Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

God Help The Little Babies

Here is a picture of a baby being operated on before birth.  With advances in medical technology, this has become a fairly common procedure. Now, imagine the operating room is in New York.  In the operating room on the other side of the wall, a doctor could be hacking a practically identical baby to death.  Legally.

Darwinian evolution and underestimating the Neanderthals

A zoologist asks why we need to see Neanderthal man as dumb: Talking about a recent paper discussing differences in skull shape, he notes, In the Pleistocene world of rapidly changing ecological scenarios luck had everything to do with success or failure. It was all about being in the right place at the right time, something that natural selection – with its restriction of acting in the present on templates from the past – could not respond to fast enough. And so we have consistently mistaken survival and extinction with biological superiority or inferiority. That is why we have incessantly sought differences to explain our observations. We are here and they are not and so we must seek differences to Read More ›

Embroidery needles much older than thought

Last year, archaeologists discovered sewing needles in Siberia that were 20,000 years old. A recent paper draws together what we know of our ancestors’ clothing habits: “Many of the needles we discovered were not simply used to manufacture clothes but for embroidery and ornaments. There was an aesthetic role,” says Francesco d’Errico, an anthropologist at the University of Bordeaux in France and a co-author of the study. As for sewing and clothing in general: We do not know which Homo species—neanderthalensis or sapiens—first pioneered the practice of wearing furs. But by 76,000 years ago, anthropologists believe that Homo sapiens were creating bone awls, a precursor to the needle, in South Africa. In the millennia to follow, artifacts suggest most prehistoric Read More ›

Maybe “genetic superbabies” is the junior version of the Fountain of Youth

The CRISPR babies scientist has been fired. (If not worse.) From the news: “CRISPR-baby scientist fired by university” Investigation by Chinese authorities finds He Jiankui broke national regulations in his controversial work on gene-edited babies.” “He provoked international outcry last November when he revealed that he had used the gene-editing technique CRISPR– Cas9 to modify human embryos in an effort to make them resistant to HIV; the embryos were then implanted into a woman and produced twin girls, Nana and Lulu, in November. According to the investigation’s findings, He is fully to blame for the gene-editing project, and flouted regulations. (David Cyranoski, Nature) The girls’ father was HIV-positive. The main reason some of us forebore to dance on the guy’s Read More ›

Logic and First Principles, 9: Can we be “certain” of any of our views or conclusions?

Currently, one of the objections on the table to a demonstration on how certain structural and quantitative entities are implicit in there being a distinct possible world is the rejection, dismissal or doubting of certainty of conclusions. This again reflects one of the many problems with thought in our day. Let’s add a quip, for those who doubt that warranted (as opposed to ill-advised) certainty is possible: are you CERTAIN that we cannot be justifiably certain? Accordingly, I took the opportunity to comment in the fallacies discussion thread: [KF, FDT 304:] One of the themes that keeps surfacing is “certainty,” which sets up the issues: warrant, knowledge, reliability, credibility, and responsibility. Given that we ever so often use knowledge in Read More ›

Are we reaching fundamental limits on building large particle colliders?

Peter Woit doesn’t want to give up but he makes it clear that the options are narrow and expensive. Perhaps we are entering a period of decline when cosmology is about the multiverse rather than the Higgs boson. Read More ›

“Rube-Bait”: Kevin Williamson vs. David Klinghoffer: Round 3

Williamson lives in a time when people don’t need to know correct facts so much as correct positions. Popular Darwinism thrives in that atmosphere because even to raise problems with a Cool theory. however serious the problems, brands one as unCool. You are never supposed to have problems with a Cool theory. Read More ›

Researchers: The Moon made life on Earth possible

From ScienceDaily: Earth most likely received the bulk of its carbon, nitrogen and other life-essential volatile elements from the planetary collision that created the moon more than 4.4 billion years ago, according to a new study by Rice University petrologists in the journal Science Advances. “From the study of primitive meteorites, scientists have long known that Earth and other rocky planets in the inner solar system are volatile-depleted,” said study co-author Rajdeep Dasgupta. “But the timing and mechanism of volatile delivery has been hotly debated. Ours is the first scenario that can explain the timing and delivery in a way that is consistent with all of the geochemical evidence.” The evidence was compiled from a combination of high-temperature, high-pressure experiments Read More ›

Plants can both “smell” and “hear”

The team did a great piece of work on plant hearing. But so much language around “evolution” is just clutter, creating the impression that we know things we really don’t. And sometimes that gets in the way of understanding what we see now in real time. Read More ›

Darwinism challenged as explanation for finch beaks

Researchers: The observation that Galapagos finch species possessed different beak shapes to obtain different foods was central to the theory of evolution by natural selection, and it has been assumed that this form-function relationship holds true across all species of bird.  (But they found it wasn't consistent.) Read More ›

Oldest animal turns out to be 40 million years older than 558 mya

MOVE over, Dickinsonia. This 558-million-year-old creature was named the earliest known animal last year, but New Scientist can now exclusively reveal one that existed even earlier – by more than 40 million years. (paywall) Graham Lawton, “Exclusive: 600-million-year old blobs are earliest animals ever found” at New Scientist Note: They are described at New Scientist above as “carnivorous comb jellies” but all known comb jellies are carnivorous so it will be interesting to learn more about what that “earliest known animal” was eating. Last year, we learned Intro: A strange soft-bodied sea creature that lived over half a billion years ago may have been the first animal species on Earth, fossil evidence suggests. The first large complex organisms – known Read More ›