Readers may also remember ENCODE from a flap a few years ago when Darwinian Dan Graur announced that the ENCODE team had to be wrong in saying that there wasn’t nearly as much junk DNA as had been thought. After a while, Graur just wasn’t doing politeness any more.
Intelligent Design
Rob Sheldon on the recent reduction in the age of the universe
Sheldon: I have long advocated a rewrite of the Big Bang model that converts the cosmic microwave numbers into a Hubble constant. But strangely, like Darwin’s model in biology, we see few cosmologists willing to kill the sacred cow. They would rather change the laws of physics (“new physics”) than change their model.
Darwin Devolves: Darwinists see evolution as bottom up; Michael Behe sees it as top down
Scambray: “the polar bear, Behe writes, “adjusted to its harsh environment mainly by degrading its genes that its ancestors already possessed. Despite its impressive abilities, rather than evolving, it has adapted predominately by devolving.”
Liberal college prof takes aim at the the fairytale world of an “evolution” textbook
Shedinger: … when discussing major transitions in evolutionary history. In these discussions, Hall and Hallgrimsson set aside science and engage in the telling of fairy tales worthy of Hans Christian Andersen.
The “sturdlefish” is the offspring of sturgeon and paddlefish—separated by 184 million years’ evolution
We are also informed that both fish are “living fossils,” which is supposed to settle the matter. The main strength of the explanations is that they uphold Darwinian thinking.
Does Darwinism help produce anarchic nihilism?
A vid, less than three minutes, by John West, presents some evidence. From David Klinghoffer: But see how much nihilism has been justified and advocated by some very smart and influential people in the name of evolutionary theory.
A striking illustration of the size and other differences between protons and electrons
“If atoms were tennis balls…”
Critical Theory is Certainly Correct
Indeed, it is more than merely true; it is an inexorable logical certainty if the premises of the theorists are true. That is the question I will address in this post. Before we go on, we need to understand what ‘critical theory’ is. Wikipedia has a good summary: In sociology and political philosophy, the term Read More…
At Rutgers English department, grammar is just prejudice
New curriculum: “The curriculum puts an emphasis on the variability of the English language instead of accuracy.”
Michael Egnor skewers claim that there is no continuity of the human self
Egnor: if Blackmore is not the same person now that she was a moment ago, then it makes no sense to call the YouTube video above an interview with Susan Blackmore. Perhaps it should be called interviews with Susan Blackmores or interviews with countless women, one of whom was Susan Blackmore. Or interviews with women formerly known as Susan Blackmore…
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers to explain how the universe made us
The proponents of chance origins tend to make it look less likely all the time.
An Overview of Design Evidence
The following is an overview of the evidence for design which I wrote recently for a political journal whose readers have mostly had little exposure to ID arguments. It was rejected. It is a pretty basic summary, nothing here that UD readers have not seen many times, but maybe you may find it useful as Read More…
Asked at Wall Street Journal: How can life forms show intelligence with no brain?
A reasonable conclusion is that there is indeed intelligence involved but it isn’t in the individual flatworm. It is rather implicit in the origin and development of the flatworm. Thus the individual worm doesn’t think and doesn’t need to.
Sabine Hossenfelder: Einstein’s greatest legacy was the thought experiment
She notes that one needs evidence from real experiments to demonstrate that the outcome of a thought experiment is real. But it is significant that the human mind is capable of developing the basis for momentous discoveries even before we commit to stuff that requires a budget.
Could COVID-19 help us understand the current buzz in science media about space aliens?
It’s worth noting that we haven’t established that there are even fossil bacteria on Mars. But we are starting to hear more than ever that there are intelligent aliens out there, most recently from Ars Technica and Scientific American. Fundamentally, we have found nothing since the Sixties that truly suggests extraterrestrial civilizations. Nothing. If they want to keep looking, fine. Nobody’s stopping them. But spare us the dramatics.