Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 31, 2019
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life
Tagged
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Even viruses have complex origins now

Denyse O'Leary
July 31, 2019
Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life
Well, this is interesting, for sure: “The findings show that this broad class of single-stranded DNA viruses, which infect all three cellular domains of life, have acquired their genetic components through complex evolutionary processes not traceable to a single ancestral event.” Maybe there wasn’t a “single ancestral event” for cells either. Also: The hope is to “resolve the question of how cell-based life came to co-exist with the planet's staggering array of viruses (dubbed the virome).” One commonly heard hypothesis is that viruses are degraded cells. It will be interesting to hear alternative theses. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 31, 2019
Categorized
Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Religion, science education
Tagged
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Speaker bounced from science teachers’ conference recounts his experiences

Denyse O'Leary
July 31, 2019
Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Religion, science education
One way of looking at the story: When Darwinian evolution became a secular religion, as Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse admits it is, an inevitable consequence followed: The usual assortment of puritans, pharisees, and timeservers who hang around other religions also hung around Darwinism. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 31, 2019
Categorized
Darwinism, Genetics, Intelligent Design

A single set of genes drives pufferfish spines, mouse hair, and chicken feathers

Denyse O'Leary
July 31, 2019
Darwinism, Genetics, Intelligent Design
If so, this set of genes got started a very long time ago and shows an admirable ability to switch from producing, say, lawnmowers to cars to cell phones. Yet it got started back when life was supposed to be simple and primitive, remember? It would seem that something back then was not simple and primitive. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 31, 2019
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism
Tagged
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Computers can’t think like people; they only do symbolic logic

Denyse O'Leary
July 31, 2019
Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism
Engineering prof Karl D. Stephan: Symbolic logic says nothing about the truth or reality of what you give it. To understand what things really are, you have to get outside the pristine mathematical structure of symbolic logic and embrace what Prof. Kreeft calls Socratic logic. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 31, 2019
Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism
Tagged
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Bob Marks: Bias is inevitable in AI; time to admit it

Denyse O'Leary
July 31, 2019
Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism
Marks’s point is that such biases are not a matter of villains taking over. It’s a normal feature of the way people think. And people program computers. Doubtless, it finds its way into evolution issues for which people say they ran a simulation on a computer. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 30, 2019
Categorized
Books of interest, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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A prof on looking into ID literature for the first time…

Denyse O'Leary
July 30, 2019
Books of interest, Intelligent Design
“this literature was far more scientifically substantive than the usual caricature, and this drove me to immerse myself in the scientific literature of evolutionary biology to see if it was as convincing as usually portrayed.” Um, yes. And the longer such critiques can be evaded rather than addressed, the more substantive they will be. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 30, 2019
Categorized
Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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Richard Weikart on yet another Darwinian rewrite of Darwin and the facts

Denyse O'Leary
July 30, 2019
Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design
Ruse can get away with simply misrepresenting Darwin on the subject of race. Being a Darwinist means, among other things, never having to answer critics. Critics can be dismissed, in all senses of the word. It’s true that nothing is learned but, under the circumstances, nothing need be learned. Darwinism is the default setting for pop science culture. It will always be preferred to evidence. One must wait until that culture self-destructs. Read More ›
Type
post
Date
July 29, 2019
Categorized
Atheism, Defending our Civilization, Logic and Reason, Selective Hyperskepticism, worldview
Tagged
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BBC swings and misses: “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, pt. 2 ( –> Being, Logic and First Principles, 24b)

kairosfocus
July 29, 2019
Atheism, Defending our Civilization, Logic and Reason, Selective Hyperskepticism, worldview

The exploration in-the-wild on Heidegger’s pivotal question is turning out to be quite fruitful. Here, we see BBC swing and miss, leading to dancing stumps. Dancing stumps: Video, with one of the greats at bat: First, context, we are discussing here popularised forms of the idea that “nothing” has been defined by physicists to denote in effect a sub-universe that gives rise to quantum fluctuations and thus expanding sub-universes. Let’s clip from the parent thread LFP 24: [KF, LFP 24, 41:] Let us continue our “in-the-wild” exploration, here a Robert Adler BBC article (as representing what we might find in high-prestige media): [BBC:] >>Why is there something rather than nothing? By Robert Adler 6 November 2014 People have wrestled with Read More ›

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
July 28, 2019
Categorized
Human evolution, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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Apes and humans: How did science get so detached from reality?

Denyse O'Leary
July 28, 2019
Human evolution, Intelligent Design
We’re not “one” with chimpanzees. The wall has not “been breached.” So far as anyone can tell, it is not even breachable. Nobody thinks chimpanzees are the same as humans except a few researchers who mayhave spent too long in the bush. Read More ›