Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Steve Meyer on whether extraterrestrials created life, as opposed to an intelligence outside nature

"Yet those who propose panspermia have not explained, or even seriously grappled with, the problem of the origin of specified biological information." - Meyer No, but they don't need to, do they? Their seamless blend of science fiction and non-fiction would be rudely interrupted by needless complexities in the plot... Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: What do Hindus think about the Big Bang? The cyclic universe?

Takehome: In the Hindu view, the material universe is meant to enable living consciousnesses to have sensory experiences that ultimately bring them back to God. That’s hardly a materialist view. Read More ›

Virus manipulates caterpillars into killing themselves

The suggestion is that, as the caterpillars are dying from the virus, the virus manipulates them to die in a place more convenient for itself. Incidentally, "Neuroscientist: Even viruses are intelligent. Antonio Damasio says, in the excerpt from his new book, that — based on the evidence — we cannot deny viruses “some fraction” of intelligence. Researchers who study viruses, including the one that causes COVID, note similarities between viral strategies and those of insects and animals." Read More ›

Researchers: Tool patterns show that Neanderthals were declining before Homo sapiens arrived

Researchers: "Based on this evidence, the authors suggest that older Iberian Neandertal populations disappeared, taking their tool styles with them, and were replaced by different Neandertal groups using Châtelperronian tools, likely migrating from France, and these populations were in turn replaced by Homo sapiens." Read More ›

Steve Meyer on why a supposed multiverse is no answer to the extreme fine-tuning of our universe

Meyer on multiverse cosmologists: "The speculative cosmologies (such as inflationary cosmology and string theory) they propose for generating alternative universes invariably invoke mechanisms that themselves require fine-tuning, thus begging the question as to the origin of that prior fine-tuning." Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: NASA develops a scale for assessing the chances of ET life

The idea is to give media some idea of the level of confidence in what the apparent signal might be telling us — biological activity or just chemistry? Read More ›

Francis Schaeffer’s “line of despair” model of our civilisation’s intellectual history:

We can adapt Francis Schaeffer’s themes, looking back to the Christian Synthesis of the heritage of Jerusalem, Greece and Rome, and the onward flow of ideas and cultural agendas since Paul of Tarsus: Schaeffer thought that once there was an upper/lower storey approach that in effect gave up on solving the problem of the one and the many, the lower storey would eat up the upper one, unity and coherence would disintegrate: Schaeffer and others also thought in terms of the seven mountains picture of the span of culture, how the dominant view sets the agenda and how cultures therefore change. This has been championed by Wallnau and others in recent years. I adapt: We may carry this onward to Read More ›

Standard Model doubted at Inference Review

In the cosmic microwave background frame, the large-scale averaged distribution of matter is also assumed to be isotropic… These assumptions are no longer tenable. Several independent data sets now argue against the existence of a cosmic rest frame. Read More ›

Do genetics and homology really support Darwinism where the fossil record has failed?

Klinghoffer: Even if universal common ancestry is true, there seemingly is no drawable “true tree.” As Lukas says, “Those who study homology simply assume evolution to be true, but they’ve never actually demonstrated that the ancestral evolutionary relationships between different organisms are real.” Read More ›

Evolutionary genomics with Richard Buggs: Why flowering plants are a mystery

Talk intro: Charles Darwin was convinced that the evolution of complexity must proceed by tiny steps. Only tiny steps could be accumulated by natural selection. The process had to go slowly for it to work. Billions of years were needed. But Darwin was aware that this theory had a problem: flowers. Read More ›

To get change, create or exploit a crisis . . .

to control the change, set the agenda and control thought to a thesis, an antithesis and your desired synthesis. So, we see, in a cartoon: Where, let us recall the change challenge: . . . thus the fallacy of the false dilemma pushing a simplistic dichotomy of choices: . . . and the Overton Window context, where one has to open up space to pull policy, likely incrementally — thus we see a slippery slope ratchet: so, we see how a slippery slope slide into lawless oligarchy can be created: Are we facing a march of the Lemmings? Food for thought as we contemplate technoplutocracy. END

Those awful comb jellies betray the Darwinians again: They were even more complex than feared, starting at maybe 635 million years ago

They’re said to have appeared between 634 and 604 million years ago (Peterson and Butterfield, 2005) and figure in the Cambrian Explosion. Darwinians have been trying to Cancel the Cambrian Explosion since practically forever but it keeps coming back into the fact base. Read More ›

As the Babylon Bee staff wait it out in Twitter Jail…

The Babylon Bee's Twitter Account Was Suspended, But That Made Its Story Go Viral “If Twitter's goal had been to remove the harmful content, it backfired spectacularly. That original tweet, which was posted on March 15, had largely flown under the radar – yet when news that the parody site's account was suspended, the tweet suddenly went viral.” Look, it’s an updated version of “Banned in Boston,” right? Read More ›