Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Category

Science

What blocks new ideas in science?

Clancy: Wang, Veuglers, and Stephan, create a new category for “highly” novel papers, which cite a pair of journals that have never been cited together in the past, and also are not even in the same neighborhood. Here, we mean journals that are not well “connected” by some other pair of journals. Read More ›

L&FP, 55: Defining/Clarifying Intelligent Design as Inference, as Theory, as a Movement

It seems, despite UD’s resources tab, some still struggle to understand ID in the three distinct senses: inference, theory/research programme, movement. Accordingly, let us headline a clarifying note from the current thread on people who doubt, for the record: [KF, 269:] >>. . . first we must mark out a matter of inductive reasoning and epistemology. Observed tested, reliable signs such as FSCO/I [= functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information, “fun-skee”] beyond 500 – 1,000 bits point to design as cause for cases we have not observed. This is the design INFERENCE. Note, inference, not movement, not theory. Following the UD Weak Argument Correctives under the Resources tab, we can identify ID Theory as a [small] research programme that Read More ›

Some things never change: Ridiculous attack on the surgeon author of an article on scientific gatekeeping

Let’s just say, 1) the author goes on at some length and 2) readers may find it useful to know that gate defenders are out there and some of them would appear to have a lot of time on their hands. Read More ›

As evolutionary biologists slowly kill off Darwinism… hacking down the Tree of Life, even…

Species merging. Julie Berwald: What I didn’t know then was that, even as I ambivalently placed the overhead film on the projector, the concept of the tree of life had begun to wilt. Four decades on, it’s morphed entirely. Read More ›

Dr John Campbell on the illusion of evidence-based medicine

For the past two years, we have been concerned that medical practice and pandemic management have been skewed by selective hyperskepticism and bias. Dr Campbell speaks out, based on the recent paper: We can look at a screen shot, where he targets domination of medical drug approvals by big pharma: Earlier, he expressed concern about how integrity of the science could be compromised, as is now exposed due to Freedom of Information requests: The obvious issue of special interest agendas leads to the issue of regulatory capture. Wikipedia (an example itself of ideological agenda capture) outlines: In politics, regulatory capture (also agency capture and client politics) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, Read More ›

How the COVID pandemic showed that evidence-based medicine is — at present — an illusion

Malone: The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion. Read More ›

Trust the Science! Instructive testimony from media efforts to squelch debate about the COVID panic

It would be good to study how “science” became a synonym for “what people do when they are in a panic” and how “disinformation” came to mean “casting doubt on panic-stricken responses.” But obviously, there is a larger message here... Read More ›

At BMJ: Evidence based medicine running into many of the same problems as felled earlier reform movements

Op-ed: "Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs [key opinion leaders] appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers." Read More ›

At last someone is asking: Why are science reporters so credulous?

Another way of putting it is that too many people are — at best — naive about government-led and government-funded science. And science writers can make a living out of avoiding realities and catering to their illusions while retaining a sense of impeccable righteousness. Read More ›

Noted at Hillfaith: Atheists’ books show that God must exist

They couldn't have written them without intelligent design of the universe. The blog also notes the impact of Steve Meyer's book, Return of the God Hypothesis, which seems to be giving the Darwinian materialist atheists some serious competition. Read More ›

Francis Collins in the hot seat re COVID-19

Readers may know Collins from his role promoting theistic evolution and/or some ethical issues around accusations of the use of premature babies as guinea pigs. More recently, his recent and unexpected resignation from the directorship of National Institutes of Health has created expected questions around the Institute’s handling of COVID-19. ... If Collins was confronted about that e-mail for the first time — after a year and a half — most U.S. media have way too cozy a relationship with science bureaucrats. Read More ›

The New Yorker — oh, so cleverly! — misunderstands the issues around teaching of origins

Essentially, in many places, it is compulsory to teach common ancestry of humans and apes as a dogma and illegal to teach any evidence against it. The progressive vilifies the people who object on any grounds… Read More ›