Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

ID: Living Things Appear To Be Designed Because They Are Designed

At its core ID affirms the truth of two statements and then makes a logical deduction: Statement 1. Designers often leave behind objectively discernible indicia of design in the things they design. Statement 2. Some aspects of living things exhibit these objectively discernible indicia of design. Logical conclusion. Therefore, the best explanation for the existence of the aspects of living things that exhibit these objectively discernible indicia of design is that they were in fact designed. In a comment to a prior post lastyearon says the ID project is “meaningless.” That is a powerful charge to make; therefore it is incumbent upon lastyearon to prove his case. That, in turn, is a very tall order, because statement 1 is obviously Read More ›

Insights into a largely cryptic Cambrian radiation of crustaceans

The abrupt appearance of Cambrian life forms in the Cambrian Period of Earth history continues to provide us with spectacular evidence of sophistication. New research on fossils recovered from petroleum exploration drill cores assigned to the Deadwood Formation of western Canada documents “a cryptic but significant diversity of Cambrian crustaceans”. Previously, palaeontologists have had hints of these animals from the nonmineralised remains of minute organisms (<2mm). The new finds are of disarticulated body parts that are unambiguously crustacean, representing branchiopods, copepods and ostracods. They are part of an assemblage known as SCFs (small carbonaceous fossils). They show many signs of modernity. “The fresh taphonomic perspective of SCFs provides the only direct evidence for sophisticated particle-handling in larger-bodied Cambrian arthropods. This Read More ›

Q: LYO challenges: “give me a fact, real or hypothetical, any fact at all about the world which would falsify ID” A: If CSI were demonstrably to come from blind chance and necessity it would (but, with high empirical reliability, it does not . . . )

For some time now, LYO has been a fairly frequent critic in UD’s comment threads. Overnight, he has challenged EA:

I challenge you to give me a fact, real or hypothetical, any fact at all about the world which would falsify ID.

There were prompt short answers that immediately followed the just linked:

UB: A demonstration that inanimate matter can physically establish the relationships required for information to be recorded and transferred.

Joe: Demonstrate that blind and undirected chemical processes can produce a living organism from non-living matter- ie demonstrate that a living organism is reducible to matter, energy, necessity and chance.

A little later, responding to the wider point being raised by LYO, EA said: Read More ›

Schopenhauer’s Mouse Wins?

Concerning the question of “natural evil” or “cruelty in nature” that others have been discussing today, Chesterton writes: But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted Read More ›