15th Jun 2008 : Britain's most famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, has accused the government of making "disastrous" cuts to research funding that threaten the country's international standing.

Hawking has released correspondence accusing ministers of putting science at risk through basic "bookkeeping errors" that have led to an £80m budget shortfall and warning that several university physics departments may be forced to close.

14th Jun 2008 : Behe's Empty Box

Some years ago, John Catalano, of New York, was a kind of predecessor of Josh who ran a website which was a kind of predecessor of this one. One of the many good things John did was to maintain a section called "Behe's Empty Box". You might be surprised that it is necessary to pay attention to Behe. Unfortunately, it is. I frequently get letters from people who have read Darwin's Black Box and seem persuaded by it,

14th Jun 2008 : Why is faith still so important in the modern world? How has it confounded the many thinkers and commentators who, for the past 200 years and more, have predicted that religion would wither away and die? Why, on the contrary, is faith still flourishing?

13th Jun 2008 :
Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, in a paper published on June 15, 2008

Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, in a paper published on 15 June 2008.

13th Jun 2008 : KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: For decades now, Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has waged a sustained campaign maintaining global pressure on China to relax its iron fist on Tibet and grant a genuine autonomy within the People's Republic.

But rarely has the Dalai Lama been in the headlines more than since the sometimes violent demonstrations that began in Tibet on March 10 this year and raged on and off for two weeks.

In the inevitable Chinese crackdown, an unknown number of Tibetans were killed. The Chinese acknowledge 21 deaths; demonstrators say it
was more than 200.

13th Jun 2008 : Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks personally being circumcized and the stories and myths behind the procedure with On Faith's Sally Quinn.

13th Jun 2008 : A recently completed youtube series on Science and the history of the Universe.

13th Jun 2008 : ScienceDaily (Jun. 12, 2008) — When you grab a cold beverage out of the cooler this summer, what is really going on between your brain, your eyes and your hands?

"It is still a mystery, really," says UBC computer science professor Prof. Dinesh Pai. "No one has ever completely mapped out the processes at the level of specific neurons, muscles and tendons."

12th Jun 2008 : This is an older article, but well worth the read.

12th Jun 2008 : People with higher IQs are less likely to believe in God, according to a new study.

Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.

12th Jun 2008 :
McLEAN, Va. - Textbooks at a private Islamic school in northern Virginia teach students that it is permissible for Muslims to kill adulterers and converts from Islam, according to a federal investigation released Wednesday.

Other passages in the school's textbooks state that "the Jews conspired against Islam and its people" and that Muslims are permitted to take the lives and property of those deemed "polytheists."

12th Jun 2008 : VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article's tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

12th Jun 2008 :
This Father's Day, one of most popular pastors in America will open his megachurch to homosexual dads, an event that would usually signal an extreme weather alert from old guard Republican evangelical leaders.

But by welcoming gay fathers into his Southern California flock, Rick Warren, author of the "The Purpose Driven Life," is not just living up to the highest standards of Christian fellowship, he's turning the page on a particularly embarrassing part of our politics.

11th Jun 2008 : SB 733, the "LA Science Education Act," is a stealth creationism bill. Introduced by Louisiana Sen. Ben Nevers on behalf of the LA Family Forum (LFF—the LA affiliate of Focus on the Family), it is the direct descendant of SB 561, the "LA Academic Freedom Act." SB 561's twin in the LA House of Representatives was HB 1168. SB 733 was passed in the LA Senate on April 17, 2008, and in the House Education Committee on May 21 as a compromise bill. SB 733 is being promoted by the Discovery Institute (the Seattle headquarters of the intelligent design (ID) creationism movement) and the LFF as part of the Discovery Institute's coordination of the introduction of academic freedom bills in six states: Florida, Alabama, Missouri, Michigan, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

11th Jun 2008 : Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern University, and Gene Mills from the Louisiana Forum on Family, debate the pros and cons of teaching creationism in schools.

11th Jun 2008 : Repeatedly threatening children with brutal torture in the form of eternal damnation is psychological child abuse, and has extremely negative, long-term effects on their mental health. It's bullying, it's disgusting, and we need to put a stop to it.

See:
http://www.stopthenightmares.org.uk/

11th Jun 2008 : I strongly support this research. It is being carried out to the highest standards, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the results when they are all analysed. I shall be filling in the Survey myself and I urge others to do the same.

Richard Dawkins

To participate in the survey, please visit:
http://recornwelllab.com/consent_form.html

10th Jun 2008 : Excellent new book by Gary Marcus.

10th Jun 2008 : Colossal structures larger than the visible universe – forged during the period of cosmic inflation nearly 14 billion years ago – may be responsible for a strange pattern seen in the big bang's afterglow, says a team of cosmologists. If confirmed, the structures could provide precious information about the universe's earliest moments.

10th Jun 2008 :

10th Jun 2008 : Matthew, a 26-year-old chimp, is headed to court in Europe as part of a human effort to classify him as a person.

Beyond the legal challenges, anthropologists say chimpanzees are not humans, though without a clear definition of what it means to be human, backing that claim up is a challenge perhaps fit for some great courtroom drama.

10th Jun 2008 : A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

10th Jun 2008 : Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I apologise for getting you out of bed so early. At 0500 hours this morning the combined armed forces of mankind across the globe launched a massive and sustained land, sea and air attack on the Kingdom of Heaven. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. There will be time for questions later.

10th Jun 2008 : As three soldiers are blown up, teenager caught on a lethal mission reveals how he was groomed to kill British troops.

The surroundings were grim and forbidding, a notorious jail run by Afghanistan's feared security service for those taken prisoner in the bloody war with the Taliban.

9th Jun 2008 : One of the beautiful aspects of self evident truths is that they can be proven on both the simplest and the most complex of levels. By contrast, to make an argument for what is in fact an illogical fallacy, one must use plenty of skill, sophistry and remain beholden to a dogmatic protection of what is really an illogical position.

Yet even after a detailed case is made for the illogical side of the argument, it can instantly be deflated like a balloon with the simplest poke of clear logic. It can also be attacked piece by piece with even greater skill and logic, stemming from a steadfast pursuit of the truth.

9th Jun 2008 : The documentary RELIGULOUS follows political humorist and author Bill Maher ("Real Time With Bill Maher," "Politically Incorrect") as he travels around the globe interviewing people about God and religion. Known for his astute analytical skills, irreverent wit and commitment to never pulling a punch, Maher brings his characteristic honesty to an unusual spiritual journey. Directed by Larry Charles (BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN, "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), RELIGULOUS will mark Charles' first feature project since the critically acclaimed, wildly successful BORAT. Jonah Smith and Palmer West of Thousand Words (A SCANNER DARKLY, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM) and Bill Maher are producing.

9th Jun 2008 : ScienceDaily (Jun. 9, 2008) — One of the great scientific challenges is to understand the design principles and origins of the human brain. New research has shed light on the evolutionary origins of the brain and how it evolved into the remarkably complex structure found in humans.

he research suggests that it is not size alone that gives more brain power, but that, during evolution, increasingly sophisticated molecular processing of nerve impulses allowed development of animals with more complex behaviours.

8th Jun 2008 :

8th Jun 2008 :
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — Samuel Mluge steps outside his office and scans the sidewalk. His pale blue eyes dart back and forth, back and forth, trying to focus.

The sun used to be his main enemy, but now he has others.

Mr. Mluge is an albino, and in Tanzania now there is a price for his pinkish skin.

"I feel like I am being hunted," he said.

8th Jun 2008 :
For three days this week, a UN sponsored meeting in Rome examined the world food crisis and what to do about it. Wars and the disruption of local economies by destructive storms, such as the cyclone that hit Burma (Myanmar), drought, and so on – along with the higher fuel prices – play a major role in the shortages.

Although millions of dollars in food aid is being sent to countries in need, experts say it will not be enough. Even if it helps to ease the short-term crisis, what's needed is a longer-term vision.

8th Jun 2008 :
OSLO — Police in Norway said Friday they have filed preliminary charges against a husband and wife for the alleged genital mutilation of five of their daughters.

It was the first such case opened under Norwegian laws against female circumcision.

The couple were both originally from Gambia, but are now Norwegian citizens, said a statement from Human Rights Services, an activist group that alerted police to the case. The daughters, ranging in age from 5 to 14 years, were all born in Norway.

8th Jun 2008 : ScienceDaily (Jun. 6, 2008) — A team of researchers at Harvard University have modeled in the laboratory a primitive cell, or protocell, that is capable of building, copying and containing DNA.

Since there are no physical records of what the first primitive cells on Earth looked like, or how they grew and divided, the research team's protocell project offers a useful way to learn about how Earth's earliest cells may have interacted with their environment approximately 3.5 billion years ago.

7th Jun 2008 : Nietzsche said that if a human being put his ear to the heart chamber of the world and heard the roar of existence, the "innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe," he would surely break into pieces. But a newspaper, pumping its inky current of despair, might serve as well. On a single day, Thursday, May 15th, the Times contained the following. The lead article was about the earthquake in China, now estimated to have killed more than fifty thousand people. It was titled "Tiny Bodies in a Morgue, and Unspeakable Grief in China," and was accompanied by a photograph of two parents sitting next to their dead child. A story about the recent cyclone in Myanmar estimated the number of deaths at anywhere between 68,833 and 127,990. The journalist mentioned a man named Zaw Ayea, twenty-seven, who found his sister's body; his mother and two younger brothers are missing. He cannot speak: "He stares straight ahead with a strangely placid expression on his face. His friends say he has been in shock since the cyclone."

7th Jun 2008 : In 1928, as America heads towards the Wall Street Crash, Joseph Stalin reveals his master plan - nature is to be conquered by science, Russia to be made brutally, glitteringly modern and the world transformed by communist endeavour.

Into the heart of this vision stepped Trofim Lysenko, a self-taught geneticist who promised to turn Russian wasteland into a grain-laden Garden of Eden.

7th Jun 2008 : I don't know how World Youth Day is going down in your household but in mine it's fanning the flames of militant atheism.

As the family member with the oldest pedigree as a non-believer, I find myself in the odd position of fervently preaching religious tolerance to cool the antagonism World Youth Day is engendering around my dinner table.

7th Jun 2008 : W00t! Great news from the Lone Star State: two seats on the State School Board were being challenged by creationists, and both creationists lost (free registration may be required to read that story).

Yeehaw!

As they say down there.

So the two incumbents, one a moderate Republican and the other a Democrat, retain their seats. Texans, you may breathe a momentary sigh of relief.

6th Jun 2008 : Billboard on I-95 reaches out to atheists in the region

6th Jun 2008 : Since 1839, the world inventory of photographs has been accumulating at an accelerating pace, multiplying into a near infinitude of images, into a resemblance of a Borgesian library. This haunting technology has been with us long enough now that we are able to look at a crowd scene, a busy street, say, in the late 19th century and know for certain that every single figure is dead. Not only the young couple pausing by a park railing, but the child with a hoop and stick, the starchy nurse, the solemn baby upright in its carriage - their lives have run their course, and they are all gone. And yet, frozen in sepia, they appear curiously, busily, oblivious of the fact that they must die - as Susan Sontag put it, "photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction ..."

6th Jun 2008 : Circumcision and other forms of male genital mutilation have always been a puzzle. The ritual mutilations can leave the man vulnerable to infection and even death. So why do some societies insist on such a risky ritual for their men?

There may be an evolutionary explanation, according to Christopher Wilson, of Cornell University in New York, US. It could function to reduce a young man's potential to father a child with an older man's wife, he says.

6th Jun 2008 : A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old.

Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

Details of the work have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

5th Jun 2008 : And controversy follows evolution's staunch champion

5th Jun 2008 : P.Z. Myers is the evolutionist creationists love to hate: They hate him so much that he was expelled from an advance screening of "Expelled," even though the anti-evolution movie includes an interview with him.

During a visit to Seattle, the biology professor, blogger and "godless liberal" recounted the tale with relish - and then predicted that old-time creationism will be making a comeback.

Not that he's looking forward to that: Myers bases that prediction on his view that efforts to undermine evolutionary theory without referring to religion, using a concept known as intelligent design, have fallen short. Back in 2005, a federal judge ruled that intelligent design was basically a religious concept, and thus should not be taught in public-school science classes.

5th Jun 2008 : GENEVA (AFP) - It doesn't pay to be smart and ignorance really is bliss if you want a long life -- at least if you're a fly, according to new research by a Swiss university.

Scientists Tadeusz Kawecki and Joep Burger at the University of Lausanne said Wednesday they had discovered a "negative correlation between an improvement in a fly's mental capacity and its longevity".

As part of their research project, the results of which are published in the journal Evolution, they divided into two

5th Jun 2008 : KEVIN RUDD wears his Christianity on his sleeve more prominently than any Labor leader since the devout Catholic Arthur Calwell.

It is a stance that yielded political dividends at last year's election, when Labor achieved its highest level of support from regular churchgoers since 1993.

But now the Prime Minister faces a decision that may alienate socially conservative Catholics and born-again Protestants.

The Rudd Government is considering overturning the Howard government's ban on Australian overseas aid being used to fund abortions in poor countries.

4th Jun 2008 : LONDON, Jun. 4, 2008 (Reuters) — Speeches and a scientific meeting next month will kick off 18 months of events to celebrate the impact and lasting legacy of Charles Darwin, whose theories on evolution are still causing waves 150 years later.

4th Jun 2008 : DALLAS — Opponents of teaching evolution, in a natural selection of sorts, have gradually shed those strategies that have not survived the courts. Over the last decade, creationism has given rise to "creation science," which became "intelligent design," which in 2005 was banned from the public school curriculum in Pennsylvania by a federal judge.

Now a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. None of them are "creationism" or "intelligent design" or even "creator."

4th Jun 2008 : What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC's 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue.

And unless God provides a miracle, the trends will continue. The denomination's growth rate has been declining since the 1950s. The conservative/fundamentalist takeover 30 years ago was supposed to turn the trend around; it didn't make a bit of difference.

3rd Jun 2008 : A New York judge today dealt a serious blow to the widow and children of John Lennon, who are seeking to force the removal of the John Lennon song "Imagine" from a controversial film about intelligent design, creationism's PR-savvy cousin. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed argues that advocates of the theory of intelligent design face persecution in the academy. Judge Sidney H. Stein rejected the plaintiff's request for an injunction against further distribution of the film, finding that the makers of Expelled were likely to prevail in their argument that the use of "Imagine" was fair use under copyright law.

3rd Jun 2008 : One of the most important experiments in evolution is going on right now in a laboratory in Michigan State University. A dozen flasks full of E. coli are sloshing around on a gently rocking table. The bacteria in those flasks has been evolving since 1988--for over 44,000 generations. And because they've been so carefully observed all that time, they've revealed some important lessons about how evolution works.

2nd Jun 2008 : A doctor tells her patient to lose weight, and the patient thinks: "If my doctor really believed that, she wouldn't be so fat." A movie aficionado pans the latest Tom Cruise flick because Cruise is a Scientologist. A home­owner ignores a neighbor's advice on lawn care because the neighbor is a ... you name it: Democrat, ­Re­publican, Christian or atheist. These examples illustrate classic uses of ad hominem attacks, in which an argument is rejected, or advanced, based on a personal characteristic of an individual rather than on reasons for or against the claim itself.