Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Claim: Solar system might once have had two companion stars

But wait! Who’s claiming this? The second author of this paper is Abraham (Avi) Loeb. That rings a bell. Wasn’t he the one who suggested that the obvious space junk Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial light sail? Look, why does the name “Harvard” put all doubts about credibility to rest? Especially in these times? Read More ›

What? Cosmologist Sean Carroll doesn’t freak out when Darwin is doubted?

Interesting podcast in which astrophysicist Bartlett is permitted to question dogmas. The dogma about the One Single Common Ancestor that kicked off Darwinian evolution is the product of a prior belief in life’s sheer Flukiness. If you do not believe that life is a fluke, whatever else you believe, you can discard that One Single Cell doctrine as nonessential and problematic. Read More ›

Steve Meyer on James Tour’s podcast

"In this interview, Dr. James Tour and Dr. Stephen Meyer discuss science and faith, while getting into the details on the discovery of complex, sequence specific information required for life's function and origin, and the required fine-tuned laboratory that we call our universe that must exist in order for assembly to occur." People are taking reality seriously? What next, we wonder? Read More ›

A University of Arizona prof works hard to make Darwinism coincide with the history of life

She does a good job of pointing out how much of the history of life is really stasis. But then what about Darwin's claim about nature daily, hourly adding stuff up, subtracting the bad, retaining the good... Apparently not. Read More ›

Is information really the fifth state of matter? Rob Sheldon responds

Sheldon: Throughout history we have examples of these bad physics generalizations. For example, heat was once considered a fluid embedded in the oak log, absorbed from the sun, called phlogiston. As it turned out, heat is not a material substance. Read More ›

Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins on free will

They think it’s an illusion, of course. Dawkins recommends Richard Dennett on the subject but Dennett also thinks that consciousness is an illusion. Michael Egnor would say, if your proposition is that consciousness is an illusion, then you don’t have a proposition. Read More ›

The Frontline Doctors put some “plausible” mechanisms for Hydroxychloroquine on the table

In their July 28 seminar, the Frontline Doctors Group led by Dr Simone Gold, have put some plausible mechanisms for HCQ based cocktails on the table. These were noted on in an augmentation to an earlier post, but deserve headlining in their own right: Dr Frieden OP: >>I have found at Bit Chute, a July 28 Frontline Doctors seminar which describes several mechanisms of action. Accordingly, I take liberty to annotate a screenshot, summarising several mechanisms of action described by these Doctors [cf. here for their references], but which are hard to find because of now almost pervasive censorship: I add, that the above suggests a fairly similar viral attack process to the West Nile Virus (which is also an Read More ›

More on male vs. female body form and Darwinian sexual selection

Nelson: There is no evidence to support the assumption that mechanically efficient bipedal walking requires a narrow pelvic morphology. If there are metabolic costs to walking and running with wider hips, they could be offset by subtle changes in movement patterns. Read More ›

Dr Thomas Frieden, formerly Director of the US CDC, 2017 in NEJM, on the need to go beyond placebo-controlled studies as “gold standard”

One of the key steps in dismissing evidence of efficacy of hydroxychloroquine-based cocktails in treating early stageCovid-19 for patients in vulnerable groups on an outpatient basis is the use of the premise that such evidence is of low quality as it does not match the “gold standard” of placebo-controlled, randomised tests (often. RCT’s). However, observations are observations, natural regularities are often observable from the first few trials, evidence is evidence, ethical and practical considerations are real, and valid scientific methods do not reduce to applied statistics. It is in that context that we should attend carefully to remarks by Dr Thomas Frieden, writing in NEJM 3 1/2 years ago, in terms that uncannily anticipate our current woes: Despite their strengths, Read More ›