Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Computer science: “Write-only articles”

Not an improvement, apparently, on read-only memory. From Bio-Complexity’s editor-in-chief Robert Marks II, some more thoughts on peer review: Authors are often asked to write short autobiographies in the third person at the end of their papers. In these biographies we often read self-congratulatory phrases like “Dr. Pythagoras is the author of over 500 journal and conference papers.” This is like saying “Dr. Pythagoras pounded 500 nails into various types of lumber.” The pounding of the nails is unimportant. It’s what you’ve built that counts. I once found myself in a discussion about publication count with a newly minted acquaintance at a neural network conference in Japan. He asked me how many publications I had. I told him. He looked Read More ›

Hunter on “shared error” argument for common ancestry

As at Biologos. He writes: Venema’s argument is that harmful mutations shared amongst different species, such as the human and chimpanzee, are powerful and compelling evidence for evolution. These harmful mutations disable a useful gene and, importantly, the mutations are identical. Are not such harmful, shared, mutations analogous to identical typos in the term papers handed in by different students, or in historical manuscripts? Such typos are tell-tale indicators of a common source, for it is unlikely that the same typo would have occurred independently, by chance, in the same place, in different documents. Instead, the documents share a common source. Now imagine not one, but several such typos, all identical, in the two manuscripts. Surely the evidence is now Read More ›

How did the body come to be seen as a machine?

From Jessica Riskin at ABC: Since Weismann’s [a 19th century German biologist] refutation of Lamarckism was obviously false, you might think it couldn’t have had much influence. On the contrary. Weismann actually had a huge influence on Darwinism that has lasted until the present day. Today’s neo-Darwinists—people such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—are really Weismannians (in fact, Dawkins has called himself an ‘extreme Weismannian’). Even outside of evolutionary biology, some of the most influential thinkers and writers in biology and cognitive science today have adopted the Weismannian view that living organisms are essentially passive, made of dumb and inert mechanical parts. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker is an example: he has written that the human mind can be reduced to Read More ›

James Shapiro on intelligence in nature

Biochemist James Shapiro told Suzan Mazur in The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” Genome change is not the result of accidents. If you have accidents and they’re not fixed, the cells die. It’s in the course of fixing damage or responding to damage or responding to other inputs—in the case I studied, it was starvation—that cells turn on the systems they have for restructuring their genomes. So what we have is something different from accidents and mistakes as a source of genetic change. We have what I call “natural genetic engineering.” Cells are acting on their own genomes in a large variety of well-defined non-random ways to bring about change. p. 15 This is consistent Read More ›

Michael Denton on the discontinuity of nature

Michael Denton does not quarrel with common descent in principle but finds that there is no good evidence for the continuous series of small changes over time that Darwin’s theory of evolution requires. Rather, after summarizing the evidence in Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016), he writes, There is a tree of life. There is no doubt that all extant life forms are related and descended from a primeval ancestral form at the base of the tree. But there is no evidence to support the Darwinian claim that the tree is a functional continuum where it is possible to move from the base of te trunk to all the most peripheral branches in tiny incremental adaptive steps. On the Read More ›

An unusually steep hill for naturalism to climb

Readers may recall cosmologist Sean Carroll and his new book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. At Science, science philosopher Barry Loewer reviews it, noting Sean Carroll’s “poetic naturalism” tries to make naturalism palatable to the rest of us. However, the reviewer points out that there are unanswered questions. The last few paragraphs ask some questions that many of us would want to ask Carroll. For example: “Another challenge is understanding how thought, consciousness, and free will fit into physical theory. [. . .] But poetic naturalism should not be satisfied until it can include an account of how these elements emerge from fundamental physics or, if such an account is not forthcoming, Read More ›

Mainstreaming ID in Denmark

Tom Woodward, author of Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design (2003) and its sequel (2006), Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, is coauthor with Dr. James Gills of The Mysterious Epigenome: What Lies Beyond DNA (2012), writes to tell us, Just a quick report from the front lines of the ID/Darwin debate here in Copenhagen, Denmark, as I near the end of a 15-day speaking tour of those two countries. First, for another few hours, you can see a surprise major article in the largest daily newspaper of Denmark, The Jutland Post (Jyllens-Posten), where here you can scroll down to see the headline at least, and a pic of me holding up one of our Read More ›

Nicholas Kristof: More self-deceptive blather on academic freedom

From Nicholas Kristof at New York Times, who has just discovered  that most “liberals” don’t agree that close-mindedness is a bad thing (he wrote about it recently, and now follows up): Third, when scholars cluster on the left end of the spectrum, they marginalize themselves. We desperately need academics like sociologists and anthropologists influencing American public policy on issues like poverty, yet when they are in an outer-left orbit, their wisdom often goes untapped. In contrast, economists remain influential. I wonder if that isn’t partly because there is a critical mass of Republican economists who battle the Democratic economists and thus tether the discipline to the American mainstream. I’ve had scores of earnest conversations with scholars on these issues. Many Read More ›

New BioLogos book on evangelicals “changing their minds” about evolution

Priceless: Perhaps no topic appears as potentially threatening to evangelicals as evolution. The very idea seems to exclude God from the creation the book of Genesis celebrates. Yet many evangelicals have come to accept the conclusions of science while still holding to a vigorous belief in God and the Bible. How did they make this journey? How did they come to embrace both evolution and faith? Here are stories from a community of people who love Jesus and honor the authority of the Bible, but who also agree with what science says about the cosmos, our planet and the life that so abundantly fills it. Among the contributors are Scientists such as … More. Just think. The rest of the Read More ›

Cornelius Hunter on human chromosome 2

Response to Dennis Venema, Part II. From Cornelius Hunter: The Naked Ape: BioLogos on Human Chromosome Two There is one piece of contradictory evidence I did not discuss in my previous article. I omitted it because Venema gives it special emphasis and so it merits its own article. This evidence is that while we humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 46, the chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla each have 24 pairs of chromosomes, for a total of 48. In my previous article I pointed out several differences in the primate genomes that contradict evolutionary theory. This difference in chromosome count is yet another fundamental problem for evolution. According to evolution, humans have 23 rather than 24 pairs Read More ›

H. Allen Orr on DNA as information

From H. Allen Orr in “DNA: ‘The Power of the Beautiful Experiment,’” in a review of Matthew Cobb’s Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code (Basic Books)New York Review of Books: The “information” that is “encoded” in DNA gets “read” by cells. You likely didn’t notice because this is now a nearly reflexive way of talking about DNA, even in popular culture. It’s just obvious to us that DNA stores information—for curly hair or blue eyes—and it’s natural to think of it as an information storage device much like the hard disk of a computer. Yet one of Cobb’s main points is that this is a remarkably recent way of thinking about biology. True Then it gets Read More ›

British science culture (and science) festival features some people we know

A friend draws our attention to a current festival in Britain, “How the light gets in,” with presenters in the sci tech area such as: Steve Fuller, one of the few philosophers of science who has tried to write seriously about the ID community (Dissent over Descent) Massimo Pigliucci (one of the Altenberg 16, back when challenging Darwinism wasn’t normal) “This morning, Massimo Pigliucci poses the radical question: does science need evidence?”* Rupert Sheldrake, who challenged Darwinism back in the late 1960s, when it was the sign of a sick mind. Denis Noble, who, many say, is the point man behind the rethinking evolution project (here). See how many others you spot. * An attempted non-radical answer: Not if science Read More ›

DNA as the “littlest origami”

From Futurism: When it comes to building at the nanoscale, DNA is the construction material of choice. That may seem a little strange. After all, DNA is nature’s hard drive, encoding the software of life. But the macromolecule turns out to be a very hardy and versatile building material, perfectly suited to building complex structures with dimensions measured in nanometers-what is known as “DNA origami.” Biology has settled on the DNA double helix as the default configuration, but there are many more possibilities. Rearrange the base pairs or insert other molecules, and DNA can twist into just about any shape you could wish for. More. “Biology has settled on DNA?” After due consideration, at a series of committee meetings? When Read More ›

Mars emerging from Ice Age?

But so? Mars is interesting. But, apart from life, why do we study it with such intensity? Just wondeing. From ScienceDaily: “Because the climate on Mars fluctuates with larger swings in axial tilt, and ice will distribute differently for each swing, Mars would look substantially different in the past than it does now,” said Smith. “Furthermore, because Mars has no oceans at present, it represents a simplified ‘laboratory’ for understanding climate science on Earth.” Detailed measurements of ice thickness show that about 87,000 cubic kilometers of ice have accumulated at the poles since the end of the last ice age about 370,000 years ago; the majority of the material accumulated at the martian north pole. This volume is equivalent to Read More ›