Sunspots 651

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

The Arts: Here's a web page explaining many of the features of The Garden of Earthly Delights, a really strange painting by Hieronymus Bosch. (His first name is also spelled with a J.)

Listverse tells us where some movies were actually shot.

Christianity: Christianity Today discusses how information appliance use changes the way we read the Bible.

Christianity Today also reflects on the 500th anniversary of Luther's theses.

Ken Schenck has posted 95 theses for today's church.


Computing: National Public Radio reports on Facebook's questions about whether it's doing more harm than good.

Gizmo's Freeware reports on a free Optical Character Recognition web site.

Food: Listverse discusses 10 food plants that have been drastically genetically modified (all prior to the discovery of DNA).


Politics: FiveThirtyEight analyzes tweeting, and finds that those who self-report that they are very conservative, or very liberal, are much more likely to tweet about politics.

Economic columnist Robert Samuelson says that there's no hard evidence that cutting taxes leads to economic growth.

FiveThirtyEight also says that we don't really know how many people are in gangs in the US.

A Wired writer discusses how the Trump administration has stopped collecting all sorts of potentially useful data.

Science: Nature reports that there are actually two species of orangutan, and one of these is in danger of extinction.

A US Government report clearly blames human activity for global climate change.

A poem, "Why I Love Being Married to a Chemist," was featured in The Writer's Almanac for November 7.

Thanks for looking!



Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 588

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: A Relevant columnist discusses her experiences with online dating.
 
Benjamin L. Corey re-examines Romans 8:28, the verse that seems to be saying that all things work together for our good.

Relevant tells us that being in the center of God's will isn't always safe.

Literature: Listverse notes 10 important works written while the author was in prison. (Not included: Revelation, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail.")


Politics: Relevant points out that "Jesus Never Worried About Politics."

Science: Listverse on ten animal species that show real intelligence.
 
Listverse also has an article on ten of the most important crop plants, that had their genomes changed significantly by ancient humans.


Wired reports that horse racers are using DNA testing in developing successful race horses.

Wired reports that there are underwater heat waves, and they are devastating to marine life.

DarkSiteFinder is designed to show us how well we can, or can't, see the stars at night, because of light pollution. It has a link to an detailed map.


Sports: Wired tells us that athletes in most Olympic events are helped by various equipment enhancements, and, actually, are cyborgs, rather than pure humans.


Image source (public domain)

Natural selection is a fact

Today's Greenville News, in an article on page 7a, has published a report from the Associated Press. That report says that South Carolina State Senator Mike Fair "says natural selection should not be taught as fact." Mr. Fair has made more news on this sort of topic recently, as he at first opposed the adoption of a South Carolina State Fossil, because of his belief in a six-day creation a few thousand years ago. He withdrew his opposition, because the proposer was an eight-year-old girl.

Mr. Fair is entitled to his beliefs, and they are, perhaps, more nuanced than suggested by the nine words quoted in the report, but this post takes them at face value, and refutes them.

Natural selection is a fact! Why is that so?

First, artificial selection works. Humans have selected breeds of dogs for various traits, and done similar selection with other animals. Plants, grown as crops or ornamentals, have also responded to the selective work of humans.

It is true that keeping track of butterfat production by cows, and deciding which bull to use in fathering the next generation, based on the production record of his daughters, is not exactly natural selection. But much selection of animals and plants, over the millennia of domestication, was simply looking at various characteristics, and deciding which seed to plant, or which animal to use in breeding. It was very low-tech, presumably operating without even written breeding or production records, and, we have reason to believe, worked very much like natural selection has.

Second, natural selection works in humans. No doubt Mr. Fair believes that all humans descended from an ancestral couple. If that was the case, how can we explain the differences between various groups of humans? Some of the differences may be due to chance,  but some of them, probably most of them, are due to natural selection. The Wikipedia article on "Human skin color" begins with these two sentences: "Human skin color ranges in variety from the darkest brown to the lightest pinkish-white hues. Human skin pigmentation is the result of natural selection." The article refers to solid scientific evidence for that second statement.

Third, and less obvious, but more compelling, natural selection works in the ordinary reproduction of organisms, including humans. Not in selecting for new forms, but in selecting so that current well-adapted forms persist. You may have seen an albino animal in the wild. I have. They are rare, but they do exist. Why are they so rare? Because Darwin's common-sense description of natural selection does, indeed, make sense. Organisms that have a tendency to have offspring that differ much from the norm are less likely to have their genes passed on to succeeding generations. A rabbit, in the wild, that can produce an albino offspring, is a rabbit that is less likely to produce surviving offspring than a similar rabbit that cannot produce such offspring.

God may, indeed, have created the first humans from scratch, or created the "kinds" of living things in separate special creative acts. But, even if both of those are true, He built natural selection into the system, just like He built gravity into the system, and natural selection, like gravity, influences the way things are, and serves to maintain God's good creation.

Mr. Fair should have read this post by a committed Young-earth creationist with solid scientific credentials, who says that evolution (by which he means natural selection) is not up for scientific dispute.

Thanks for reading.

Sunspots 421

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

The Arts: A writer for Wired reflects on the reasons for, and effects of, "binge watching." (That means using Netflix or its competitors, or DVDs, to watch several episodes of a TV show at once.)

Christianity: This is not a recommendation -- I don't know enough about the organization, and haven't read enough of their web site -- but the motto of Day Star Research is promising: "Ending the Christian Holy War on Science."

Todd Wood reacts to an article by Vern Poythress on the "Adam debate." There are a lot of interesting ideas in the reaction. One idea that I should have had long ago -- Jesus presumably had a Y chromosome, but didn't get it from his parents. It must have been created for him at some point in His early development.

Science: According to the New York Times, cockroach populations given poison in sugar solutions evolved so that sugar sends a signal to a portion of their brain that interprets the taste as if it were bitter, not sweet.

National Public Radio reports on how cherries from Hungary have been used in cherry-breeding work in the US. Apparently Hungarians take cherries very seriously.

NPR also reports on the use of live human lung cells (cultured) to detect air pollution.



Image source (public domain)