We have a jury system not because jurors are are necessarily wiser, more educated, or innately smarter than the alternatives (judges, kings, standing tribunals, viziers, etc.).  By and large they almost certainly are not.  We have juries because they are safer for those of us without power (the 99%, to use a phrase that has become all too hackneyed in such a short time) than the alternatives. The Zimmerman case is a classic example.  The prosecution was not based on the evidence against Zimmerman.  It was based on the politics of race.  The State Attorney should never have brought the case.  She had no hope of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman committed murder, but she was afraid to do the right thing.  The jury Read More ›

Over at his Website, Why Evolution is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has written three unintentionally funny posts in the past week. I thought readers of Uncommon Descent might enjoy them, so here goes. Coyne gets taken in by a fake photo of Charles Darwin Recently, Professor Coyne wrote a post titled, What Darwin looked like (10 July 2013), in which he displayed a colorized copy (emailed to him by a reader named Fred, and colorized by a talented 18-year-old artist named “Zuzah” from Denmark) of what Coyne assured his readers was an original photo of Charles Darwin. In his own words: I thought I’d seen every photo of Darwin, but didn’t know this one, so I suspected it was a Read More ›

No sooner had Dan Graur finished his talk at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution this week on how if ENCODE’s conclusion (that much of our genome is functional rather than junk) is true, then evolution is false, but that ENCODE most assuredly is not true, that the human genome is small, low on genes, unoriginal and repetitive, and that junk DNA is a known known, then new research out of John Mattick’s lab took the next step in the inexorable march of science showing that, once again, it’s not good to bet against Mother Nature. While Graur argued that only about 5% of our genome can be functional because, after all, the pufferfish’s genome Read More ›

Di.. Eb.., or Dieb,  on the blog DiEbLog, has posted a number of questions, relating to the paper A General Theory of Information Cost Incurred by Successful Search. He raises a number of questions and objections to the paper. Firstly, Dieb objects that the quasi-Bayesian calculation on Page 56 is incorrect, although it obtains the correct result. However, the calculation is called a quasi-Bayesian calculation because it engages in hand-waving rather than presenting a rigorous proof. The text in question is shortly after a theorem and is intended to explicate the consequences of that theorem rather than rigorously prove its result. The calculation is not incorrect, but rather deliberately oversimplified. Secondly, Dieb objects that many quite different searches can be Read More ›