Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Reverend Jerry Coyne: Lanugo and Epistemology

You probably have never seen the words lanugo and epistemology in the same sentence. But to understand the power of evolutionary thinking we need to understand both words. Lanugo is a fine hair we grow about six months after conception and then lose before birth. Epistemology, on the other hand, is the theory of knowledge. How do we know what we know? How can we know that what we know is true? It’s a complicated subject and science avoids many of the quandaries by simply positing hypotheses that make predictions. Think of the process as an IF-THEN statement. IF the planets circle the sun, THEN we should observe retrograde motion. Epistemologically speaking, the IF-THEN statement is very safe. It makes Read More ›

Modular Evolution: All of The Benefits, None of the Risk

You have probably heard that evolution has difficulty explaining the origin of amazingly complex designs. It turns out that evolutionists have quietly solved the problem while we weren’t paying attention. With little fanfare, they have rolled out modular evolution. This new kind of evolution is truly astonishing. What it does is, well, it creates complexity just like that. Evolutionists once thought that biology’s miracles evolved more or less one step at a time. But such staid ideas about evolution have long since become, as J. D. Hooker probably would say if he were around today, “old stick-in-the-mud doctrines.” If bankers can liven things up then why not evolutionists?  Read more

An Oracle of the Reverend Jerry Coyne

The Reverend Jerry Coyne has condescended to reveal a treasure of timeless truths in his little revelation entitled Why Evolution is True. That these truths are metaphysical–they cannot be deduced from science–make them especially precious. In his revelation Reverend Coyne illuminates a wide range of truths for us to revere. Here is an oracle of Coyne on bad design:  Read more