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Massimo Boscherini

Evolution and religion: In the beginning | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...9036706

science evolution religion creationism intelligent design

shared by Massimo Boscherini on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • THE “Atlas of Creation” runs to 770 pages and is lavishly illustrated with photographs of fossils and living animals, interlaced with quotations from the Koran. Its author claims to prove not only the falsehood of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, but the links between “Darwinism” and such diverse evils as communism, fascism and terrorism.
  • The mass distribution of a French version of the “Atlas” (already published in English and Turkish) typifies the style of an Istanbul publishing house whose sole business is the dissemination, in many languages, of scores of works by a single author, a charismatic but controversial Turkish preacher who writes as Harun Yahya but is really called Adnan Oktar.
  • Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the world's 80m Anglicans, has dismissed literal readings of the Creation story in Genesis as a “category mistake”.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • A much more nuanced critique, not of Darwin himself but of secular world-views based on Darwin's ideas, has been advanced by Pope Benedict XVI, the conservative Bavarian who assumed the most powerful office in the Christian world two years ago.
  • In Kenya, for example, there is a bitter controversy over plans to put on display the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human being ever found, a figure known as Turkana Boy—along with a collection of fossils, some of which may be as much as 200m years old.
  • Rows over religion and reason are also raging in Russia.
  • As these examples from around the world show, the debate over creation, evolution and religion is rapidly going global. Until recently, all the hottest public arguments had taken place in the United States, where school boards in many districts and states tried to restrict the teaching of Darwin's idea that life in its myriad forms evolved through a natural process of adaptation to changing conditions.
  • the case made by the “intelligent design” camp: the idea that some features of the natural world can be explained only by the direct intervention of a ingenious creator.
Massimo Boscherini

BBC News - Nature's hidden prime number code - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...magazine-14305667

science biology math prime numbers evolution natural selection cryptography

shared by Massimo Boscherini on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Buzzing quietly beneath the planet we inhabit is an unseen world of numbers, patterns and geometry. Mathematics is the code that makes sense of our universe.
  • But every 13 years, the banjos and basses get drowned out for six weeks by the chorus of an insect that has fascinated me ever since I became a mathematician. Only found in the eastern areas of North America, this cicadas survival depends on exploiting the strange properties of some of the most fundamental numbers in mathematics - the primes, numbers that are only divisible by themselves and one.
  • This choice of a 13-year cycle doesn't seem too arbitrary. There are another two broods across north America that also have this 13-year life cycle, appearing in different regions and different years. In addition there are another 12 broods that appear every 17 years.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • You could just dismiss these numbers as random. But it's very curious that there are no cicadas with 12, 14, 15, 16 or 18-year life cycles. However look at these cicadas through the mathematician's eyes and a pattern begins to emerge. Because 13 and 17 are both indivisible this gives the cicadas an evolutionary advantage as primes are helpful in avoiding other animals with periodic behaviour. Suppose for example that a predator appears every six years in the forest. Then a cicada with an eight or nine-year life cycle will coincide with the predator much more often than a cicada with a seven-year prime life cycle.
  • The cryptography that keeps our credit cards secure when we shop online exploits the same numbers that protect the cicadas in North America - the primes.
  • The reason this is so secure is that although it is easy to multiply two prime numbers together it is almost impossible to pull them apart.
  • The primes are the atoms of the arithmetic. The hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers.
  • We know primes go on for ever but finding a pattern in the primes is one of the biggest mysteries in mathematics. A million-dollar prize has been offered to anyone who can reveal the secret of these numbers.
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