Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Month

March 2012

James Barham at Best Schools ‘fesses up III: Biology (like the social sciences) is guilty of massive and systematic equivocation

"Biologists are constantly basing nearly all their work on an unspoken assumption of the “usefulness” or “efficiency” or “rationality” or “intelligence” of biological systems, even if they would strenuously deny the fact. " Read More ›

These New Protein Findings Might be a Problem Even According to the Evolutionist’s Own Numbers

The BSC4 gene inSaccharomyces cerevisiae, or baker’s yeast, was interesting to researchers because of its leaky stop codon but then it became more interesting because it only showed up in that one particular organism. The BSC4 gene is yet another example of a species-specific, orde novo, protein-coding gene. In this case, the protein appears to be involved in DNA repair and helping the organisms cope with nutrient-poor environments. And if this protein is anything like a typical protein, then evolution, even by the evolutionist’s own reckoning, would not be able to construct such low-probability designs. The BSC4 gene must have been constructed in only the past 10 million years or so. And evolutionists cannot appeal to speculative mechanisms. No exon shuffling, Read More ›

Evolutionist PZ Myers is Now Saying That The Gorilla Genome Contradicts Creationism

Remember all those unique human hearing genes that evolutionists said must have undergone “accelerated” evolution because of human language, but then similar genes showed up in the gorilla too? Evolutionists had to conclude that not only was there accelerated evolution, but amazingly it must have occurred in parallel, in both the human and gorilla lineages. So if human language was the reason for the accelerated evolution in the human lineage, the cause in the gorilla lineage was “entirely different, but as-yet-unknown.”  Read more

From The Best Schools: A Long Row of Days: Atheist Redemption in Russian playwright Chekhov

  James Barham offers (March 12, 2012), “Another way of understanding Chekhov’s position is as the contrary of John Gray’s. That contemporary pessimist was observed here a while ago to be essentially saying to science and religion: “A plague on both your houses.” We may think of Chekhov as saying the exact opposite: We need both science and religion. Or, more exactly, we need the core of faith in the goodness of humanity that lies at the common root of both science and religion. Chekhov’s great subject is how we are to live our lives in the absence of all ideologies—how to get through the “long row of days” facing each of us. In this, he is the clear forerunner Read More ›

Napoleon’s Revenge: An Evolutionist is Suggesting We Make People Smaller and Give Them Pills to Fight Global Warming

A professor of philosophy and bioethics at New York University is now saying that since humans caused global warming, humans should fix the problem. But since market-based and geoengineering solutions are too risky and ineffective, we need to engineer humans to consume less, for example, by making them smaller.  Read more