Dembski: "At the end of the discussion, however, Kurzweil's overweening confidence in the glowing prospects for strong AI's future were undiminished. And indeed, they remain undiminished to this day (I last saw Kurzweil at a Seattle tech conference in 2019 — age seemed to have mellowed his person but not his views)." But Larson says it's all nonsense. Read More ›
At ACSH: Rather shamelessly, the Washington Post has also offered tips to stop yourself from spreading “misinformation.” And the Guardian has even recommended “10 ideas to rebuild our broken internet.” Let's add an eleventh: take your own advice and stop running sloppy stories because they attract eyeballs. Read More ›
Readers may remember J. Scott Turner, author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It. He was taking a risk even putting things that way (we thought he'd been Canceled a while back) but now he has a new video series out. Read More ›
Sheldon: I hate to disappoint you, but most of my gut reaction is negative... In fact, this 40-year stasis in particle physics has meant that two generations of graduate students have never had a successful breakthrough experiment, or confirmed a new theory. The field, as Sabine Hossenfelder reminds everyone, is littered with wrong papers. Read More ›
Bencze: the "evolutionary hack" is ... "the task of safely raising the next generation." That is certainly an odd way of referring to parenting but, by alluding to evolution, the tone of the review rises to a more exalted scientific level thus confirming that reviewer Emily is no mere mommy but sort of a scientist herself. Read More ›
New Scientist: "Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is arguably the most important scientific idea ever" ... Thing is, last year (was it only last year?), New Scientist published a thirteen-part serious that would make you think they’d sworn off all that Darwin stuff. Maybe readers missed it too much. Or they need to reassure readers that nothing has changed… Read More ›
Ross: The human body is optimally designed for speech communication involving just a few people in a quiet setting. It also is optimally designed for what researchers call "cocktail party listening." Cocktail party listening refers to humans gathered in a crowded situation where many people are talking simultaneously in an environment where music and other background sounds interfere with speech recognition. Read More ›
Egnor: [t]he logic pointing to God’s existence is overwhelmingly stronger than the evidence and logic supporting any other scientific theory in nature. Aquinas’s First Way proof of God’s existence, for example, has exactly the same structure as any other scientific theory. The empirical evidence is the presence of change in nature. Because infinite regress is logically impossible in an essentially ordered chain of changes, there must be a Prime Mover to begin the process and that is what we call God. Read More ›
Logic and evidence both point to the existence of God, whatever atheists may think: Michael Egnor addresses three arguments in Steve Meyer’s new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis. Read More ›
Of course, one outcome of a shorter period during which oxygen is stable enough for complex life is — the obvious one — that all that bewildering complexity of life had to just sort of fall into place in a shorter period of time. If that's unlikely, it's an argument for underlying design. Read More ›