Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Article on latest OOL theory criticized for design language

From Quanta Magazine: Life emerged so long ago that even the rock formations covering the planet at that time have been destroyed — and with them, most chemical and geological clues to early evolution. “There’s a huge chasm between the origins of life and the last common ancestor,” said Eric Gaucher, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The stretch of time between the origins of life and the last universal common ancestor saw a series of remarkable innovations — the origins of cells, metabolism and the genetic code. But scientists know little about when they happened or the order in which they occurred. Scientists do know that at some point in that time span, living creatures Read More ›

New Yorker Magazine considers the sponge

Here: A sponge essentially carves organs out of negative space, using its layers and jelly to delineate a complex network of channels and pores, which transport nutrients and waste much like a human kidney or bloodstream. This Spartan anatomy is so efficient that a single sponge can filter up to a thousand times its body volume of water in one day. Off the coast of Canada, reefs of glass sponges (so named for their silicate skeletons) can clean more than five hundred vertical feet of overlying water. And, if they take in dirt or toxins, sponges can clear themselves out with a languorous sneeze. … Even some professional biologists disregard sponges as lowly, primitive proto-animals, sitting at the bottom of Read More ›

Hydrothermal vents spout life again, at New Scientist

Here, Michael Le Page reviews biochemist Nick Lane’s new book, The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? Living cells are powered by a totally unexpected process. The energy from food is used to pump protons across a membrane to build up an electrochemical gradient. This gradient drives the machinery of life, like water from a dam driving a turbine. And Lane argues that life has been powered by proton gradients from the very beginning. Forget all those primordial soups or “warm ponds”: only the natural proton gradients found in undersea alkaline hydrothermal vents could have provided the continuous flux of carbon and energy that life requires. These vents may be common on rocky planets so, if this Read More ›

Chimpanzee mind vs. human mind

Earlier we noted that the “We share 99% of our DNA with chimps” claim rises again” (Like Dracula it can’t really die, as it is culturally needed. So it just keeps rising from the grave. Evidence is irrelevant.*) In a paywalled article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Henry Gee reviews Thomas Suddendorf’s The Gap: Suddendorf’s task is to get into the minds of apes to get a more precise idea of what it is that separates us from the other apes. He concludes that the difference springs from six interdependent facilities, some of which are present in some degree in other creatures but which, in humans, reinforce one another, bootstrapping us from the mud and into the firmament. These Read More ›

Philosopher of physics to physicists: Calculate, but don’t shut up

From Tim Maudlin at PBS Nova blog: Many questions about the nature of reality cannot be properly pursued without contemporary physics. Inquiry into the fundamental structure of space, time and matter must take account of the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Philosophers accept this. In fact, several leading philosophers of physics hold doctorates in physics. Yet they chose to affiliate with philosophy departments rather than physics departments because so many physicists strongly discourage questions about the nature of reality. The reigning attitude in physics has been “shut up and calculate”: solve the equations, and do not ask questions about what they mean. … If your goal is only to calculate, this might be sufficient. But understanding existing theories and Read More ›

How Would You Answer These Questions?

A friend writes to inform me that his son’s high school biology teacher is busily indoctrinating him into Darwinism by writing test questions that force the student to spew back Darwinist party-line answers in order to receive credit. Here are the questions: 1. One argument made against evolution is: evolution is random, so it cannot generate complex, orderly organisms. Explain why this statement is false. 2. Some people argue that evolution cannot be observed today. Explain how natural selection is observable in each of the following professionals (and makes their work more difficult): medical professionals, exterminators, and farmers. If the student were in college, I would advise him to simply spew back the party line as the teacher expects. At Read More ›

Eight reasons why atheists change their minds…

Closing our religion coverage a bit late today, here’s an interesting item on eight common factors as to why atheists change their minds. One key reason appears to be that they are propagandized to think that theists are dumb. But then, as one witness writes, And then there’s Leah Libresco—another atheist blogger turned Catholic. Leah recalls the challenging impact of reasonable Christians in her academic circle: “I was in a philosophical debating group, so the strongest pitch I saw was probably the way my Catholic friends rooted their moral, philosophical, or aesthetic arguments in their theology. We covered a huge spread of topics so I got so see a lot of long and winding paths into the consequences of belief.” Read More ›

Richard Lenski: “It is an incontrovertible fact that organisms have changed, or evolved”

Practically since Darwin the various species of finches on the Galápagos Islands have been declared to be decisive, powerful examples of evolutionary theory. An undeniable confirmation of the age-old Epicurean idea that the world arose spontaneously. But exactly how do some bird species on an island group in the middle of the ocean demonstrate such a bold claim?  Read more

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the biggest mystery of the universe …

… that it is knowable and mathematically based. That was said better by Eugene Wigner. The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. – “The Unreasonable Effectiveness “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. – Nobel Laureate physicist Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) See also: At PBS: Puzzle of mathematics is more complex than we sometimes think Astrophysicist Mario Livio: There are actually two facets to the “unreasonable effectiveness,” one that I Read More ›

If neurons evolved more than once on Earth…

From New Scientist: Until recently, the consensus has leaned towards a very Darwinian story. In this scenario, sometime around 600 million years ago, the common ancestor to all animals gave rise to some organisms with simple neural networks. Central nervous systems arose later, allowing for greater coordination and more complex behaviours. These perhaps started out as tight balls of neurons, but eventually gave rise to the magnificently complex primate brain. The story was somewhat turned on its head by the recent whole genome sequence of comb jellies. These small marine animals look like jellyfish but in fact seem to be only distantly related. They use a neural network just beneath their skin and a brain-like knot of neurons at one Read More ›

Babble on, pop neuroscience. The crowd is listening.

From The Register: Neurobabble makes nonsense brain ‘science’ more believable Neuroscientific explanations of human behaviour appeal to people because we’re suckers for simplified, mechanistic brain-centred explanations – even if they’re rubbish or don’t make sense. A droll study by four psychologists tested psychological statements and placed them alongside “irrelevant” information from neuroimaging fMRI scans, to “ask whether such superfluous neuroscience information increases the perceived quality of psychological explanations and begin to explore the possible mechanisms underlying this effect”. They also tested participants’ analytical skills. Some of the psychological insights were well founded, while some were rubbish. Did the inclusion of neuroimaging fMRI make the rubbish sound more authoritative? Apparently so. “Across four experiments, the presence of irrelevant neuroscience information made Read More ›

Is Intelligent Design dead?

Mathematician Jason Rosenhouse has written an extraordinary post in which he pronounces the Intelligent Design movement officially dead: “Truly, ID is dead,” he declares. In this post, I’d like to put forward three good mathematical arguments illustrating why the Intelligent Design movement remains very much alive. All of these arguments come from scientists who are highly qualified in the fields they are writing about. Two of the scientists are committed evolutionists (one is a Darwinian, the other an adherent of the “nearly-neutral” theory of evolution), and the other scientist is the holder of a Caltech Ph.D. who has written two articles for the Journal of Molecular Biology (see here and here for abstracts), as well as co-authoring an article published Read More ›

Octopus movement control is unique

From ScienceDaily: “Octopuses use unique locomotion strategies that are different from those found in other animals,” says Binyamin Hochner of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “This is most likely due to their soft molluscan body that led to the evolution of ‘strange’ morphology, enabling efficient locomotion control without a rigid skeleton.” Odd, isn’t it, how entirely different, very complex systems can just happen to evolve randomly in a universe dominated by mere agglomerations of lifeless material. After poring over videos of octopuses in action, frame by frame, the researchers made several surprising discoveries, as reported in the new study. Despite its bilaterally symmetrical body, the octopus can crawl in any direction relative to its body orientation. The orientation of its Read More ›