Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Experts challenge wild bee near-extinction claim

From Hank Campbell at Science 2.0: Colony Collapse Disorder, the belief that honeybees, an important pollinator, are being killed off in droves, has been good for environmental fundraising but hasn’t had a scientific foundation. … Nonetheless, it has persisted for 10 years despite data showing that periodic die-offs in bees are as common, and therefore predictable, as solar cycles and California droughts. From the time that records of bees were formally kept, there were reports of mass die-offs without explanation, a thousand years before pesticides even existed. More. Indeed. There are even superstitions connected with the humanly unpredictable ways of bees, including sudden departures and mass die-offs. One problem is that extinction and serious declines feel like Armageddon and many Read More ›

Glimmer: Information is not physical, not like matter or energy

From Philosophy of Science: Abstract: We have a conundrum. The physical basis of information is clearly a highly active research area. Yet the power of information theory comes precisely from separating it from the detailed problems of building physical systems to perform information processing tasks. Developments in quantum information over the last two decades seem to have undermined this separation, leading to suggestions that information is itself a physical entity and must be part of our physical theories, with resource-cost implications. We will consider a variety of ways in which physics seems to a affect computation, but will ultimately argue to the contrary: rejecting the claims that information is physical provides a better basis for understanding the fertile relationship between Read More ›

David Deming: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” misused due to ambiguity

Further to Barry Arrington’s The Materialist “Extraordinary Claims” Double Standard: From geologist David Deming at Philosophia: Abstract In 1979 astronomer Carl Sagan popularized the aphorism “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE). But Sagan never defined the term “extraordinary.” Ambiguity in what constitutes “extraordinary” has led to misuse of the aphorism. ECREE is commonly invoked to discredit research dealing with scientific anomalies, and has even been rhetorically employed in attempts to raise doubts concerning mainstream scientific hypotheses that have substantive empirical support. The origin of ECREE lies in eighteenth-century Enlightenment criticisms of miracles. The most important of these was Hume’s essay On Miracles. Hume precisely defined an extraordinary claim as one that is directly contradicted by a massive amount of existing Read More ›

Can medical research be brought back from rigor mortis?

A review of Richard F. Harris Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Marcus Munafò at Nature: Harris introduces us to the growing field of metascience — the scientific study of science itself — and some of those working in it. These reproducibility firefighters are providing answers to such empirical questions, and identifying interventions. Robert Kaplan and Veronica Irvin at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) showed that when the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute required preregistration of primary outcomes (the main outcome against which success should be judged) in clinical trials, the proportion of studies reporting a benefit fell from 57% to 8%. That’s the good news. The bad news Read More ›

FFT*: Charles unmasks the anti-ID trollish tactic of attacking God, Christian values and worldview themes

In a current thread on SJW invasions in engineering education,  in which yet another anti-ID commenter crosses over into troll territory, Charles does a very important worldviews and cultural agendas dissection. One, that is well worth headlining as *food for thought (as opposed to a point by point across-the-board endorsement): Charles, 51>>The point of the original post was that Engineering was being contaminated with Social Justice Warrior values & viewpoints. As any engineer knows, what makes engineering “Engineering” is the rigorous adherence to physical reality, analysis, and testing to design something that is reliably fit for purpose. As the author’s article at American Conservative elaborates, Prof. Riley’s SJW viewpoint is the antithesis of sound Engineering. kairosfocus summarized this point with Read More ›

Design Disquisitions: Critic’s Corner-Elliott Sober

Over at Design Disquisitions I have a new ‘Critic’s Corner’ post. This one focusses on the work related to ID and evolution by Elliott Sober, a prominent ID critic and philosopher of science. I’ve always seen Sober as a more sophisticated critic of ID. This will be a handy resource for finding pretty much everything that has been published in response to Sober’s attack on ID:   Critic’s Corner: Elliott Sober    

New ID branch at Brazilian University in May

Here: On May 5-6, Discovery-Mackenzie will be inaugurated as a new research group of Mackenzie Presbyterian University, 930 Consolação Street, Higienópolis Campus in São Paulo – Brazil. On the Friday evening of May 5, at 6:00 pm, the Discovery-Mackenzie office will be inaugurated (free entry for subscribers). It will include a library, training room and workshops, reading room and offices. This event will be followed by an inauguration ceremony at 7:30 pm in the auditorium of the American School. At these events, a delegation of renowned fellows from Discovery Institute-USA (DI-USA) will be present, including the president of DI-USA, Steven J. Buri, and three of its top affiliated researchers: Michel Behe, Douglas Axe and Brian Miller. Biochemist Michel Behe is Read More ›

The Materialist “Extraordinary Claims” Double Standard

Materialist Carl Sagan is credited with the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  The dictum is known as the “Sagan Standard,” but it should be known as the “Extraordinary Claims Fallacy,” as explained very well in this article. Materialists often use the Sagan Standard as a cudgel against theistic claims.  For example, as pointed out in the article, they may assert that people do not ordinarily rise from the dead, and therefore the claim that Jesus rose from the dead must be supported by something more than ordinary evidence; it must be supported by some vaguely defined standard of evidence they call “extraordinary evidence.” My purpose here is not to debunk the Sagan Standard.  That has been done many times.  Read More ›

For better science, dismiss the rubbish that “science is self-correcting” in principle

A more honest appraisal can be had from Douglas Allchin at Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science: Abstract: In standard characterizations, science is self-correcting. Scientists examine each other’s work skeptically, try to replicate important discoveries, and thereby expose latent errors. Thus, while science is tentative, it also seems to have a system for correcting whatever mistakes arise. It powerfully explains and justifies the authority of science. Self-correction thus often serves emblematically in promoting science as a superior form of knowledge. But errors can and do occur. Some errors remain uncorrected for long periods. I present five sets of historical observations that indicate a need to rethink the widespread mythos of self-correction. First, some errors persist for decades, wholly undetected. Second, Read More ›

March for Science: Nice little science you have here, it would be a pity if…

Over at Evolution News & Views, David Klinghoffer predicts that the March for Science (April 22) will be a hell of a mess, and thinks maybe that’s okay: But judging from the coverage we’ve seen up till now, it looks like the march is set to be an exercise in self-congratulation and virtue signaling, political axe-grinding, a veiled grab by ideological partisans for power and funding. We venture to predict that most marchers won’t even be scientists but, instead, people looking to seize hold of the prestige of science for their own ends. There’s been much talk of diversity, as organizers have revised the diversity statement on their website multiple times, so that nobody — no possible sexuality, ethnicity, or Read More ›

New Scientist on information: More fundamental than matter and energy?

Are they growing up over there? From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: But what is this information? Is it “ontological” – a real thing from which space, time and matter emerge, just as an atom emerges from fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks and gluons? Or is it “epistemic” – something that just represents our state of knowledge about reality? Here opinions are divided. Cosmologist Paul Davies argues in the book Information and the Nature of Reality that information “occupies the ontological basement”. In other words, it is not about something, it is itself something. Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena disagrees. Even if all of reality emerges from information, he says, this information is Read More ›

Programming by Accident – The Darwinian Paradigm

The last couple of days I have spent too much time trying to rescue a hard drive.  This drive was intended for a Windows 10 system, but it would not appear anywhere in utilities.  BIOS could recognize it was plugged in, but that was it.  Nothing in Explorer, nothing in Disk Management, not even in the command-line diskpart partitioning utility.  In fact, just plugging the drive in would cause all of these to hang until terminated. I went through the whole litany of troubleshooting procedures: BIOS check, memory diagnostics, different slots, direct plug, external connections, a special cloning hardware connection.  Nothing. Finally, after painstaking effort on multiple different machines I was able to get a Linux command-line terminal on one Read More ›

Aired on BBC: Consciousness no different than our ability to digest

From Anna Buckley at BBC: Consciousness is real. Of course it is. We experience it every day. But for Daniel Dennett, consciousness is no more real than the screen on your laptop or your phone. The geeks who make electronic devices call what we see on our screens the “user illusion”. It’s a bit patronising, perhaps, but they’ve got a point. … Our brains, like our bodies, have evolved over hundreds of millions of years. They are the result of millions and millions of years of haphazard trial and error evolutionary experiments. From an evolutionary perspective, our ability to think is no different from our ability to digest, says Dennett. Both these biological activities can be explained by Darwin’s Theory Read More ›

Take back Nobel prizes for accelerating expansion of universe?

Dark energy might be an illusion say some researchers. From Adrian Cho at Science: For the past 20 years, physicists have known that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, as if some bizarre “dark energy” is blowing up space like a balloon. In fact, cosmologists’ well-tested standard model assumes that 69% of the content of the universe is dark energy. However, there may be no need for the mysterious stuff, a team of theorists claims. Instead, the researchers argue, the universe’s acceleration could be driven by variations, or inhomogeneities, in its density. If so, then one of the biggest mysteries in physics could be explained away with nothing other than Albert Einstein’s familiar general theory of relativity. Other researchers Read More ›

Protein families are still improbably astonishing – retraction of Matlock and Swamidass paper in order?

That is, if you write a realistic evolutionary simulation, instead of a simplistic one. From Kirk Durston at Contemplations: A Response to Matlock and Swamidass on the Astonishing Improbability of Protein Families … In their simulation, they began with a perfectly ordered repeating sequence and then mutate it to see if the estimated functional information for non-functional sequences would converge on the actual value of zero bits of information. It did not, producing estimates that were significantly in error from the known value of zero bits. They provided no analysis as to why their results were so badly off. I wrote a more realistic simulation that began with the same, highly ordered repeating sequence. From that seed sequence the program Read More ›