Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Should research funding agencies move resources away from particle physics to fighting climate change?

You know particle physics is in serious trouble when the idea of just putting the money into climate change instead gets serious face time. Read More ›

“Very few” exoplanets have strong magnetic fields like Earth’s

This means that the search for extraterrestrial life should focus on planets with strong magnetic fields. Meanwhile, why is it that a thousand coincidences pointing in the same direction never seem to add up to a pattern, just something to explain away? Read More ›

Hugh Ross: The fine-tuning that enabled our life-friendly moon creates discomfort

Astronomer Robin Canup has spent fifteen years developing models that seem to demonstrate that, whether it is a desired finding or not: Such fine-tuning was not lost on Canup, who remarked in a recent Nature review article, “Current theories on the formation of the Moon owe too much to cosmic coincidences.”4 Indeed, the required “coincidences” continue to pile up… In yet another article in the same issue as Canup’s review, earth scientist Tim Elliott observes that the degree and kinds of complexity and fine-tuning required by lunar origin models appear to be increasing at an exponential rate. Among lunar origin researchers, he notes, “the sequence of conditions that currently seems necessary in these revised versions of lunar formation have led Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder: Cosmic inflation is overblown

he author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, makes clear that cosmic inflation was intended to deal with evidence for fine-tuning, which she considers a “waste of time.” But, as she shows, the cosmology has gone nowhere. Read More ›

Researchers: Genetic code emerging in an RNA world faces “insuperable problems”

Note: “ The hypothetical RNA World does not furnish an adequate basis for explaining how this system came into being, principles of self-organisation that transcend Darwinian natural selection furnish an unexpectedly robust basis for a rapid, concerted transition to genetic coding from a peptide·RNA world.” Read More ›

A first: Solitary bees serve as stepdads

If this report is a first, we might want to go a bit light on the traditional Darwinism while more bees are researched. If people used to think males wouldn’t do this, they will realize that one can be mistaken; those who rush in with an easy traditional answer might be too. Read More ›

Should we look for patterns of life, not chemical signatures, on Mars?

Was it Hugh Ross who said that if we find fossilized life on Mars, chances are, it’ll have come from Earth? That’s at least possible if life started very early when the planets were not as firm. But how frustrating for those looking for genuine non-Earth life… Read More ›