Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The Three Cardinal Problems of Biology

French biologist Jean Rostand, in his 1956 book Can Man be Modified? wrote: Have not the biologists the right to a little conceit, when they add up what they have achieved in the space of a mere half century? Would they not be justified in believing that to them all things will become possible, simply by going on deepening the trenches already dug and continuing along the lines of researches already marked out? But this is where we must remind ourselves that our successes, amazing as they are, leave the formidable riddles of life itself almost intact. The three cardinal problems of biology—the problem of how a living creature grows, the problem of how species evolve, the problem of how Read More ›

A toad looks and sounds like a venomous snake

A classic example of Darwinism at work, right?. It did a lot of good for the toad to happen to look one per cent like a venomous snake, so then it evolved to two percent and that did more good so it naturally selected to three percent and… Not really. Whatever happened isn’t a form of Darwinism. Read More ›

The Hyperreal Number System

The hyperreal number system is a way of treating infinities and infinitesimals in a rigorous way that is consistent with the way that we treat ordinary numbers. I recently posted a short video introducing the concept in a simple way. I thought some of you might be interested. I find the hyperreals interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, I think that infinities and infinitesimals are somewhat of the equivalent of Intelligent Design for mathematics. Infinitesimals were essentially banned from mathematics in the 1800s because it was said that they were inconsistent and non-rigorous (this is why calculus switched from infinitesimals to limits). This move was largely philosophically motivated, with Hilbert and others trying to naturalize mathematics. However, Read More ›

The science-based arguments against Copernicus and Galileo

Pop science writing typically misleads us by portraying the conflict as if the rightness of the Copernican universe were self-evident. For sure not at the time. Read More ›

At the Atlantic: Textbook evolution story is said to be WRONG

Hadn’t the Darwin lobby better invade and frogmarch all these little East Coast snots back into line? They must never talk in such a way as to imply that Darwinism could be wrong about anything. Read More ›