Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Abandoning statistical significance in science

From Blakeley B. McShane, David Gal, Andrew Gelman, Christian Robert, Jennifer L. Tackett (22 Sep 2017) at arXiv.org: Abandon Statistical Significance In science publishing and many areas of research, the status quo is a lexicographic decision rule in which any result is first required to have a p-value that surpasses the 0.05 threshold and only then is consideration–often scant–given to such factors as prior and related evidence, plausibility of mechanism, study design and data quality, real world costs and benefits, novelty of finding, and other factors that vary by research domain. There have been recent proposals to change the p-value threshold, but instead we recommend abandoning the null hypothesis significance testing paradigm entirely, leaving p-values as just one of many Read More ›

Well, of course, animal behavior IS an argument against Darwinian gradualism

Remember Gunter Bechly, the paleontologist who got erased from Wikipedia *? At ENST, he says, Based on the Darwinian narrative, we should expect not only that morphological complexity increases gradually in the fossil record, but we should also expect the same for complex animal behavior. This is because according to Darwinists, “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact, but…it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work” (Dawkins 2009). Charles Darwin himself strictly insisted on gradualism and famously quoted the Latin phrase “natura non facit saltus” (“nature does not make jumps”) no fewer than six times in his Origin of Species. He realized that any kind of significant saltational change would Read More ›

Darwinian fundamentalist Jerry Coyne responds to “Atheist Fairytales”

U Chicago prof here: First of all, Weikart doesn’t recognize the irony of his implication that “See? Atheists believe in fairy tales. They’re just as bad as we are!” Well, he might respond that his Christianity is certainly not a fairy tale, because it’s not only based on empirical truths like Jesus Man being resurrected, but also gives us an objective morality and an objective purpose in our lives. But why is his Christianity true and Islam and Hinduism, which inspire different purposes, false? But step back and consider the question: what is that meaning and purpose? As we know, one can discern an infinite number of meanings and life-purposes from just the Bible alone, for its “objective” lessons are Read More ›

Biology majors recruited to face rearward promoting Darwin

From Guillermo Paz-y-Miño C. and Avelina Espinosa at Evolution: Education and Outreach: The controversy around evolution, creationism, and intelligent design resides in a historical struggle between scientific knowledge and popular belief. Four hundred seventy-six students (biology majors n = 237, nonmajors n = 239) at a secular liberal arts private university in Northeastern United States responded to a five-question survey to assess their views about: (1) evolution, creationism, and intelligent design in the science class; (2) students’ attitudes toward evolution; (3) students’ position about the teaching of human evolution; (4) evolution in science exams; and (5) students’ willingness to discuss evolution openly. There were 60.6% of biology majors and 42% of nonmajors supported the exclusive teaching of evolution in the Read More ›

Did the universe never have a chance?

From C. D. McCoy: Abstract: Demarest asserts that we have good evidence for the existence and nature of an initial chance event for the universe. I claim that we have no such evidence and no knowledge of its supposed nature. Against relevant comparison classes her initial chance account is no better, and in some ways worse, than its alternatives. More. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista See also: (if you have the day off) Does the size of the universe sweep us toward atheism? Philosopher: If there is something rather than nothing, questions around God cannot be ignored Waghorn: “Firstly, that on the most plausible demarcation criterion for science, science is constitutionally unable to show theism to be a redundant hypothesis; the debate Read More ›

Do atheists find meaning in life from inventing fairy tales?

From Richard Weikart at the Federalist: The 2018 study in question by David Speed, et al, “What Do You Mean, ‘What Does It All Mean?’ Atheism, Nonreligion, and Life Meaning,” used surveys to try to figure out if atheists find meaning in life or are nihilistic. This survey defined someone as nihilistic if he or she upheld the position: “In my opinion, life does not serve any purpose.” This study found that atheists and non-religious people are not nihilistic, because they claimed that they did have a purpose in life. This is an interesting finding that seems to refute the oft-repeated charge (levied by religious folks) that atheists are nihilistic. However, there is a problem with this finding. The survey Read More ›

Is this a serious attempt to evaluate natural selection as something other than an ideology? At PNAS?

From W. Ford Doolittle and S. Andrew Inkpen at PNAS: Many practicing biologists accept that nothing in their discipline makes sense except in the light of evolution, and that natural selection is evolution’s principal sense-maker. But what natural selection actually is (a force or a statistical outcome, for example) and the levels of the biological hierarchy (genes, organisms, species, or even ecosystems) at which it operates directly are still actively disputed among philosophers and theoretical biologists. Most formulations of evolution by natural selection emphasize the differential reproduction of entities at one or the other of these levels. Some also recognize differential persistence, but in either case the focus is on lineages of material things: even species can be thought of Read More ›

Advice: Reserve now for major conference on theistic evolution

Hey, springtime in Philadelphia. Can you get your institution to pay? 😉 From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Science Today: Update: The deadline to register for this event is Monday, April 2. We strongly advise registering now to reserve your place. As philosophy, theology, and sociology, theistic evolution is a fascinating and extremely influential phenomenon. Less so as science, since on that score it’s basically a rebranding of traditional evolution for a religious audience. Yet the rebranding effort itself carries many lessons with it. One of the remarkable things about theistic evolution is how resistant it is to counterarguments. Evolution News has spent weeks, concluding today, rebutting a book by prominent BioLogos author Dennis Venema, Adam and the Genome. Yet it would be entirely Read More ›

Claim: The multiverse is a logical outcome of the existence of empty space

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The controversial idea that our universe is just a random bubble in an endless, frothing multiverse arises logically from nature’s most innocuous-seeming feature: empty space. Specifically, the seed of the multiverse hypothesis is the inexplicably tiny amount of energy infused in empty space — energy known as the vacuum energy, dark energy or the cosmological constant. Each cubic meter of empty space contains only enough of this energy to light a lightbulb for 11-trillionths of a second. “The bone in our throat,” as the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once put it, is that the vacuum ought to be at least a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more energetic, because of all the matter and Read More ›

In pursuit of the multiverse’s black hole to infinity

From Philip Perry at BigThink: What’s inside a black hole? In most, there’s something called the singularity—an area of such density and intense gravitational force that not even light can escape. Don’t venture too close. Once you enter the event horizon—the outer rim—it’s all over for you. You’d be shredded to ribbons of atoms that’ll be sucked down into its depths. But there may be one exception. Mathematicians have recently unveiled a scenario even more mind-blowing. If you stepped into a Reissner-Nordström-de Sitter black hole, the deterministic nature of the universe would break down, and your past and your future would no longer be connected. The past would simply slide away, while an infinite number of futures would open up Read More ›

“Burning” climate change dissenters

From Peter Rees at Quadrant: The Little Ice age was quite severe in Europe from 1550- 1700. After the prosperity and plenty of the medieval warm period, the LIA led to impoverishment, crop failure, starvation and a resurgence in witch burnings. Every misfortune was an excuse to accuse someone of being a witch working under the direction of Satan. Many of these accusations were the result of some calamity caused by an extreme weather event. For example, in 1626 a hailstorm struck Germany and dropped a metre of hail. Two days later an Arctic front descended on Europe. Rivers froze, grapes on the vine ‘exploded’ and rye and barley crops were destroyed. Then came a severe frost the likes of Read More ›

Researchers: Animals’ “agronomic revolution” earlier than thought

From ScienceDaily: In the history of life on Earth, a dramatic and revolutionary change in the nature of the sea floor occurred in the early Cambrian (541–485 million years ago): the “agronomic revolution.” This phenomenon was coupled with the diversification of marine animals that could burrow into seafloor sediments. Previously, the sea floor was covered by hard microbial mats, and animals were limited to standing on, resting on, or moving horizontally along those mats. In the agronomic revolution, part of the so-called Cambrian Explosion of animal diversity and complexity, vertical burrowers began to churn up the underlying sediments, which softened and oxygenated the subsurface, created new ecological niches, and thus radically transformed the marine ecosystem into one more like that Read More ›

Does eternally inflating cosmology cause probabilities to fail?

From John D. Norton: (2018) Eternal Inflation: When Probabilities Fail. [Preprint] In eternally inflating cosmology, infinitely many pocket universes are seeded. Attempts to show that universes like our observable universe are probable amongst them have failed, since no unique probability measure is recoverable. This lack of definite probabilities is taken to reveal a complete predictive failure. Inductive inference over the pocket universes, it would seem, is impossible. I argue that this conclusion of impossibility mistakes the nature of the problem. It confuses the case in which no inductive inference is possible, with another in which a weaker inductive logic applies. The alternative, applicable inductive logic is determined by background conditions and is the same, non-probabilistic logic as applies to an Read More ›

Genetic literacy project: Are humans genetically loaded for extinction?

From Andrew Porterfield at the Genetic Literacy Project: idea called “genetic load” was developed in the 1930s by famed biologist J.B.S. Haldane, referring to any genome that had increasing numbers of deleterious mutations. The more mutations in a population, the more likely that members of that population couldn’t survive, ultimately threatening the fitness of that population. With enough mutations, a group couldn’t adapt as well to environments, and members would die off. Thus, there’s a limit to natural selection. Now, for some evolutionary biologists, the concept of genetic load has resurfaced as a genuine concern. … He doesn’t think it’s that big a concern. One problem is that modern sequencing has produced much more data, and shown us so many Read More ›