george-dvorsky – Page 4 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Does the new Pope believe in evolution?

The answer is actually yes. And in fact, the Roman Catholic Church has recognized Darwinian evolution for the past 60 years. It openly rejects Intelligent Design and Young Earth Creationism saying that it ” pretends to be science .” But the Church’s unique take on the theory, what it calls theistic evolution , still shows that Catholics have largely missed the point. Back in 1950, Pope Pius XII laid out his papal encyclical, “Humani Generis,” in which the Church’s official position on natural selection was laid out. The statement said that there’s no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and evolution . The theory, as articulated by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species , has withstood scientific scrutiny since its publication in 1859 — and the Church does not dispute this. But — and this is a big but — Catholics can believe in evolution just as long as God’s involvement is acknowledged . Just what this involvement actually entails has never been made entirely clear, but the Church is adamant on one point: The human soul is a creation of God and not the product of material forces. On this point, the Church will never waiver. Catholics believe that humans are descended from apes, but that we all share a common male ancestor, Adam. He’s the lucky guy who got to hand down Original Sin to all his descendants. This means that Catholics don’t believe in polygenism , the idea that humans are descended from a group of early humans. Interestingly, all humans may be descended from a common female ancestor , the so-called Mitochondrial Eve . But that’s science, not Biblical conjecture. At the same time, Catholics take no issue with the Big Bang theory, along with cosmological, geological, and biological axioms touted by science. The Church rejects the notion that humans can find traces of God’s work or his intention by looking for “design signatures” (i.e. specified complexity) in the world around us — a central contention of the ID crowd. God, says former Vatican astronomer Rev. George Coyne, is “not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves.” The previous Pope, Benedict XVI, saw the conflict between creationism and evolution as absurd. He wrote : Currently, I see in Germany, but also in the United States, a somewhat fierce debate raging between so-called “creationism” and evolutionism, presented as though they were mutually exclusive alternatives: those who believe in the Creator would not be able to conceive of evolution, and those who instead support evolution would have to exclude God. This antithesis is absurd because, on the one hand, there are so many scientific proofs in favour of evolution which appears to be a reality we can see and which enriches our knowledge of life and being as such. But on the other, the doctrine of evolution does not answer every query, especially the great philosophical question: where does everything come from? And how did everything start which ultimately led to man? I believe this is of the utmost importance. But it’s here where the Church falls flat. This is the classic argument made by all reconciliationists — the idea that religion and Darwinian natural selection can work in harmony together. It’s a “want my cake and eat it too” proposition that largely ignores the potency of Darwin’s dangerous idea as a God killer. Darwin’s theory provides for a stand alone system. Evolution is fully autonomous process that does not require any guiding “rationality” (Benedict’s term) to function. It’s an agonizingly slow, brutish, and insanely methodical process, but it works. Moreover, it has given rise to the concept of scientific naturalism — the idea that the material world and all the phenomena we see around us can be explained without having to invoke an architect or overseer. All the evidence currently points to this conclusion, and until science reveals any hint of supernatural meddling — which it has not – we will continue to have to accept naturalism as the ongoing scientific paradigm. As for the new Pope, Francis I, his position will have to follow those of his predecessors in keeping with the principle of papal infallibility. But like Pius and Benedict, he can elaborate on the Church’s position when he feels it necessary.

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Does the new Pope believe in evolution?

First a baby, now 14 adults “functionally cured” of HIV

Earlier this month, doctors announced that a baby had been cured of an HIV infection . Now, using a similar technique, it appears that 14 adults have likewise been successfully treated for the disease. The trick, say the scientists, is to tackle the infection early. The research was conducted by Asier Sáez-Cirión of the Pasteur Institute and his results now appear in the open source journal PLOS Pathogens . His team analyzed 70 people with HIV who had been treated by combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) just a short time after infection, a range spanning 35 days to 10 weeks. This is much sooner than people are normally treated. And in fact, these patients, called the Visconti Cohort , were all diagnosed with HIV early (and by chance) when they turned up at hospitals to be assessed for other conditions. The cohort stuck to the antiretrovirals (ARVs) for an average of three years, during which time the drugs kept the virus in check (they do not eradicate HIV from the body). Eventually, all of the patients stopped taking the ARVs for various reasons (personal choice, different drug protocols, etc.). Normally, HIV will return when patients stop taking their ARVs. But this time, something interesting happened. The authors of the study described it this way: We identified 14 HIV patients (post-treatment controllers [PTCs]) whose viremia remained controlled for several years after the interruption of prolonged cART initiated during the primary infection. That’s roughly one in ten of the patients , a group that included four women and 10 men. On average, they were off the medication for seven years. It’s important to note that the patients still have the HIV infection. Also, they’re not ” supercontrollers ” (the

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First a baby, now 14 adults “functionally cured” of HIV

This crazy-dense planet could be of an entirely new type

When it comes to detecting and cataloguing exoplanets, astronomers have only just begun. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that an entirely new class of planets may have been discovered — Neptune-like planets that were stripped of their outer gaseous layers after venturing too close to their sun. Several years ago, astronomers involved in NASA’s Kepler program discovered celestial bodies that appeared too heavy for their size. Some of these planets were Earth-like in size, but featured densities greater than pure iron. No existing theory could explain these observations, but Olivier Grasset, a geophysicist at the University of Nantes in France, has just come up with a possible explanation. Nature News reports : Grasset and his collaborators now say that the strange bodies could be the “fossil cores” of planets that were once much larger, an idea that was first proposed by researchers in 20111. These planets would have been ice giants that formed in the outer parts of a star system and then migrated inwards — as their orbits were affected by interactions with surrounding gas and dust — perhaps getting as close to their suns as Mercury is to ours. The hotter temperatures closer to the stars, Grasset explains, would evaporate the outer layers of the planets, which are made mainly of volatile components such as hydrogen, helium and water. The leftover cores would consist of rock and metal, just like the bulk of Earth, and could weigh up to several times as much as our planet, making them what scientists call super-Earths. But these cores formed under the weight of their planets’ outer layers, under pressures of around 500 gigapascals — 5 million times atmospheric pressure on Earth — and typical temperatures of about 6,000 kelvin. As a result, the materials in these cores should be more compacted, and denser, than Earth. The results were recently presented at a meeting on exoplanets at the Royal Society in London. Read Davide Castelvecchi’s entire article to learn more. Image: NASA/ESA/C.CARREAU.