Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

One of Boghossian’s hoaxers started the Woke on the 2 plus 2 equals five drive?

Meanwhile, Lindsay has a blog keeping track of Woke folk and other unfunny crazies, where he says he himself might have started off the 2 + 2 = 5 crazy, intending only to explain to someone how the Woke think. Read More ›

Bacteria are smarter than we think

At Wired: As they cleared paths of food, the E.coli tended to move toward unexplored, broth-rich areas, which ultimately helped them evacuate the maze. It took about 10 hours for about 1 percent of the multiple generations of bacteria to collectively solve the puzzle. That may not sound fast, but it’s five times faster than if the organisms had just been swimming around randomly, says Phan. Read More ›

Tuatara genome sequenced; some surprising findings

At Nature: The genome produced by Gemmell and co-workers is one of the largest vertebrate genomes published so far. At more than 5 gigabases, it is about 50% larger than the human genome… Tuatara have a close resemblance to their forebears from the early Mesozoic era, between 240 million and 230 million years ago… Read More ›

There is no human counterpart to some types of dog intelligence

What dogs really excel at is understanding humans. It’s the key to their well-being. Naturally, when they succeed, we think they are very clever. Are wolves more clever because they survive on their own? Well, they are more clever in certain ways, such as group co-operation and problem-solving, but not in understanding human communications. It really depends on what type of intelligence we want to measure. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on recent claims of dramatic new Higgs boson findings

Sheldon: This required analysis of thousands of decays and Terabytes of data crunching. So it is a triumph of data analysis to be able to see this rare decay against the more common route to stability, but neither unexpected nor revealing of physics "beyond the standard model". Read More ›

Tales of the Woke: #MeTooSTEM leader faked up COVID-19 victim

At The Scientist:But after McLaughlin announced @Sciencing_Bi’s death from COVID-19 several days ago, people began trying to identify her, and her story began to fall apart. Scientists who had considered @Sciencing_Bi an online friend turned from mourning her death to accusing McLaughlin of inventing her outright … Read More ›

“Astounding”hybridization between species of angelfish

At Phys.org: Other hybrids were found between species with over 12 percent pairwise distance in mitochondrial DNA. Pairwise distance is a measurement of differences in pairs of DNA sequences. "This genetic separation is quite astounding, considering that hybrids are rarely reported between species that share more than 2 percent in genetic distance," Mr Tea said. "Though coral reef fish hybrids are common; they are usually formed by closely-related species." Read More ›

Brain connectivity is equal in 130 mammals, including humans

Researcher:"Our study revealed a universal law: Conservation of Brain Connectivity. This law denotes that the efficiency of information transfer in the brain's neural network is equal in all mammals, including humans.” So what makes humans unique isn’t brain connectivity. Read More ›

Mental Reality Theory vs External Reality Theory: Checkmate

All experience is mental, regardless of whether or not anything extra-mental causes or informs it. We can only ever directly interact with and experience mental experience/phenomena. We have direct, empirical evidence mind exists and that is the only thing we can have such evidence exists, even in principle. What we actually experience as “reality” is thus necessarily, entirely mental (again, whether or not anything extra-mental causes or informs it.) Thus, “mental reality,” the mental world that we all live in, is not a theory; it is an undeniable fact of our existence. The only relevant question is if an additional, extra-mental “world” exists that our mental reality interacts with in any meaningful way. Since mental reality is an experiential and Read More ›