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- Faith in feelings 14/07/2026
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Author Archives: Jon Garvey
Y-Abdullah and Mitochondrial Yvonne
There’s a Dennis Venema article, and thread, over on BioLogos about Y-chromosome Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. It’s mainly factual and not particularly controversial, but has attracted a lot of discussion. That’s pretty much exclusively because it corrects claims on the Reasons to Believe website that this genetic work confirms the existence of a single couple as progenitors of the human race. For the reasons why this isn’t so, it’s a good article to read.
Posted in Adam, Creation, Genealogical Adam, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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Conformity allowed, not intelligence
ID blogger and fellow BioLogos commentator Bilbo has linked to a blog by a chap calling himself Scootie Royale, defending the Ben Stein film Expelled. The Bilbo/Scootie link appears to have little to do with ID and everything to do with the fact that they are both 9/11 Truthers. This subject (which hardly registers with me at all) is the main subject of Scootie’s blog, and his interest in ID only seems to have developed as a side issue. Maybe he read Bilbo’s blog.
Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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New song of the month…
Carrying on the habit of a new song every month, I’ve put a new recording on my website. This one was done to try out the new setup after my old system blew up. The song is a few years old, but hasn’t been put on disk before. It’s about the “foundness” of music – though that would apply to much science, too. And as the song says, to theology. Hope you like it. You may notice that links to the old songs no longer work as I’m just replacing them on the front page. I’ll put the whole album up when I’ve finished it, probably early in 2012.
Posted in Music, Theology
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More on E. coli and Windows
Regarding the paper I linked to in my last post, I just want briefly to emphasize an implicit conclusion from it that may not have been obvious. If you remember, the difference in architecture of E. coli compared to the Linux operating system was taken by the authors as evidence of the difference in “the design principles of the two systems” (sic). Human developers aim at cost-effectiveness and top-down design, whereas bacteria take a bottom-up approach suited to random mutation and natural selection:
Extinction on the desktop
One reason I’ve not posted for a few days is that my computer blew up. Quite spectacular – smoke and bangs and everything. A failing power supply took out much of the rest, requiring a new system. The old one lasted nearly ten years, so I can’t complain. But even in that time updates to Windows and so on created headaches in keeping the thing functioning. I’ve had to update drivers for hardware rendered obsolete, buy new compatible programs and so on. I frankly dreaded trying to start again from scratch.
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
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Or more succinctly…
“Choice is an illusion”: True or False?
Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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Unwilling to accept determinism – spot the mistake
A quick one prompted by Uncommon Descent’s ongoing campaign against reductionist psychology. UD links to this blog about a book by David Eagleman, which is another of those efforts to show that neuroscience increasingly demonstrates that free will is an illusion.
Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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Macroepigenetics for beginners
Clearing out the stable manure this morning my heart was lifted by the sight of a large flock of ravens interacting with a large flock of carrion crows in quite a complex way. It seemed to be one of those “close to nature” moments that is a bit more subtle than sunsets and so on. Consulting my limited library on British birds I couldn’t find anything about such conjoined flocks (strictly it was a congress of ravens with a murder of crows), until it occurred to me that there was probably just a dead deer or badger in the wood nearby. Nevertheless it got me to thinking about the origin … Continue reading
LUCA and the thicket of life
Why is universal common descent so important, though? What does it actually do? It affirms Charles Darwin, of course, who famously wrote of life being “breathed into few forms or one”, but his theory didn’t actually demand it scientifically. He wrote against a prevailing assumption that natural species – if not artificially selected varieties – were unchanged since creation, but descent with modification needn’t imply a single ancestor, and the fossil record available to him certainly didn’t support that.
Posted in Creation, Science
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Epigenetics goes mainstream
I was woken from sleep by this this morning. The EU are investing 30m Euros (if the currency doesn’t disintegrate beforehand) in a project to understand human epigenetics. Several references in the piece view this as the successor to the Human Genome Project, with the implication that the latter delivered, in medicine at least, a lot less than was promised, as the clip of Francis Collins demonstrates.
Posted in Creation, Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
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