Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Evolution crime: Grasses are “stealing” genes from neighbors, researchers tell us

Horizontal gene transfer isn’t even that uncommon, as the researchers admit. If this is how people who are used to explaining evolution in Darwinian terms react, maybe they should just stick to propounding Darwinism and leave the rest to people who take a broader and more balanced view. Read More ›

A review of Behe’s Darwin Devolves that looks at what Behe actually says

In a review, one reviewer has decided to talk about what Michael Behe actually says in Darwin Devolves. For example, In a section called “The Blind Metaphor,” Behe notes: “The primary way by which natural selection makes evolution self-limiting is by promoting poison-pill mutations. Whatever genetic alterations that help an organism survive and reproduce better than its competitors will be fodder for natural selection—even if the alterations make a species less able to adapt in the future (200). In hindsight, that is what we should have expected. Despite the boost in plausibility it receives from its metaphorical name, over multiple rounds natural selection is clearly nothing like the opposite of chance, no more than, say, gravity is the opposite of Read More ›

How Do You Know an Artificial Intelligence Advocate is Shining You On?

When they say they “know” that an AI machine is conscious.  How can I be so sure?  Easy.  As I have discussed before, we cannot in principle “know” that even other humans are conscious; far less can we know that an AI is conscious.  By its very nature, consciousness, as evidenced by subjective self-awareness, can be known for certain only by subjective experience.  It is self-evident to a person who is subjectively self-aware that he is conscious.  Indeed, this has been called the “primordial datum” – “me” and “not me” exist – from which all other knowledge proceeds.  By definition, I can have subjective experience only of my own self.  I cannot be subjectively self-aware of any other self.  It Read More ›

For Progressives, the Only “Principle” That Matters is This: We Advance Principles When They Suit Our Interests, and we Abandon Them When They Don’t

Two recent posts have highlighted the moral and intellectual rot that threatens Western Civilization.  In the first, materialist Seversky expressed a moral nihilism that is breathtaking in its scope.  I asked him if the ancient practice of killing unwanted girl babies was an affirmatively good thing.  His answer:  “It was an affirmatively good thing for them.”  He hastened to add that he personally does not approve of the practice.  But he added that there is no standard against which to measure whether his preference in the matter is superior to those who would kill the little babies.  I asked Sev if the same reasoning applied to slavery, human sacrifice and genocide.  His answer:  “Yes, it does.”  So, infanticide, slavery, human Read More ›

Human Zoos documentary now free on YouTube

"It’s a sordid chapter in American history many scientists would rather not talk about. Thousands of indigenous people from Africa and elsewhere were put on public display in 20th-century America, often touted by scientists as evolutionary 'missing links' between humans and apes." Read More ›

What’s Gunter Bechly doing these days?

What the Darwinians should do is write the hit review for Science now, in advance of seeing any data, accuse the researchers of not co-operating, and then say they justwnat to be friends. Increasingly, that’s what they’ve got to work with. Read More ›

Researchers: Double down on theory like “natural selection” to solve replication crisis

At Nature Human Behaviour, we are told that the replication crisis is due to lack of rigid adherence to such a theory: Science, he explains, is about accumulating sets of observations that occur reliably—the Sun appears at different places in the sky depending on the season and time of day; finches have different shaped beaks depending on what they eat. “That’s the raw ingredients,” he says. “To make sense of it requires a framework to say, this is how all these different facts fit together, and this is why.” We explain these observations by developing theoretical models—of how the Earth rotates around the Sun on a tilted axis, of natural selection. Cathleen O’Grady, “The replication crisis may also be a Read More ›

Some reasons why machines won’t take over

Even if some people would like them to. In case the subject comes up over coffee. For example, ● Finally, physicist Alfredo Metere of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) insists that AI must deal in specifics but humans live in an indefinitely blurry world that is always changing: AI is a bunch of mathematical models that need to be realised in some physical medium, such as, for example, programs that can be stored and run in a computer. No wizards, no magic. The moment we implement AI models as computer programs, we are sacrificing something, due to the fact that we must reduce reality to a bunch of finite bits that a computer can crunch on. Alfredo Metere, “AI Read More ›

Are philosophical proofs for God better than science ones?

From a philosophy prof and chaplain: Let’s now look at an example of a scientific proof and contrast it with an argument from philosophy. An argument from natural science goes something like this (there are even some philosophical moves here, such as the move from effect to cause): “Everything that has a beginning has a cause. The universe had a beginning. Therefore, the universe had a cause.” Most of the effort is usually placed on the second premise to marshal evidence for the universe’s beginning. For example, the second law of thermodynamics (law of entropy) is often invoked. It says that energy in a closed system (a system that doesn’t get energy from the outside) converts from usable to unusable Read More ›