Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Junk science publishing house buys up journals?

From at CTV: Researchers are coming forward with examples of junk science distributed by an international company that now has ties to respectable Canadian journals. OMICS Group Inc., an online publishing firm headquartered in India, has been accused of duping academics and publishing bogus research with little to no vetting by experts in the field. A CTV News/Toronto Star investigation found that OMICS purchased two Canadian companies, Andrew John Publishing and Pulsus Group, which have been publishing a number of respected medical journals in fields like cardiology, pathology and optometry. OMICS purchased two Canadian companies, Andrew John Publishing and Pulsus Group. Many scientists, doctors and editors said they were outraged and concerned that a company like OMICS can now essentially Read More ›

Popular Mechanics: Time only exists because Big Bang started out ordered?

From Avery Thompson at Popular Mechanics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the reason you can’t go back to the past. The universe, like an unmixed cup of coffee, started in an extremely ordered state. Over time, the universe mixed together and became less ordered, like what happens when you stir the coffee. Going back in time is unmixing; it can’t be done. The universe can’t be ‘unmixed’. What this means, ultimately, is that time only exists because the Big Bang created a universe that started out ordered. More. There is also a law of conservation of information that would be worth looking out. Biologist Peter Medawar used it in the 1980s to refer to mathematical and computational systems that Read More ›

Our prehistoric ancestors were just as violent as ourselves?

From Amy Middleton at Cosmos: The team calculated the percentage of deaths caused by members within the same species, which might include aggression, infanticide or cannibalism; or, among humans, war, homicide or execution. According to the findings, interpersonal violence represents about 2% of all deaths across the history of humans. This number was close to the estimates for our evolutionary ancestors, which may suggest a certain amount of our tendency to kill each other is built into us from way back when our species first evolved. Importantly, the findings show that the killing of other humans varies across different populations, suggesting that social and cultural factors also play a role. That used to be called human nature, or—by religious sources—original Read More ›

On Comparing Dotted Apples With Solid Oranges

This time the climate alarmist Chicken Littles are lauding a cartoon.  Yes, you read that right, a cartoon.  But the cartoon is fundamentally false in that it links two wildly different kinds of data sets on the same line and pretends they are the same.  Robert Tracinski sets them right here.      

Dark matter theory “running out of room to hide”?

From Jeff Hecht at Nature: Most of the Universe is missing. The motion of the stars and galaxies allows astronomers to weigh it, and when they do, they see a major discrepancy in cosmological accounting. For every gram of ordinary matter that emits and absorbs light, the Universe contains around five grams of matter that responds to gravity, but is invisible to light. Physicists call this stuff dark matter, and as the search to identify it is now in its fourth decade, things are starting to get a little desperate.More. Actually, they are better off than the Darwinists. At last they realize they have a problem. See also: Dark matter: Skeptics wanted Follow UD News at Twitter!

Royal Society meeting on evolution appears to be going ahead

That much-diminished meeting on rethinking evolution, remember, which couldn’t really come off, or not much anyway? Some of us thought it would go the way of the firm that used to teach the peace sign to grizzly bears. But here it is again: — New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives Monday 7 – Wednesday 9 November 2016, The Royal Society, London Organised in partnership with the British Academy by Professor Denis Noble CBE FMedSci FRS, Professor Nancy Cartwright, Sir Patrick Bateson FRS, Professor John Dupré and Professor Kevin Laland — So, are they going to uncork the bottle? At this point, it almost doesn’t matter whether they do or not. Acknowledging the questions that Darwinism Read More ›

War on cancer could benefit from design perspective?

From Oregon State U: Researchers have discovered a mechanism of intercellular communication that helps explain how biological systems and actions – ranging from a beating heart to the ability to hit a home run – function properly most of the time, and in some scenarios quite remarkably. The findings are an important basic advance in how cell sensory systems function. They shed light on the poorly-understood interaction between cells – and they also suggest that some of the damage done by cancer cells can be seen as a “failure to communicate.” … With this accuracy of communication, cells in a heart chamber collectively decide to contract at the appropriate time, and blood gets pumped, dozens of times a minute, for Read More ›

The Ubiquitous Miracles Of Our Existence

In another thread, I asked daveS why he was an atheist. He responded: The proposition “there is no god” also appears to me to be consistent with what I observe in the world. When asked what that meant, he expanded: Well, I don’t know of any inconsistencies between this proposition and my observations. For example, I’m not aware of a god blatantly intervening in the world, as some people say happens. I’ve addressed this in the other thread, but this comment is reflective of what a lot of atheists say is a convincing lack of evidence for god: the supposed lack of observed miracles. Atheists think we live in a world that looks like a world without a god. Of course, that’s Read More ›

Paul Davies: Cosmos mostly devoid of life?

At SciAm: Many distinguished scientists proclaim that the universe is teeming with life, at least some of it intelligent. Biologist Christian de Duve went so far as to call life “a cosmic imperative.” Yet the science has hardly changed. We are almost as much in the dark today about the pathway from nonlife to life as Charles Darwin was when he wrote, “It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.” There is no doubt that SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—has received a huge fillip from the recent discovery of hundreds of extrasolar planets. Astronomers think there could be billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. Read More ›

Peer reviewers influenced by prestige? Say it ain’t so!

Well, Ben Andrew Henry is saying this at The Scientist: When a manuscript goes out for peer review, most medical journals inform their reviewers of the authors’ identities and affiliations, in what’s called a single-blind review. But new research suggests that concealing the identities of authors—double-blind review—could help reduce reviewer bias. In a study published in JAMA this week (September 27), Kanu Okike of Kaiser Moanalua Medical Center in Honolulu and colleagues assigned the same mock manuscript to 119 reviewers for an orthopedic journal. Half of the reviewers were not given the names of the authors, while the other half were told that the paper was written by two past presidents of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons from prestigious Read More ›

Scary climate predictions in the light of Earth’s history

From John Timmer at Ars Technica: Somewhere around a million years ago, the climate underwent a transition. Earlier, it was going through glacial cycles every 40,000 years, but it shifted to taking 100,000 years to cycle (this shift is termed the mid-Pleistocene transition). Snyder’s new record shows that the planet was getting slowly but progressively colder for the first million years or so. But by 1.2 million years ago, the cooling trend began to slow down. After it flattened out, the overall global average temperature has remained stable through to the present, even as glacial cycles caused lots of fluctuations around that average. The analysis can’t separate cause and effect, so there are a number of possibilities here. One is Read More ›

Brazilian chemist explains how intelligent design informs his science

We talk to Marcos Eberlin, Thomson Mass Spectrometry Lab, Brazil: 1. Enezio tells me you are interested in the concept of design in nature. Do you relate it to your work in mass spectrometry or to other, larger issues, or both? J. J. Thomson, the father of mass spectrometry—the man who discovered the electron and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906—once said in a paper he published in Nature. As we conquer peak after peak, we see in front of us regions full of interest and beauty, but we do not see our goal, we do not see the horizon; in the distance tower still higher peaks, which will yield to those who ascend them still wider prospects, and deepen the Read More ›

Does Moore’s Law apply to origin of life?

What we know and don’t know about the origin of life Moore’s Law The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore’s Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore’s Law to hold for at least another two decades. – Vangie Beal, Webopedia Further to life being older than Earth, a kind reader draws our Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter: Time is all in our heads?

From Wayne Rossiter,, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, on the recent claim that time is all in our heads: 1) Don’t a series of events have to pass in order to arrive at a state of the universe in which observers can exist? On atheistic naturalism, doesn’t intelligent life emerge from non-life at one or more places in the cosmos, after some cosmic evolution? If the passage of time is directly related to the experience of the observer, how could time pass leading up to the first observer (or was there no time back there)? 2) What qualifies as an observer? Sure, us (humans). But what/who else? 3) Okay, a third one: If an observer is Read More ›

Time is all in our heads? Then we can reverse time!

Reader Ilion Troas kindly writes to say, re the pop science of the week (Time is all in our heads:” “… In other words, if we do experience the future (which we might), we are not able to store the memories about such processes. You can’t go back in time without this information being erased from your brain. By contrast, if you experience the future by using the usual route “past > present > future,” you accumulate memories and entropy grows.” So, whenever a person acquires amnesia, this causes a (slight) decrease in entropy? If a Mad Scientist (TM) induces amnesia to all human beings, might this effect a wholesale rolling-back of entropy? Might this even enable *him* to reverse Read More ›