Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 30, 2020
Categorized
extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design
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Tens of thousands of rock paintings from 12,500 ya discovered in Colombia

Denyse O'Leary
November 30, 2020
extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design
From The Guardian: Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 30, 2020
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Dark matter and dark energy as 21st century Ptolemaic epicycles? – Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts

Denyse O'Leary
November 30, 2020
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Why can’t they find dark matter, despite much search? Sheldon: The old joke is that a man is looking under a lamppost one night. The policeman asks what he is doing. "Looking for my keys" he replies. "Did you lose them here?" "No, but the light is better over here." (And the funding is better for some research than for others.) Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 30, 2020
Categorized
Academic Freedom, Culture, Intelligent Design
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Snowball Earth prof attacked by Cancel Culture

Denyse O'Leary
November 30, 2020
Academic Freedom, Culture, Intelligent Design
Jacobson warns, “What is so disturbing is the large number of graduate and post-doctoral students who signed the list of demands. I warned in 2017 that STEM would not be immune to the social justice (and racial) warfare tearing through universities.” Read More ›
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post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 30, 2020
Categorized
Cambrian explosion, Intelligent Design
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At Geological Society of America’s house rag: QUIT calling it the Cambrian Explosion!

Denyse O'Leary
November 30, 2020
Cambrian explosion, Intelligent Design
Sorry, guys. The Cambrian is a bit like quantum theory. Anyone who ISN’T flummoxed by it doesn’t understand it. Now comes the punch line: “We suggest, as an alternative to “Cambrian explosion,” the Great Cambrian Biodiversification (GCB)…” Sure, that’ll catch on. It sounds like a large animal vet’s description of an elephant’s bowel problems. Read More ›
Type
post
Date
November 30, 2020
Categorized
Control vs Anarchy, Defending our Civilization, Geo-strategic issues, News Highlights, Politics, rhetoric

UD Live Event from Nov 3, US Election cont’d: BBC — yes the BEEB — on BLM’s Marxist founders, “[We] fought to change history and we won”

kairosfocus
November 30, 2020
Control vs Anarchy, Defending our Civilization, Geo-strategic issues, News Highlights, Politics, rhetoric

Okay, we are looking at the victory lap being taken (a bit prematurely, methinks) by the BLM trio of marxist founders. Here is BEEB: Black Lives Matter founders: We fought to change history and we won Published14 hours ago The year 2020 will be remembered for a lot of things – not least the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement around the world. The organisation has led huge street rallies and high-profile campaigns against racism and police brutality. Now the three women who founded the movement have told the BBC they believe it has transformed politics. “Black people alongside our allies stood up to change the course of history and we won,” said Alicia Garza. Garza and her BLM Read More ›

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 29, 2020
Categorized
Intelligent Design, Religion, Science
Tagged
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At Nautilus: How Einstein reconciled religion to science

Denyse O'Leary
November 29, 2020
Intelligent Design, Religion, Science
Actually, despite the article’s title, Einstein didn’t reconcile anything. He said different things at different times to different people. And it didn’t matter. People took what they wanted from it. It sounds as though he didn’t really have a firm opinion. Read More ›
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post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 29, 2020
Categorized
Academic Freedom
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Crybullies in publishing attack Jordan Peterson but not Mein Kampf

Denyse O'Leary
November 29, 2020
Academic Freedom
This would be off topic except that we may anticipate similar scenes played out in the future around books with any theme that Cancel Culture deems ID-friendly (or whatever their beech is). As it happens, Penguin’s UK branch publishes Hitler’s Mein Kampf but that’s okay with the Woke because shut up. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 29, 2020
Categorized
Academic Freedom, Intelligent Design, Peer review
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Cancel Culture tries to get a Nature Communications paper retracted

Denyse O'Leary
November 29, 2020
Academic Freedom, Intelligent Design, Peer review
We are informed that all science Twitter is in a ghastly rage over an open access paper in Nature Communications which seems to show that female scientists benefit more from male mentors than from female mentors. To a layperson with some life experience, that wouldn’t be a surprising outcome at all. In a system that has been male-dominated since forever, more guys would be higher up on the pole. And if you want to get ahead, it pays to know Top People… But, of course, the Outrage Mob is sharpening the guillotine. Their final enemy is, after all, reality in any of its forms. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 29, 2020
Categorized
Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Neuroscience

Proposed anxiety remedy: Your brain isn’t for thinking, just surviving

Denyse O'Leary
November 29, 2020
Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Neuroscience
If the brain is really just a mechanism for deposits and withdrawals, who or what thought up the image that describes it that way? Unthinking things cannot characterize themselves. The brain is characterized, correctly or otherwise, by something that operates with but beyond the brain. For convenience, we refer to it as the mind. Read More ›
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post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 28, 2020
Categorized
Intelligent Design, Peer review
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A laugh from the world of predatory journals

Denyse O'Leary
November 28, 2020
Intelligent Design, Peer review
Our intrepid narrator had reason to wonder when the badly written letter soliciting papers had an odd attachment: “The editor who sent it to me had, inexplicably, attached a handbook on Covid-19 hospital protocols, a document that detailed at length the precise mechanism of sealing the dead in a “leak-proof corpse wrapping sheet.” Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 28, 2020
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics
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At Quanta: Are we looking at the end of physics?

Denyse O'Leary
November 28, 2020
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics
Ah yes, the problem of dead-endedness that Sabine Hossenfelder often writes about. As does Columbia mathematician Peter Woit, on the subject of string theory. But surely much of the nonsense around string theory and the multiverse is in part due to a practical failure—the inability to find even a single particle of dark matter or similar evidence for dark energy. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 28, 2020
Categorized
Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design
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Asked at The Conversation: Could dinosaurs re-evolve?

Denyse O'Leary
November 28, 2020
Evolution, extinction, Intelligent Design
We are told no. But just a minute. According to the story, some dinos evolved into birds. If so, massive changes ARE possible. It’s not clear why changed circumstances could not cause some of those changes to be reversed. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 28, 2020
Categorized
Extraterrestrial life, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design
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Life is rare in the universe—IF there is no design

Denyse O'Leary
November 28, 2020
Extraterrestrial life, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design
It would make a lot of sense for astrobiologists to be fans of intelligent design theory. Eventually, they will fall and hit their heads and realize that. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 28, 2020
Categorized
Design inference, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design
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SETI is really one big fat design inference

Denyse O'Leary
November 28, 2020
Design inference, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) folk should induct ID theorist Bill Dembski into their Hall of Fame because he literally wrote the book on The Design Inference and that's the idea that keeps them going. Read More ›