Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Year

2021

A comet, not an asteroid, killed the dinosaurs, say astrophysicists

At Smithsonian Mag: Siraj and co-author Avi Loeb concluded from their analysis that Jupiter's gravitational field was strong enough to bump many such long-period comets from the Oort cloud off course, bringing them very close to the Sun. Read More ›

Claims for random evolution overlook the fact that life needs software as well as hardware

Richard W. Stevens points out that a bird does not fly just because it has wings; it needs a Explanations of the evolution of flight do not account for that.“flight” program in its brain. Read More ›

Naturalism and Its Alternatives Free Until Wednesday

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies, now is your chance to do so. The Kindle version has been made free until Wednesday, so, if you’re interested, pick it up now! If you have been curious about the question of methodological naturalism, and wondered what the alternative would be, and what scientific investigation would *look like* under non-naturalism, this book contains papers that explore that question, both generally and within specific disciplines, including disciplines which already employ non-naturalism as a foundation. Click Here

3D chimp and human genomes differ significantly

Some of us remember when we were 99% chimpanzee… But that is so last decade … This type of finding makes more sense. If we were really 99% genetically similar to chimpanzees, the logical deduction is that the genome doesn't tell us much about a life form. Would be nice if it did, right? Read More ›

A geophysicist’s unconventional guide to surviving campus witch hunts: Show love

Let’s hope it continues to work for Abbot. A couple of difficulties: 1) It’s not clear that Cancel Culture is an academic community, as opposed to a mob running an academic racket. 2) Many Cancelers will interpret efforts to be nice as evidence of weakness, more or less as wolves do. But so long as the strategy really works, go with it. Read More ›

Researchers ask: Are we more like primitive fish than we thought?

“the genetic basis of air-breathing and limb movement was already established in our fish ancestor 50 million years earlier” than a transition to land. That sounds like directed evolution, no? The researchers have stumbled onto directed evolution but their careers depend on not recognizing that fact. Read More ›

Researchers: Huge coelacanth fish is “not a living fossil”

For all practical purposes, the coelacanth is a “living fossil,” in the sense that it is an example of stasis. It wanders a bit genetically over millions of years but doesn’t change much over hundreds of millions of years. Could we say the same of most vertebrates? Read More ›

Researcher: Humpback whales DON’T learn songs from one another?

Don’t blame Eduardo Mercado. In order to deal safely, if not rationally, with the demand that whales be seen to be nearly as smart as people, he is stuck with making these nonsense claims. The probable situation is that whales don’t vary their songs much because they can’t. One might say the same of many birds. Read More ›

Chronicles of the war on math: Why math is racist

Wethinks that the big winners are teachers who can’t teach, protected by unions. The big losers are kids who leave school innumerate and must cope with a workplace that no longer needs innumerate people. We have machines now. Read More ›

Chemist James Tour offers a YouTube series on abiogenesis, treated as a form of magic

"In this compelling series of lectures on abiogenesis, James Tour's riposte slices through both hype and myths using science to critique "science", demonstrating how experts in the field truly remain clueless on the origin of life." We recommend that inveterate yay-hoos find someone else to attack. Read More ›

Just in time for Darwin Day: Abolitionist Frederick Douglass on evolutionary racism

Science historian Michael Flannery points out that Douglass’s comments preceded Darwin’s On the Origin of Species because the basic idea of the "modified monkey" (Thomas Huxley's phrase) was in Lamarck (and probably in the air). Read More ›