Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Human evolution: You evolved to think holes are poisonous animals?

Can a pop sci book be far behind? And pop sci mag articles? Adorned with beautiful photos of the blue-ringed Aha! octopus that gave a key author the idea? Well, one guesses, that sure won’t be for lack of trying. Is there time for publication before Hallowe’en? Read More ›

Open Mike: Cornell OBI Conference Chapter 12—“Can Purifying Natural Selection Preserve Biological Information?”—Excerpt

Authors: The primary findings of this study are that the selection threshold problem is real and that it is more serious than generally recognized. These findings are very robust. Read More ›

Open Mike: Cornell OBI Conference Chapter 12—“Can Purifying Natural Selection Preserve Biological Information?”—Abstract

Authors: Indeed, we find that under most realistic circumstances, the large majority of harmful mutations are essentially unaffected by natural selection and continue to accumulate unhindered. This finding has major theoretical implications ... Read More ›

Clarence Darrow on rape and chloroforming the unfit: Jerry Coyne’s strange choice of heroes

“Clarence Darrow … is one of my heroes,” Professor Jerry Coyne declares in a recent post over at Why Evolution Is True. I wonder how well Professor Coyne really knows the man whom he idolizes. I’d like to quote from a book titled, Crime: Its Cause and Treatment by Clarence Darrow, published in 1922. Darrow apparently believed that rapists weren’t responsible for their deeds because they were governed by their sex instincts: the poor things simply couldn’t help doing what they did. Here’s what he had to say about rape, in a chapter titled, “Sex Crimes”: Most of the inmates of prisons convicted of sex crimes are the poor and wretched and the plainly defective. Nature, in her determination to Read More ›