Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

ID Science Applied Practically

ID science is being applied at a practical level to determine if COVID-19 is a natural or artificial organism. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, we get everything short of an explicit reference to Dembski’s explanatory filter: Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made? Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural Read More ›

L&FP43: Big-S Science, Official Consensus and the pessimistic induction

It is highly relevant and timely to now ponder “Big-S Science and appeals to official consensus i/l/o the logic of the pessimistic induction and what warrant entails,” with “degrees of warrant, open mindedness and tolerance/diversity.” It is probably best to start with the pessimistic induction, here, via SEP: If one considers the history of scientific theories in any given discipline, what one typically finds is a regular turnover of older theories in favor of newer ones, as scientific knowledge develops. From the point of view of the present, most past theories must be considered false; indeed, this will be true from the point of view of most times. Therefore, by enumerative induction (that is, generalizing from these cases), surely theories Read More ›