Nature has announced a new journal called Nature Nanotechnology .

here

As we see high quality "ideas between physical scientists, life scientists, engineers and other researchers" exchange, it will more than likely have many implications for ID.

The cell is already jammed packed with nanomachines like the ATP synthase and the ribosome. Our nanotechnology will also have nanoscale factories, and they are going to be among the most complex things that humans have ever designed. As Marvin Minsky points out :

Most arguments against nanotechnology are arguments against life itself.

Paul Nelson has an account of his debate with Sahotra Sarkar up at ID the Future. Some events worth noticing:

- For years, Paul Nelson has been saying that intelligent design is not ready for public schools (as have we at Telic Thoughts, by the way).

- In an extensive e-mail correspondence prior to the debate, Paul Nelson told Sahotra Sarkar that he didn't think that intelligent design was ready for public schools.

- The night before the debate, over a couple of beers, Paul Nelson told Sahotra Sarkar that intelligent design wasn't ready for public schools.

- During the debate, Sahotra Sarkar by his own account succeeded in wringing a confession out of Paul Nelson that, indeed, intelligent design isn't ready for public schools. As Paul comments, "Sahotra has one whopper of a public school science curriculum obsession."

Welcome to the debate format of the post-wedge world. As it becomes obvious that there is no threat of intelligent design being taught in public schools, the talking points of ID critics like Sahotra Sarkar will be seen as increasingly desperate, as they're based on fears that are no longer relevant (if they ever were).

The comments section of Mike's blog post Barbara Forrest Speaks Out has become a bit overloaded with defenses of Forrest's hyperbolic fear-mongering and reasonable responses pointing out the blatant propaganda she's become so expert at dishing out to her fan club since deciding to tie her career and legacy to defeating ID.

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There have been several threads on front-loading lately so I thought I'd offer one from an engineering perspective. Front-loading is not a term used in engineering, but there is a correlate in planning for future designs.

Probably the first aspect of front-loading comes in under the category of architecture. Typically things like modularization, scalability, standardization, utilizing interfaces, and the like fall under this category. The purpose of architecting a solution is to plan for both the current design and future designs. If an architecture is poorly conceived at the onset of a design, the design may at some point find itself "in a box" where it can proceed no further and redesign is required. Also since most designs never remain static over their life, a good architecture provides for easy changes to improve design performance or add new features.

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Sahotra Sarkar is a biologist at the University of Texas, who recently debated ID supporter Paul Nelson. Here's the impression that one person in the audience got:

I was really happy with the way Sahotra started the debate. He spent ~2 of his first 15 minutes emphasizing that the reason we're here talking about ID isn't that it's actually a scientific viewpoint anyone seriously respects. He likened IDers to flat-earthers and Raelians, saying the only reason we were debating ID was that more political power had gotten behind that view than the other crazy views. He specifically mentioned the ID movement's funding from Howard Ahmanson, who apparently wants to turn America into a theocracy.

So, intelligent design supporters are like flat-earthers, and they want to turn America into a theocracy. I wonder how Sahotra Sarkar would react, should he some day be asked to review a research article supporting intelligent design?

For more on Sarkar's fears about the Coming Theocracy, see here.

I've long been reading John Hawks Anthropology Weblog, which is a good source of information, not just about anthropology, but about evolution and biology in general. So when blogging about Carl Zimmer's doubts about the wrist-walking family in Turkey having "evolved backwards", I jokingly wondered why John Hawks wasn't also covering this. Well, it seems like I wasn't the only one, and after having received nummerous e-mails about this, John Hawks is now ready with his analysis:

Of course, the most important question is whether any of this actually contributes to understanding human origins. Generally, I think the answer is no — not just an itsy-bitsy no, but a great big honking no.

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Some of you have yet to grasp just how dangerous ID is. Barbara Forrest will set you straight:

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The Scientists has a short article on Paul Mirecki, the professor of religious studies at KU who reported having been beaten up over the contents of some e-mails he had sent to a public listserv. The fact that The Scientist publishes this article now is in itself peculiar, as there has been no new developments in the case since December last year, when Mirecki reported the assault. Unfortunately, the article is a testament to the phenomenon that Mike noticed back in December, when he remarked: "An urban legend is clearly evolving into place before our eyes, where many in the blogosphere now tell the story of a professor who insulted some fundamentalists and this caused those in political power to pressure his university to have him fired while taking away his free speech." More beneath the fold.

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Here's some interesting research on hummingbirds from the scientific journal Current Biology. Susan D. Healy and her colleagues exposed hummingbirds to artificial flowers that were refilled at different intervals and noted that the fast-filling flowers were visited more often than the slow-filling flowers. As they write: "Not only is this the first time that this degree of timing ability has been shown in wild animals, but these hummingbirds also exhibit two of the fundamental aspects of episodic-like memory (where and when), the kind of memory for specific events often thought to be exclusive to humans."

This casts doubt on Stephen Jay Gould's argument, in his book Wonderful Life, that rerunning the "tape of life" would have produced a vastly different outcome. If the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct, Gould said, mammals would never have had a chance to branch out from their roles as small nocturnals, scurrying around in an age of reptiles. And since dinosaurs allegedly didn't have a physiology for evolving big brains (relative to their body size), human-like intelligence would never have arisen.

For more on the intelligence of birds, here's an old post of mine from the ARN Forum.

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose there is an alternate universe where there is also a trial in Dover, PA. However, in this universe a few things are different.

In this universe this is how evolution is currently taught in high school biology classes:

Evolution means change over time. Observation suggests that life has evolved with some form of common descent. It also suggests that change occurs because of mutations in the genome where the environment has some effect on what gets passed on from one generation to the next.

Except for materials on fossils and genetics, that's it.

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