Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Crits Are Terrible Judges

As I explained in a previous post, “Critical Race Theory,” with its denial of objective morality and neutral principles of justice, is essentially metaphysical materialism applied to race relations.  While CRT has received a lot of media attention in recent days, “critical studies” of various stripes have been around for a long time.  I was first exposed to them when I was in law school in the 80’s and learned about critical legal theory (“CLT”).  Proponents of CLT (often called “Crits”) assert that the law is just another tool oppressors use to victimize the oppressed.  Harvard’s The Bridge project summarizes CLT as follows: A family of new legal theories, launched since 1970, share commitments to criticize not merely particular legal Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder: New evidence against the Standard Model of cosmology

Hossenfelder: "... the evidence is mounting that the cosmological principle is a bad assumption to develop a model for the entire universe and it probably has to go. It increasingly looks like we live in a region in the universe that happens to have a significantly lower density than the average in the visible universe." Read More ›

Historian Peter Harrison’s five best science and religion books

Harrison: If you look at the frequency of the word “religion”, no one talks about it much until the 17th century—this is true for English, originally Latin, and also the European vernacular languages, too. So, “religion” as a category is not really important to anyone until the modern period. With science, the practices that we regard as science went under a range of different labels. Read More ›

Dark matter as Fermi balls? Rob Sheldon offers a question

Sheldon: Quite surprisingly, such a theory is readily available for testing. Remember, dark matter avoids the center of galaxies, but neither does it condense into stellar-sized black holes (we looked). So if it is little balls created in the Big Bang, then it is indistinguishable from Primordial Black Holes that have been proposed for decades... Read More ›

The religious dimensions of Darwinian evolution theory

What about this? Darwinism was the way an imperial British culture justified its rule over the “lesser breeds without the law?” That really was how they did see it all. And Darwinism was perfect for the purpose. Read More ›

Maybe this is an argument for the rights of human embryos…

Researchers: The result revealed several key characteristics of the human embryonic development process. Firstly, mutation rates are higher in the first cell division, but then decrease to approximately one mutation per cell during later cell division. Secondly, early cells contributed unequally to the development of the embryo in all informative donors, for example, at the two-cell stage, one of the cells always left more progeny cells than the other. The ratio of this was different from person to person, implying that the process varies between individuals and is not fully deterministic. Read More ›

How to explain why you don’t believe in “evolution”

Math prof Granville Sewell suggests how to respond when you don't have time to offer a 30-minute answer on all the meanings of the term and, chance are, the yob who is asking is just trying to get you anyway Read More ›

Science, science denial, and popular neuroses

There is a finger on the scale! Suppose, listening to the evidence around COVID-19, I reasonably believed that it originated in a lab in Wuhan (China) which was doing experiments that the local people were not qualified to be doing? So then, are the bureaucrats “pro-science” and the rest of us “anti-science”? Read More ›

The four-legged whale: The biggest tourist attraction that never was?

Casey Luskin: The problem with these claims? That’s right, folks — they didn’t find any of the fossil’s legs. Everything you just read about this fossil is the product of imagination. In fact, if you check the technical paper you’ll learn that they found very little of the fossil at all. Read More ›