Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Nature has retracted a major oceans warming paper, after ten months of mass freakouts

The more sobbing, screaming teens are paraded in front of the public, the more reasonable climate skepticism begins to sound. Read More ›

If Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent him

Michael Egnor: A shimmering example of atheist idiocy (there is no other word for it) is Jerry Coyne’s recent argument, at Why Evolution Is True, against God’s existence in his post on David Attenborough’s agnosticism. Read More ›

Michael Egnor: Did consciousness “evolve”?

Michael Egnor: If consciousness is merely a property of the brain, it has no agency—no power to cause anything—in itself. Properties can’t do anything. For example, if you hit a nail with a yellow hammer, you hit it with the hammer, not with the yellow. Read More ›

James Tour: 1 hr lecture on OoL

on the mystery of the origin of life: From the blurb: Dr. Tour is one of the world’s top synthetic organic chemists. He has authored 680 scientific publications and holds more than 120 patents (here is a partial list). In 2014, Thomson Reuters named him one of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” and in 2018 Clarivate Analytics recognized him as one of the world’s most highly cited researchers. Tour is also fearless. He joined more than a thousand other scientists in signing the “Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” More recently, he has become a thorn in the side of the origin of life research community, offering blunt assessments of the current state of origin of life research. Read more on Read More ›

Jonathan Bartlett: Can computers simply evolve greater intelligence, Avida-style?

The failure to do so is consistent with Bill Dembski’s notion of displacement. Put simply, to develop complex functional systems, you can shift design around but you can’t actually get rid of it. Read More ›

Eric Holloway: Can free will be a scientific idea?

In everyday life, we casually throw around the terms “confidence,” “chance,” and “likely.” We sometimes attach numbers too. We say that an event has a 90% chance of occurring. But, what do we mean by a “90% chance”? Read More ›