Author: News

Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Epigenetics Intelligent Design

(Reformed) New Scientist 4: There is more to inheritance than just genes

At New Scientist: “Subsequent studies in plants and animals suggest that epigenetic inheritance is more common than anyone had expected. Whatʼs more, compared with genetic inheritance, it has some big advantages. Environments can change rapidly and dramatically, but genetic mutations are random, so often require generations to take hold.” Just think, within a few years, genetics might start to make some sense.
You’ve got to hand it to the New Scientist gang; when they rethink, they really do.

Animal minds Intelligent Design Neuroscience

Debunking another claim that an alleged “pillar” of human exceptionalism has “fallen”

Stripped of the rhetoric about supposedly fallen “pillars of human exceptionalism,” the researchers found a neuronal response in carrion crows that “might be a broad marker” for consciousness. Well, sure, it might. But before we get carried away, the consciousness we should know the most about is human consciousness, which remains almost a complete mystery to us, despite much research.

Artificial Intelligence Darwinism Intelligent Design Mathematics Natural selection

How much computing power would we need to evolve computer via Darwinian evolution that can program itself ?

But read the fine print: We would need to run many trials of planets in parallel in order to simulate the real conditions in the universe. Yampolskiy concludes, ‘In fact, depending on some assumptions we make regarding multiverse, quantum aspects of biology, and probabilistic nature of Darwinian algorithm such compute may never be available.’”

Books of interest Intelligent Design Philosophy

Book by classical philosopher of design in nature is now available after 200 years

At Amazon: The Lectures on Natural Theology were not included in the ten-volume Edinburgh Edition of Reid’s collected works. Moreover, while two earlier editions of these lectures exist, both contain serious mistakes of transcription and annotation. For these reasons, this carefully revised edition of this important text fills an important gap in the literature.

Information Intelligent Design Origin Of Life

Jonathan Bartlett: Elon Musk inadvertently tumbles to a big problem in origin of life theory

Bartlett: Indeed, whatever the difficulty of creating life in the lab, making individual prototypes is not nearly as problematic as making “the machine that makes the machine,” which all reproducing living cells can do. That is, the ability of an organism to reproduce is at least an order of magnitude harder that the ability of an organism to just live.