Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Evolution

Type
post
Author
Joshua Gidney
Date
September 9, 2021
Categorized
Biology, Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Design inference, Evolution, Evolutionary biology, Food for thought, ID Foundations, Information, Intelligent Design, Natural selection, Naturalism, Philosophy, Science, specified complexity, Video
Tagged
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

New Video Presentation on YouTube: Intelligent Design & Scientific Conservatism

Joshua Gidney
September 9, 2021
Biology, Convergent evolution, Darwinism, Design inference, Evolution, Evolutionary biology, Food for thought, ID Foundations, Information, Intelligent Design, Natural selection, Naturalism, Philosophy, Science, specified complexity, Video

I have recently posted a new video on my Intelligent Design YouTube channel. In this video I discuss several areas in the philosophy of science and modern evolutionary biology, and their relationship to ID. These thoughts were prompted initially by an interesting paper by philosopher of science Jeffrey Koperski ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design, and Two Good Ones’. Koperski thinks that one good way to critique ID is to point out that it violates principles like ‘scientific conservatism’. Because there are several potential naturalistic mechanisms on the table, even if orthodox neo-Darwinism fails, ID is an unnecessary proposal. To turn to design explanations would be to adjust our theories too drastically. I argue against this claim, concluding that Read More ›

Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
September 5, 2021
Categorized
Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Naturalism
Tagged
,

How to explain why you don’t believe in “evolution”

Denyse O'Leary
September 5, 2021
Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Naturalism
Math prof Granville Sewell suggests how to respond when you don't have time to offer a 30-minute answer on all the meanings of the term and, chance are, the yob who is asking is just trying to get you anyway Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
September 4, 2021
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design
Tagged
, , ,

The four-legged whale: The biggest tourist attraction that never was?

Denyse O'Leary
September 4, 2021
Evolution, Intelligent Design
Casey Luskin: The problem with these claims? That’s right, folks — they didn’t find any of the fossil’s legs. Everything you just read about this fossil is the product of imagination. In fact, if you check the technical paper you’ll learn that they found very little of the fossil at all. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
September 1, 2021
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life
Tagged
,

Sponges, believed to be oldest animals, are thought to be even older, at 890 mya

Denyse O'Leary
September 1, 2021
Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life
At The Scientist: In fact, if the new fossil finds are confirmed to be sponges, “they would be not just the oldest sponges; they would be the oldest animals,” Riding points out. To find any fossil more than 200 million years older than previous animal fossils “is significant,” he says. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 30, 2021
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design
Tagged
, ,

Comb jellies, among the oldest life forms, lost rather than gained complexity

Denyse O'Leary
August 30, 2021
Evolution, Intelligent Design
Throwing a horseshoe into the works of Darwinism, many life forms simply reduce their complexity in order to survive. Yes, natural selection works and is real but — because it depends on randomness — it doesn’t produce reliably complexity all by itself any more than winning a lottery ticket reliably produces wealth. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 29, 2021
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis
Tagged
, ,

Reptile’s skull changed little in 22 million years

Denyse O'Leary
August 29, 2021
Evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis
At ScienceDaily: ""Basically, in anything except living fossils, you don't go 22 million years without evolving," said [Louis] Jacobs, professor emeritus of Earth Sciences at SMU and president of ISEM at SMU." (Well, first, if that’s true, maybe they were the “living fossils” of their day. Maybe it is not even that unusual. Any chance there is a pattern here that devotion to Darwinism prevents people from seeing?) Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 27, 2021
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design
Tagged
, , ,

Researchers: Blind mouse pups prepared for sight

Denyse O'Leary
August 27, 2021
Evolution, Intelligent Design
Researcher: “I love this paper. It blew my mind,” says David Berson, who studies the visual system at Brown University and was not involved in the research. “What it implies is that evolution has built a visual system that can simulate the patterns of activity that it will see later when it’s fully mature and the eyes are open, and that [the simulated pattern] in turn shapes the development of the nervous system in a way that makes it better adapted to seeing those patterns. . . . That’s staggering.” Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 24, 2021
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants, stasis
Tagged
, ,

Fossil spores on land pushed back 20 million years

Denyse O'Leary
August 24, 2021
Evolution, Intelligent Design, Plants, stasis
The big story here isn’t about the disconnect between molecular and fossil data; it’s about how early on more complex life forms got started (all that complexity in such a short time isn’t looking good for random mutations). Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 22, 2021
Categorized
Evolution, Intelligent Design, Religion
Tagged
,

Kirk Durston on evolution and faith

Denyse O'Leary
August 22, 2021
Evolution, Intelligent Design, Religion
Durston: What if you found out that one of the most frequent reasons that people have abandoned their faith was itself looking very sketchy indeed? I’m talking about evolution and its consistent failure to verify its most important prediction — without which it is dead in the water, as it were. The Darwinian theory that the full diversity of life evolved from a single primitive cell. Read More ›
Type
post
Author
Denyse O'Leary
Date
August 22, 2021
Categorized
Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design
Tagged
, ,

Colin Patterson: A key late twentieth-century establishment Darwin skeptic

Denyse O'Leary
August 22, 2021
Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design
The paleontologist is credited with starting a “revolution.” But then the tenured fossils struck back. If you have ever wondered whether a lot of establishment thinking was blithering nonsense, spare a kind thought for Colin Patterson… Read More ›