Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Massimo Pigliucci: Feynman was wrong about truth and beauty in science

He starts out well but notice how Darwinism, flung into the works like an old shoe, undermines the topic completely. If beauty is really “in the eye of the beholder” full stop, there is really no such thing as beauty. If the “capacity for aesthetic appreciation” evolved “possibly involving natural selection,” then it is unrelated to the object and best understood in terms of how many children artists have. Read More ›

Listen to Mother Nature Network convince itself that parallel worlds exist

Nope. Not a chance the proposed evidence will matter. The parallel universe folk probably don't like our universe because it shows massive evidence of fine-tuning and that implies an intelligent origin. Any alternative theory will always be popular, irrespective of evidence. Read More ›

Jonathan Bartlett points out a key contradiction about “thinking robots” and “robot rights”

If we were able to make intelligent and sentient AIs, wouldn’t that mean we would have to stop programming them? It would be unethical for me to force you to do my will, so wouldn’t the same thing be true with AIs? [Not that it is ever going to happen, but... ] Read More ›

High Impulse Nuclear rocket engines — Mars in 40 days?

As we continue to rethink the way forward (with Solar system colonisation and Earth transformation in mind as we exorcise the cheerless ghost of Malthus), the possibilities posed by nuke rockets are well worth pondering: >>By Jeremy Hsu [Space dot com] March 05, 2010 Future Mars outposts or colonies may seem more distant than ever with NASA’s exploration plans in flux, but the rocket technology that could someday propel a human mission to the red planet in as little as 40 days may already exist. A company founded by former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz has been developing a new rocket engine that draws upon electric power and magnetic fields to channel superheated plasma out the back. That stream of plasma Read More ›

Fossil forest update: “Pretty sophisticated” for nearly 400 million years ago

Researcher: "Based on what we know from the body fossil evidence of Archaeopteris prior to this, and now from the rooting evidence that we've added at Cairo, these plants are very modern compared to other Devonian plants. Read More ›

The “mysterious” Denisovans are ScienceNews’s top 2019 story

But their significance is understated. Traditional Darwinism requires that someone be the subhuman Now that we are talking about braided streams, who exactly is the subhuman? Can we play musical chairs if there is a chair for everybody? Read More ›