The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Critics haven't yet got to "it's just a fluke."

However it turns out, lawyer Edward Sisson writes to say,

The Frank Close argument presented below [here] (that the distance may have been mis-measured) is a question that would have been central to the design of the experiment in the first place, long before any actual data-collection was done. Thus, it seems to me that the people designing the experiment would not even have bothered to go ahead with it, unless they were satisfied that their technique for measurement of distance was reliable. The questioning of the distance-measuring technique is now being raised because the result of the experiment does not fit the theory. Selective special scrutiny of only aberrant results, rather than every result, produces an inherently biased experiment.

This reminds me of Milliken's "oil drop" experiment to determine the charge on the electron, which was the subject of one of the episodes of the 1980s physics TV series "The Mechanical Universe." Each time the experiment produced a result that was in accord with the theory, it was accepted as accurate, but each time the experiment produced a divergent result, there was a lot of inquiry into possible flaws in the operation of the experimental apparatus during that particular trial. The point made in the TV series is that the scrutiny of the apparatus only occurred with divergent results, never with consistent results.

See also: Rob Sheldon's take on the neutrinos here.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Anyone who has suffered through business motivation books has learned about the reptilian brain - the supposedly primitive part of the brain that difficult co-workers and family members are supposedly channelling.

You heard that? Now forget it. Not remotely related to real life. For one thing, as we learn in "Cold-blooded cunning Reptiles are more intelligent than previously thought" (The Economist, Jul 14th 2011), a species of anole lizards are at least as clever as tits (a bird well-studied for intelligence), researchers face a problem:

Having established that lizards are at least as clever as birds at such simple tasks, Dr Leal hopes to go on and explore the evolutionary forces behind lizard intelligence. He does, however, have a problem—and it is one that might help to explain why, besides phylogenetic prejudice, the lizard mind has not been properly investigated before. Tits, being warm-blooded, have to eat a lot and thus have a strong incentive to collaborate with researchers in such experiments. The average lizard, by contrast, is happy to consume a single grub a day. It may therefore be some time before the next paper appears on the subject.

In short, while Darwinism reigns (= the only explanation for intelligence is the need to compete for food, and mates), nothing can be learned about intelligence that gets past the fatuous motivation manual. What if curiosity were a motive?

See also: A really smart lizard would conceal the extent of its knowledge

Smart reptiles watch: So much for the dumb, unfeeling reptilian brain

Hat tip: AITSE

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Invasion of Genomic Parasites Triggered Modern Mammalian Pregnancy, Study Finds" (ScienceDaily, Sep. 26, 2011), we learn:

"In the last two decades there have been dramatic changes in our understanding of how evolution works," said Gunter Wagner, the Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EE and senior author of the paper. "We used to believe that changes only took place through small mutations in our DNA that accumulated over time. But in this case we found a huge cut-and-paste operation that altered wide areas of the genome to create large-scale morphological change." nonlocalizability, ...

Cut and paste from where, guys?

The Yale team studying the evolutionary history of pregnancy looked at cells found in the uterus associated with placental development. They compared the genetic make-up of these cells in opossums -- marsupials that give birth two weeks after conception -- to armadillos and humans, distantly related mammals with highly developed placentas that nurture developing fetuses for nine months.

They found more than 1500 genes that were expressed in the uterus solely in the placental mammals.

Which natural selection completely accounts for, operating in a glacially slow series of steps ...

It gets better:

Intriguingly, note the researchers, the expression of these genes in the uterus is coordinated by transposons -- essentially selfish pieces of genetic material that replicate within the host genome and used to be called junk DNA.

So the Darwinists fronting junk DNA were and are wrong. The Christian Darwinists who preach that junk DNA proves that Christians must embrace Jesus n' Darwin are wrong.

Notice how the announcement is cloaked in "we've figured it out now" language. But Darwin is dead. No matter what his lobby forces scared people to say or dense people to believe.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

First, how the calculated the measurements here.

From Frank Close at The Guardian:

"Renowned physicist Frank Close urges caution before we abandon the theory of relativity and prepare for time travel"

Sending a radio signal up to a satellite, at the instant the neutrino leaves Cern, which then passes it on down to the receiver in Rome, and comparing which arrives first, and by how much, has its own difficulties. The speed of radio waves through the atmosphere is affected by magnetic fields, and by other phenomena; it is far from simply a radio beam passing through a vacuum at "the speed of light". I would bet that a subtle error in the measured distance or time is more likely than that their ratio - the inferred speed - exceeds Einstein's speed limit. (24 September 2011)

(Note: Here at UD News, we don't propose making this our lives, but it's in a pretty interesting phase right now. For one thing, physicists may learn a lot from the error, if that is what it turns out to be. In an age of crackpot cosmologies and political science as the only kind, this proves physics really is a discipline.)

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