July 2013

Over at his Website, Why Evolution is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has written three unintentionally funny posts in the past week. I thought readers of Uncommon Descent might enjoy them, so here goes. Coyne gets taken in by a fake photo of Charles Darwin Recently, Professor Coyne wrote a post titled, What Darwin looked like (10 July 2013), in which he displayed a colorized copy (emailed to him by a reader named Fred, and colorized by a talented 18-year-old artist named “Zuzah” from Denmark) of what Coyne assured his readers was an original photo of Charles Darwin. In his own words: I thought I’d seen every photo of Darwin, but didn’t know this one, so I suspected it was a Read More ›

No sooner had Dan Graur finished his talk at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution this week on how if ENCODE’s conclusion (that much of our genome is functional rather than junk) is true, then evolution is false, but that ENCODE most assuredly is not true, that the human genome is small, low on genes, unoriginal and repetitive, and that junk DNA is a known known, then new research out of John Mattick’s lab took the next step in the inexorable march of science showing that, once again, it’s not good to bet against Mother Nature. While Graur argued that only about 5% of our genome can be functional because, after all, the pufferfish’s genome Read More ›

Di.. Eb.., or Dieb,  on the blog DiEbLog, has posted a number of questions, relating to the paper A General Theory of Information Cost Incurred by Successful Search. He raises a number of questions and objections to the paper. Firstly, Dieb objects that the quasi-Bayesian calculation on Page 56 is incorrect, although it obtains the correct result. However, the calculation is called a quasi-Bayesian calculation because it engages in hand-waving rather than presenting a rigorous proof. The text in question is shortly after a theorem and is intended to explicate the consequences of that theorem rather than rigorously prove its result. The calculation is not incorrect, but rather deliberately oversimplified. Secondly, Dieb objects that many quite different searches can be Read More ›

EL: “why is there something rather than nothing? I do not think it can be resolved by science. But I could be wrong.” No, you are not wrong. Science is the study of the natural world. It presupposes the existence and intelligibility of the natural world. It cannot account for the existence and intelligibility of the natural world. EL: “I think we will find that life is not particularly unlikely, given the universe we have.” There is no particular reason to believe this other than that it suits your metaphysical predisposition to reject ID. It is no different from saying “life is a brute fact that I can’t explain.” EL: “fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of scientific enquiry in general, Read More ›

Evolution has always had a love-hate relationship with biological junk. When scientists discover something new in biology but don’t understand it, evolutionists—who believe everything in the universe just happened to form by chance—decide it is a useless evolutionary leftover. Such a useless design is pressed into service as an evolution apologetic. Is not our useless and dangerous appendix yet another proof text of Darwinism? Later, when the function is eventually uncovered, evolutionists begrudgingly admit to it while maintaining that its clumsiness still proves evolution. As Richard Dawkins explained, in response to the growing knowledge of how well our “backward” retina works, “it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!” Just because it works doesn’t mean Read More ›