Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Year

2022

New Zealand’s Royal Society grudgingly lets off two scientists who critiqued “Indigenous ways of knowing” as conventional science

Jerry Coyne: As I said, the controversy over the hegemony of MM [Indigenous ways of knowing taught as science] in science continues, and if I know anything about New Zealand educational politics, MM will worm its way into science class. All the new RSNZ statement does is exculpate two scientists unfairly accused of misbehavior and harm for saying that MM, while worthy of being taught, is not coequal with modern science. Read More ›

Darwin’s tree of life is just… ground cover?

"Charles Darwin himself predicted that countless intermediate animal forms must exist within the fossil record, given that organisms gradually evolved from one species into the next. However, what the fossil record actually shows is the exact opposite, namely, that whenever new species appear, they do so suddenly and without evidence of precursory forms in the geological record." Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on the problems with the peptide origin of life hypothesis

Sheldon: It is unlikely life can start with one or a few amino acids, because the full suite is needed to build nano-machines. Although your car has lots of bolts, one cannot build a car out of nothing but bolts. Read More ›

How the Doctrine of Original Sin Helped Spark the Scientific Revolution and Why Neo- Pelagianism Has Produced the Replication Crisis

Are the majority of new scientific publications false?  There is very good evidence to believe that is the case.  This short video is must viewing for anyone who wants to know why that is the case.  As our News Desk has faithfully reported these last couple of years, science is beset with a replication crisis.  A passage in Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis got me to thinking about this crisis and perhaps the reason it arose.  In an early chapter of his book, Meyer discussed why the scientific revolution occurred in Christian Europe and nowhere else.  The reason, of course, is that far from being at war with science as some blinkered revisionist historians would have it, science Read More ›

Asked by science watchdog: Why is Lancet — famed medical journal — into anti-science advocacy?

Sure, “anti-science” is a loaded term. So often, it just means inconvenient science or “unacceptable views” or revelations of ties that should definitely be investigated. Or whatever. In some cases, it can mean a preference for Wokeness over facts. We think that’s what American Council on Science and Health is referring to here. Read More ›

China’s surveillance and control move, targeting esp. Christians

We see in current news: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has activated measures to drastically restrict the availability of Christian content on the internet, Open Doors reported this week. Last December, China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) announced its upcoming “Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services,” a series of regulations designed to eliminate any online religious message that fails to conform to the principles of the CCP. Without express government permission, no organization or individual “shall preach on the Internet, carry out religious education and training, publish sermon content, forward or link to related content, organize and conduct religious activities on the Internet, or live broadcast or post recorded videos of religious rituals,” the CCP declared Read More ›

The oldest cephalopods — much older than thought — had 10 working arms, not 8

Wouldn’t that mean that the cephalopods had an even more complex nervous system in the past? For that matter, why do we hear about so much stasis and so little about evolution? The evolution must be happening very fast, punctuated by long periods of stasis. Read More ›

Would you believe? Science ghostwriting factories in China

Epoch Times: A reporter from Xinhua Viewpoint, a column of official media Xinhua, posing as a cardiovascular and cerebrovascular physician contacted numerous paper factories and was told that all levels of dissertation could be written and published for him as long as the delivery time was not too short, according to Xinhua in a Jan. 11 report. Read More ›

Researchers: CRISPR is not the big answer to de-extinction

With genes as with documents, how much do the lost ones matter? If the recreated passenger pigeon was pretty much like the old one, what difference would it make? Shouldn’t the main question be, is this a good ecological idea overall? Read More ›

Why physicists adhere to quantum theory despite bafflement

At Symmetry Magazine: Quantum field theory is rife with something mathematicians can’t stand: unresolved infinities. In a 1977 essay, Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg wrote that “[Quantum field theory’s] reputation among physicists suffered frequent fluctuations… at times dropping so low that quantum field theory came close to be[ing] abandoned altogether.” (But it was kept because it works. And what might that point to?) Read More ›