What our moral and intellectual superiors want for us #3223: Using religion to create “nice neighbours”
The Splendors of the Multiverse
In a comment to this post dmullenix writes: “What happened before the Big Bang? The multiverse already existed, it just hadn’t created this particular universe yet. What about space and time? No problem, they’re a part of the universe and came into existence when it did. . . we know that this universe came into existence from something . . .” When I read dmullenix’s comment I was reminded of a statement widely attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “When men stop believing in God, it is not that they believe in nothing; they will believe in anything.” Dmullenix insists the multiverse existed prior to this universe and it “created” this universe. How does he know this? If we define a “scientific Read More ›
How dare you appeal to . . . conscious agents in science!
Sometimes, comments at UD can be quite revealing. Jan 25, AIG objected in the Shermer/Flannery Wallace debate thread in an inadvertently revealing way, which I have picked up: ___________ >>AIG: Re: questions of how, why, and “who” (the names of people involved [at Stonehenge etc]?) are secondary. We know that human beings were present at the time these were built, so everybody agrees that human beings were responsible . . . . “Agency” is a term from philosophy (mainly moral philosophy and philosophy of mind). It is also used in sociology, where it refers to people (human beings) in social systems. It is not a term used in biology, physics, or the cognitive sciences . . . This is utterly, Read More ›
Elephant’s extra “toe”: Another “vestigial organ” bites the dust – in this case, literally
Jerry Coyne won’t meet Moshe Averick to discuss the origin of life puzzle – but turns out he’s just as puzzled … .
Flannery replies to Shermer on Wallace: Wallace’s World of Life “was written largely to demonstrate that evolution is not blind but intelligent”
Astrophysicist: Super Earths are more attractive to life than Earth is
Dogs could have come from different groups of ancestors: Researchers
More evidence that dinobird icon Archaeopteryx could fly?
ID Foundations 15 (b): Front-loading as a testable hypothesis cont’d — a guest post by Genomicus
Genomicus continues his presentation of the front-loading hypothesis: ___________ Geno: >>In my previous article on the subject of front-loading, I described the front-loading hypothesis and what it proposes. I outlined three testable predictions generated by the front-loading hypothesis. In this article, we’ll see how the front-loading hypothesis can lead us to numerous research questions, and this, in turn, will allow us to establish a better picture about the history of the origin and development of biological complexity. There are probably dozens of research questions that we can ask as a result of the front-loading hypothesis, so I’ll only cover some of them here. How could molecular machines and systems be front-loaded? An interesting question from a front-loading perspective is how Read More ›