The worldview in which Darwinism made sense will not survive quantum mechanics.
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
At Mind Matters News: The remarkable medicines wild animals find in nature
While intelligent animals like dolphins may sense cause and effect, we don’t know how butterflies and fruit flies pick out the plants that can help.
At Mind Matters News: Eric Holloway’s Weasel Libs — a variant of Mad Libs, in honor of Richard Dawkins
Eric Holloway looks at Richard Dawkins’ famous Darwinian evolution-only Weasel program in light of epigenetic information.
Eric Hedin is the new News co-ordinator at Uncommon Descent
Starting tomorrow, Denyse O’Leary is retiring from the News desk at Uncommon Descent. Physicist Eric Hedin replaces her.
Gene-edited hamsters did not behave as expected
Hamsters from hell. Quote of the decade: “We don’t understand this system as well as we thought we did.” One suspects that some of these people are going to learn respect for the design of life the hard way. Hope it’s not too hard on the rest of us.
At Mind Matters News: Study: Eight-week mindfulness courses do not change the brain
O’Leary: Eight-week courses don’t provide enough time. Tibetan monks can control metabolism and even brain waves through meditation but they devote their lives to it. It would be more surprising if that fact had no effect on their brains than if it does.
At Evolution News: Natural Machinery Operates Without Intervention; But How?
David Coppedge: “The old mechanical philosophy is hopelessly inadequate for these realities. The reason? We know from our experience that unguided natural law does not produce machinery, factories, and quality control. Something else is required: information.” He recommended Bill Dembski’s book, Being as Communion.
Debate: Theism vs. Naturalism: Which is a Better Account of Reality?
The May 16 debate featured apologist Jonathan McLatchie vs “Cosmic Skeptic” Alex O’Connor, an influential New Atheist.
Sabine Hossenfelder on the closest we have to a theory of everything
She argues that the principle of least action is the closest we have to a theory of everything but, of course, along comes quantum mechanics and… Quantum mechanics keeps the world interesting and reminds us that this is not a deterministic world after all.
At Mind Matters News: Could the dinosaurs have had a now-lost civilization?
Conway Morris almost sounds like an ID theorist. No wonder the BBC had to bring a bunch of people on toward the very end to imply that he is an idiot.
Are all those codes used by cells really “codes”?
One biologist thinks that only DNA is really a code. David Coppedge disagrees. Coppedge: But it seems fair to categorize codes separately if they contain unique information and produce unique results. Even if histones are built from DNA, once they are assembled, they no longer rely on the genetic code.
Epigenetics: Editing epigenome decreased alcoholism in rats
Epigenetics chips away at the Darwinian edifice in the sense that the question of whether one “inherits” a tendency to drink too much alcohol may be obviated if epigenetics change cements the tendency long after fertilization.
Some species thought to be extinct may simply be “lost”
Apart from loss of habitat due to human encroachment, it would be interesting to know whether there is much study of patterns that govern extinctions — that is, natural extinctions. Paleontologist David Raup (1933–2015) wrote quite a good book on the topic, Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck in 1991 but it’s not clear how much has been done since then.
New complexities discovered in how plants protect themselves against microorganisms
We keep discovering these novel mechanisms that all work together like an exquisitely designed system. And it is all supposed to have just happened by natural selection. Yet we never see that working in any situation where we try it.
At Mind Matters News: Did small brains doom the mammoth and the giant armadillo?
A recent study showed that survivors had brains that were 53% larger, which was perhaps useful in avoiding predators. The problem is, it is genuinely unclear what role brain size plays in intelligence.