiction between short- and long-term evolutionary change, scientists have discovered that although evolution is a constant and sometimes rapid process, the changes that hit and stick tend to take a long time.

Give or take a little, one million years seems to be the magic number.

The problem seems to be that researchers were pouncing on small and easily reversible changes, and declaring them to be "evolution". This, in turn, is because they were desperate for actual evidence of Darwinian evolution - natural selection, acting on random mutations - as opposed to just plain evolution - stable change over time, due to a variety of causes.

A recent study was the first [!] to combine data from short periods such as 10-100 years with the fossil record over millions of years.

It determined that rapid changes in local populations often don't continue, stand the test of time or spread through a species.

In other words, just because humans are two or three inches taller now than they were 200 years ago, it doesn't mean that process will continue and we'll be two or three feet taller in 2,000 years. Or even as tall in one million years as we are now.

No. And any significant, permanent change in height might require such massive restructuring that design is a necessary component for success.

This research supports the overall pattern of stasis and punctuational change. However, Uyeda says there may be different causal mechanisms at work than have often been proposed.

Then he starts talking nonsense:

"Evolutionary adaptations are caused by some force of natural selection such as environmental change, predation or anthropogenic disturbance, and these forces have to continue and become widespread for the change to persist and accumulate. That's slower and more rare than one might think."

If evolution that involved the development of complex new machinery depended on these forces, it would simply never occur. Natural selection cannot produce intricate machinery as needed, nor can environmental change. And "anthropogenic disturbance" has not been much of a factor before a few centuries ago.

It is sad to see a scientist talking like this, for the sole purpose of defending Darwinism.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From International Business Times (August 22, 2011), we learn: "Cooking is 1.9 Million Years Old: Study." And Michael Cremo is still wrong anyway?:

New evidence suggests that our ancestors have been cooking and processing food as far back as 1.9 million years ago. This could explain why humans have small teeth, as we don't need to spend our time chewing as much as animals.

The scientists found that chimpanzees spend 10 times more time chewing compared to humans.

Bovines spend almost all their waking hours eating grasses.

Cooking softens and processes food to make eating much easier and reduce chewing time. Had our ancestors not cooked, we'd be eating nearly half of the day instead of just 5 percent that we spend today.

The theory goes, cooking freed our ancestors up for more creative activities than chewing. Like talking without your mouth full. It makes sense in principle, but here's the hitch:

"There isn't a lot of good evidence for fire. That's kind of controversial," Organ said. "That's one of the holes in this cooking hypothesis. If those species right then were cooking you should find evidence for hearths and fire pits."

To put their theory on the table, so to speak, they need to definitely establish that people used fire in those days.

Note: Technologically primitive peoples have also made use of hot springs and naturally occurring fire. If a natural fire has started and is burning out, it is easy to grasp the principle of keeping a bit of it going, even if one doesn't know how to start a fire. Also some methods of preparing food can make it easier to digest without cooking - chopping vegetable matter into small bits, for example, as well as pounding grains. We shall see.
See also: Stone tools v – and Michael Cremo is still wrong?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Trickling down through pop science media: The Large Hadron Collider has not found "the God particle," the Higgs boson.

From The Australian (August 23, 2011),

INTERNATIONAL scientists searching to solve the greatest riddle in all of physics say that signs are fading of the elusive Higgs-Boson particle, which is believed to give objects mass.

Just last month, physicists announced at a European conference that a big atom-smasher experiment had shown tantalising hints of the Higgs-Boson, as the search to identify the particle enters the final stretch with results expected late next year.

Sometimes described as the "God particle" because it is such a mystery yet such a potent force of nature, the Higgs-Boson - if it exists - represents the final piece of the Standard Model of physics.

"At this moment we don't see any evidence for the Higgs in the lower mass region where it is likely to be," said physicist Howard Gordon, deputy US ATLAS operations program manager.

ATLAS is the biggest particle collider lab at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN)"s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). ...

Remember "Physicists closing in on the God"? That was just so last November.

Prophet, ranting: There IS a God. There is no God particle. There is no God machine!

File under: New gimmick needed pronto.

File with: Higgs boson could be ruled out as particle by the end of next year, says CERN boss

News starts to sink in: Large Hadron Collider not wish list for multiverse

No God needed: CalTech physicist responds to Uncommon Descent's questions

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Look, it's summer, every second day is Slow Newsday. At The Daily Mail (22nd August 2011), Fiona Macrae asks, "Was the human race given an ever-lasting boost by breeding with Neanderthal man?":

We like to think our superior brainpower means we survived while they perished. But we may not have been alive today, if it were not for the Neanderthals.

How so?

Interbreeding with Neanderthals gave our ancestors a ready-made cocktail of DNA invaluable in fighting diseases common in northern climates, research by immunologist Peter Parham suggests.

You know it's screen writing when "suggests" replaces "determined."

This, in turn, vastly sped up our evolution, and gave us the strength and resilience needed to populate the world.

And it didn't do anything of the kind for them? Guys, there's a hole in our story here.

Professor Parham, of the respected Stanford University in California, focused on a family of 200-plus genes called human leukocyte antigens that are key to the workings of the immune system.

He showed that some of our HLA genes are identical to those that were found in Neanderthals.

That's it! Once the source is unimpeachable, forget the hole. Start shooting first thing tomorrow.
Physicist Rob Sheldon, who watches the series, has asked: Are Neanderthals - or are they not - a distinct species? Shush, Rob. If anyone admitted they are not, we'd have to cancel the series. Interspecies sex hints keep it going.

File with: In this episode, an early industrial revolution was the closing curtain for Neanderthals

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Amid the uproar about hope for life on Mars, significantly, no one addresses the true conundrum lurking in the find: How soon life got started after Earth cooled. Where is the window for random evolution?

In "Fossil find shows Martian life possible" (ABC News, August 22, 2011), Kate Kelland reports that the world's oldest fossils to date have been found in Australia, pretty accurately dated to about 3.4 billion years ago:

"We can be very sure about the age as the rocks were formed between two volcanic successions that narrow the possible age down to a few tens of millions of years," he says. "That's very accurate indeed when the rocks are 3.4 billion years old."

The fossils appear to be extremophiles utilizing sulphur, thus able to cope with an almost oxygen-free environment.

An investigator, on early Earth:

"It's a rather hellish picture," he says. "Not a great place for the likes of us. But for bacteria, all of this was wonderful. In fact, if you were to invent a place where you wanted life to emerge, the early Earth is exactly right."

Martin Brasier doesn't explain why it's exactly right, but the thought seems to be: If Mars is similarly hellish, there must be life there.

"Could these sorts of things exist on Mars? It's just about conceivable. This evidence is certainly encouraging and lack of oxygen on Mars is not a problem," says Martin Brasier of Oxford University, who worked on the team that made the discovery.

So now, hellish environments are sources of hope, not disappointment, when looking for life? Oh yes, of course, galaxy full of exoplanets teeming with life.

Significantly, no one addresses the true conundrum lurking in the find: How soon life got started after Earth cooled. Where is the window for random evolution?

File under: Hope clings eternal, with "The Shroud of Turin makes way more sense than water on Mars

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From escience News (August 17, 2011), we learn learn, "Scientists discover the most primitive living eel"

Off Palau.

"The equivalent of this primitive eel, in fishes, has perhaps not been seen since the discovery of the coelacanth in the late 1930s," said Dave Johnson, ichthyologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the team's research. "We believe that such a long, independent evolutionary history, dating back to the early Mesozoic (about 200 million years ago), retention of several primitive anatomical features and apparently restricted distribution, warrant its recognition as a living fossil."

File under: Older than thought, with Ancient lizards gave live birth

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Or so they think at MSNBC. In "Can life evolve from a different chemical code?" (8/19/2011), Clara Moskowitz tells us, "Scientists ponder if life elsewhere is based on another set of amino acids."

Other, that is, than the 20 - among hundreds - that build life's known proteins:

"Life has been using a standard set of 20 amino acids to build proteins for more than 3 billion years," said Stephen J. Freeland of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of Hawaii. "It's becoming increasingly clear that many other amino acids were plausible candidates, and although there's been speculation and even assumptions about what life was doing, there's been very little in the way of testable hypotheses."

Along with colleagues, he discovered that

... life seemingly did not choose its 20 building blocks randomly.

"We found that chance alone would be extremely unlikely to pick a set of amino acids that outperforms life's choice," Freeland said.

So there is only one possible answer:
Natural selection

The story is,

"Here we found a very simple test that begins to show us that life knew exactly what it was doing," Freeland said. "This is consistent with the idea that there was natural selection going on."

No, it is not. Natural selection is blind to outcomes. That was the point, remember?

Turns out it's "experimentally difficult" to find out any more.

We'll be back here in 20 years. Same station, Same show. Some new cast members.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From the "Bad Astronomy" blog at Discover Magazine, we learn about the "Skeptic’s Dictionary for kids" (August 12, 2011), setting forth the teachings of secular humanism (defined forthe purpose as "scientific skepticism"). Most interesting is the definition of scientific skepticism, which we are all enjoined to read:

In a nutshell: Scientific skepticism holds that science is the best way to find out things about the world and ourselves. Scientific skeptics don't trust claims made by people who don't think that science is the best way to learn about the world.

No, we thought not. The Skeptics for Kids sound so much like another group UD News is familiar with, the local chapter of the Blatchstonians, named in honour of their foundress, Emma Blatchstone, psychic, space alien channeller, and hat shop clerk (1919-2007),

In a nutshell: Blatchstonianism holds that Blatchstonian channelling is the best way to find out things about the world and ourselves. Channellists don't trust claims made by people who don't think that alien channelling is the best way to learn about the world.

What feels similar between the two groups is that neither will ever encounter a question that gives them much difficulty - because they can always resort to mistrusting the source of the information.

Prof interjects: A truly formidable intellectual tool doesn't do everything and , doesn't easily explain everything. It just does some things really well. Just as you would not buy a utensil whose makers claim it can do anything, you should not buy an idea whose developers claim it is the single best way to understand everything, with all others set aside. Of course, people are free to teach their children any non-criminal, non-health-endangering idea that they wish, but ....

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Research reveals how butterflies copy their neighbors to fool birds" Eurekalert, 4-Aug-2011, we learn:

The mystery of how a butterfly has changed its wing patterns to mimic neighbouring species and avoid being eaten by birds has been solved by a team of European scientists.

Dogmatic Darwinists have always demanded that the public believe that it happened through the magic of natural selection, slowly emerging wing panel by wing panel. But now a science-based answer has emerged. The researchers chose butterfly species Heliconius numata, which, at one site in the rainforest, mimics several species, thus featuring a variety of wing patterns.

The researchers located and sequenced the chromosomal region responsible for the wing patterns in H. numata. The butterfly's wing-pattern variation is controlled by a single region on a single chromosome, containing several genes which control the different elements of the pattern.

Known as a 'supergene', this clustering allows genetic combinations that are favoured for their mimetic resemblance to be maintained, while preventing combinations that produce non-mimetic patterns from arising.

The researchers found that three versions of the same chromosome coexist in this species, each version controlling distinct wing-pattern forms. This has resulted in butterflies that look completely different from one another, despite having the same DNA.

The researchers swiftly pay homage at Darwin's shrine, of course, leaving unaddressed the question of such an elaborate signal system develops from, natural selection acting on random mutations. would just happen to evolve.

Darwinists have always demanded that the public believe that exact butterfly mimics developed through the magic of natural selection. But now a science-based answer has emerged. http://tinyurl.com/3nbsqms
http://www.uncommondescent.com/genetics/researchers-discover-supergene-that-controls-a-butterfly-s-mimicry-patterns/

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Cod genome reveals unusual immune system" (Nature News, August 10, 201 ) George Wigmore reports "Missing molecules show evolutionary flexibility, and may help fish farmers":

It's been known for many years that cod were more susceptible to certain illnesses, and the impaired MHC class II was system has been suggested as the reason., but how they managed to survive in considerable numbers was a mystery:

They lost the genes for "three important components of the adaptive immune system."

One missing component is called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) II, which presents fragments of bacteria and other pathogens to cells in the immune system to trigger a wider response. Cod also lack the gene for the proteins CD4, which interacts with MHC II, and invariant chain, which is involved in making and transporting MHC II.

However,

One way that cod compensate for their missing MHC II is by having ten times more genes than other vertebrates, including related fish species and humans, for another component of the immune system, called MHC I. MHC I takes proteins from within the cell, and displays them on the cell surface. If the immune system detects any foreign bodies, such as viral proteins, it destroys the infected cell.

This find may help produce better vaccines for cod, but that's a stretch because most vaccines are developed to assist the missing MNC II system.

The finding could also challenge our understanding of the evolution and flexibility of the vertebrate immune system.

Well, if this is an example of "evolution in action," it's an example of successfully (for the most part) compensating for a loss, not of the development of new traits. Don;'t count on the pop science press to notice the distinction.

See also: You should have had more faith in cod.

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Escaping Gravity's Clutches: Information Could Escape from Black Holes After All, Study Suggests" (ScienceDaily, Aug. 11, 2011), we learn:

Conventional thinking asserts that black holes swallow everything that gets too close and that nothing can escape, but a new study suggests that information could escape from black holes after all.

Okay, but

Dr. Patra adds: "We cannot claim to have proven that escape from a black hole is truly possible, but that is the most straight-forward interpretation of our results. Indeed, our results suggest that quantum information theory will play a key role in a future theory combining quantum mechanics and gravity."

If they're into information theory, they are on the right track.

See also: It’s not time that ends in the multiverse, it’s meaning

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Will science banish superstition for ever?: Which makes people more superstitious: fervent scientism or fervent religious belief? The answer may surprise you," we learn, among other things:

In Britain, during National Science Week (2003), University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman and associates surveyed 2068 people on superstitious behaviour. They found, among other things, that

"The current levels of superstitious behaviour and beliefs in the UK are surprisingly high, even among those with a scientific background. Touching wood is the most popular UK superstition, followed by crossing fingers, avoiding ladders, not smashing mirrors, carrying a lucky charm and having superstitious beliefs about the number 13."
'
Twenty-five percent of the people who claimed a background in science were very or somewhat superstitious. (Mercatornet, August 10, 2011) More.
'
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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In"This Week's Hype" (Not Even Wrong, August 5, 2011), Peter Woit assesses recent "evidence" for the multiverse, addressed here by Rob Sheldon as well:

I noticed today that BBC News has a story headlined 'Multiverse' theory suggested by microwave background that assures us that:

The idea that other universes – as well as our own – lie within "bubbles" of space and time has received a boost.

After taking a look at the PRL and PRD papers that are behind this, it's clear that a more accurate title for the story would have been "'Multiverse' theory suggested by microwave background – NOT". As usual, the source of the problem here is a misleading university press release, one from University College London entitled First observational test of the 'multiverse'. Somehow the press release neglected to mention something one might think was an important detail, the fact that this "First observational test" had a null result.

More.

But how could failed tests possibly matter when popular science mags increasingly assume the multiverse is true, without reservation? The days are long gone when Fred Hoyle conceded that his Steady State Universe had failed an evidence test. After the multiverse, no one bothers with the limited kind of reality that evidence entails any more.

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

NO DINOSAURS IN HEAVEN is a film essay that examines the hijacking of science education by religious fundamentalists, threatening the separation of church and state and dangerously undermining scientific literacy. The documentary weaves together two strands: an examination of the problem posed by creationists who earn science education degrees only to advocate anti-scientific beliefs in the classroom;

and a raft trip down the Grand Canyon, led by Dr. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, that debunks creationist explanations for its formation. These strands expose the fallacies in the "debate," manufactured by anti-science forces, that creationism is a valid scientific alternative to evolution.

Emmy Award-winning director and science educator Greta Schiller uses her own experience -- with a graduate school biology professor who refused to teach evolution -- to expose the insidious effect that so-called "creationist science" has had on science education. NO DINOSAURS IN HEAVEN intelligently argues that public education must steadfastly resist the encroachment of religion in the form of anti-evolution creationism, and that science literacy is crucial to a healthy democracy.

FIlmmaker Greta Schiller poses with Darwin lobbyist Eugenie Scott here. Isn't it a bit late for all this, girls? It might have worked better before the Synthese debacle. Trailer here:

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Asian 'phoenix' lived with the dinosaurs" (ABC News, August 10, 2011), we learn that the fossil bones of a 65 million year-old bird that lived in Central Asia challenge theories about the size of early birds.

The bones measure 275 millimetres, indicating a skull that would have been a whopping 30 centimetres long.

Whether the bird was flighted or what its lifestyle was is not yet known.

Birds are believed to have evolved from tiny two-footed dinosaurs called theropods at the start of the Cretaceous era, around 150 million years ago.

The prevailing theory, based on usually-incomplete fossils, is that they remained extremely small for tens of millions of years.

And the one outlier is disputed, as it might have been a flying reptile.

From the BBC News story,

Dr Darren Naish of the University of Portsmouth

"I think the really interesting thing is that they're living alongside the big dinosaurs we know were around at the time: big tyrannosaurs, long-necked sauropods, duck-billed dinosaurs," he said. "That opens up loads of questions about ecological interactions that we can only speculate about.

"People have said there weren't big birds when there were big pterosaurs, but now we know there were."

People have said all sorts of things about ancient birds. The problem is when they become fanatics about it. Ask Feduccia

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In the latest round of controversy over Flores man (ka "The Hobbit"), "Hobbits Were Brain Diseased Modern Humans" holds the floor against "Hobbits were a different species," according to Creation-Evolution Headlines (August 08, 2011):

Using MRI, a team of three anthropologists from New York University and Columbia University measured craniometric ratios for 21 age-corrected skulls infants with microcephaly, with 118 normal skulls for control. In addition, they measured skull bones of 10 microcephalic individuals, 79 anatomically modern humans, and 17 Homo erectus specimens. These were compared with two skulls of the so-called Hobbits from Ling Bua cave 1 (LB1). The results put pressure on those who maintain that the Hobbits represent an evolutionary transitional form prior to the emergence of modern humans

According to the analysts,

Te findings showed that the calculated cerebral/cerebellar ratios of the LB1 endocast [Falk D, et al. (2007) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:2513–2518] fall outside the range of living normocephalic individuals. The ratios derived from two LB1 endocasts also fall largely outside the range of modern normal human and H. erectus endocasts and within the range of microcephalic endocasts. The findings support but do not prove the contention that LB1 represents a pathological microcephalic Homo sapiens rather than a new species, (i.e., H. floresiensis).

Of course no one can "prove" that tiny Flores man was a microcephalic but otherwise normal human. But it looks increasingly like that is the reasonable interpretation. If they lasted as long as they did, it must not have been fatal.

See also: Human evolution: Now "the Hobbit" may revise "major tenets of human evolution"?

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Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Some Plants Duplicate Their DNA to Overcome Adversity" (ScienceDaily, Aug. 3, 2011), we learn:

Whatever does not kill a plant may actually make it stronger. After being partially eaten by grazing animals, for example, some plants grow bigger and faster and reproduce more successfully than they otherwise would. In a new study, researchers report that one secret to these plants' post-traumatic triumph lies in their ability to duplicate their chromosomes -- again and again -- without undergoing cell division.

While this process, called "endoreduplication," is not new to science, no previous study had looked at it in relation to the seemingly miraculous burst of growth and reproductive fitness that occurs in many plants after they have been grazed, said University of Illinois animal biology professor Ken Paige, who conducted the study with doctoral student Daniel Scholes.

Actually, the fact that pruning some plants makes them grow more vigorously has been well understood for millennia; what we didn't know was what was happening inside the plant when its growth surged. A really interesting finding here is that only one of the two cultivars of Arabadopsis ("leafy green lab rat") thaliana - A Columbia - responded favourably. The other dweebed out.

Why does it work?

The added DNA content could allow the plants to increase production of proteins that are needed for growth and reproduction, Scholes said. More DNA also means larger cells.

"Because you have more DNA in the nucleus, you must have a greater nuclear volume, which causes your entire cell to get bigger," Scholes said. Increases in the size of individual cells can ultimately lead to an increase in the size of the whole plant.

The researchers believe wild plants evolved this process because it confers greater reproductive fitness. Maybe. But consider: The lusher the endoreduplicants grow back, the more likely they are to attract another visit from ruminants. They could actually be running faster than the dweebs genetically, just to stay in place. By contrast, the dweeb (Landsberg erecta) will look unattractive, not be visited again by ruminants, and thus ripen its seeds in peace.

In that case, both methods work from the point of view of reproduction, and we should expect to see both in nature. The endoreduplicant benefits the ecology much more than the dweeb by raising the biomass and supporting a varied population of life forms. To do this it just needs to keep running in place.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Kind of an alternative use of the word "evolved," no?

From "Light Shed On South Pole Dinosaurs" (ScienceDaily, Aug. 5, 2011), we learn:

Dog-sized dinosaurs that lived near the South Pole, sometimes in the dark for months at a time, had bone tissue very similar to dinosaurs that lived everywhere on the planet, according to a doctoral candidate at Montana State University.

That surprising fact falsifies a 13-year-old study and may help explain why dinosaurs were able to dominate the planet for 160 million years, said Holly Woodward, MSU graduate student in the Department of Earth Sciences and co-author of a paper published Aug. 3 in the journal PLoS ONE.

The scientists had expected to find that South Pole dinosaurs differed from others, as an earlier study implied.

"This tells us something very interesting; that basically from the very start, early dinosaurs, or even the ancestors of dinosaurs, evolved a physiology that allowed an entire group of animals to successfully exploit a multitude of environmental conditions for millions of years," Woodward said.

We also learn that dinosaur bones have annual growth lines and those specimens that don't have them are not yet a year old.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In"This Week's Hype" (Not Even Wrong, August 5, 2011), Peter Woit assesses recent "evidence" for the multiverse, addressed here by Rob Sheldon as well:

I noticed today that BBC News has a story headlined 'Multiverse' theory suggested by microwave background that assures us that:

The idea that other universes – as well as our own – lie within "bubbles" of space and time has received a boost.

After taking a look at the PRL and PRD papers that are behind this, it's clear that a more accurate title for the story would have been "'Multiverse' theory suggested by microwave background – NOT". As usual, the source of the problem here is a misleading university press release, one from University College London entitled First observational test of the 'multiverse'. Somehow the press release neglected to mention something one might think was an important detail, the fact that this "First observational test" had a null result.

More.

But how could failed tests possibly matter when popular science mags increasingly assume the multiverse is true, without reservation? The days are long gone when Fred Hoyle conceded that his Steady State Universe had failed an evidence test. After the multiverse, no one bothers with the limited kind of reality that evidence entails any more.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/new-intelligent-design-friendly-facebook-page-operated-by-agnostics-focuses-on-the-science/
Intelligent Design - the Official Page is an open Facebook page operated by agnostics and an atheist in an effort to bury the red herrings around the issue of design in life forms. Led by California paralegal Dennis Jones, they've recently tacked "Who designed the designer" (= infinite regression) and "What scientific evidence does this group set forth as support for "artificial intervention is a universally necessary condition of the first initiation of life?" Let's hope they can keep it an open page (it won't be trolls' fault if they fail) and keep it focused, as per their intention, on science issues.

Anyone can start a thread but Jones says he'll remove impertinent material, which is a good start.

Salut! From ARN reporter Denyse O'Leary! Given the number of atheists and agnostics who doubt Darwin (see, for example, "Atheists and agnostics who are not Darwinists"), this is long overdue.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Researchers are discovering that what had been dismissed as evolution's relics are actually vital to life. What used to be considered evidence for neo-Darwinism gene-formation mechanism can no longer be use as such evidence. In this case, neo-Darwinism has been a proven science inhibitor as it postponed serious investigation of the non-coding DNA within the genome, which was "one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology" [John Mattick, BioEssays, 2003 930-939]." This is reminiscent of the classification of 86 (later expanded to 180) human organs as "vestigial" that Robert Wiedersheim (1893) believed "lost their original physiological significance." in that they were vestiges of evolution. Functions have since been discovered for all 180 organs that were thought to be vestigial, including the wings of flightless birds, the appendix, and the ear muscles of humans."

- Don Johnson, Probability's Nature and the Nature of Probability, pp. 58-59.

The explicit reason for both the junk DNA error and the vestigial organs error

Read more!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

... one of his supreme scientific achievements, the theory of universal gravitation, was not a mechanical explanation at all, but rather a fruitful mathematical description of phenomena on the basis of a postulated gravitational force that acted at a distance and permitted very precise predictions of astronomical events. As a theist, Newton was not bothered by this state of affairs in the least, since he regarded God as being integrally involved in the quotidian course of nature. What should therefore be observed—especially in respect of Newton's theory of universal gravitation—is that it was precisely his rejection of methodological naturalism in conjunction with his mathematical genius that enabled him to follow the course that he did, and to revolutionize physics and astronomy.

As a consequence, gravitational theory proceeded quite happily without a "mechanism" for well over two centuries, until Einstein provided one in the general theory of relativity: Mass-energy affects the structure of spacetime through gravitational waves propagating at the speed of light. Of course, quantum theory undoes all this. Feynman diagrams as aids to computation and visualizability are mere expedients.

What is basic to quantum field theory and essential to its empirical adequacy are (1) nonlocal action-at-a-distance that defies any conception of efficient material causality, and (2) statistical descriptions and principles of superposition that cast aside anything even vaguely reminiscent of individuatable material substances with intrinsic identities.85 And if, as most physicists believe, the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum theory will come through the quantization of gravity, all of these basic quantum-theoretic consequences will reassert themselves in gravitational phenomena.

- Bruce L. Gordon, "The Rise of Naturalism," in The Nature of Nature (Pp. 22-23)

Don't forget, you can win a copy of The Nature of Nature in this contest, which closes Saturday (August 6, 2011): "Uncommon Descent contest: List the five books that helped ID most – written by non-ID researchers"

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Astrobiology: Life's beginnings" (Nature 476, 30–31, 04 August 2011), origin of life expert Robert Shapiro tells us "that laboratory experiments don't always translate to nature":

Deamer's thesis diverges from the standard RNA-world concept. He focuses not on the generation of a naked RNA-like polymer, but on the formation of a simple cell-like compartment, or vesicle. Modern cells are enclosed by a complex fatty membrane, which prevents leakage. Vesicles with similar properties have been formed in the lab from certain fatty acids. Deamer holds that the spontaneous formation of vesicles, into which RNA could be incorporated, was a crucial step in life's origin. Unfortunately, his theory retains the improbable generation of self-replicating polymers such as RNA.

Nevertheless, Deamer's insight deflates the synthetic proofs put forward in numerous papers supporting the RNA world. He ends First Life by calling for the construction of a new set of biochemical simulators that match more closely the conditions on the early Earth. Unfortunately, the chemicals that he suggests for inclusion are drawn from modern biology, not from ancient geochemistry. We should let nature inform us, rather than pasting our ideas onto her.

But surely nature only exists to front atheist cosmology?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Does religion shrink your brain?" (MercatorNet, August 1, 2011), we learn:

Over the past couple of weeks we have looked at studies suggesting that religion rots your intelligence and that religion rots teens' intelligence, and, not surprisingly, both theses fell apart. Now here is a different, more solid proposition:

In "Religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in late life," Amy Owen and colleagues at Duke University found that in late life there was greater atrophy in the hippocampus (associated with memory) among individuals who have been "born again," as well as those with no religious affiliation.

Which attracted the attention of a Scientific American neuroscientist columnist. More.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.