In the News

As reported in ScienceDaily...
Caenorhabditis elegans - tiny, translucent worms with just 302 neurons - have long been studied to understand how a whole nervous system is capable of translating sensory input into motion and behavior.

New research conducted by the laboratory of Aravi Samuel in the Harvard Physics Department and the Center for Brain Sciences, however, is uncovering surprising sophistication in the individual neurons of the worms' "simple" nervous system.

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Is any living being really "simple".

Worth a look?

Dr. John Ashton Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Victoria University, Melbourne, and Adjunct Professor of Applied Sciences at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, the largest Australian tertiary institution. He holds a BSc (Honors) with prize in chemistry and PhD in epistemology (a branch of philosophy dealing with the limits of knowledge), also with prize, from the University of Newcastle and an MSc in chemistry from the University of Tasmania. Dr. Ashton is a Chartered Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, and a former Honorary Associate in the School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences at the University of Sydney. He also served as editor of three books related to science and faith issues

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As reported in ScienceDaily...
Animals, including humans, actively select the gut microbes that are the best partners and nurture them with nutritious secretions, suggests a new study led by Oxford University.

The Oxford team created an evolutionary computer model of interactions between gut microbes and the lining (the host epithelial cell layer) of the animal gut. The model shows that beneficial microbes that are slow-growing are rapidly lost, and need to be helped by host secretions, such as specific nutrients, that favour the beneficial microbes over harmful ones.

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How this got started is a mystery, and requires no explanation from the evolutionists.

As reported in ScienceDaily...
Academics at the Universities of Bristol, Yale and Calgary have shown that prehistoric birds had a much more primitive version of the wings we see today, with rigid layers of feathers acting as simple airfoils for gliding.

Close examination of the earliest theropod dinosaurs suggests that feathers were initially developed for insulation, arranged in multiple layers to preserve heat, before their shape evolved for display and camouflage.

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Just because Archaeopteryx was not a great flier does not mean it was a primitive "experiment" in evolution. There are many birds today that are poor fliers, or no fliers at all!

This is a refreshing place to find an endorsement of intelligent design. In The New Republic, Alvin Plantinga reviews Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False with, on top of that, kind attention to Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell.

More from ENV...

Philosopher Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False is short enough to entice even the Darwinian fellow-travelers, but the book's 144 pages are "tightly argued and exacting," M. D. Aeschliman says in the November 12 National Review.

Aeshliman, professor emeritus of education at Boston University, is eager to showcase the several ways Nagel defends intelligent design proponents.

More in ENV...

Michael Behe, in ENV, writes...

I'm a big fan of Professor Richard Lenski, a microbiologist at Michigan State University and member of the National Academy of Sciences. For the past few decades he has been conducting the largest laboratory evolution experiment ever attempted. Growing E. coli in flasks continuously, he has been following evolutionary changes in the bacterium for over 50,000 generations (which is equivalent to roughly a million years for large animals). Although Lenski is decidedly not an intelligent design proponent, his work enables us to see what evolution actually does when it has the resources of a large number of organisms over a substantial number of generations. Rather than speculate, Lenski and his coworkers have observed the workings of mutation and selection. For this, we ID proponents should be very grateful.

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David Klinghoffer in ENV reports on a website for younger kids. There's an adorable cartoon dog named Darwin who explains about how he likes science and being nice: "He believes in being a good person, even though he doesn't believe in any of the gods from his stories."

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As reported by Willaim Dembski in ENV...Thomas Nagel, with his just published Mind & Cosmos, has now become another defector from Darwinian naturalism. Appearing from Oxford University Press and subtitled Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, this slender volume (it's only 130 pages) represents the most disconcerting defection (disconcerting to Darwinists) from Darwinian naturalism to date.

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The ENV response from John West...

HERE.

Stunning high-speed footage of hummingbird flight. Many would say this is a lucky collection of molecules. Probably not...

See the video...

In my opinion, a great blog on the subject by Melissa Cain Travis...

CLICK HERE

This is the story according to AP...this is only a tentative ruling...

A former computer specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was not dismissed because he advocated his belief in intelligent design while at work, a Superior Court judge has tentatively ruled.

Judge Ernest Hiroshige said Thursday he is leaning in favor of JPL's argument that David Coppedge instead was let go because he was combative and did not keep his skills sharp.

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I am sure we will get other perspectives in the days to come...