Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Journal editors now claim they didn’t “know” that the Thorvaldsen and Hossjer paper was ID-friendly

In Klinghoffer’s telling, maybe the editors thought the paper was okay, maybe even interesting. Then they got mobbed by Darwin thugs and now can’t cringe low enough to atone for their grievous error. Surely there’s a floor down there somewhere… Read More ›

Simple, Unambigous Evidence We Do Not Live In An Objective, External Material World

When how I choose to observe a photon at a particular time and place can (1) instantaneously affect a photon a billion light years away and (2) retroactively changes the history of that photon (delayed choice quantum eraser), and when we have searched far, wide and deep and have not found any “matter,” we have comprehensive, conclusive evidence that we do not live in an objective, external, material world. At some point, if your views are guided by reason and evidence, you will have to accept that whatever “experience” is, it is not caused by an objective, external, material world.

At Gizmodo: 24 planets might be better places to live than Earth

As in: “For exoplanets to be superhabitable, they should be older, larger, heavier, warmer, and wetter compared to Earth, and ideally located around stars with longer lifespans than our own. So yeah, not only is Earth inferior, so too is our Sun, according to the new research.” Read More ›

Rob Sheldon responds to Nature’s decision to go political: Are they really scientists or just political hacks?

Sheldon: My best explanation is that the editors of Nature, SciAm, NEJM are themselves not research scientists, but political hacks—hired under the supposition that good relations with government funders required not science but PR. Read More ›

Ethan Siegel at Forbes on “finally” making the United States a “scientific nation”

Siegel: “It is a fundamentally misinformative act to present multiple sides of a controversial issue equally when the scientific consensus overwhelmingly favors one perspective.” Actually, consensus is achieved in many ways, including some that contribute to the likelihood that the consensus will be wrong, no matter how many experts believe it. In fact, the surest way to often be wrong is to adopt the very attitude Siegel displays here. Read More ›

Researcher: We need a new Theory of Everything, one with no “things”

We’d have to guess that Stephen Wolfram’s attempt at a Theory of Everything didn’t solve all the problems. At any rate, by the time we get down to “a theory of every thing requires that one not start with a thing,” it’s not easy to distinguish science from Zen. But then maybe that’s the idea. Read More ›

(Reformed) New Scientist takes horizontal gene transfer seriously

At New Scientist: “‘Yeast and bacteria have fundamentally different ways of turning DNA into protein, and this seemed like a really, really strange phenomenon,’ he says.” They ain’t seen nothing yet. If you subtract the “random mutation” from “natural selection,” what’s left of Darwinism? By the time the Raging Woke hammer down Darwin’s statue, chances are the New Scientist crowd will have forgotten who the old Brit toff even was. Shrug. Read More ›

The journal Nature defends its right to cover politics

No one says Nature can’t be active in politics and publish screeds of this type. What its staff can’t do—because nobody can—is be both a participant and a referee. They’ve chosen to be participants, fine. Then, “Listen to science” has as much clout as “Listen to the union boss” and “Listen to the corporate head office.” Which is to say, the next time they bellyache that people don’t listen to science, all one can respond is, “Take a number and wait. Meanwhile, suck it up.” Read More ›

End of tenure forecast. What about academic freedom?

That may reduce tuition fee bloat but it won’t be good for academic freedom, a point that Vedder acknowledges: “The rise in political correctness has been accompanied by a decline in tolerance of alternative points of view.” The thing is, absence of academic freedom makes many degrees worth much less—unless all a student wants to know is how to be unemployed and resentful, with a bunch of letters after his name. Read More ›

Cambrian Explosion may have involved new genes

Researchers: “The genetic mechanisms underlying these events are unknown, leaving a fundamental question in evolutionary biology unanswered.” and “Contradicting the current view, our study reveals that genes with bilaterian origin are robustly associated with key features in extant bilaterians, suggesting a causal relationship.” = the genes originated with the bilaterians (creatures with two distinct sides). Read More ›

Robert J. Marks: Pigeons can solve the Monty Hall problem. But can you?

The dilemma pits human folk intuition against actual probability theory, with surprising results. But the howler is that pigeons tended to get this right more easily than humans - at least in one study. (Another study found that it depended on the humans’ age.) Read More ›

Culture Revolution insurgency escalator

As background, let us first refresh our memory on the BATNA concept and the Overton Window: Where, let us further refresh on centres of cultural influence . . . as well as the Machiavelli challenge of timely, prudent change: Now, let us expose the 4th Generation Colour Revolution playbook and operational patterns, so that we may begin to better recognise what has been going on and where we now are: Next, let us bear in mind the crooked yardstick effect: The matter of clarifying political spectra will help: Let us further set that in the global geostrategic context: Now, we can have a more focused discussion on where we are going over the next 3 to 15 months, in the Read More ›