Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 7, 2021
Categorized
Intelligent Design, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Science
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Rob Sheldon reflects on skepticism about the findings from research brain scans (fMRI)

Denyse O'Leary
April 7, 2021
Intelligent Design, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Science
Sheldon: The skeptical neuroscience student talks about the sin of employing too many statistical searches on the data, also known as "p-hacking". Once again, the sin is not in using statistics, but rather in refusing to tell the world how many searches you made on the data before you settled on this one. Because the significance is not simply the data p-value, but the search space you used in finding it. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 7, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Stan Robertson’s paper on black holes is free for download

Denyse O'Leary
April 7, 2021
Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Physics
One factor that one needn’t be a physicist to see is that black holes became a “thing” in popular culture, in a way that “red dwarfs” and “white dwarfs” never did. No one says that red dwarfs, for example, are a gateway to another universe. That sort of thing may affect people’s willingness to evaluate the evidence base critically. Cf Darwinism. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 7, 2021
Categorized
Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design
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Horizontal gene transfer between vertebrates: herring and smelt

Denyse O'Leary
April 7, 2021
Darwinism, Evolution, horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design
We don’t know that HGT is "extremely rare" in vertebrates. We know that it was unexpected so no one was looking for it. We also know that it is extremely inconvenient for a discipline that invested so heavily in natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism). Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 6, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Rob Sheldon takes aim at black holes: How much is really known?

Denyse O'Leary
April 6, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
It is most unfortunate that both scientists themselves and the popular press discuss black holes (bh) as if they are (a) a scientifically defined object; and, (b) an experimentally observed one. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 6, 2021
Categorized
Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy
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Gregory Chaitin: Why “impractical” things like philosophy are actually quite useful

Denyse O'Leary
April 6, 2021
Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy
Chaitin reflects on the fact that if he had to do practical work 60 years ago, there wouldn't be practical research today based on the Omega number. But that raises a question: If materialism were true, why does theoretical stuff matter so much? Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 5, 2021
Categorized
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
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Sabine Hossenfelder asks, Should Stephen Hawking have won the Nobel? Rob Sheldon weighs in

Denyse O'Leary
April 5, 2021
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics
Rob Sheldon: Hawking did not get the Nobel, however, because he hung his hopes on the radiation emitted by BH--the so-called "Hawking radiation". And it was never observed. Sabine tries to explain why. But one argument that Sabine doesn't make, is that Hawking radiation may never have been observed because BH are themselves never observed. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 5, 2021
Categorized
horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life
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New origin of life thesis: Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) wasn’t actually a single cell

Denyse O'Leary
April 5, 2021
horizontal gene transfer, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life
Marshall favors horizontal gene transfer as a key method of early development because ancestor–descendant evolution is a “very slow” (42:25) evolutionary process. HGT among multiple independent lineages, by contrast, allows a “vast exchange of information,” thus sharing innovations and leading to faster development. Okay. And in the midst of all that, Dawkins’s Selfish Gene got lost in a crowd somewhere and was never heard from again. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 4, 2021
Categorized
Human evolution, Intelligent Design, theism
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Asked of Steve Meyer: If humans are so important to God, why did they take so long to develop?

Denyse O'Leary
April 4, 2021
Human evolution, Intelligent Design, theism
In the book, Meyer argues from three scientific discoveries to an inference to a personal God. If God is the creator, Keating wants to know, why was He so patient as to wait billions of years, during which not much that was very interesting happened, for the fulfillment of His purpose in initiating the universe to begin with? Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
April 4, 2021
Categorized
Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience
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Is science drifting from simple materialism to panpsychism?

Denyse O'Leary
April 4, 2021
Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience
It seems to have come down to a choice between “nothing is conscious” and “everything is conscious.” But materialism becomes incoherent when it requires us to believe that we only imagine we are conscious — that's a basic error in logic. Read More ›