Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

An example of interwoven protein code (HT, Wiki!)

Here, in human mitochondrial DNA — note the BLUE code start and the RED code stop; all HT to Wiki publishing against known ideological interest: Complex interwoven code is of course doubly functionally specific, so it is exponentially harder to account for, other than by exceedingly sophisticated and creative intelligently directed configuration. Indeed, when I had to write machine code, I thanked my lucky stars 2114’s and 2716’s were by then affordable RAM and EPROM chips, and proceeded from there. (BTW, a neighbour who was an engineer in an earlier era spoke of how people flew across North America just to see 1 MB of live RAM, in a video memory, a million dollar cost in itself.) We know v Read More ›

Guillermo Gonzalez: Earth’s position makes space exploration easier

Gonzalez: In the larger context of the Milky Way galaxy, our Solar System is in the best location to initiate interstellar missions. In summary, we here confirm and expand upon recent studies that argue that the Earth and the Solar System are rare in the degree to which they facilitate space exploration. Read More ›

At Quanta: Bacteria are now seen as very complex too

Cepelewicz: The very existence of organelles in these bacteria, coupled with intriguing parallels to the more familiar ones that characterize eukaryotes, has prompted scientists to revise how they think about the evolution of cellular complexity — all while offering new ways to probe the basic principles that underlie it. Read More ›

Quote of the Day

Renaissance astrology, in other words, was a premodern form of scientism, if we take scientism in its broadest sense of unwarranted reliance on science, or a predisposition to believe opinions that present themselves illicitly as scientific facts. It differed from our contemporary forms of scientism largely relative to its intellectual prestige. In the modern world scientism is parasitic on an enormous body of valid ­scientific achievements as well as on the dominance of materialism and utilitarianism in public philosophy. In the Renaissance, by contrast, the scientistic practice of astrology had to share the intellectual ecosystem with powerful traditions of practical reasoning that challenged its premises in fundamental ways: the moral theology of the Catholic Church and the moral philosophy of Read More ›

For Those Keeping Count, Colorado Had Negative 272 COVID Deaths Friday

The Colorado Department of Health has been caught inflating COVID 19 deaths. A state lawmaker has requested a criminal investigation. He also provided another letter dated April 17 from the Someren Glen senior care center to its staff, residents, and residents’ families. The Centennial facility’s letter said CPDHE had overruled the cause of death findings by attending physicians in order to list seven deaths as being caused by COVID-19. This will come as a surprise to absolutely no one. In March, the scientific advisor to the Italian Minister of Health stated: “On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have Read More ›

Can deep undersea rocks give us clues about ET life?

Cepelewicz: They’ve also found evidence that those microbes persist by getting energy from an abiotic process called radiolysis, during which radiation released by the rocks reacts with water in the system to release hydrogen, which the cells can then use in various forms as fuel. Read More ›

Robert J. Marks: Time to change the peer review system

Marks: The assumption that today’s peer-reviewed paper has been vetted by experts and therefore has been awarded a blue ribbon for excellence is far from the truth. Peer review often does not do its job. Consequently, today’s collection of scholarly literature is exploding in quantity and deteriorating in quality. Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on the prof who challenges evo psych: Covering her tracks carefully…

Sheldon: Did you notice how Smith trashes Evolutionary Psychology because it uses "circular" reasoning? Then she realizes it sounds like an ID criticism, so she rushes to defend the remaining Evolutionary sciences with this paragraph… Read More ›

Rob Sheldon dishes on dark matter and dark energy

Rob Sheldon: My takeaway is that dark energy is "pathological science," using the words of Irving Langmuir to describe N-rays or polywater. It is science at the edge of messy data, finding what one is looking for by using poor statistical methods. It is precisely what astronomers are trained NOT to do, and therefore this whole Nobel Prize thing is a corruption of what had been a relatively unstained field. Read More ›

COVID-19 and Vitamin D – data vs noise in science

Statistics analyst Gary Smith: Even if COVID-19 deaths are randomly distributed among the population (and they surely aren’t), data mining will, more likely than not, discover a geographic cluster of victims... (Lots of things can start to appear meaningful.) Read More ›

Philosopher challenges evolutionary psychology

But that’s not the amazing part. The amazing part is the admission of skepticism at a popular scitech mag. Hey, we can provide lots of examples of flapdoodle. But we took for granted that all these science writers actually believed in it. And not wanting to just pick a stupid useless fight with true believers, we mostly talked (well, okay, hooted, really) among ourselves… Read More ›