Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Rob Sheldon on the secret to design detection

Sheldon: Why should I be able to understand the universe? What characteristics do the designer and I share? Love of math? Love of order? Love of intricacy? When I feel like the designer is someone I could meet at an icebreaker and have a great conversation with, that's when I know I'm on the right track. Read More ›

CERN: New exotic particle, tetraquark, discovered

CERN: The new particle contains two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Several tetraquarks have been discovered in recent years (including one with two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks), but this is the first one that contains two charm quarks, without charm antiquarks to balance them. Read More ›

Building a Yacht — design in action

Here, we see a sped up time-lapsed snapshot succession view of the design and construction of a fibreglass vs a wooden yacht: Here is another: Now, let’s scale down to a canoe: We thus see illustrated how . . . design is intelligently directed configuration which makes advantageous, and ideally skilled and artistic, use of forces and materials in nature, economically, to achieve desired ends. Now, let us follow Paley in his second step, in Ch 2 of his argument. Suppose, that, in the course of its voyaging we were to notice that a particular yacht — having in it various stored plans, algorithms, assembler position- arm- effector devices, jigs, frames and devices etc, were to somehow construct another yacht Read More ›

Botanist Margaret Helder asks: How can a “simple” or “primitive” sponge surprise engineers with its optimal physics?

Helder: A team of Italian and American scientists researching this topic declared that the sponges display “exceptional structural properties” which enable them to thrive. In fact, their study reveals “mechanisms of extraordinary adaptation to live in the abyss.” Read More ›

Asked at the Journal of Theoretical Biology: Is the cell REALLY a machine?

Daniel J. Nicholson: "... the recent introduction of novel experimental techniques capable of tracking individual molecules within cells in real time is leading to the rapid accumulation of data that are inconsistent with an engineering view of the cell. This paper examines four major domains of current research in which the challenges to the machine conception of the cell are particularly pronounced" Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Randomness is not a scientific explanation

Eric Holloway: ... randomness is unprovable, which was proven by three different computer scientists: Ray Solomonoff, Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin. The only thing we can know is that something is not random. Hence, we can never know that something originated from randomness. Read More ›

Researchers now believe skull found in 1933 belongs to “our closest relative” “species”

But read on. There are problems with this interpretation. Sinclair: "For example, this study proposes that Homo sapiens were in Eurasia at about 400,000 years ago. But the oldest fossil for this species known outside Africa is little more than half this age." Read More ›