Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Author of Taking Leave of Darwin on common descent of humans and apes

Neil Thomas: Darwin envisioned the momentous ontological change from ape to man occurring gradually by way of “transitional forms.” Pressing far too heavily on time itself as a causal agent, he advanced the untestable hypothesis that the changes will have taken place during the billions of years separating our present day from the supposed time of the first appearance of a simian species on our planet. Since this theory is beyond the reach of any possible empirical test, it requires alternative evidential back-up. Unfortunately for Darwin there is a dearth of any fossil evidence establishing the claimed evolutionary “missing links,” ... Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Does Mt Rushmore contain no more information than Mt Fuji?

As Jeffrey Shallit claims? That is, does intelligent intervention increase information? Is that intervention detectable by science methods? Read More ›

From the world of “Trust the science… ”

Reform is nearly impossible if the incentive structure remains as it is — rewarding publication in and of itself. On the other hand, nothing stays the same forever and growing public cynicism might provide a spur to reform. Read More ›

At Evolution News: C. S. Lewis and the argument for theism from reason

Jay Richards: Natural selection could conceivably select for survival-enhancing behavior. But it has no tool for selecting only the behaviors caused by true beliefs, and weeding out all the others. So if our reasoning faculties came about as most naturalists assume they have, then we have little reason to assume they are reliable in the sense of giving us true beliefs. And that applies to our belief that naturalism is true. Read More ›

And now… David Hume Cancelled? Jerry Coyne reports.

Jerry, what goes around, comes around. You did to Eric Hedin what the Woke are doing to your faves. They'll Cancel them all. Then they won't have to do any homework. We didn’t tell them to. You did. We could all help stop it now but then you have to stop too. Read More ›

Barna profiles a generation on the cliff’s crumbling edge — 78 million US Millennials

Barna’s current report, “New Insights into the Generation of Growing Influence: Millennials In America,” is a portrait of a generation adrift, dancing on the edge of a cliff, and reflective of generations of civilisational betrayal by intellectual, policy/political, media and educational leadership leading to a destabilised culture. And so, this cannot wait, triple bereavement life crisis or no, this needs to be highlighted and preliminarily assessed here at UD: The report’s snapshot summary tells the grim story in outline: And: Also, we may add on Religious identification, affinity and affiliation: We can start with the obvious, as within living memory of those of us who were of age to notice, between 1989 and 1991, Marxism’s credibility as a principle of Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Why physicalism is failing as the accepted approach to science

Essentially, panpsychism offers a way for scientists to address human consciousness, as currently understood, without explaining it away as an illusion. It would allow us to say that if Zombie-Jane existed, she would be missing something critical that Jane has (and so does everything else, to some extent). Whether that makes panpsychism a better explanation of reality than idealism or dualism is a separate question. Like all points of view, they have their own issues but the Zombie isn’t one of them. Read More ›

John West on C.S. Lewis (who was not really a “theistic evolutionist” as the term is understood today)

West: "Indeed, [Ken] Miller insists that 'mankind’s appearance on this planet was not preordained, that we are here… as an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out.'" Needless to say, Lewis did not subscribe to anything similar to this and might not have recognized it as Christian. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: 2. Neurosurgeon and neuropsychologist agree: Brain is not mind

Egnor saw patients who didn’t have most of their frontal lobes who were completely conscious, “in fact, rather pleasant, bright people.” Read More ›

New introduction to intelligent design at YouTube

Palmer: Part 1 begins with the basic concepts of Darwinian Evolution. Darwin’s theory related to heredity, but the science behind genetics was a mystery in his day. Darwin’s assumptions about heredity have proven to be mistaken. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Astronomer says, ET is more likely to be AI than to be a life form

Rees and colleagues assume that artificial intelligences can be creative thinkers. But the evidence so far is against that view. It’s not necessarily a matter of just ramping up the technology. By their very nature, computers compute but creative thinking is largely non-computational. We should keep that in mind when we encounter breathless media releases claiming to have overcome the problem. Read More ›

Researchers: “Positive interactions are common among culturable bacteria”

And here we thought nature was “red in tooth and claw.” From the paper: "We find that positive interactions, often described to be rare, occur commonly and primarily as parasitisms between strains that differ in their carbon consumption profiles." Read More ›