Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Gregory Chaitin on the dead hand of bureaucracy in science

Chaitin: I have a pessimistic vision which I hope is completely wrong, that the bureaucracies are like a cancer — the ones that control research and funding for research and counting how much you’ve been publishing. I’ve noticed that at universities, for example, the administrative personnel are gradually taking all the best buildings and expanding. So I think that the bureaucracy and the rules and regulations increases to the point that it sinks the society. Read More ›

Fine tuning of the universe: The strong force and the fine structure constant

Luke Barnes: What would happen in a hypothetical universe in which the fundamental constants of nature had other values? There is nothing mathematically wrong with these hypothetical universes. But there is one thing that they almost always lack — life. Read More ›

Another evidence-free whoop for the multiverse

Let’s be clear here. We have evidence for fine-tuning in the only universe we know to exist. To argue against it, we must posit universes for which we have no evidence and maybe cannot ever have any evidence. This makes sense, WHY again? Isn't it all becoming a bit of a scandal? Read More ›

Interact with your ID faves in the Trinity College webinars — but book soon!

Registrations were pretty heavy for the first webinar, the one with John Lennox,(“Has Science Buried God?”). We are told there are numbers constraints even for online stuff. So if you see something you like below, get your index finger moving around that Registration Link button! Read More ›

Michael Egnor’s thought experiment on partial brain transplants

Egnor: We tend to assume that there must be a medium of communication both between our eyes and our whole brain in order to see. But people who have had split brain surgery see quite well even though their hemispheres have been separated (thus there is no direct connection). If the eyes (and hemispheres) are separated by 4000 miles, would the principle be any different? Read More ›

Can cryogenics (freezing at death) preserve memories or consciousness?

The question cryogenics of the connectome raises is, can we freeze and then recover consciousness itself as opposed to simply saving imprints of a person’s memories? Dr. Frankenstein is now taking your calls. Read More ›

Wikipedia presents pseudo-“knowledge” [fake “knowledge”?] on ID, yet again

In discussing implication logic and first duties, Wikipedia on ID came up yet again. The lead’s manifest failure to be responsibly objective, descending into slander from the outset, speaks volumes: Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as “an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins”.[1][2][3][4][5] Proponents claim that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”[6] ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science.[7][8][9] The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank Read More ›

How Darwinism wound its way into various schemes for improving American society

Scambray: Hofstadter softened Darwin, making his a “conservative” force, supporting the laissez-faire status quo. Others classified Darwin as a change agent, a precursor to social planning. These intermural quarrels aside, Watson demonstrates that progressivism “aimed a dagger at the heart of the Constitution.” … Read More ›

Grand Darwinian experiment with 10,000 generations of yeast proves that Mike Behe is right

If the authors could have predicted adaptation through loss-of-function mutations, why didn’t they let high school textbook authors and pop science presenters in on the secret?: Michael Behe is right: Darwin devolves. Evolution is mostly about devolution. Does that maybe make sense in a universe where entropy is growing? But where does it leave Darwin? At the bus stop after the last bus has left? Read More ›

Taking aim at species classifier Carl Linnaeus for racism — but not Darwin

Now, how on earth did Haeckel get the idea of “social Darwinism”? Or is it “social Derwoodism.” Surely Haeckel can’t have been riffing of the celebrated Brit toff who wrote all this racist stuff? Whatever, Darwin still has an asbestos reputation among the Woke. Anyone can be blamed for the generally racist attitudes of 19th century scientists except the man who did so much to pass them on. Read More ›

At MMN: Columbia professor wants government to regulate news media (Don’t imagine these moves won’t affect ID)

Bassett: “[J]ournalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others,” writes award-winning journalist and former attorney Glenn Greenwald. Read More ›

A forthright admission of how the lamprey larvae change official vertebrate history

Lamprey paper first author: “Once fortified with historical inertia, just-so stories are difficult to interrogate.” Just-So stories in science are not just difficult to interrogate but risky! People fear the questioner Doubts the Narrative and That Is Not Allowed. The essay is charming and it is heartening to read someone in science who is prepared to let evidence, not Narrative, be the guide. Read More ›

Researchers: “Vast reservoir” of complex molecules found in cold cloud, not dying stars, as expected

Researcher: "It's like going into a boutique shop and just browsing the inventory on the front-end without ever knowing there was a back room. We've been collecting little molecules for 50 years or so and now we have discovered there's a back door. When we opened that door and looked in, we found this giant warehouse of molecules and chemistry that we did not expect," said McGuire. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder asks: Whatever happened to life on Venus?

Hossenfelder ends by reminding us, re phosphine on Venus, that “ absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” True, but that’s just a corollary of the fact that one can’t prove a negative. No, we can’t but that doesn’t prevent us from drawing reasonable conclusions. The proverb has been used to cover far too many situations where a more realistic conclusion would be “There is no particular reason to believe this.” Read More ›