Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

What? Harmful bacteria “masquerade” as red blood cells?

She explains: “Once we kind of came to that idea, it all sort of fell into place.” Indeed, Madam Professor! You follow brilliantly in the footsteps of Miss Marple. We need intelligence to uncover this because intelligence underlies it. Read More ›

Blood feeding evolved independently about 100 times despite being a very complex trait

But still we hear, “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.” Darwin, "Life and Letters," i, p. 278 ? Hadn’t the Darwinists better change their story a bit? Read More ›

The issue of epistemic rights and duties

Back in 2007, “todangst ” of the “rational response squad” atheistical site wrote: To say that I am within my ‘epistemic rights’ to hold to a claim, I am saying that I violate no epistemic responsibilities or obligations in believing in my claim. (Rights and responsibilities go hand-in-hand.) An epistemic obligation is an intellectual responsibility with respect to the formation of, or holding to, my beliefs. The basic obligations would include 1) Not forming a belief dishonestly, through self deception. 2) Not misrepresenting how we can to hold a belief (claiming a belief came through reason, when in fact it was inculcated into us in infancy, and merely verified afterwards) 3) Not forming a belief irresponsibly (for example, seeking only Read More ›

“Paraspeckles” are another complex system recently discovered in the cell, responding to stress

Of course, paraspeckles just happened randomly (“There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.” Darwin, "Life and Letters," i, p. 278). Even though they somehow work seamlessly with everything else. Read More ›

VIDEO: Digital unwrapping and reading of the En Gedi OT scroll

News has posted on this recent technological development. It is worth taking a couple of minutes to watch the video describing and imaging what was done using AI technologies: Fascinating, what 3-d scanning can do. It also of course corroborates the known result from the main Dead Sea Scroll finds, that the OT text was faithfully transmitted to posterity from remote times. END PS: Chain of custody for the NT message and by extension its texts: PPS: HT NewScientist, a case of Lead-based ink pigment detected in a papyrus manuscript written in Greek uncials:

Rob Sheldon on a claim that the Big Bang did not happen

We need to go back to Philip Johnson's insight 30 years ago. At that time the creationists were all attacking each other over local/global flood, the meaning of "yom", the historicity of Adam, etc, whereas the Darwinists had a united front--Darwin was a genius. What Johnson discovered, was that the Darwinists had a huge internal battle over nearly every assumption of their model, but politically were unified in their opposition to Creation. By putting his finger on their critical assumption of Methodological Naturalism, which was contrary to nature and to nature's laws, Johnson was able to unite the creationists behind this cause and turn the tables. Read More ›

Science, miracles, and Benny Hinn

Bill Dembski's 2nd chapter of a book on miracles is now on line. One wonders whether scam vs. no-scam is even the right question in many cases. Perhaps what we should be asking is, how much of what is happening can be accounted for by the well-documented—and quite real— placebo effect? Read More ›

Biblical archeology gets a boost from AI

As with the Dead Sea Scrolls, when they did decipher it, using AI, they found it was the same Scriptural texts as elsewhere. Which reinforces the fact that ancient peoples were not in the habit of simply rewriting the Scriptures now and then according to taste. Read More ›

At The Scientist: No, we did not kill off the Neanderthals but maybe we helped

If the Neanderthal woman was living and having kids with a non-Neanderthal man, she wasn’t living and having kids with a Neanderthal man. Perhaps, if non-Neanderthal men were more numerous, it was only a matter of time and only the usual amount of violence, rather than a big massacre. Read More ›