Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Year

2022

Those awful comb jellies betray the Darwinians again: They were even more complex than feared, starting at maybe 635 million years ago

They’re said to have appeared between 634 and 604 million years ago (Peterson and Butterfield, 2005) and figure in the Cambrian Explosion. Darwinians have been trying to Cancel the Cambrian Explosion since practically forever but it keeps coming back into the fact base. Read More ›

As the Babylon Bee staff wait it out in Twitter Jail…

The Babylon Bee's Twitter Account Was Suspended, But That Made Its Story Go Viral “If Twitter's goal had been to remove the harmful content, it backfired spectacularly. That original tweet, which was posted on March 15, had largely flown under the radar – yet when news that the parody site's account was suspended, the tweet suddenly went viral.” Look, it’s an updated version of “Banned in Boston,” right? Read More ›

Supposedly: Hundreds of new mammal species remain undetected

Look, it is probably true that hundreds of genuine species remain undetected. But in the absence of any rigorous standards for declaring a species, won’t claims like this be used merely for political purposes? Oh, and another paper: “Astonishing!: Separate species frequently hybridize!” Third paper: That’s a big problem! Give us money for extensive efforts to prevent it…. We need legislation…!" Read More ›

Dr John Campbell on the illusion of evidence-based medicine

For the past two years, we have been concerned that medical practice and pandemic management have been skewed by selective hyperskepticism and bias. Dr Campbell speaks out, based on the recent paper: We can look at a screen shot, where he targets domination of medical drug approvals by big pharma: Earlier, he expressed concern about how integrity of the science could be compromised, as is now exposed due to Freedom of Information requests: The obvious issue of special interest agendas leads to the issue of regulatory capture. Wikipedia (an example itself of ideological agenda capture) outlines: In politics, regulatory capture (also agency capture and client politics) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, Read More ›

The curious connection between Charles Darwin and John Brown

Aeschliman: "After the Civil War and the death of Lincoln, 'those that stepped into the pathway marked by men like John Brown faltered and large numbers turned back,' Du Bois wrote. 'They said: He was a good man — even great, but he has no message for us today — he was a "belated [Protestant] Covenanter," an anachronism in the age of Darwin, one who gave his life to lift not only the unlifted but the unliftable.'" Read More ›

Our cells even have tentacles

So the little blobs aren’t nearly as helpless, let alone simple, as they have sometimes been made out to be. It’s quite the little world in there. Unfortunately, some of the cells that probably get a lot of use out of their filapodia are cancer cells. But maybe, the researchers suggest, that fact points to new treatment methods. Read More ›

From the Babylon Bee (still in Twitter jail)

This stuff is not our usual line of coverage. But in these strange times — when Woke American billionaires tell us all when we may and may not laugh — you might be missing the Bee’s sendup of some of the most asinine upperclassmen in Western world history. So here’s your fix. Read More ›

Origin of life: But how do cells come to have “borders” at all?

Inanimate objects don’t have “borders” because they need not defend themselves against anything. Boulders don’t care if they end up as sand. Having a membrane at all suggests that something is different about life that can’t be explained by the various “It all just happened” scenarios we often hear about how life got started. How did life forms decide they wanted to protect themselves? Read More ›

Shades of “junk DNA”? Tiny bubbles are NOT “cellular debris”

EVs, which are found in human fluids including urine and blood, may be used in liquid biopsies as biomarkers for disease because healthy and sick cells package different EV cargo. It’s getting harder all the time to find genuine junk in the human body. Just as well that Nathan Lents, author of Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, probably isn't listening. Read More ›

How the COVID pandemic showed that evidence-based medicine is — at present — an illusion

Malone: The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion. Read More ›