Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Upside of dinosaur extinction: Life came back to the asteroid’s crater very quickly

Okay, it wasn’t good news for the dinosaur. Still, as earth scientist Scott K. Johnson tells it at Ars Technica, reporting on a find from the Chicxulub Crater hit 66 million years ago: Usually, new studies of the dino-killing mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous provide another view into just how bloody awful it was. But if you’re a glass-half-full kind of person, it’s interesting to think about how quickly life recovered—not on timescales relevant to an individual organism, necessarily, but in terms of species and ecosystems. … While the lower part of the brown limestone contains just older fossils that were kicked up with the rest of the mud, the upper part of this layer contains tiny worm Read More ›

James Tour

As I write this post, UD’s all-time most accessed post (here) just passed 368,000 views.  Get to know the man who is the subject of that post in this seven-minute video:   https://www.facebook.com/oneforIsrael/videos/2323725797645366/

AI pros boycott new Nature AI journal. Why?

From Matthew Hutson at Science: Computer science was born of a rebellious, hacker culture, a spirit that lives on in the publishing culture of artificial intelligence (AI). The burgeoning field is increasingly turning to conference publications and free, open-review websites while shunning traditional outlets—sentiments dramatically expressed in a growing boycott of a high-profile AI journal. As of 15 May, about 3000 people, mostly academic computer scientists, had signed a petition promising not to submit, review, or edit articles for Nature Machine Intelligence (NMI), a new journal from the publisher Springer Nature set to begin publication in January 2019. The petition, signed by many prominent researchers in AI, is more than just a call for open access. It decries not only Read More ›

Can acknowledgment of design in nature be a part of science?

Recently, Joshua Gidney linked to a piece by philosopher Robin Collins on why design in nature is not part of science. Really, it’s a misleading question that enables academics to huff and puff casuistries, while ducking the key question, as follows: If the evidence clearly points to design in nature (fine-tuning, irreducible complexity, etc.), must science refuse to acknowledge that and accept any alternative as a starting point? The price is high. A multiverse, in which the fine-tuning of our universe is just a fluke, is accepted as an alternative, without evidence. A war on falsifiability ensues. Claims for Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation within the genome) must be accepted, even though they defy any meaningful relationship Read More ›

That panspermia paper at Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology generated some heat: Links and analysis

Readers may recall the paper advocating panspermia (life came from outer space) in the journal Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology. It has attracted paywalled replies from Keith Baverstock and Karin Moelling, Also a paywalled response from the authors. Because many of our readers can’t afford all that reading material, a friend kindly offers some notes to the bunfight: — The reply by Karin Moelling, a German virologist, starts off positive toward the paper. She makes the highly dubious claim that “there are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy.” We just don’t know that. She also makes the strange, unbacked assertion that “Retroviruses caused the Cambrian explosion of all animal species.” She thus seems to endorse the original paper’s claim Read More ›

The Cambrian explosion is back on again and Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt is doing well too

Readers may remember a recent paper that tried to show that the Cambrian explosion was not really an explosion after all. From Gunter Bechly at ENST: The paper allegedly settles the case in favor of a more gradual pattern of appearance as predicted by Darwin’s theory. That would be big news indeed, if it were true. Darwinists bloggers are thrilled To judge from the hype, you might expect that the authors of the new paper have discovered a well-dated temporal transitional series of fossils, documenting a gradual evolution stretched out over a long period of time, rather than an explosive event. Well, far from that. Actually, the article presents no new fossil evidence, no new phylogenetic studies, nor any new Read More ›

Study of causes of science skepticism sails right by the most obvious cause

From psychologist Bastiaan T. Rutjens at Aeon: What makes people distrust science? Surprisingly, not politics Moving beyond domain-specific skepticism, what did we observe about a general trust in science, and the willingness to support science more broadly? The results were quite clear: trust in science was by far the lowest among the religious. In particular, religious orthodoxy was a strong negative predictor of faith in science and the orthodox participants were also the least positive about investing federal money in science. But notice here again political ideology did not contribute any meaningful variance over and beyond religiosity. From these studies there are a couple of lessons to be learned about the current crisis of faith that plagues science. Science skepticism Read More ›

At Nature: We need to “overhaul our views” on heredity

From Nick Lane’s review at Nature of science writer Carl Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity: At a deeper level, the book is a serious treatise on why we need to overhaul our views on heredity. Zimmer shows how the idea evolved from medieval times, with the passing down of possessions, to our modern focus on genes. He recounts how nineteenth-century genetics pioneers Gregor Mendel and August Weismann seemed to bring clarity by defining simple laws of inheritance in sexual organisms, and by distinguishing between sex cells in the germ line and cells in the rest of the body (see J. Maienschein Nature 522, 31–32; 2015). But heredity soon returned to a swamp Read More ›

Study: Species are “compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.”

Yesterday, PaV drew our attention to this story from Marlowe Hood at Phys.org: Sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution Here’s another swatch from it, of interest: “another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between. “If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.” The absence of “in-between” species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.” More. If this replicates, it will do for textbook Darwinism what the Cambrian explosion did. Paper. See also: Startling Result–90% of Animals Less than 200 kya and Researchers: Cambrian explosion was not an explosion after all (It was just an intense Read More ›

Largest particle detector draws a blank on dark matter

From Emily Conover at ScienceNews: The largest particle detector of its kind has failed to turn up any hints of dark matter, despite searching for about a year. Known as XENON1T, the experiment is designed to detect elusive dark matter particles, which are thought to make up most of the matter in the cosmos. Physicists don’t know what dark matter is. One of the most popular explanations is a particle called a WIMP, short for weakly interacting massive particle. More. The researchers saw no collisions with atomic nuclei in 1300 kg of chilled xenon, which is depressing. But at least they are ruling out spaces where dark matter could be. It’s frustrating because, at this point, researchers don’t know whether Read More ›

Skeptic asks, why do people who abandon religion embrace superstition?

From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: Belief in God is declining and belief in ghosts and witches is rising. … It is a robust, longstanding phenomenon that liberals/progressives (especially millennials), including the “sciencey” ones, show more interest in occult ideas than others do. Is that counterintuitive, as many imply, or are we missing something? Vyse offers an interesting take: … So here’s the religion angle: It’s clearly not science that holds superstition in check in Western society. It’s traditional Western religion, which insists on transparent truths (truths that all may know) and forbids attempts at occult, secret truths. Vyse notes that traditionally religious people would be much less likely to resort to the occult following an electoral disaster. In a universe Read More ›

Answering AK: “who determines who is in the right? From my reading of your words, you obviously do not brook the possibility that you may be wrong.”

Where, of course, the very first self-evident, plumbline truth I have stressed is this: error exists. (The crucial diagnostically decisive error of cultural relativism here being exposed by the reference to WHO determines, rather than WHAT defines and determines the truth and the right.) It is one thing when we of UD say that we deal with a pattern of thought, talking points and behaviour; it is another thing entirely when we see it in action, live from the horse’s mouth.  Let me clip from the continued discussion in the correcting hyperskepticism thread: KF, 244:>> I have limited time, so let me clip the following from 229 and respond, as it seems to go to the heart of the matter. Read More ›

Sociologist Steve Fuller’s new book on post-truth in science

Sociologist Steve Fuller, who has written competently about ID, has a new book out. From the publisher: ‘Steve Fuller takes the concept of post-truth to a new level of analysis, explaining the history of “meta” thinking about truth, the institutional structuring of truth through “rules of the game”, and the forms of knowledge that go beyond and problematize this kind of truth. Fuller skewers contemporary thinkers who are in denial about the problematic character of institutional truth and wish to occlude or ignore the processes by which it is produced, and who invent philosophical rationalizations for this denial. This is a readable, bravura performance that develops themes from his earlier writings.’ —Stephen Turner, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida, Read More ›

Call for papers: Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation

Deadline: 30 June 2018 Here. — We proudly announce the list of the scientists who have accepted to give a keynote speech at Wivace 2018. Professors Peter M.A. Sloot (University of Amsterdam) Roberto Serra (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia) for the main track Professors Simone Montangero (University of Padua) Fabio Sciarrino (La Sapienza University, Rome) Ivano Tavernelli (IBM Research, Zurich) for the Special Session on Quantum Computing. CALL FOR PAPERS WIVACE 2018 XIII Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation featuring a special session on Quantum Computing Centro S.Elisabetta, University Campus Parma (Italy), 10-12 September 2018 http://wivace.org/2018/ Submissions are now open for WIVACE 2018, the XIII Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation, that will take place from 10 Read More ›