A sendup of science journals How’s That Again? From the Los Angeles Times: In the muddy sediments beneath the deep sea, scientists have found ancient communities of bacteria that have remained virtually unchanged for 2.3 billion years. Researchers say these microscopic organisms are an example of “extreme evolutionary stasis” and represent the greatest lack of evolution ever seen. They may also, paradoxically, prove that Darwin’s theory of evolution is true. ? JPD At least some authors are suspected of ID links No problem. The Dumbdown police will be there shortly. Wherever is “there” these days… Follow UD News at Twitter!

In my last post I challenged materialists to answer the following challenge: Materialist premises lead ineluctably to the following conclusions. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal preferences can be reduced to the impulses caused by the electro-chemical processes of each person’s brain. My challenge to materialists was to show how any of the conclusions I’ve reached based on materialist premises are not in fact compelled by those premises. RDFish responded with a comment you can read for yourself (comment 23), the gist of which was “normal people agree that evil things are evil.” RDFish’s response Read More ›

History prof Richard Weikart reviews Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth: “While I was reading Nancy Pearcey’s new book, Finding Truth, a professor at the state university where I teach circulated a news item about a politician seeking to alter the university’s goals. Instead of facilitating “the search for truth,” the university under this plan would commit itself to meeting “the state’s work-force needs.” I remarked to this professor and other colleagues that many academics had already eliminated “the search for truth.” In the ensuing e-mail conversation, several professors rejected the idea that there is any universal truth, and one professor even described the whole concept of a “search for truth” as incoherent. … The fourth principle involves examining the worldview for Read More ›

Saves time. Here: As a physics professor working in a secular university in Australia, and publishing in scientific journals, and knowing the importance of communicating one’s science to the wider community, I have had many opportunities to see how the system works. Outside of the experts in your field the details do not matter, but a good story does. As an illustration of this let me relate a story from early 2013. At that time I published a cosmology paper,3 which included an interesting concept. I found that using an alternative cosmology in a finite bounded expanding universe, with a unique centre and an edge, one could get the same physical description of the large-scale structure of the universe, which Read More ›

Had to happen: The theory of “intelligent design” holds that the universe and living beings are so complex that they must have been created by an “intelligent” force typically identified as a deity. Conservative Christian opponents of teaching evolution have advocated that “intelligent design” be taught as an alternative. Perzanoski in a phone interview Tuesday dismissed the basis for the complaint. “We categorically deny we were teaching anything about creationism,” he said, adding that many of the allegations “transpired from a discussion [Sullivan] had with the kids” during which they asked him about his personal beliefs. Also: Superintendent Paul Perzanoski denied the ACLU’s allegation and said the 26-year veteran teacher was just responding to a question from a student who Read More ›

Mark Frank apparently no longer wants to play. So I will throw the question I asked him open to any of the other materialists who post here. Imagine the following exchange: Barry: Mr. Materialist, is it possible to imagine a universe in which torturing an infant to death for personal pleasure is actually an affirmatively good thing? Mr. Materialist: The answer to your question is that my metaphysics compel me to say that the phrase “affirmatively good thing” is all but meaningless in the sense you are using it. There is no such thing as “good.” There is no such thing as “evil.” There is only my personal preferences competing with everyone else’s personal preferences, and all of those personal Read More ›

So says New Scientist: Once the fragments had been pieced together, the skeleton was declared to be of the species Australopithecus afarensis. But the skeleton became known as Lucy, inspired by a Beatles song that blasted out of a cassette player as the researchers celebrated their discovery that evening. Forty years later, thanks to its age and completeness, Lucy remains an important specimen. It shows, for instance, that our distant ancestors began to walk upright on two legs long before they developed big brains. It’s no surprise, then, that replicas of the skeleton are on display at museums across the world. But when Gary Sawyer and Mike Smith at the American Museum of Natural History in New York recently began Read More ›

… we wouldn’t find this?: From ScienceDaily: “In addition to being incredibly small in overall size, this jaw has a mixture of traits that combine typical modern human anatomy, such as the presence of a protruding chin, with traits that are more common of our archaic ancestors like Neandertals — for example, very thick bone to hold the molars in place,” said University of Illinois anthropology professor Laura Shackelford, who led the study with anthropologist Fabrice Demeter, of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. This combination of archaic and modern human traits is not unusual, Shackelford said. … Not unusual? For sure not, if you have ever taken the bus or train between Toronto and Ottawa (Canada). In Read More ›

Here. Smarter than you think but maybe not as smart as they do.

Not Even Wrong has the story: Just about ten years ago, my April 1 posting here was a fantasy about the Stanford ITP getting major funding from the Templeton Foundation, using it to fund a program on the multiverse, and renaming themselves the Stanford Templeton Research Institute for Nature, God and Science. The last part hasn’t yet come true yet, but I just noticed the announcement last year of a $878K Inflation, the Multiverse, and Holography grant from Templeton to the SITP, the third part of “A three component Templeton Initiative at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics.” To get some idea of the scale of this funding, note that the entire NSF budget for theoretical HEP is about $12 Read More ›

I have written a “Theological Supplement” to my new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition.” It is theological, not scientific, so it is not part of the new book, and some may feel I should not even be introducing it here at UD. But here is how I introduced the supplement in my new book (in Section 9.4) and explained why I felt the supplementary essays were relevant to the topic of ID, even though they are explicitly (non-fundamentalist) Christian essays. I would especially like to encourage some of our angry ID critics here to take a look. You may be surprised to find you like it more than you expected; Read More ›

In the still active discussion thread on failure of compensation arguments, long term maverick ID (and, I think, still YEC-sympathetic) supporter SalC comments: SalC, 570:    . . .  I’ve argued against using information theory type arguments in defense of ID, it adds way too much confusion. Basic probability will do the job, and basic probability is clear and unassailable. The mutliplicities of interest to ID proponents don’t vary with temperature, whereas the multiplicities from a thermodynamic perspective change with temperature. I find that very problematic for invoking 2LOT in defense of ID. Algorithmically controlled metabolisms (such as realized in life) are low multiplicity constructs as a matter of principle. They are high in information content. But why add more jargon Read More ›

From the excellent Nautilus, like we said: But trawling the Internet, I found a strange paradox: While memes were everywhere, serious meme theory was almost nowhere. Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term. The peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics folded in 2005. “The term has moved away from its theoretical beginnings, and a lot of people don’t know or care about its theoretical use,” philosopher and meme theorist Daniel Dennett told me. What has happened to the idea of the meme, and what does that evolution reveal about its usefulness as a concept? It Read More ›

To “the Singularity”? Science writer John Horgan interviews Neuroskeptic (Discover) It’s a wonder anyone is asking. Aren’t we still baffled as to what consciousness is? Perceptronium vs. the immateriality and consciousness? We might usefully decide first what we are trying to upload. See also: Why the human mind continue to baffle

The importance of information: For life to have begun, something that could encode information and replicate itself was necessary. A molecule—or perhaps a group of molecules—would have done the trick. Once these substances could replicate themselves, it’s believed that natural selection would have stepped in to create new versions of the ‘Great Starter’. Then it just degenerates into the usual big media Darwinsludge: According to Lane, the environment that created life would need to be ‘continuously’ producing the building blocks of RNA in ‘large numbers’. ‘Any form of replication is doubling,’ says Lane. ‘So you need an environment that will feed you.’ ‘This is one of the problems with a soup,’ says Lane, referring to Darwin’s 1871 theory that life Read More ›