Researchers: “A previously overlooked factor—the position of continents—helps fill Earth’s oceans with life-supporting oxygen. Continental movement could ultimately have the opposite effect, killing most deep ocean creatures.”
Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design and the Designer – an Opinion
Eric Hedin writes: In arguing for intelligent design for the origin of life, exhibited in the millions of species found on Earth, what is the role of the Designer? Evolution, if merely defined as “change over time,” matches the evidence found in nature. But that doesn’t mean that the “evolution” happened by purely natural mechanisms. Read More…
At Evolution News: Mammoth Support for Devolution
Michael Behe: “The more science progresses, the more hapless Darwin seems.”
At Science News: Why humans have more voice control than any other primates
“Human’s ability to talk may depend, in part, on our having lost a part of the larynx that dozens of other primate species have, new research suggests.”
At Evolution News: From Intelligent Cause to Intelligent Design: My Debt to Charles Thaxton
Stephen C. Meyer shares, from the Foreword to the new memoir by Charles Thaxton, A Leg to Stand On:
At Phys.org: ‘Eternal engine’ inspires the next generation of ultraprecise atomic clocks
“UK scientists have created an “eternal engine” to keep the next generation of atomic clock ticking.”
At Reasons.org: Benefits of Viruses
“Why would an all-powerful, all-loving God create a world with viruses?”
At Mind Matters News: Epitaph for transhumanism: But it’s far from dead!, advocate says
The waning of interest in transhumanism may be related to a growing awareness of the fundamental limits of artificial intelligence.
Eric Holloway: How AI neural networks show that the mind is not the brain
Holloway: Neural networks get stymied by complex decisions due to the very processes that enable them to make any decisions at all. That’s a fundamental limitation.
At Mind Matters News: If DNA is a language, who is the speaker?
So, the pivotal question that the information content of DNA and other biomolecules raises is, can the relevant forces of nature, namely gravity and the electromagnetic forces, produce the complex, information-rich, functional biomolecules found within even unicellular organisms?
At Mind Matters News: Could we really increase human IQ via genetic engineering?
It’s not clear what, explicitly, human intelligence is or even how it originates. Ethics aside, there’s no way to decide who to save and who to throw away.
Eric Holloway: Can computer neural networks learn better than human neurons?
Takehome: Humans can do things that AI cannot do, as we saw earlier, but those abilities are not due to the superior learning ability of a human neuron.
At Mind Matters News: Panpsychism: If computers can have minds, why can’t the Sun?
If the Hard AI people are right, animism — the belief that inanimate objects (whether the Sun or a computer) can have minds — has been unjustly dismissed.
At Evolution News: Recognizing Providence in the History of Life Is a Hint About Our Own Lives
“An arena of fine-tuning we can all appreciate, not quantitatively but qualitatively, is how in most events of our lives, things go right, when there are so many more ways that they could go wrong.”
The Intelligent Design Audiopaper Project
I was thinking recently, about how many audiobooks are consumed by people these days. I would guess that the main reason behind this consumption is convenience. Many people just don’t have the time, or don’t create the time, to really sit down and get their head in a book. But I understand that for many, Read More…