Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

New biography of the original ID guy, Alfred Russel Wallace

Klinghoffer: A spiritualist, libertarian socialist, women’s rights advocate, and critic of Victorian social convention, Alfred Russel Wallace was in every sense a rebel who challenged the emergent scientific certainties of Victorian England by arguing for a natural world imbued with purpose and spiritual significance. Read More ›

AI That Can Read Minds? Deconstructing AI Hype

From computer engineering prof Robert J. Marks at Mind Matters Today: Fake and misleading AI news is everywhere today. Here’s an example I  ran across recently: A  headline from a large-circulation daily’s  web page screams: “No more secrets! New mind-reading machine can translate your thoughts and display them as text INSTANTLY!” Not just “instantly,” notice, but “INSTANTLY!” The Daily Mail is the United Kingdom’s second biggest-selling daily newspaper. … As with all hype, there is some truth in the piece. A headline like “New AI outperforms humans by a factor of a BILLION!” could be written about a calculator that computes specific values of trig functions. Calculating the cosine of 27.3 degrees from scratch to six significant places is a laborious Read More ›

Rob Sheldon’s thoughts on physicists’ “warped” view of time

Further to Carlo Rovelli’s views on time travel (only a technological problem, not a scientific one) and the order of time in general,  views, as set out in The Order of Time, our color commentator Rob Sheldon offers, — If I can speculate about what goes on in physicist’s heads, this issue about time is an attempt to force symmetry on the universe. Sorta like the 2-yr old who wants to regularize irregular verbs. “Mommy not home; she goed to the store.” Einstein’s Special Relativity (SR) argued that time was a fourth dimension and should not be treated any differently than height, width, and length. To get the units right, one only needed to multiply time by the speed of light–c*t. Only Read More ›

Cosmologist Carlo Rovelli: Future time travel only a technological problem

Not a scientific one. Dan Falk interviews physicist Carlo Rovelli about “about the nature of time, whether it has a beginning and if humans might one day master time travel:” Could time travel ever be possible? Well, “time traveling” is what we do all our lives, isn’t it? But you mean, can we jump quickly to the past or to the future. Jumping to the far future is certainly possible. It’s only a technological problem, not a scientific one. One way is to move very fast. When you move fast, time passes very slowly for you — so if you could run fast enough around your house many times, you could do that in a time span which for you Read More ›

Evolutionary informatics: A simplified explanation of Winston Ewert’s dependency graph

From Cornelius Hunter at Evolution News and Science Today: A recent paper in the journal BIO-Complexity, authored by Winston Ewert, uses a dependency graph approach to model the relationships between the species. This idea is inspired by computer science which makes great use of dependency graphs for packaging of software and optimization of software architecture. Complicated software applications typically use a wealth of lower level software routines. These routines have been developed, tested, and stored in modules for use by higher level applications. When this happens the application inherits the lower-level software and has a dependency on those modules. … What Ewert has developed is a model to explain the pattern of similarities in different organisms that mimics how computer Read More ›

Krauss Ousted

Headline in azcentral:  Renowned ASU professor Lawrence Krauss ousted from post after sex misconduct claims  

Researchers: FOXP2 is not the “language” gene

From ScienceDaily: “A paper published in 2002 (Enard et al., Nature 418, 869-872) claimed there was a selective sweep relatively recently in human evolutionary history that could largely account for our linguistic abilities and even help explain how modern humans were able to flourish so rapidly in Africa within the last 50-100,000 years,” says senior author Brenna Henn, a population geneticist at Stony Brook University and UC Davis. “I was immediately interested in dating the selective sweep and re-analyzing FOXP2 with larger and more diverse datasets, especially in more African populations.” Henn says that when the original 2002 work was done, the researchers did not have access to the modern sequencing technology that now provides data on whole genomes, so Read More ›

At the New York Times: Defending the failures of social science as “science”

Even while prominent people in that field are coming to terms with the problem. From a New York Times science writer: It is one thing to frisk the studies appearing almost daily in journals that form the current back-and-forth of behavior research. It is somewhat different to call out experiments that became classics — and world-famous outside of psychology — because they dramatized something people recognized in themselves and in others. They live in the common culture as powerful metaphors, explanations for aspects of our behavior that we sense are true and that are captured somehow in a laboratory mini-drama constructed by an inventive researcher, or research team. Huh? Whether many people recognized something in themselves or not, the experiments Read More ›

Is Bitcoin Safe? Why the human side of security is critical

From Jonathan Bartlett at Mind Matters Today: Bitcoin solves a lot of tough problems in very ingenious ways. Unfortunately, however, those benefits don’t tend to translate well for end users, who are not nearly as ingenious as the people developing the system. More. Readers will recognize Johnny Bartlett Jonathan Bartlett, Research and Education Director of the Blyth Institute, as a longtime author here.

About the universe, the ID guys were right all along?

From science fiction writer Vox Day at Vox Popoli, responding to Fred Reed, Fred has landed on precisely the aspect of evolutionary theory that made me into a strong TE(p)NSBMGDaGF skeptic. What many people who have not thought seriously about the issue don’t realize is that biologists are literally so stupid, and so innumerate, and so illogical, that they don’t understand the problems that quantification creates for their many unfounded assumptions. We will pass over the further things that Mr. Day has to say about biologists as “confused” and “least intelligent of the STEM field graduates,” as you can read that for yourself at his blog. But then: For example, it is particularly amusing to note that I have encountered Read More ›

Is the evolution debate becoming “much more civil and thoughtful”?

From Fred Reed, an “evolution skeptic” at UNZ: Recently I wrote a column about the theory of Intelligent Design, which holds that that life, both in its origins and its changes over time, are the result of design instead of chance. Several hundred comments and emails arrived, more than I could read. This was not surprising as there seems to be considerable public interest in the question, while a virulent political correctness prevents discussion in most forums. In particular the major media prevent mention of Intelligent Design except in derogatory terms. Interesting to me at any rate was that the tone of response was much more civil and thoughtful than it was say, a decade ago. That may partly be Read More ›

Replication failures of Darwinian sexual selection openly discussed at The Scientist

It’s as if evolutionary biologists are beginning to take some of the problems of Darwinism seriously enough to discuss them openly, as failures in research. In this case, the failure of claims for sexual selection (females drive evolution by choosing the fittest mates) are openly publicized. In the past five years, meta-analyses and reviews have generated more evidence of bias in ecology and evolutionary biology research. For example, biases have been found in the literature on ideas such as feather color affecting mate choice in blue tits and black bib sizes indicating male dominance in house sparrows. As with zebra finch leg bands, such biases don’t necessarily invalidate the hypotheses themselves, but undermine the strength of evidence for them, leaving Read More ›

At Nature: New evolution book represents “radical” new perspective

Including things you didn’t know about Archaea discoverer, Carl Woese. From a review of The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen (Simon & Schuster, 2018): In The Tangled Tree, celebrated science writer David Quammen tells perhaps the grandest tale in biology: how scientists used gene sequencing to elucidate the evolutionary relationships between living beings. Charles Darwin called it the ‘great Tree of Life’. But as Quammen reveals, at the molecular level, life’s history is more accurately depicted as a network, a tangled web through which organisms have been exchanging genes for more than 3 billion years. This perspective is indeed radical, and he presents the science — and the scientists involved — with patience, candour and Read More ›