Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Year

2022

L&FP, 55: Defining/Clarifying Intelligent Design as Inference, as Theory, as a Movement

It seems, despite UD’s resources tab, some still struggle to understand ID in the three distinct senses: inference, theory/research programme, movement. Accordingly, let us headline a clarifying note from the current thread on people who doubt, for the record: [KF, 269:] >>. . . first we must mark out a matter of inductive reasoning and epistemology. Observed tested, reliable signs such as FSCO/I [= functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information, “fun-skee”] beyond 500 – 1,000 bits point to design as cause for cases we have not observed. This is the design INFERENCE. Note, inference, not movement, not theory. Following the UD Weak Argument Correctives under the Resources tab, we can identify ID Theory as a [small] research programme that Read More ›

Fun from the Babylon Bee in Twitter jail while Elon Musk tries to buy them and others out

Science: Just last month, Issues & Insights reported a poll it conducted with TIPP, the most accurate predictor of the last five presidential elections, regarding people’s feelings about COVID. The survey found 65% of Americans think COVID policy in the United States is “driven by politics,” with only 21% believing it’s “driven by science.” Read More ›

Richard Buggs’s talk on the abominable mystery of flowers now available

Intro: Charles Darwin was convinced that the evolution of complexity must proceed by tiny steps. Only tiny steps could be accumulated by natural selection. The process had to go slowly for it to work. Billions of years were needed. But Darwin was aware that this theory had a problem: flowers. Read More ›

So life on Earth is even older than we thought?

At ScienceDaily: The researchers say that, while some of the structures could conceivably have been created through chance chemical reactions, the 'tree-like' stem with parallel branches was most likely biological in origin, as no structure created via chemistry alone has been found like it. Read More ›

Changing the genetic code — and still enabling life — would be a challenge

The basic message is that we can’t improve on all the things that just happen to work by accident in exactly the right way. Yet in just about any area of life other than evolution theory we find a completely different picture. Why is Darwinism allowed to be such a big exception to the general rule? Read More ›

Neil Thomas comments on the difficulty of accommodating Darwinism to sudden origin of life

Here’s a thought: If your origin of life theory works, can we reverse engineer the conditions to produce life from non-life today? If we can’t, that doesn’t prove your theory false. After all, it is very difficult to demonstrate that something “couldn’t have” happened under any circumstances whatever. But you must now rejoin the queue in your previous place… Read More ›

Could life have started in the depths of the Earth? It’s controversial.

Talk about an extremophile deep in the Earth! Trouble is we don’t know that life started out like audaxviator. It could just as easily be that one late-arriving microbe could inhabit that territory but nothing else could. Read More ›

Asked at Space.com: Could gravity itself be the origin of dark matter?

Paul Sutter: A new model of the very early universe proposes that the graviton, the quantum mechanical force carrier of gravity, flooded the cosmos with dark matter before normal matter even had a chance to get started. Read More ›