Category: Science

starting to turn. Science is catching up!

Democrats hardest hit…

fancy that!

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that people vaccinated against COVID-19 remained contagious with the virus for a longer period of time than their unvaccinated counterparts.

very impressed.

Let’s do a simple thought experiment: IF this happened randomly, why can’t the best scientists over hundreds of years even come close to reproducing it? Why is this not a high school science fair staple?

And when they try, it is intelligently designed, not random. Until they can actually create life and show how it could have arisen randomly, it’s really a major snoozer.

“The beauty of this model is its simplicity. It can be tested by highschoolers in chemistry class,” said Jan Špaček, who was not involved in this study but who develops instrument to detect alien genetic polymers on Mars. “Mix the ingredients, wait for a few days and detect the RNA.”

OK then, create life with your “beautiful” model.

So, if I assume certain parameters, it can work. Oh, and parenthetically, if I assume that monkeys CAN fly out my butt, perhaps they did!

But right now we are only dealing with assumptions and assertions. SHOW ME THE DATA!

So asserting that RNA (not DNA) could (theoretically) form on basalt lava glass under amazingly specific and non-natural conditions? THIS is just bald assertion wrapped in the garb of science, and nothing more. Big freakin’ whoop. <yawn>

science! Don’t be a knuckle-dragging rube…

no relationship.

Eat it, Lefties!

kidneys are way more complex and active than we thought. They actively “pump” blood.

“What we showed is that kidney cells are pumps, not filters, and they are generating forces.”

… Yet each kidney consists of kilometers of channels and tubules crammed into a space no bigger than your fist, potentially making for some weird plumbing deep inside.

SO, we need to scientifically come to grips with the Darwinian Evolution concept that such a complex system, with many interlocking parts, came about through random, undirected chance alone.

And pretty much all at once, too. I mean, half of a functioning kidney wouldn’t have much “survival value,” now would it? And, of course, we have to also statistically calculate the odds of all these things just happening to randomly occur together.

As a statistician, it’s pretty hard for me to believe those long odds. I mean, one might possibly expect such a thing to happen purely by chance, but in WELL greater time than the earth itself has been in existence. So as a scientist, I don’t really buy those odds–there simply is not enough “statistical space.”

Oh, and that’s just one small aspect. We haven’t even talked about the eye, yet. And then we need to calculate the odds/probability of the eye and the kidney happening together, purely by random chance…

An undirected, “totally-by-chance” thing simply is not rational or believable to me. OK, so NOW we are left with some kind of directed process.

And for a TON of reasons it can’t logically some kind of quasi-Deistic “Theistic Evolution” explanation. Pure Deism also falls short–humans came to be well after the creation of the universe (The Big Bang), so it has to be some kind of immanent (Theistic) entity, not a Deistic one. The quasi-Deistic “God did it this way” most often simply won’t work, for a number of reasons.

Deism–God makes the “rules” or “laws” for all time, sets them in motion, and then leaves–maybe to make himself a grilled cheese sandwich or something. Not a personal God.
Theism–There is an immanent God who is always there and who can (and does) intervene, and with whom you can have a relationship. A personal God. Emmanuel–God with us.

not reasonable to think that all this “just happened by accident.” I really don’t have enough faith in Darwinism to believe that.

(h/t: Instapundit)

YOU have 18 minutes to watch this, so do… I think that it is quite clear that there are often micro changes to animal structure. Every animal breeder for thousands of years has known THAT! Environment, broadly conceived, drives these micro-changes.

And an intelligent agent (the breeder) can decide what traits are most important, here. But, at heart, we are NOT talking simply about “woolier sheep.”

Yeah, and we haven’t even gotten to the “Cambrian explosion” and the Burgess shale…

The issue is that we have yet to find macro, complex, multi-step changes. Sure, I can go from wolf to pug, but they are both still dogs! Wolves are not now alligators. Where is the example of a proto-dog suddenly growing feathers and then taking flight? C’mon!

And what “survival value” would such a proto-dog with feathers have? What good would half a mammalian eye be?

Now once an eye already exists I can breed for a certain color or a certain acuity. Yeah, DUH!

But THAT is not the question. The question is how the eye got there in the first place! The issue is not the survival of the fittest. It is the arrival of the fittest!

We need to take a bit of a hard-nosed scientific stance, here. No more early 19th-century Darwinian fairy tales and catechisms!

and a bit of a theoretical statistician. So for me, I want to look at odds and probabilities. That’s why I am skeptical of completely naturalistic explanations for life. Of course there is micro evolution. Animal breeders have known THAT for thousands of years. DUH!

But where is the evidence for macro evolution? It’s one thing to produce woolier sheep or a certain color of eyes through breeding selection. It is quite another to go from sheep to birds! I mean, just where does the information for the new structures come from? And why are there no intermediary steps in the fossil record? (See: Cambrian explosion)

RANDOMNESS? That hardly seems likely! We need to look at odds and probabilities, here.

“His experiments revealed that, for every one DNA sequence that generates a short functional protein fold of just 150 amino acids in length, there are 10(77) nonfunctional combinations—combinations that will not form a stable three-dimensional protein fold capable of performing a specific biological function.

—Stephen Meyer. The Return Of The God Hypothesis

And remember, just one protein fold won’t do it. Many are needed for an even rudimentary function. And all these protein folds have happen at once–I mean, what survival value is there in 1/3 of a mammalian eye?

See, material evolution scribes tend to blithely wave off such objections with a casual, “over millions of years.” But that just won’t do. There simply is not enough time (statistical space) in the 13 billion years of the universe for that to be even remotely likely.

No, as a scientist who is a bit wedded to statistics and probability, I honestly don’t have enough faith to go down that materialist road…