Category Archives: Science

I remember a cartoon in Punch many years ago (sadly all the cartoons in Punch were many years ago now), in which a sudden new display of stars in the night sky spelled out, in evenly spaced Roman capitals, “GOD IS DEAD”. The caption underneath read, “Official Humanist Miracle Declared.”

Actually, if I hadn’t liked the alliteration, I wouldn’t have used “falsifying” in the title. What I really want to assert is that none of the key ideas in Neodarwinian theory (taken as the heart of evolution) are either verified or logically capable of being demonstrated empirically, let alone falsified. This has been said before, but it’s worth reiterating, because we’re still being told it’s as factual as gravity…

I’ve stumbled across this astonishing series of articles by Stephen L Talbott at the Nature Institute. Astonishing because it’s an overview of some of the new (and astonishing!) processes being discovered within the cell, including some very good stuff on epigenetics, yet put in the context of a whole scientific and philosophical critique of not only Neodarwinism, but of the whole reductionist approach to biology and of ateleological science overall. An ambitious set of targets indeed! There’s a lot of it, and some is somewhat technical, but don’t let that put you off wading through the lot. It’s some of the most conceptually fruitful stuff I’ve read in a long … Continue reading →

A refutation of William Paley’s design argument (Garvey, J.C. Kipling, J.R. et al 2011) William Paley, the 19th century Intelligent Design Creationist, tried to put the scientific clock back 500 years to the time when Francis Bacon was burned at the stake for denying that the world was flat, by using the example of a self-replicating watch found during a walk on the heath. His “argument” (which was never peer-reviewed in the proper way) has been rightly dismissed many times on the basis that a watch is quite different from the biological systems known to have evolved by random mutation and natural selection. But in these days when Fundamentalist attempts … Continue reading →