Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Two Great Gifts

In the spirit of Christmas, I thought I would share with you all two intellectual gifts I received from my parents growing up. Read More

Detecting the supernatural: Why science doesn’t presuppose methodological naturalism, after all

Memo to Eugenie Scott and the National Center for Science Education: the claim that scientists must explain the natural world in terms of natural processes alone, eschewing all supernatural explanations, is now being openly denied by three leading scientists who are also outspoken atheists. I’m referring to physicist Sean Carroll, and biologists Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers, who hold that there are circumstances under which scientists can legitimately infer the existence of supernatural causes. That’s a pretty formidable trio. The NCSE is perfectly free to disown these scientists if it wishes, but I think it would be severely undermining its own credibility if it did so. Let me state at the outset that Intelligent Design, while open to the Read More ›

From Biocompare, “The Disease Fighting Potential of Long Non-coding RNAs”

From here: Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are mysterious molecules. They are almost-proteins—transcripts of about 200 or more nucleotides that appear not to encode proteins. Given their noncoding status, it is perhaps surprising that many lncRNAs are expressed in very specific anatomical or developmental patterns, suggesting that their regulation is of biological importance. At the cellular level, most lncRNAs, also called large intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs), are localized to the nucleus. In addition, most lncRNAs either overlap with genes that encode proteins, are transcribed antisense to genes that encode proteins or are expressed as intergenic or intronic regions. But why spend energy tightly regulating the expression and localization of RNA molecules that don’t eventually end up as proteins? And what do Read More ›

Casey Luskin Reports On Last Night’s Visit to the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club

Last night, a few of us from Discovery Institute attended the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club meetup discussion on “Is Intelligent Design Science?” I’ve never met so many thoughtful and open-minded ID critics! One atheist gentleman even said that he would have to abandon one of the arguments he’s been using against ID and research the ID position more thoroughly. He came to realize that, although dismissing ID out of hand as ‘unscientific’ offered an easy way to reject ID without careful consideration and analysis of its claims, the assertion that ID isn’t science is a very difficult position to defend philosophically. When we adequately addressed objections, our detractors would concede the point. Why can’t all ID-critics be like that? Some Read More ›

New Book: “Lynn Margulis — The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel” (Dorion Sagan)

Lynn Margulis’s son, Dorion Sagan, co-author of Margulis’s well-known book Acquiring Genomes, has written a book dedicated to his mother’s life and work. The book description on Amazon reads, Tireless, controversial, and hugely inspirational to those who knew her or encountered her work, Lynn Margulis was a scientist whose intellectual energy and interests knew no bounds. Best known for her work on the origins of eukaryotic cells, the Gaia hypothesis, and symbiogenesis as a driving force in evolution, her work has forever changed the way we understand life on Earth. When Margulis passed away in 2011, she left behind a groundbreaking scientific legacy that spanned decades. In this collection, Dorion Sagan, Margulis’s son and longtime collaborator, gathers together the voices of Read More ›

Tonight In Seattle, “Is Intelligent Design Science?”

Come along this evening (7-9pm) to the Lake Hills Library in Seattle for a discussion hosted by the Seattle Analytic Philosophy Club on “Is Intelligent Design Science?” Casey Luskin, myself (Jonathan M.) and Josh Youngkin from Discovery Institute will be there. Go here for details!

That Silly Belief That Life is Sacred and Inviolable

The twentieth century’s eugenics movement was eventually discarded, but eugenics did not go away entirely. Today eugenics continues, but it is a much more diverse and technologically sophisticated. There are the so-called eugenic abortions where the unborn with higher disease risks are “terminated.” And today’s technology allows for specific embryos, and even genes, to be selected. There seems to be, as Nathaniel Comfort observed this month, a eugenic impulse that drives us to seek a better human race. Underlying such health concerns, however, are the usual less benevolent motivations. In addition to the promised health benefits, Comfort explains that eugenics offers an intellectual thrill, and the profits of genetic biomedicine. Such lures are, explains Comfort, “too great for us to do Read More ›

Death is Evolution’s Engine of Progress

Nature is, as Tennyson lamented, red in tooth and claw, but Darwinism turned death and bloodshed into a virtue. It is evolution’s natural selection that makes way for the more fit by killing off the less fit. Natural selection did not, indeed it cannot, induce better mutations. But when by chance they luckily arise, then they propagate at the cost of the lesser designs. Spencer’s phrase “the survival of the fittest,” which Darwin adopted, is more optimistic sounding but no less telling. With evolution, death is the engine of progress. Or as Matt Ridley explained today, … Read more

More Functions For “Junk DNA”

A new paper has just been published in the journal Genome Biology by John Rinn and David Kelley, identifying a role for transposable elements in gene regulation in stem cells. Science Daily reports on the paper: Over a decade after sequencing the human genome, it has now become clear that the genome is not mostly ‘junk’ as previously thought. In fact, the ENCODE project consortium of dozens of labs and petabytes of data have determined that these ‘noncoding’ regions house everything from disease trait loci to important regulatory signals, all the way through to new types of RNA-based genes. Yet over 70 years ago, it was first proclaimed that all this junk wasn’t so junky. Barbara McClintock discovered the first utility of all Read More ›

Libby Anne (part 3): A reply to her article, “How I lost faith in the pro-life movement”

In my previous two posts (see here and here) on feminist atheist Libby Anne’s Love, Joy, Feminism blog, I critiqued her embrace of evolutionary naturalism, and her rejection of the view that the cosmos was designed by an Intelligent Being. I then exposed the deficiencies in her ethical views, which have led her to conclude that human beings do not become persons until the moment of birth, and that abortion should be a woman’s legal right at any time before her baby is born. In my final post, I’m going to address the factual claims that Libby Anne makes in a post that subsequently went viral, entitled, How I lost faith in the pro-life movement. Her opening paragraph immediately grabs Read More ›

Enter Two More Ideas For Earth-Moon Evolution

Evolutionary thought holds that the universe, the quasars, the galaxies, the solar systems, the planets and moons arose spontaneously by chance events and natural law. How that occurred is uncertain and under scientific investigation. That it occurred is not uncertain, it is a fact. These two different departments of evolutionary thought are disjoint. The fact of evolution does not derive from the particular theories of how it could have happened. It must be that way because there is substantial uncertainty of how it could have happened. Theories of the Solar system evolution, for instance, fall into two broad categories. In the monistic theories, the planets and Sun arise from the same process, such as in Laplace’s Nebular Hypothesis. In dualistic Read More ›

The Silent Yawn

A culture’s creation narrative is foundational, for it forms the template for everything else. One of the consequences of evolution—the belief that the world spontaneously arose by itself—is that it underwrites moral relativism, which is not to say there is no right and wrong but rather that right and wrong is something that we decide. And since evolution is true, it is to evolution that we go for our rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaims the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But with evolution there is no such endowment, for there is Read More ›

Now Evolutionists Say Evolution Created Evolution (Again)

It’s another rags-to-riches evolutionary story, this time with epigenetics going from dog house to white house. First evolutionists denied epigenetics, then they said epigenetics are inconsequential and now they say epigenetics may be instrumental in, err, the origin of the human brain. That’s quite a turn around. When (i) leading evolutionists such as Jerry Coyneare saying epigenetic characters are not usually inherited past one or two generations and so are not “going to change our concept of evolution,” while (ii) research papers are concluding that epigenetic changes, coordinated with genetic changes, “could play a role in the evolution of the primate brain,” then you know something is wrong. Evolutionists are having to rewrite their story at an ever increasing rate to try to Read More ›

There is a Big Misconception Right Now About the Impact of Evolution

Ideas have consequences. Over the past century evolutionary thought has become dominant in much more than just the historical sciences. Other branches of science as well as education, law, history, public policy and media have increasingly been influenced by the idea that the world arose spontaneously. This tremendous influence of evolutionary thought has consequences that are largely misunderstood. The misconception is that, while there have been some missteps along the way such as in the twentieth century’s eugenics movement, those were both minor and largely behind us now and the greater and lasting consequences of evolution have been positive. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Read more