2014

Readers who were taught about ring species as evidence for evolution in high school are due for a surprise: it now appears that there aren’t any, after all. There were only a few alleged cases to begin with, but now, they’ve all been discredited. The last “good example” of a ring species has just been struck off the list, in a new paper by Miguel Alcaide et al. in Nature “What’s a ring species?” I hear some of you ask. In a recent post titled, There are no ring species, which is well worth reading, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne describes the process whereby ring species supposedly originate: It works like this: a species expands its range and encounters a roughly Read More ›

Over three months ago I posted Psychopath as Übermensch or Nietzsche at Columbine, in which I wrote: Let us assume for the sake of argument that metaphysical naturalism is a true account of reality. What if a person were able to act based on a clear-eyed and unsentimental understanding of the consequences outlined above? If that person had the courage not to be overwhelmed by the utter meaningless of existence, he would be transformed. He would be bold, self-confident, assertive, uninhibited, and unrestrained. He would consider empathy to be nothing but weak-kneed sentimentality. To him others would not be ends; they would be objects to be exploited for his own gratification. He would not mind being called cruel, because he Read More ›

A thermodynamically closed system that is far from equilibrium can increase the amount of physical design provided it is either front loaded or has an intelligent agent (like a human) within it. A simple example: A human on a large nuclear powered space ship can write software and compose music or many other designs. The space ship is closed but far from equilibrium. But complexity can still increase because of the human intelligent agent. Consider then a robot whose sole purpose is to make other robots like it or even unlike it in a similarly thermodynamically closed system. It can do this provided the software is front loaded into the robot. Can the robot make something more irreducibly complex than Read More ›

A few days ago, Professor Jerry Coyne attacked fellow atheist and Darwinist Michael Ruse, for going too easy on the cosmological argument for God’s existence in an interview with philosopher Gary Gutting, titled, Does Evolution Explain Religious Beliefs? (New York Times, July 8, 2014). In the interview, Ruse, a professor of philosophy at Florida State University and the author of the forthcoming book Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, indicated that although he did not find the traditional philosophical arguments for God’s existence at all persuasive, he could respect people who did, and he added that he found Richard Dawkins’ attempted refutations of these arguments downright embarrassing, as a philosopher: If the person of faith wants to say that God Read More ›