Math is something we can use but cannot overthrow. Is that why progressives hate it so much?
Month: January 2020
Coffee!!: A grievance studies hoaxer explains what happened to the New Atheists
We miss the New Atheists. They made absolutely everyone else look so sane and reasonable.
The design of life, even in a rat’s whiskers
As usual Darwin was creating a rhetorical fog. There is no conflict between design in nature and the operation of fixed laws of nature. Quite the opposite. The Euler spiral is a fixed law of the mathematics that helps hold our universe together, resulting in the design we see. There is no reason to believe that the rat went through hundreds of flopped, fatal designs for whiskers (natural selection acting on random mutation) before hitting on the Euler spiral. It was probably implicit from the beginning because the nature of reality in our universe would enact it. You can call this creationism if you want.
Sometimes physicists really have to work at ignoring fine-tuning
At Symmetry: There’s no known underlying reason for these almost exact cancellations, and insisting that “it is the way it is” is unsatisfying.
Podcast: Walter Bradley on the new, expanded edition of The Mystery of Life’s origin
From ID the Future: On this episode of ID the Future, Robert J. Marks interviews Walter Bradley, co-author of the seminal 1984 ID book The Mystery of Life’s Origin, now being released in a revised and expanded edition with updates from multiple contributors discussing the progress (or lack of it) in origins science in the 35 years since the book’s original publication.
Monod’s “objectivity” (= naturalistic scientism) and begging big questions
Jacques Monod won a Nobel Prize in 1965 for work on the mechanism of genetic replication and protein synthesis. By 1970 – 71, he published a pivotal book, known in English as Chance and Necessity, which is a part of the context in which Design Thinkers have argued that no, intelligently directed configuration, design, is Read More…
Researchers: Homogenous RNA could emerge from a primordial mess
Friends doubt that the random polymerizing of nucleotides is going to explain the origin of information needed for “RNA genomes” to come into existence.
Michael Egnor on why Jerry Coyne can’t actually deny free will
He wants to and he tried to—at a speaking engagement at Williams U. But if he is a meat puppet, well, …
Do mysterious particles flying out of Antarctica threaten the Standard Model of physics?
At Space.com: But ultra high-energy neutrinos shouldn’t be able to pass through the Earth. That suggests that some other kind of particle — one that’s never been seen before…
Only FIVE Neanderthal extinction theories? But wait, one actually makes sense
We’ve certainly heard more than five around here. But one of them sounds like something that could really happen. For one thing, it has happened in historical time.
Dark energy critics are outnumbered, we are told, and its defenders are digging in
At Inside Science: “While most scientists still seem to believe that dark energy remains on solid ground, no one yet has any firm idea what it actually is.” Maybe dark energy is cosmic consciousness? Don’t laugh before you read this: “Could information be—at long last—the missing dark matter?”
Effort to prove Galileo and Einstein wrong fails
It’s almost as if the universe were governed by mathematical laws designed from outside itself. But we aren’t allowed to conclude that, of course.
At Oscillations: How the College Board skews students toward Darwinism
Is the stuff she identifies designed to insulate students from the ferment going on in biology or is just the outcome of educrats’ self-insulation…? Maybe both?
Brazil picks ID sympathizer as science boffin; science media henhouse in total flap
There is no discussion of the guy’s admin skills or anything else that would be directly relevant to his new position. One thing the anti-Neto noise will do is make a great many Brazilians and others aware of ID who weren’t before.
Here’s Peter Atkins again, on why only science can answer all the big questions
Atkins: I consider that there is nothing that the scientific method cannot elucidate.