Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

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. Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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 a third relevant factor. In writing about naturalistic origins of life, in Chance and Necessity, Monod proposed that life is the result of chance and necessity. This reflects the naturalistic attitude noted in our headline, and is tied to the a priori rejection of design as a possibility; yes, an assumption held to be pivotal to scientific “objectivity.” Clipping: [T]he basic premise of the scientific Read More ›

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... Read More ›

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?" Read More ›

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. Read More ›