Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Apologies for displaying an African man in a Bronx Zoo monkey house conveniently leave out the Darwinian motivation

David Klinghoffer: The truth is that placing a man in the Monkey House was intended as an education for the public in Darwinian evolution. As John West has said, Ota Benga was “only one of thousands of indigenous peoples who were put on display in America in the name of Darwinian evolution.” Read More ›

ENCODE produces a genomic encyclopedia

Readers may also remember ENCODE from a flap a few years ago when Darwinian Dan Graur announced that the ENCODE team had to be wrong in saying that there wasn’t nearly as much junk DNA as had been thought. After a while, Graur just wasn’t doing politeness any more. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on the recent reduction in the age of the universe

Sheldon: I have long advocated a rewrite of the Big Bang model that converts the cosmic microwave numbers into a Hubble constant. But strangely, like Darwin's model in biology, we see few cosmologists willing to kill the sacred cow. They would rather change the laws of physics ("new physics") than change their model. Read More ›

Darwin Devolves: Darwinists see evolution as bottom up; Michael Behe sees it as top down

Scambray: "the polar bear, Behe writes, “adjusted to its harsh environment mainly by degrading its genes that its ancestors already possessed. Despite its impressive abilities, rather than evolving, it has adapted predominately by devolving.” Read More ›

Liberal college prof takes aim at the the fairytale world of an “evolution” textbook

Shedinger: ... when discussing major transitions in evolutionary history. In these discussions, Hall and Hallgrimsson set aside science and engage in the telling of fairy tales worthy of Hans Christian Andersen. Read More ›

The “sturdlefish” is the offspring of sturgeon and paddlefish—separated by 184 million years’ evolution

We are also informed that both fish are “living fossils,” which is supposed to settle the matter. The main strength of the explanations is that they uphold Darwinian thinking. Read More ›

Does Darwinism help produce anarchic nihilism?

A vid, less than three minutes, by John West, presents some evidence. From David Klinghoffer: But see how much nihilism has been justified and advocated by some very smart and influential people in the name of evolutionary theory. Read More ›

Critical Theory is Certainly Correct

Indeed, it is more than merely true; it is an inexorable logical certainty if the premises of the theorists are true.  That is the question I will address in this post. Before we go on, we need to understand what ‘critical theory’ is.  Wikipedia has a good summary:  In sociology and political philosophy, the term Critical Theory describes the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s and draws on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. . . . Postmodern critical theory analyzes the fragmentation of cultural identities in order to challenge modernist-era constructs such as metanarratives, rationality, and universal truths, while politicizing social problems ‘by situating them in historical and cultural Read More ›

Michael Egnor skewers claim that there is no continuity of the human self

Egnor: if Blackmore is not the same person now that she was a moment ago, then it makes no sense to call the YouTube video above an interview with Susan Blackmore. Perhaps it should be called interviews with Susan Blackmores or interviews with countless women, one of whom was Susan Blackmore. Or interviews with women formerly known as Susan Blackmore... Read More ›

An Overview of Design Evidence

The following is an overview of the evidence for design which I wrote recently for a political journal whose readers have mostly had little exposure to ID arguments. It was rejected. It is a pretty basic summary, nothing here that UD readers have not seen many times, but maybe you may find it useful as an introduction to ID for friends. The real meat is in the videos linked, the text here is just an outline. The idea that natural selection of random variations could explain all the apparent design in the living world might have seemed superficially plausible in 1859, but, in recent years, as scientific research has continually revealed the astonishing dimensions of the complexity of life, especially Read More ›