Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

At Mind Matters News: Compassion and religion: Darwin’s unscratchable itches

If one’s research is in a hole as deep as evolutionary psychology is when accounting for compassion, why not stop digging? Stop digging? The hole evolutionary psychologists are digging IS the enterprise. Any motive that didn’t merely spread selfish genes would be invisible to them. Read More ›

Did Francis Collins or Anthony Fauci have any role in the slow torture death of beagle puppies in Tunisia?

As now alleged? Some US legislators want answers. We’ve been warning for some time that “Trust the Science” is going to take a huge — and well-deserved — beating among intelligent people. This’ll help that along. Read More ›

Berkeley scientist and center director resigns over MIT’s deplatforming of exoplanet scientist

Note how little difference facts of science make in these matters — whether Abbot has anything to say that contributes to our knowledge does not matter of the Woke are displeased. Darwinism was the original Wokeness in science — immune to fact-based critique. The people who thought that that didn’t concern them are now formally wrong. It’s everywhere now. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder: No way to tell if the universe was fine-tuned for us — Rob Sheldon partially agrees

Sheldon: Even though I agree with Sabine about the fine tuning argument, I disagree strongly with her about the significance of the design we see in the world. "It just is" is not an explanation. Read More ›

At Evolution News: Three stunners challenge traditional Darwinism

At ENST: Scientists at Flinders University in Australia found that our DNA spreads up to a meter around us without even touching anything. We’re leaving breadcrumbs of genetic code everywhere we go! Read More ›

Physicist Marcelo Gleiser: Beauty in the universe is an “illusory consequence of our human mathematics”

So what, exactly, is this “false and illusory” view of our universe? Is this short essay another veiled “correct” assault on the fact of the fine-tuning of the universe for life? There seems to be a lot of that out there these days. Orthodox science is now in a deadly conflict with facts… There can only be one outcome. Read More ›

Researchers study why many life forms discard pieces of their DNA as they develop

Researchers: "A surprisingly wide array of creatures, all the way up to some vertebrates, dump significant stretches of DNA during early development, so the stretches don’t end up in most of their body cells." [Only in the germ cells they pass on.] Read More ›

Design theorist Eric Anderson on claims for a self-replicating machine

Anderson: "The Cornell molecubes didn’t build themselves. Instead, they were built by intelligent researchers using other tools and systems — by a separate “factory” so to speak — that was, in turn, built by other tools and systems, and so on. Yet beyond the observation of this uncomfortable regress, there are several additional instructive issues we need to examine if we are to really appreciate what self-replication entails." Read More ›

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne learns s thing or three about censorship – when he’s not doling it out

The explanation for Coyne’s sudden support for academic freedom might be fairly simple: He thought that Cancel Culture would only ever be deployed against people who think that nature shows evidence of design. He never expected it to come for people HE values. Read More ›

Is it the “junk DNA” that makes us human?

Researchers: "This suggests that the basis for the human brain's evolution are genetic mechanisms that are probably a lot more complex than previously thought, as it was supposed that the answer was in those two per cent of the genetic DNA. Our results indicate that what has been significant for the brain's development is instead perhaps hidden in the overlooked 98 per cent, which appears to be important. This is a surprising finding." Read More ›

At Cosmos Magazine: Why viruses are considered non-living

It doesn’t help settle the ongoing debate that there is no single definition of life. Or that giant viruses like the mimivirus blur the line. Or that viruses share some genetics with host cells. Also, we often hear about the “strategies” of viruses. Which raises the question: If information had a physical form, would it be like viruses? Read More ›

Oldest human-like footprints are 2.5 million years older than the ones attributed to “Lucy”

Re footprints in Crete: “The tracks are almost 2.5 million years older than the tracks attributed to Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) from Laetoli in Tanzania,” says study co-author Uwe Kirscher, an expert on paleogeography at the University of Tübingen, in a statement. [Crete?!] Read More ›

New findings on the devolution of tuskless elephants

Why were two-thirds of the tuskless babies females? "They also suspected that the relevant gene was dominant – meaning that a female needs only one altered gene to become tuskless — and that when passed to male embryos, it may short-circuit their development." Read More ›