Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

New way of producing pluripotent stem cells stuns biologists

Biologists around the world are in shock following the discovery of a revolutionary third way of producing pluripotent cells, which can grow into any type of mature organ. The new research is the brainchild of a 30-year-old Japanese woman who triumphed over academic adversity, according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun (which also publishes the Japan News): Haruko Obokata of the Kobe-based Riken Center for Developmental Biology came up with the idea for her research six years ago. She later developed a surprisingly simple method to create stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells, which can develop into various cells. Her paper was initially rejected by the British journal Nature, which was not convinced of her findings, but thanks to Read More ›

A Quiz for Intelligent Design Critics

In the near decade that I’ve been watching the Intelligent Design movement, one thing has consistently amazed me: the pathological inability of many ID critics to accurately represent what ID actually is, what claims and assumptions are made on the part of the most noteworthy ID proponents, and so on. Even ID critics who have been repeatedly informed about what ID is seem to have a knack for forgetting this in later exchanges. It’s frustrating – and this from a guy who’s not even a defender of ID as science.

But I’m interested in progress on this front, and I think I’ve come up with a good solution: let’s have an ID quiz. And let’s put this quiz to critics, in public, so at the very least we can see whether or not they’re even on the same page as the ID proponents they are criticizing.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson: Religion Not Allowed In Science

With his upcoming reprisal of Carl Sagan’s acclaimed Cosmosdocumentary just weeks away, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s interview with Bill Moyers touches on science and religion as well. At the [16:50] mark Moyers wonders about religious people who are trying to find signs of the divine in all those cold, hard scientific findings. Like most journalists Moyers takes the mythical Warfare Thesis (religion fights the inexorable march of science when not in full retreat and must locate its god in the gaps not yet filled by science) for granted and asked unsurprising questions about the feeble-minded faithful for the Director of the Hayden Planetarium to reluctantly set straight. The exchange reaches peak banality at the [20:50] mark where Tyson finally cuts to the heart Read More ›