Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
March 13, 2021
Categorized
Cell biology, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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Science discovery: The non-existence of harmful proteins

Denyse O'Leary
March 13, 2021
Cell biology, Intelligent Design
Researchers: “More than one-fourth of human proteins are one substitution away from containing a significant MAW, with the majority of replacements being predicted harmful.” Just above that, they say “This suggests that their absence is due to negative selection.” That’s a lot of negative selection going on. It feels somewhat like saying “The plagiarism checker provided considerable negative selection for the inappropriate use of others’ work.” Sure it did but that’s what it was designed to do. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
March 13, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Sabine Hossenfelder reassures us that Schrodinger’s cat is still not dead

Denyse O'Leary
March 13, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Hossenfelder: It’s no secret that I myself am signed up to superdeterminism, which means that the measurement outcome is partly determined by the measurement settings. In this case, the cat may start out in a superposition, but by the time you measure it, it has reached the state which you actually observe. So, there is no sudden collapse in superdeterminism, it’s a smooth, deterministic, and local process. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
March 12, 2021
Categorized
Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Mathematics
Tagged
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Gregory Chaitin on true randomness

Denyse O'Leary
March 12, 2021
Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Mathematics
Chaitin: You see, with the normal coin tosses, actually every possible finite sequence of heads and tails in a sense is equally random, because they were all generated by tossing a fair coin. But some of them, all heads has a lot of structure, all tails have a lot of structure, alternating heads and tails have a lot of structure. I was looking at something that ignored how the sequence is generated and just looked at it and said, is there structure here or isn’t there? Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
March 11, 2021
Categorized
Academic Freedom, Creationism, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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Josh Swamidass on the need to single out and punish creationists

Denyse O'Leary
March 11, 2021
Academic Freedom, Creationism, Intelligent Design
One key effect of Cancel Culture is the elimination of competition by citing grounds that are irrelevant to performance. As Klinghoffer puts it, employers “will wish to know if they are about to take aboard a creationist in a science-related field. For example, a pediatric nurse oncologist, caring for little kids with cancer, while believing that the world is under 10,000 years old.” Someone with “Correct” views on the age of Earth will be deemed more acceptable even with fewer gifts in pediatric nursing. It’s a recipe for Virtuous underperformance. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
March 11, 2021
Categorized
Intelligent Design, Plants
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Tree fern, once considered “evolutionary dead-end,” turns out to have been advanced

Denyse O'Leary
March 11, 2021
Intelligent Design, Plants
Curiously, we keep finding that ancient life forms were more complex or advanced than thought, not that they were simpler and more primitive than thought. What does that imply about the drivers of our expectations? Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
March 11, 2021
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design
Tagged
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Researchers: Lamprey larvae do NOT resemble the early animal “that all vertebrates evolved from”

Denyse O'Leary
March 11, 2021
Evolution, Intelligent Design
The resemblance sounds like so nice and neat a Darwinian belief that few can have wanted, in these times, to subject it to scrutiny. But some people did. And it’s almost like they don’t mind rewriting the textbooks. It’s as if they don’t “trust science” or something. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
March 10, 2021
Categorized
extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind
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A psychologist weighs in on the Neanderthal extinction

Denyse O'Leary
March 10, 2021
extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind
Of course, it's all very interesting. That is why we listen. But a dozen different theories are called "science" only out of courtesy. And it’s not clear that Coolidge and Overmann’s thirteenth theory (if that’s the count) is any improvement. Read More ›