Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Behe was right: Bacteria eject flagella to avoid starvation

Here’s an example of what Michael Behe is (actually) talking about in Darwin Devolves The evolution strategy “Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain”: Eleven authors writing in PLOS Biology found that “γ-proteobacteria eject their polar flagella under nutrient depletion, retaining flagellar motor relic structures.” When there’s nothing to eat, these bacteria are willing to toss off their flagella and plug the hole in order to save energy. If you were out on a lake, would you unlatch your new Yamaha F250 4.2-liter V6 outboard motor and let it drop to the bottom? You might if the boat was taking on water and was about to sink, and you were about to Read More ›

Jonathan Bartlett and the war on Occam’s Razor

Bartlett on Sober's Occam's Razors: I'm only 30 pages in, and its already worth the time and price of reading. Even if it were all downhill from here, I highly recommend it! A great discussion on the philosophy of science and the principles of reasoning from Copernicus forward. Read More ›

Churchill on rebuilding the traditional: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us”

According to news reports, already over US$ 1 billion has been pledged towards rebuilding Notre Dame: BTW: after the fire, a video tour: In today’s ever so polarised age [currently awaiting the infamous redacted Mueller Report on a two-year investigation into US President Trump], it is unsurprising that we see for example in Rolling Stone: . . . for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard Read More ›

Researchers: Human face evolved to enhance social expression

Okay, but social expression is only important if one has something to communicate. How the “something to communicate” came to exist is the tricky part. That’s when the nonsense starts up. And when did the “something to communicate” start to happen? What if evidence of abstract reasoning predates the noted facial changes by tens of thousands of millennia? Read More ›

Plants “evolve” during the course of an experiment?

Wait a minute. This isn’t evolution! If these traits developed during the experiment, the tendency to do this sort of thing must be coded into the plants. The question then becomes, what signal systems convey information throughout the plant about self-pollination or blossom size in response to environment changes? Read More ›

Simpson’s Paradox: Numbers are stranger than we think

One outcome of Simpson’s Paradox is that machines cannot replace statisticians in analysing results. A great deal depends on interpretation, as Marks shows. “Clustering remains largely an art.” Read More ›

Increasing Skepticism Among Secular Scientists?

Today at The Federalist: The plain truth from the literature, conferences, expert perception, and a bit of anecdote for color, is that current Neo-Darwinism is far from the untouchable theory it is lauded to be. Not only this, but it has serious and increasing skeptics and challengers from within the secular scientific community.

A biophysicist looks at the limits of what science can tell us

Kirk Durston: An essential prediction of the Darwinian theory of common descent, for example, is that functional genetic information increases through a process of mutations, insertions, and deletions. Experimental science, however, consistently falsifies this prediction. Read More ›

At Inference Review: Human language is much more than a system of signals

University of maryland linguist: The formal structures of linguistics and neurophysiology are disjoint, a point emphasized by Poeppel and David Embick in a widely cited study. There is an incommensurability between theories of the brain and theories of the mind… Read More ›

Notre Dame burns – updated

David Berlinski, who lives down the street from Notre Dame, writes, “The pompiers were in their glory last night, and, when I was allowed to return home as dawn was breaking, they were still there, red-eyed, exhausted, grim. The police, too. The great cloud of smoke had drifted to the west and south. Later that day, I saw the front of the cathedral. Its towers were still standing, but its great bells, which I had heard every day, were silent.” From Mark Steyn: “Twenty-four hours after Notre Dame de Paris began to burn, there is better news than we might have expected: More of the cathedral than appeared likely to has, in fact, survived intact – including the famous rose Read More ›