Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

At Big Think: How the Multiverse could break the scientific method

Theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser raises the issue that the multiverse hypothesis suffers from the unscientific property of non-falsifiability. Embedded in his article is a solid acknowledgement of the fine-tuning of physical parameters for life to exist in our universe. Read More ›

Eukaryogenesis: The Rise of an Emergent Superorganism

In his lengthy article, Bell draws attention to evolutionary hurdles to the origin of eukaryotic cells. The "chasm" between eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells is causing a re-think of the universal common ancestor notion. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Asked at The Scientist: Do invertebrates have feelings?

What we are learning is that invertebrate status is not, by itself, evidence of an inability to think or feel — as we used to suppose. In a world full of information and intelligence, it’s not nearly as tidy as our biology teachers thought. Read More ›

Fun! Are these the most realistic CGI dinosaurs ever?

Gizmodo says they are: … Now, I suggest you compare all that you’ve seen about dinosaurs before to Apple TV+’s newest five-part series, Prehistoric Planet, which shows the true lives of dinosaurs as they were 66 million years ago, to our best current understanding. There are reptiles that need back scratches, hadrosaurs harried by mosquitos, and pterosaurs stressed out about finding a mate. In other words, Prehistoric Planet makes it apparent how similar (in some ways) dinosaurs are to us. And it makes those depictions super-real using top-of-the-line CGI and the work of over 1,500 people, including paleoartists, CGI artists, paleontologists, cinematographers, and more (like Sir David Attenborough, who narrated the series). Isaac Schultz, “These 13 Images Depict the Most Read More ›

Researchers: How plate tectonics, mountains and deep-sea sediments have maintained Earth’s ‘Goldilocks’ climate

In an article summarized at The Conversation, recent research affirms the suite of conditions involving plate tectonics and resultant mountain-building, coupled with erosion and volcanic activity, that has helped to maintain a habitable climate on our planet. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Do ants think? Yes, they do — but they think like computers

Navigation expert Eric Cassell points out that algorithms have made the ant one of the most successful insects ever, both in numbers and complexity. Computer programmers use some of the same basic structures. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Information theory: Evolution as the transfer of information

The authors of the open-access paper, marine researcher Rasmus Skern-Mauritzen and forester Thomas Nygaard Mikkelsen make clear that they understand information to be immaterial. Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder: The big problem with quantum theory is chaos

Hossenfelder: "... the chaotic motion of Hyperion tells us that we need the measurement collapse to actually be a physical process. Without it, quantum mechanics just doesn’t correctly describe our observations. But then what is this process? No one knows. And that’s the problem with quantum mechanics." Read More ›