Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Rob Sheldon on The Atlantic’s rotting multiverse

Responding to Barry Arrington’s comment that if The Atlantic thinks the multiverse is reaching its sell by date, surely the food waste dumpster looms, physicist Rob Sheldon comments, — That was a pretty ambiguous article, ending with a question. Because if the multiverse is a philosophy that is rotting culture, then we must dig down to its root, and ask “where did it come from?” I think, and we could probably ask 3 philosophers and get 4 opinions, that this multiverse concept is exactly what you expect from materialism. That is, the alternative to multiverse is NOT a determined, deterministic, Newtonian-Laplacian world. Nor is it a QM world of shadowy probabilities becoming realized by observation. Rather, the alternative to multiverse Read More ›

The Medium is Actually NOT the Message

Dennis Venema writes at BioLogos: The fact that several amino acids do in fact bind their codons or anticodons is strong evidence that at least part of the code was formed through chemical interactions My grandchildren have a set of magnetic letters and a magnetic whiteboard to stick them to.  Suppose I stuck several letters on the whiteboard in the following configuration: MY DOG WAGGED HIS TAIL AND JUMPED IN THE CAR This is code just like the genetic code.  The word “dog” is not a dog.  The word “car” is not a car.  Those words signify dog and car.  That is the essence of a code, one thing arbitrarily signifying another. Now, the letters that make up the code Read More ›

ID vs. natural selection — in health care?

Pos-Darwinista writes to say, I came across this rather strange report: Abstract The European Network for Health Technology Assessment (EUnetHTA) guidelines for health economic evaluations represent a consolidated view of non-binding recommendations for assessments of the relative effectiveness of pharmaceuticals or other health technologies. EUnetHTA views itself as the scientific and technological backbone of the development of health technology assessment in the European Union and among its member states and other partners. Unfortunately, the standards for health technology assessment proposed by EUnetHTA do not meet the standards of normal science. They do not support credible claims for the clinical and comparative cost-effectiveness of pharmaceuticals. In rejecting thestandards of normal science the guidelines put to one side the opportunity not only to Read More ›

Gobsmackingly Stupid Things Materialists Say, Entry 7,687

Tom English writes: Folks, there is no empirical evidence that intelligence exists. Psychologists and ethologists refer to it as a hypothetical construct, and define it operationally. Intelligence may play the role of a cause in a model, but it is merely an abstraction of unidentified causes. Well.  One is tempted to agree with Tom’s first sentence at least if it is constrained to apply to materialists ranting on the Internet.  But “no evidence” Tom?  What about the post you just wrote.  Was that not a product of your intelligence?  If Tom gives the standard materialist answer, he would say “no, that post is nothing but the product of the amalgam of physical causes that resulted in a twitchy bag of Read More ›

Is the “Multiverse” Reaching its Sell By Date?

Maybe, if even The Atlantic has articles with this title: The Multiverse Idea is Rotting Culture There’s no way we could ever carry out any experiment to test for the multiverse’s existence in the world, because it’s not in our world. It’s an article of faith, and not a very secure one. What’s more likely: a potentially infinite number of useless parallel universes, or one perfectly ordinary God? There’s nothing wrong with faith, but if it’s not recognized for what it is then monsters start to spawn, not in some distant reality, but right here. No religion is complete without a moral code, but how do you live ethically in our shapeless foam of worlds, invisible to telescopes but throbbing Read More ›

Is most fMRI a false positive? Or the brain far more amazing?

Statistician William M. Briggs reports an amazing medical case where the

“skull was filled largely by fluid, leaving just a thin perimeter of actual brain tissue.”
Here’s the kicker: And yet the man was a married father of two and a civil servant with an IQ of 75, below-average in his intelligence but not mentally disabled…

Read More ›

Rebuttal: Term “pseudoscience” defended

From Steven Novella at Neurologica blog, in response to science writer Katie L. Burke, who argues that the term is counterproductive: Burke concludes that, rather than labeling something pseudoscience, we should describe exactly what it is and how it fails. This is a false choice, however. We can do both. I completely agree that we should not substitute a label for an actual description or analysis of something. This is good advice in any intellectual arena. This is just not what good skeptics and science communicators do. We do give a detailed analysis of exactly why a claim is wrong, and exactly what brand of pseudoscience it is. Suggesting we don’t betrays an unfamiliarity with the vast majority of popular Read More ›

Chronicle of Higher Ed review of Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech

The Kingdom of Speech In “Piecing together a celebrity scientist,” Tom Bartlett writes re Tom Wolfe’s recent book, The Kingdom of Speech might seem an unlikely project for a white-suited literary legend who hung out with Ken Kesey back in the day and later wrote best-selling novels in the social-realist vein. But it actually fits nicely alongside two other books in the Wolfe ouevre: The Painted Word, and From Bauhaus to Our House, both extended essays that send up pretension in the worlds of art and architecture, respectively. My paperback copy of The Painted Word bears the following cover blurb: “Another Blast at the Phonies!” Wolfe is on the hunt for phonies here, too. In the first half of the Read More ›

No one pays attention to science paper rebuttals

From Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica: The classic model of scientific progress is that the field advances when new findings contradict or supersede old ones. But a new study reveals that this process isn’t working today—at least, not in scientific journals, where most data is shared with colleagues. Indeed, the researchers found that “rebuttals scarcely alter scientific perceptions about the original papers.” More. That’s bad news. It’s the Gossip Model of news dissemination. The gossip that flew around town building is recollected far more sharply and frequently than any clarification. See also: Most science findings wrong or useless? The replication crisis (few studies are done to replicate cool new findings) had been noted for decades but no one did anything Read More ›

American Scientist: Stop using word “pseudoscience”

From biologist Katie L. Burke at American Scientist: The word pseudoscience is also used to claim a certain value system: scientism, or valuing and trusting science exclusively. Relatively few people ascribe to scientism, even if they like science. Many if not most people, at least in the United States, value science and see it as an important decision-making tool. But most people—even many scientists—are religious or simply not doggedly empirical, and believe in truths other than those derived from science. In such views, science is a tool with limits, and outside those limits lie beliefs, ideas, and knowledge gathered through art, philosophy, intuition, metaphysics, or culture. When science-affiliated factions use a term that inherently implies that people are ignorant or Read More ›

Evo psych: Watching porn for science

From Steven Hayward at Powerline: … this article actually appears in the current issue of Evolutionary Psychological Science: Duration of Cunnilingus Predicts Estimated Ejaculate Volume in Humans: a Content Analysis of Pornography Abstract Humans perform copulatory behaviors that do not contribute directly to reproduction (e.g., cunnilingus, prolonged copulation). We conducted a content analysis of pornography to investigate whether such behaviors might contribute indirectly to reproduction by influencing ejaculate volume—an indicator of ejaculate quality. We coded 100 professional pornography scenes depicting the same male actor copulating with 100 different females, affording control for between-male differences in estimated ejaculate volume. … (public access) Hayward: A few observations. First, it sounds like a fancy excuse for a bunch of pervs to watch a lot Read More ›

This time, Jerry Coyne is mad at NPR

Weren’t hard enough on Tom Wolfe, author of The Kingdom of Speech From Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True: This weekend, National Public Radio (NPR) host Scott Simon interviewed renowned author Tom Wolfe about Wolfe’s new book The Kingdom of Speech. You can hear the five-minute interview here. I just now listened to it, but several exercised readers emailed me yesterday complaining about Wolfe’s criticisms of evolution—criticisms that weren’t called out by Simon. Oh dear. “Anti-science” strikes again. Jerry treats us to a long rant about the facts of “evolution” (as he understands them). But if interviewers like Simon derailed the discussion by stopping for demands for fidelity to same we would never get to hear what Wolfe has Read More ›

Mashable: Quit promoting just any new planet as Earth-like

From science writer Miriam Kramer at Mashable: Yes, it’s amazing that this possibly rocky planet is orbiting a star just 4 light-years away, possibly close enough to one day launch a mission to, but there is still so much we don’t know about this brave new world. Plus, Proxima b is far from being a twin of our planet. Scientists aren’t sure what kind of atmosphere it has or even if it’s able to support a magnetic field, two things that it would need to sustain habitability in orbit around its active, flaring star. We simply don’t know if it can support water, life or much of anything on its surface at all. Beyond the inaccuracy in this particular case, Read More ›

Darwin, Nicholas Wade and the alt right

From Guardian: Jared Taylor was prominently featured in a Hillary Clinton campaign ad released ahead of her speech denouncing the “alt-right” in Reno on Thursday and “appreciates” the Democratic presidential nominee for “calling attention to the message I have for America”. … Asked to define what the diffuse alt-right stands for, Taylor said there were “areas of disagreement”, but that “the central element of the alt-right is the position it takes on race.” Now here is where it gets interesting: For Taylor, and other members of the alt-right, race is an inescapable biological fact, which has consequences. “The races are not equal and equivalent. If a nation changes demographically, its society will change,” he said. But where does this stuff Read More ›

NPR’s interview with Tom Wolfe on his new book

From Tom “Bonfire of the Vanities” Wolfe’s interview with NPR on his new book, The Kingdom of Speech: The Kingdom of Speech is Tom Wolfe’s first non-fiction book in 16 years. Wolfe tells NPR’s Scott Simon that speech is “the attribute of attributes,” because it’s so unrelated to most other things about animals. “We’ve all been taught that we evolved from animals, and here is something that is totally absent from animal life,” he says. More. … On whether he’s worried that creationists will begin to cite his work as scientific proof I wouldn’t think so, because there’s not a shred of whatever that depends at all on faith, on belief in an extraterrestrial power. In fact, I hate people who go Read More ›