One of the biggest things I admire about the scientists I hang with and talk about on this blog is: They managed to survive in THIS environment… and do great work… yet somehow did NOT allow the life and curiosity to get sucked out of their souls. Read more »
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In early 2020, the world was shut down by a virus. There are more conspiracies about that virus than there are about who shot JFK. But no matter where it came from, is it possible we need to include something no conspiracy theorist, traditional medical professional, or even the World Health Organization has genuinely considered? Read more »
I got this very popular question from Martin Rag:
I am 100% sure that most of the species were created “according to their kinds …” ( with a capability to adapt to a certain degree, if you will )
The main reason why I am so sure that species were created according to their kinds is this:
There are TOO MANY very unique species with TOO MANY very unique and sophisticated features to be some product of guided or unguided or whatever evolutionary process … (not to mention, that no biologist can explain the origin of most of these features … )
It is clear, that all these features were engineered from scratch ( to demonstrate engineering skills of our Creator )
Martin, Read more »
Biology is an incredibly conservative profession. As the famous saying goes, “Science proceeds one funeral at a time.” The situation the author is dealing with is: the public has been fed a tragically over simplified version of science. Accurate information needs to replace long-standing misconceptions.
Philip Ball’s “How Life Works” sets a new standard for biology.
However, if you are too overt in stating this, the wrath of the old guard will be visited upon you. The emperor is wearing a thong… but please don’t embarrass him.
The bestselling book “Selfish Gene” convinced an entire generation that biology is really quite simple and evolution is simple. Everything is controlled by genes which are randomly mutated; it is really the genes which are selected, not organisms; so the purpose of every organism is to simply proliferate its own genes.
This is incredibly easy to explain and seemed like a revelation to a lot of people. But it was just brain candy. Read more »
How the Neo-Darwinists tried for 50 years to slam the door on a conversation we needed to be having all along:
Philip Ball’s new book “How Life Works” is an outstanding introduction to the new biology that transcends the dead-on-arrival textbook version of evolution that has kept science stuck in the 1970s for so long.
Philip Ball’s “How Life Works” sets a new standard for biology.
Denis Noble wrote a beautiful review of Ball’s book in Nature Magazine, saying “It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life. The view of biology often presented to the public is oversimplified and out of date. Scientists must set the record straight.
Michael Levin posted this excellent video offering a new definition of cancer:
Check out this amazing video project by Harvard student Jordan Strasser – about cancer in the broader context of multiscale complex systems:
This video explains, using simple and elegant mathematical proofs, why the universal computational ability proves a computer is not conscious – because all of the meanings and conventions of any computer (IOS vs Android, Java vs. PHP, WAV vs MP3 etc) are assigned by conscious beings: Read more »
“The Selfish Gene was the best selling science book of the 20th century. But The Selfish Gene got cause and effect backwards, assigning agency to natural selection instead of the organism itself. It embraced the greatest errors of the Modern Synthesis while downplaying much of what it got right.
“It crowned the gene king of biology, even though genes are only servants of the cell. Gene-centric duality caused genomics to promise far more than it could, or ever can deliver, since it cannot distinguish between correlation and functional causation.
“That failure has been at great cost to health care by promising miracle genetic cures that have not met the greatest challenge to health services for ageing populations caused by complex multi-factorial diseases that cannot be reduced to genetic causation.
“Thus did The Selfish Gene turn Neo-Darwinism into a pop religion with its own dogmas, dressed up as science, but without the gold standard of a scientific hypothesis: an empirical test independent of the central assumption of the theory. Read more »
Are your sense of “self” and your experiences and memories just a set of brain states? Is a human basically a wet computer? Or is your brain just a mechanism for channeling these things into the physical world?
Physicist Marco Masi is fascinated with consciousness studies and evolution. He lives in Germany.
Are we purely physical beings? Or are our minds extensions of something larger?
Marco Masi’s new paper “An evidence-based critical review of the mind-brain identity theory” challenges the current materialistic view.
Masi points out cases of people living normal lives despite missing large chunks of their brains from birth defects, surgery, or disease… like a man missing 75% of his brain tissue. Read more »