Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Did cosmic rays cause right-handed DNA?

At Quanta: Many researchers believe the selection to be random: Those right-handed genetic strands just happened to pop up first, or in slightly greater numbers. But for more than a century, some have pondered whether biology’s innate handedness has deeper roots. Read More ›

Paper: Inflation doesn’t solve fine-tuning puzzles

From Physical Review D: We investigate the initial conditions of inflation in a Bianchi I universe that is homogeneous but not isotropic. We use the Eisenhart lift to describe such a theory geometrically as geodesics on a field-space manifold. We construct the phase-space manifold of the theory by considering the tangent bundle of the field space and equipping it with a natural metric. We find that the total volume of this manifold is finite for a wide class of inflationary models. We therefore take the initial conditions to be uniformly distributed over it in accordance with Laplace’s principle of indifference. This results in a normalizable, reparametrization invariant measure on the set of initial conditions of inflation in a Bianchi I Read More ›

Eric Holloway: Why Bell’s theorem matters

Especially to conservation of information theory: This brings us to a more general result known as the conservation of information. Design theorists William Dembski and Robert J. Marks defined the law of conservation of information in their 2009 paper “Conservation of Information in Search” and then proved the result in their follow-on 2010 paper “The Search for a Search”. The conservation of information (COI) says the expected active information produced by any combination of random and deterministic processes is guaranteed to be zero or less. Active information is itself the difference between two different probability distributions. We can see the conservation of information is a generalization of Bell’s no-go theorem in quantum mechanics. It contrasts the difference between two probability Read More ›

Dino death: Asteroid impact more likely than volcanoes, new study says

t Phjys.org: Now, a research team from Imperial College London, the University of Bristol and University College London has shown that only the asteroid impact could have created conditions that were unfavourable for dinosaurs across the globe. Read More ›

Humans vs monkeys Science claims we should question more sharply

ScienceDaily: "In experiments on 100 study participants across age groups, cultures and species, researchers found that indigenous Tsimane' people in Bolivia's Amazon rainforest, American adults and preschoolers and macaque monkeys all show, to varying degrees, a knack for "recursion," But aren’t these claims a bit ridiculous? When was the last time a monkey conveyed a complex idea? Read More ›

At Forbes: What we are getting wrong about Schrodinger’s cat

Siegel: In other words, pretty much everything you've ever heard about Schrödinger's cat is probably a myth, with the sole exception of the fact that quantum systems actually are well-described by a probabilistically weighted superposition of all possible, allowable states, and that an observation or measurement will always reveal one and only one definitive state. Read More ›

There is an “underlying design principle” in plants?

"Our model shows that by absorbing only very specific colors of light, photosynthetic organisms may automatically protect themselves against sudden changes -- or 'noise' -- in solar energy, resulting in remarkably efficient power conversion," said Gabor, an associate professor of physics and astronomy, who led the study appearing today in the journal Science. Read More ›

Asked at Mind Matters News: How Do Sounds Contain Ideas?

Well, how do they? It’s not a simple question! Human language differs from animal and plant communication systems in that it enables the transmission of ideas, which are abstractions. Think of the Pythagorean theorem or tripartite government. Many explanations of how human language came to exist seem to be stabbing in the dark.

Theoretical physicist: Physics has made huge strides, but has not upset free will

George Ellis: If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings. We wouldn’t be accountable in any meaningful way for our reactions to global climate change, child trafficking or viral pandemics. The underlying physics would in reality be governing our behaviour, and responsibility wouldn’t enter into the picture. “Theoretical physicist defends free will” at Mind Matters News

Why we can’t cheat death by uploading our brains to the internet

It sounded like such a great idea, right? Robert J. Marks: Well, actually, that’s very interesting because I think there’s a presupposition on Musk’s part that we are indeed algorithmic. That we can actually be represented by an algorithm, by a computer code… There’s good foundations and algorithmic information theory and computer science, which suggest that there are indeed non-algorithmic phenomena and there’s a strong evidence that the qualities such as creativity and understanding and qualia, are above and beyond the capabilities of algorithms and computability. “Can we really cheat death?” at Mind Matters News Better read this before you buy your ticket to transhumanism. .