Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

At Phys.org: How fluctuating oxygen levels may have accelerated animal evolution

"Oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere are likely to have "fluctuated wildly" 1 billion years ago, creating conditions that could have accelerated the development of early animal life, according to new research. " Read More ›

From The New Atlantis: The Fine-Tuning Of Nature’s Laws – What Physics Tells Us About The Improbability Of Life

"Our universe’s ability to create and sustain life is rare indeed; a highly explainable but as yet unexplained fact. It could point the way to deeper physics, or beyond this universe, or even to principles beyond the ultimate laws of nature." Read More ›

From The New Atlantis: The Fine-Tuning of Nature’s Laws – What physics tells us about the improbability of life

"That the constants are all arranged in what is, mathematically speaking, the very improbable combination that makes our grand, complex, life-bearing universe possible is what physicists mean when they talk about the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life." Read More ›

L&FP, 62a: Science can rightly — and usefully — be viewed as “reverse engineering of the natural world”

Here, it is helpful to headline an update to L&FP, 62, as we need to return to a rich vein of thought that allows us to approach science in light of systems engineering perspectives: [[We may add a chart on a key subset of SE, reverse engineering, RE: One of the most significant Reverse Engineering-Forward Engineering exercises was the clean room duplication of the IBM PC’s operating framework that allowed lawsuit-proof clones to be built that then led to the explosion of PC-compatible machines. By the time this was over, IBM sold out to Lenovo and went back to its core competency, Mainframes. Where, now, a mainframe today is in effect a high end packaged server farm; the microprocessor now Read More ›

At Earth Sky: How likely is an Earth-like origin of life elsewhere?

Paul Scott Anderson writes: We know that life originated on Earth some 3.7 billion years ago. But we still don’t understand exactly how life came to be. Likewise, we know little to nothing about life on other rocky worlds, even those that might be similar to Earth. Is life a rare occurrence, or is it common? Or somewhere in between? Scientists debate the subject of abiogenesis, the idea of life arising from non-living material. If it can happen on Earth, can it happen elsewhere, too? A new paper from retired astrophysicist Daniel Whitmire at the University of Arkansas argues that it can. Whitmire published his new peer-reviewed paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology on September 23, 2022. Abiogenesis and our own existence Basically, the paper is a counter-argument to the view held Read More ›

L&FP, 62: The Systems (and Systems Engineering) Perspective — a first step to understanding design in/of our world

Our frame going forward, is knowledge reformation driven by application of the adapted JoHari Window, given obvious, fallacy-riddled ideological captivity of the intellectual high ground of our civilisation: Ideological captivity of the high ground also calls forth the perspective that we need to map the high ground: If you want some context on validity: So, we are now looking at ideologically driven captivity of the intellectual high ground and related institutions of our civilisation, leading to compromising the integrity of the knowledge commons through fallacy riddled evolutionary materialistic scientism and related ideologies. Not a happy thought but that is what we have to deal with and find a better way forward. We already know, knowledge (weak, everyday sense) is warranted, Read More ›