Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Frank Turek looks at Scientism of the gaps

To summarize Scientism of the Gaps: No mountain too high, no river so wide that sheer chaos cannot contrive to create an inextricably interlinked system that seamlessly navigates it. Even though chaos never works that way in your own life, you must believe — if you are really science-friendly — that it works that way at the foundation of all of life, the entire universe and all that. Read More ›

The remarkable expansion of the proteome across the history of life

A friend writes to draw our attention to this sentence: “Life met this challenge by evolving molecular chaperones that can minimize protein misfolding and aggregation, even under stressful out-of-equilibrium conditions favoring aggregation.” “Life” is a busy little bee, no? If this were not evolutionary biology, we would talk in terms of purpose and design. Oh but, whoops, they do talk in terms of purpose and design. But none dare call it that. Read More ›

Professional skeptic Michael Shermer takes on Stephen C. Meyer and his Return of God Hypothesis

In an age when the Raging Woke parasitize the world of ideas, banning everyone from Frank Turek through Richard Dawkins from public life (when not out setting fires and assaulting the non-Woke), it is worth nothing that Shermer’s 2020 book Giving the Devil His Due, is a defense of intellectual freedom. Read More ›

At The Scientist: Trofim Lysenko and “stamping out science” Yes… yesterday. Sure. But what about today?

From this distance, to whatever extent Lysenko thought epigenetics was a feature of life forms, he was right. To whatever extent Darwinians opposed the idea, they were wrong. The rest is totalitarianism, whether of Lysenkoists or Darwinists. To get some idea how that sort of thing plays out today, consider the current COVID-19 debacle: The lab leak theory has always been a reasonable idea, not a conspiracy theory. Yet it was treated as a conspiracy theory for purely political reasons… Read More ›

At last! Computer-generated sci babble papers to be “retracted”

The most likely reason one can think of for the persistence of computer-generated gibberish in the science database is that many other papers sound like that — but are in fact authentic human creations — so no one really wants to go there. Read More ›

L&FP, 42a: The limit on Mathematical knowledge

Here, a video series explores Godel’s incompleteness results: The core point is that Hilbert’s scheme collapsed, nicely summarised. The Godel incompleteness results and the Turing machine halting challenge made Mathematics irreducibly complex. So, Mathematics, too, is a venture of knowledge as warranted, credibly true (so reliable) belief, which must be open to correction. An exercise of rational, responsible faith, not utter certainty on the whole, once a sufficiently complex system is on the table. (Yes, first duties of reason obtain . . . here, there be dragons that love chick peas [Cicero . . .].) The defeasible [= defeat-able] framework for understanding knowledge extends to Mathematics. A fortiori to Computer Science and Physics, then onward across the spectrum of disciplines Read More ›

A unified theory of physics is within reach?

"It didn’t have to be this way. The charges of the elementary particles in our Universe could have been such that there was no way to unify any two or more of them into a single unified particle. It’s the combination of observational data and mathematics that offers us strong hints that the charges for elementary particles in the standard model aren’t arbitrary, but rather arise by virtue of being embedded into a grand unified theory framework." But isn't that an argument for God? Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: More on the COVID-19 lab leak theory

It’s off topic for ID as such. But it is important for helping people work through a general principle that concerns all issues that pertain to science: “Trust the science” is not a good approach when the science is so clearly not bound by any standards of grappling with the facts. (Darwinism anyone?) Read More ›

Wuhan ID Research Funded by Feds

See story here. A government probe last year into the origins of the coronavirus found practically no evidence COVID-19 originated from nature, former State Department official David Asher told Fox News on Thursday. “We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19,” he told “America Reports.” . . . Asher, the lead contractor on the subject, said the team investigated the two chief hypotheses for the virus’ origins, the other being the lab-leak theory that has gained credence after widespread media dismissal over the past year. . . . “The data disproportionately stacked up Read More ›

Cells compared across species — expected to be similar — prove strikingly different

At SciTechDaily: “I was struck by how stark the differences are between them,” said Tarashansky, who was lead author of the paper and is a Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Fellow. “We thought that they should have similar cell types, but when we try analyzing them using standard techniques, the method doesn’t recognize them as being similar.” Read More ›

Big Science: Questioning the lab leak theory of COVID-19 is “divisive”

Oh sure. Reality check: Millions of people have died in this debacle. That’s nothing new for the Chinese Communist Party. But it’s a bit of a kick in the head for the rest of us. If distinguishing between truth and lies is “divisive,” so be it. The Nature article is a shameful display. Read More ›

At YouTube: How Evolution Can Still Be Evidence of Design

The point of view Dr. Rope Kojonen (philosopher/theologian) and Dr. Zachary Ardern represent was, we are told, pioneered by Asa Gray (1810–1888, pictured), father of American botany. Gray is remembered now only as a foil for Darwin (as portrayed in the Britannica entry here). But he deserves to be remembered and have his views represented fairly in his own right. Read More ›

Do we really understand what intelligence in life forms is?

Thinking about Jeff Hawkins's new book, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (Basic Books 2021), championing the mammalian neocortex, for example, one might ask, what does the iconic mammalian neocortex do that equivalent systems in birds and octopuses can’t do? That’s not clear. And human intelligence is something different again. Read More ›