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Intelligent Design

Rob Sheldon on Darwinism and the problem of why intelligent women marry less intelligent men

If regression toward the mean is a nearly universal tendency, how could evolution proceed via sexual selection? Outliers would tend to get reabsorbed far more often than not. Read More ›

SwiftKey co-founder: Computers can’t just “evolve” intelligence; cites James Shapiro’s self-organization

In a still-interesting 2017 paper, Ben Medlock talks about the way life forms self-organize: (which computers don’t, really). Read More ›

Surgisphere scandal results in change in editorial practices at The Lancet

At The Scientist: "Like Malički, Watson and other researchers note that the changes don’t address larger, more general issues highlighted by Surgisphere’s papers, including journals’ reluctance to push authors to share data and code for published studies, and an overall lack of transparency in how papers are reviewed before and after publication. " Read More ›

Mathematicians debate the war on math

Carlo Rovelli stops short of saying that 2+2=5 but the article gives every sense that many would love to go there if only they could get some kind of a nudge. It is far to say that the war on Platonism is just the war on math, PhD version. Read More ›

At New Scientist: We must rethink the (Darwinian) theory of nature

If by “our greatest theory of nature,” the writers mean textbook Darwinism, well the new concepts they list are destroying it. What becomes of “natural selection acting on random mutation” if a variety of means of evolution are “natural,” mutations are not necessarily random, genes aren't selfish and don't come only from parents, and the fittest don’t necessarily survive? Just for a start... Read More ›

Michael Egnor: Darwinism as Hegel’s philosophy applied to biology

He sees that as a framework for much of the change around us: Nineteenth-century Darwinism was much more than a revolutionary scientific theory. It was hardly a scientific theory in any meaningful sense. Natural selection, as atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor has pointed out, isn’t a meaningful level of scientific explanation. It’s barely more than a tautology. Natural selection is an “empty” theory — “survivors survive” has no genuine explanatory power. As ID pioneer Phillip Johnson observed, Darwinism was really a new philosophical theory. It was the view that there is no teleology — no purpose — inherent to nature. Purpose in biology, Darwin insisted, is an illusion. Differential survival alone can explain “purpose” in nature. Darwin proposed that all of Read More ›

Behe’s First Rule Writ Large

There’s a new study reported on at Phys.Org. This was a few weeks back. It seems that a “cousin” of a shark had a bony structure. And it appears that sharks FIRST had a bony structure and only subsequently developed a cartilagineous structure. The lead researcher Dr. Martin Brazeau, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, had this to say: “It was a very unexpected discovery. Conventional wisdom says that a bony inner skeleton was a unique innovation of the lineage that split from the ancestor of sharks more than 400 million years ago, but here is clear evidence of bony inner skeleton in a cousin of both sharks and, ultimately, us.” Dr. Brazeau goes on to further say: Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel: What if the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe?

Make no mistake, the Big Bang is unpopular in many quarters and an exterminator has long been sought. Here’s the problem: The explanation for an event may be outside the event. In that case, one can’t derive an explanation from within the event. Read More ›

The weirdness of the number 42

Here’s Scientific American in a more entertaining mode. Remember when Deep Thought, the computer in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) spit out the Answer to the great question of life? It was: 42 But 42 does have some interesting features. Read More ›

Scientific American doubles down on all politics, all the time

Mme Justice Ginsberg was eighty-seven years of age and suffered with pancreatic cancer. It is remarkable and commendable that she lived as long as she did; not at all a surprise that she died. Why is her death a “terrible blow” as opposed to a foreseen near-term event? Read More ›

Eric Holloway: Evolution and artificial intelligence face the same basic problem

Eric Holloway looks at the discussions at the Wistar Institute—which fell down the memory hole in 1967—and recovers Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger (1920–1996)’s main point, that you can't actually get there from here. Read More ›