Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

If we need AlphaFold to figure out protein folding, how likely is protein folding to be a product of mere chance?

We are told by many philosophers that life came to exist on Earth purely by chance. How likely is that, given the intricacy of the machinery that governs our bodies, such that someone needs to design AlphaFold to figure it out? Read More ›

Pushback at StatNews against politicizing science. Rob Sheldon weighs in

Sheldon: The editors of Science and Nature compromised their scientific objectivity years ago. They promoted papers that big pharma wanted, they suppressed papers that made big pharma look bad. They were complicit in the coverup of not just tobacco and sugar lobbies, but vaccines and Darwinism and global warming... So of course this produced cognitive dissonance, since it violated some of the very basic tenets of objective science. Read More ›

Michael Egnor addresses an objection to free will raised here at Uncommon Descent

Egnor: [fMRI isn't decisive.] But fMRI is worthless in the neuroscience of free will. To understand why, note that fMRI has very poor temporal resolution. fMRI measures changes in blood flow in the brain in response to activity of neurons, and these changes lag neuronal activity by at least several seconds. Read More ›

Quote of the Day

“There is no such thing as truth. Science is a social phenomenon and like every other social phenomenon is limited by the benefit or injury it confers on the community” Adolph Hitler* (or your average woke postmodern academic) When you hear a progressive talk about “white science” or “patriarchal science” or “Western science” you should hear an echo of the “Jewish science” so hated by the Nazis. The impetus behind cordoning science (or any other universal enterprise) along tribalist lines is indentical. _________ *quoted in Daniel, G. (1962) The Idea of Pre-History, London: C.A. Walts and Co, p. 147,

Apparently, canceling Jordan Peterson didn’t really work

Douglas Murray: Peterson watchers will also notice that he signed off by saying that “With God’s grace and mercy” he hoped to complete some of the tasks which he lays out in it. Read More ›

Room temperature superconductivity achieved (but at huge, crushing pressures)

From Nature: Published: 14 October 2020Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfurhydrideElliot Snider, Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon, Raymond McBride, Mathew Debessai, HiranyaVindana, Kevin Vencatasamy, Keith V. Lawler, Ashkan Salamat & Ranga P. Dias  Nature  586, 373–377(2020) One of the long-standing challenges in experimental physics is the observation of room-temperature superconductivity1’2. Recently, high-temperature conventional superconductivity in hydrogen-rich materials has been reported in several systems under high pressure . . . Here we report superconductivity in a photochemically transformed carbonaceous sulfur hydride system, starting from elemental precursors, with a maximum superconducting transition temperature of 287.7 +/- 1.2 kelvin (about 15 degrees Celsius) achieved at 267 +/- 10 gigapascals. The superconducting state is observed over a broad pressure range in the diamond anvil cell, from 140 to Read More ›

The Boy Who Cried “Solipsism:” The MRT Delusion Objection Is Unfounded

(No insult or mocking intended by use of the word “boy.” Those that have been redacted in other threads are given a second chance to participate here. Off-topic comments will probably be redacted. Let’s keep it civil.) The two biggest objections to Mental Reality Theory is are: (1) it is essentially solipsist, and (2) it has no means of determining between “reality” and “delusion.” I’m going to address those items in this thread. Any hypothesis that an external physical world exists must include aspects of mental reality theory or else it fails. The ERT proponent must insist there are at least three distinct categories of mental experience that are entirely real: (1) that which is correlated to the external world; Read More ›