Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Design Disquisitions: Why the Question of Biological Origins Really Matters

Finally, I’ve managed to publish my first blog article! It’s been a rocky start as I had some technical difficulties. Nevertheless, it feels good to get the ball rolling. In this first article, I’ve chosen to take a step back and reflect upon whether or not intelligent design is an important problem to consider in the first place. I outline what I consider to be five strong reasons why this is a matter of great significance.   In the foreword to the intelligent design text, The Design of Life, biochemist William S. Harris notes: The scientific community continues to wrestle with the deep and fundamental questions: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How did a coded language (i.e., DNA) Read More ›

A veteran journalist on why Darwinism is falling apart

From Tom Bethell’s Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates: “The science of neo-Darwinism was poor all along, and supported by very few facts. I have become ever more convinced that, although Darwinism has been promoted as science, its unstated role has been to prop up a philosophy—the philosophy of materialism—and atheism along with it.” (Page 20) “The scientific evidence for evolution is not only weaker than is generally supposed, but as new discoveries have been made since 1959, the reasons for accepting the theory have diminished rather than increased.” Page 45 “Darwinian evolution can be seen as a way of looking at the history of life through the distorting lens of Progress. Given enough time, Read More ›

Not this again?: Monkeys can distinguish large from small quantities just like “low numeracy” human cultures

From ScienceDaily: Adults and children in the US, adults from a ‘low numeracy’ tribe in Bolivia and rhesus monkeys ALL possessed the ability to distinguish between large and small quantities of objects, regardless of the surface area they occupy. This ability is likely a shared evolutionary trait, according to a study. This is news? They’re surely reaching now. The ability to distinguish between more and less is, one need hardly be surprised, found among animals of all types. For example, In a study published last summer in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Kevin C. Burns of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and his colleagues burrowed holes in fallen logs and stored varying numbers of mealworms (beetle larvae) Read More ›

By all means teach evolution in Texas schools

Two Views: Keep requiring evolutionary explanations by Don McLeroy Last year the Texas State Board of Education formed an advisory committee to help them streamline the state’s science standards. The committee, composed of a majority of evolutionists, has ignited a controversy by urging the board to delete the only two evolution standards that require evolutionary explanations. To help clarify what is at stake, consider this question: Do you believe that we humans are only a bunch of molecules that enjoy having conversations? Usually, only atheists will answer “Yes.” Most of us think the idea is ridiculous and answer “No” — it goes against our scientific common sense. Yet, this purely materialistic idea is, in essence, the only officially government sanctioned Read More ›

Earliest animals with true body cavities found at 30 mya earlier than thought

Deuterostomes are animals with true body cavities, featuring a mouth and usually an anus. From Telegraph: The 540 million-year-old “exquisite” fossil was unearthed during an excavation in China by led by University of Cambridge researchers, who say its discovery means humanity can now trace its roots back a further 30 million years. The creature is now thought to be the most primitive example of the deuterostome, one of three “superphylum”, and the group from which human beings and countless other species evolved. Most other early deuterostome groups date from about 510 to 520 million years ago, when they had already begun to diversify into vertebrates, as well sea squirts, as well as animals like starfish, sea urchins and acorn worms. Read More ›

Fake news’s power shrinks with context warning?

As a sort of inoculation? From Natasha Lomas at Tech Crunch: Research conducted by social psychologists at Cambridge University in the UK, and Yale and George Mason in the US, offers a potential strategy for mitigating the spread of misinformation online — involving the use of pro-active warnings designed to contextualize and pre-expose web users to related but fake information in order to debunk factual distortion in advance. The researchers found that combining facts about climate change with a small dose of misinformation — in the form of a warning about potential distortion — helped study participants resist the influence of the false information. More. [link now fixed] Sounds like the usual motivated rubbish, actually. (That is: Give us JOBS Read More ›

How the universe will end, according to pop science

In an age where “science” poaches everything religious, yet another end-of-the-world story whistles into the box, this time via Benjamin Groggin at Digg: The power of science has enabled humans to do everything from study distant galaxies to take high-res photos of Pluto. But one thing science has struggled with is understanding the limits of our universe, and particularly how it will end (or not end). To try to fill this gap in human knowledge, theoretical physicists have come up with a litany of possible ends for the universe, and they’re pretty darn interesting. More. The ends are scattered all over the map, actually. Big Freeze. Big Rip. Big Crunch. Big Slurp… Big everything but insight. And it says a Read More ›

The problem of agit prop street theatre (U/D: UC Berkeley riot footage)

. . . and similar manipulative spin and mob-ocracy games masquerading as truth, news, knowledge/education, etc now clearly needs to be confronted — if we are to think straight and act soundly in good time to avoid going over the cliff as a civilisation: The Parable of Plato’s Cave (and the linked idea of the Overton Window): vid: [youtube d2afuTvUzBQ] . . . has much to teach us in a media-dominated age where manipulators keep trying to push/pull our window of acceptability through deceit, poison, accusation, polarising and more. Especially if we ask ourselves: how does the shadow show come to be, and how is a community so manipulated that it loses contact with objective reality? Acts 27 gives us Read More ›

Split brain does NOT lead to split consciousness?

What? After all the naturalist pop psych lectures we paid good money for at the U? Well, suckers r’ us. From Medical News Today: A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain. Their results are published in the latest edition of the journal Brain. Split brain is a lay term to describe the result of a corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure first performed in the 1940s to Read More ›

Would Newton be allowed to teach science in public schools?

Sir Isaac Newton once said,

“In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.”

The USA’s Founders required the Bill of Rights in the Constitution, including:

make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

Yet now we have US Senators coercing government officials of establishing atheistic materialism in public education, by accusing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of supporting Intelligent Design in schools. Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter on theistic evolution shell game

From Wayne Rossiter, at Shadow of Oz blog: Today, I would like to deal with a couple of classic stances espoused by most theistic evolutionists, and then detail some very specific views and opinions that have come up recently. Perhaps most important among these items is the apparent shell-game at play when a theistic evolutionist excuses God’s direct intervention by pointing to His immanence as the sustainer of all things. For example, in a recent discussion with Doug Axe, Keith Fox offered an oft-used reason for rejecting the idea that God might directly act in the world: … Fox rejects “a God who finds that things aren’t just the way they should be and has to invent the miraculous, because Read More ›

Isn’t “theistic evolution” becoming a bit of a backwater?

Theistic evolution: Darwin was right and we defend Darwinism from critics from whatever quarter. But we feel that God did it somehow anyway (even though Darwin and most of his followers do not think that)… In a time of such ferment around evolution, theistic evolution attracts lazy people with theology credentials and a gift for easy sloganeering. In my line of work (O’Leary for News), one learns to spot these types, whether one wishes to use, abuse, confuse, or refuse them. Put simply: If I belonged to a church that wanted to “take a position” on evolution, I would ask, “Why? Even the Royal Society isn’t sure what its position should be. If we haven’t already gone and said something Read More ›

NASA research now to be free to public

From Peter Dockrill at Science Alert: NASA just announced that any published research funded by the space agency will now be available at no cost, launching a new public web portal that anybody can access. The free online archive comes in response to a new NASA policy, which requires that any NASA-funded research articles in peer-reviewed journals be publicly accessible within one year of publication. More. Some of us think that all publicly funded science should be free, and friends say there is a move in that direction, for a variety of reasons, including transparency: It also follows a growing general trend towards more openness in science research and academia more broadly. With frustration stemming over the commercial control wielded Read More ›