If so, it’s remarkable outcome for genome mapping: So it has been dawning on us is that there is no prior plan or blueprint for development: Instructions are created on the hoof, far more intelligently than is possible from dumb DNA. That is why today’s molecular biologists are reporting “cognitive resources” in cells; “bio-information intelligence”; “cell intelligence”; “metabolic memory”; and “cell knowledge”—all terms appearing in recent literature.1,2 “Do cells think?” is the title of a 2007 paper in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences.3 On the other hand the assumed developmental “program” coded in a genotype has never been described. It is such discoveries that are turning our ideas of genetic causation inside out. We have traditionally thought of cell Read More ›

Some arguments are not merely wrong; they are evil. Eric Orts is a professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.  He is a progressive, and like most progressives he chafes at the checks on the unbridled power of numerical majorities built into the United States Constitution.  On Wednesday Professor Orts took to the pages of The Atlantic to vent his spleen against the unfairness of one of those checks, the provision that gives each state equal representation in the Senate.  It is not fair, declares Orts, for Wyoming to have the same representation in Senate as California, because Wyoming’s population is a small fraction of California’s.  Set aside for Read More ›

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers this definition by way of explaining that there is one sense in which consciousness IS an illusion: We are not aware of our consciousness; only of its objects. I believe that the most satisfactory definition of consciousness is the intentional power of the mind — the ability of thought to be “about” something. Consciousness is always directed to an object, whether that object is physical, emotional, or conceptual. If there is no “aboutness,” there is no consciousness. All intentionality entails two things: the process by which (1) we think about something, and the thing about which (2) we think. When I perceive a tree, I am perceiving (1) a tree (2). When I think about justice, I Read More ›

Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, offers a handy illustration of the sort of specified complexity that life forms show, which indicates design, in an April 2018 essay: Cryptographers distinguish between random signals and those carrying encoded messages, the latter indicating an intelligent source. Recognizing the activity of intelligent agents constitutes a common and fully rational mode of inference. More importantly, [design theorist William] Dembski explicates criteria by which rational agents recognize or detect the effects of other rational agents, and distinguish them from the effects of natural causes. He demonstrates that systems or sequences with the joint properties of “high complexity” (or small probability) and “specification” invariably result from intelligent causes, not chance or physical-chemical laws. Dembski noted that Read More ›