Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Type
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 ›
Type
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 ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 27, 2020
Categorized
Intelligent Design
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Karsten Pultz: Review of Denton’s “The Miracle Of The Cell”

Denyse O'Leary
November 27, 2020
Intelligent Design
Pultz: Denton reveals the extreme specificity of the elements, how the properties—the configuration of electrons—of every single element is clearly tuned to fit the properties of the other elements such that no substitutions seem possible. The chemical characteristics of each element play together in a symphony of awesome fine tuning. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 26, 2020
Categorized
Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Just For Fun
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Asked at Sapiens: Did Processed Foods Make Us Human?

Denyse O'Leary
November 26, 2020
Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Just For Fun
Well, at least the guy isn’t arguing that processed foods make us inhuman or that turkey dinners kill people. Instead, he tried living off the land in a really big way: (including climbing a tree to eat raw eland marrow). Such experiences led him to come up with an interesting theory of human origins. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 26, 2020
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design
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Ancient fish were “prepared” for life on land

Denyse O'Leary
November 26, 2020
Evolution, Intelligent Design
Now how would the sarcoptergians have come to be “already primed for living on land”? Did they know they were going to move to land? Or is there an underlying pattern? Can we call this "preparatory evolution?" Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
November 26, 2020
Categorized
Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design
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“Identical evolution” of isolated groups of early vertebrates confirmed

Denyse O'Leary
November 26, 2020
Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design
The authors claim that their find proves the “theory of evolution.” It’s certainly strong evidence for a theory of evolution - but that theory would not be Darwin’s. It would be great to get some insight into how these built-in capacities for identical adaptation are carried from one generation to the next. Read More ›