Intelligent Design

If you want to see your brain in electronic terms, you should picture it as the biggest network imaginable. It’s widely accepted that each neuron in our bodies is complex enough to be something like a little computer. Neurons are considered “pretty weird” on that account: “Unlike their blobby brethren, neurons have distinct regions. There’s the cell body, home to the nucleus. Then come the axons and dendrites, the signal-carrying and signal-receiving parts of the neuron that send long, spindly arms to form connections, called synapses, with other neurons. “ Harvard Medical School, “Once seen as nerve cells’ foot soldier, the axon emerges as decision-maker” at ScienceDaily But the system turns out to be “far more complex than once thought” Read More ›

The black hole has always occupied a sort of space in the middle, between science and philosophy. It’s good to see that acknowledged. From ScienceDaily: Erik Curiel studied Philosophy as well as Theoretical Physics at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and the primary aim of his current DFG-funded research project is to develop a precise philosophical description of certain puzzling aspects of modern physics. “Phenomena such as black holes belong to a realm that is inaccessible to observation and experiment. Work based on the assumption that black holes exist therefore involves a level of speculation that is unusual even for the field of theoretical physics.” However, this difficulty is what makes the physical approach to the nature of Read More ›

It’s already been done. As a language, DNA can carry malicious messages: People often say that our genome is like a language. For example, a recent science paper explains that “genomes appear similar to natural language texts, and protein domains can be treated as analogs of words.”1 For that reason, DNA can be used to encode messages … But in some ways, our genomes are much more powerful than words. They are part of a process that utters not just ideas but living beings. Including human beings, who ourselves have ideas. In August 2017, researchers announced that they had used DNA to encode malware to hack a computer program that reads genetic sequences:More. Also at Mind Matters: How a computer Read More ›

“Evolutionarily,” one might almost say, Darwinism dies hard. It rolls off the tongue of a TED talk type. One can construct any kind of story about nature without the benefit of having ever lived with very much of it because it is a laid-on, one-size-fits-all theory. For example, there is the “grandmother” hypothesis, which attempts to account satisfactorily for the fact that kids have grandmas and weasels don’t (At neast not in the emotional sense). Every so often, in a type of event we can only hope will become more frequent, someone actually tests the burble: The studies are part of a broader effort to explain the existence of menopause, a rarity in the animal kingdom. The so-called “grandmother hypothesis” Read More ›

Folks, it’s Darwin Day, when we are told by Darwinians to celebrate “intellectual bravery.” Very well, here is some: Dissent from Darwinism, the vid: What do you give a great scientist for his birthday when he’s already got everything? He’s got absolutely all the scientists behind his theory. All the media. All the Officially Smart People, as Jay Richards calls them. Well, today is Darwin’s Day, the birthday of the venerated Charles Darwin, whose theory is a fact beyond question. Right? The journal Nature assures its readers, “Scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an established fact.” Or as philosopher Michael Ruse wonderfully put it, “Evolution is a fact, fact, FACT!” The insistence on this point encourages Read More ›