Intelligent Design

MOVE over, Dickinsonia. This 558-million-year-old creature was named the earliest known animal last year, but New Scientist can now exclusively reveal one that existed even earlier – by more than 40 million years. (paywall) Graham Lawton, “Exclusive: 600-million-year old blobs are earliest animals ever found” at New Scientist Note: They are described at New Scientist above as “carnivorous comb jellies” but all known comb jellies are carnivorous so it will be interesting to learn more about what that “earliest known animal” was eating. Last year, we learned Intro: A strange soft-bodied sea creature that lived over half a billion years ago may have been the first animal species on Earth, fossil evidence suggests. The first large complex organisms – known Read More ›

The vertebrate family tree is all shook up, we hear, by a fossil hagfish (right: Cretaceous hagfish fossil, 100 mya/Tetsuto Miyashita, University of Chicago). From ScienceDaily: Paleontologists at the University of Chicago have discovered the first detailed fossil of a hagfish, the slimy, eel-like carrion feeders of the ocean. The 100-million-year-old fossil helps answer questions about when these ancient, jawless fish branched off the evolutionary tree from the lineage that gave rise to modern-day jawed vertebrates, including bony fish and humans. The fossil, named Tethymyxine tapirostrum,is a 12-inch long fish embedded in a slab of Cretaceous period limestone from Lebanon. It fills a 100-million-year gap in the fossil record and shows that hagfish are more closely related to the blood-sucking lamprey Read More ›

Digging further into George Montañez’s new paper at BIO-Complexity, a lay-friendly version: Specified complexity allows us to measure how surprising random outcomes are, in reference to some probabilistic model. But there are other ways of measuring surprise. In Shannon’s celebrated information theory (Shannon 1948), improbability alone can be used to measure the surprise of observing a particular random outcome, using the quantity of surprisal, which is simply the negative logarithm (base 2) of the probability of observing the outcome, namely, -log2p(x) where x is the observed outcome and p(x) is the probability of observing it under some distribution p. Unlikely outcomes generate large surprisal values, since they are in some sense unexpected. But let us consider a case where all Read More ›

From Eric Holloway, based on creativity: Because creativity is unique to humans and irreducible, all human beings have the ability in principle. The fact that a particular human being’s creativity is not in use or is perhaps unusable at present does not mean that that person does not have the ability. Consequently, all humans have at least latent intrinsic instrumental value. Eric Holloway, “The Creative Spark” at Mind Matters See also: Will artificial intelligence design artificial super-intelligence? and Human intelligence as a halting oracle Follow UD News at Twitter!

Because science writers need simple sound bites and catch phrases: Dennett’s integration of popular evolution theory into his work appeals to many science writers, as this snippet from a BBC news item shows: From an evolutionary perspective, our ability to think is no different from our ability to digest, says Dennett. Both these biological activities can be explained by Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, often described as the survival of the fittest. We evolved from uncomprehending bacteria. Our minds, with all their remarkable talents, are the result of endless biological experiments. Our genius is not God-given. It’s the result of millions of years of trial and error. Anna Buckley, “Is consciousness just an illusion?” at BBC News BBC writer Buckley makes Read More ›

Recently, we covered Evolution News and Science Today editor David Klinghoffer’s response to a sneer by Kevin Williamson against ID at National Review (where Klinghoffer used to work, incidentally). Klinghoffer cited a number of respectable thinkers who have held Darwinism in little esteem—which led to our publishing a separate and different long list of such thinkers here at Uncommon Descent. Meanwhile, Williamson replied to Klinghoffer (“Irreducible Perplexity”), who fired back: Here’s what is missing: serious public debate. Telling scientists to “slug it out” in professional journals and not try to persuade others is like asking a free-market advocate to persuade his Marxist colleagues before he dares offer his case to the public. What makes Kevin think entrenched Darwinists are willing Read More ›

. . . and the reality behind that illusion is, well, the initial illusion. Richard Dawkins famously declared that the appearance of design in living things is overwhelming. Theistic evolutionists do not disagree.  But, like arch-atheist Dawkins, they assert that the appearance of design is an illusion and Darwinian evolution is the reality behind the illusion. But TEs don’t agree with Dawkins about everything; they are, after all, “theistic.”  And to give themselves a fig leaf for the whole “theistic” part, they assert that at a deeper, empirically undetectable ontological level, God directs the process toward an end. In summary, the TE position is that the reality behind the illusion is itself an illusion, and the ultimate reality behind that Read More ›

As long-time readers know, we at UD often disparage Wikipedia for its left-wing bias. Still, you have to give it its due. For a quick lookup of non-controversial facts, it has its uses. Uses to which, apparently, Bill Nye has not put it. If he had looked up Wiki’s entry on Ptolemy’s Almagest (published in around 150 AD), he would have known that the ancients understood very well that the universe is incomprehensibly vast. Here is the Summary of Ptolemy’s Cosmos from that article: The cosmology of the Syntaxis includes five main points, each of which is the subject of a chapter in Book I. What follows is a close paraphrase of Ptolemy’s own words from Toomer’s translation. The celestial realm is Read More ›