Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Researchers: Dickinsonia (571–541 mya) could have had mouth and guts

Associate Professor Jochen Brocks commented, "These fossils comprise our best window into earliest animal evolution and are the key to understanding our own deep origins." Yes, in the sense that sudden emergence rather than a long, slow Darwinian process seems more likely all the time. Read More ›

Unique giant virus messes with current theories of viral evolution

Giant viruses have only been known from the past few decades. There is still debate about whether viruses are actually life forms. Surely, there will be many game changers to come. Anyone attempting to compile an evolutionary history of giant viruses would be like the person who writes the history of a major league playoff series after the first game. Without the crystal ball. Read More ›

Michael Behe responds to the critics at his university, Parts 2 and 3

Contra Lang and Rice, it’s preposterous to say that the data “are more than sufficient to convince any open minded skeptic that unguided evolution is capable of generating complex systems.” Unless one defines a skeptic of Darwin’s theory (the most prominent proposed “unguided” explanation) as closed-minded, a quick visit to the library will disabuse one of that notion. Read More ›

Two views of Ben Shapiro’s interview with Steve Meyer

Meanwhile, a critic, French-Canadian neuroscientist Jean-Francois Gariépy, who appears to be an alt right figure, has made his own vid, at The Public Space reviewing/attacking Shapiro’s interview with Meyer. Read More ›

Researchers: Newly discovered frog separated from others by 50 million years

"It's a perfect scenario for cooking up new species," he said. What? Wait! This isn’t a “new species.” This is a holdover from 50 million years ago, during which it’s always been an obvious frog. Read More ›

A philosopher explains why machines are not creative

When you consider all the reasons why machines cannot be creative, one must ask, is the belief that we can build superintelligent machines rooted in naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” or in evidence? Read More ›

Logic and First Principles, 15: On the architecture of being. Or, are certain abstract entities (“abstracta”) such as numbers, natures, truth etc real? If so, how — and where?

For some weeks now, an underlying persistent debate on the reality of numbers has emerged in several discussion threads at UD. In part, it has been cast in terms of nominalism vs platonic realism; the latter being the effective view of most working mathematicians. Obviously, this is a first principles issue and is worth focussed discussion. Now, No. 14 in this series, on objectivity of aesthetics principles as canons of beauty, begins by pointing to an underlying challenge: We live in a Kant-haunted age, where the “ugly gulch” between our inner world of appearances and judgements and the world of things in themselves is often seen as unbridgeable. Of course, there are many other streams of thought that lead to Read More ›