What? From The Conversation: The universes predicted by string theory and inflation live in the same physical space (unlike the many universes of quantum mechanics which live in a mathematical space), they can overlap or collide. Indeed, they inevitably must collide, leaving possible signatures in the cosmic sky which we can try to search for. The exact details of the signatures depends intimately on the models – ranging from cold or hot spots in the cosmic microwave background to anomalous voids in the distribution of galaxies. Nevertheless, since collisions with other universes must occur in a particular direction, a general expectation is that any signatures will break the uniformity of our observable universe. These signatures are actively being pursued by Read More ›

Sean Samis is one of our most inveterate opponents here at UD.  It is gratifying, therefore, to lean that he has no use for all of those ID opponents who say that ID theory is invalid because it does not identify the designer.  Sean’s exact words: There’s no problem here. If scientists investigating phenomena X theorize that and as-yet unverified cause Y explains X, then all scientists need to do is to verify (or falsify) Y. The question of Y’s cause or origin will eventually need to be investigated, but if Y can be empirically confirmed then that is enough. To be fair, Sean was speaking in the OOL context, but I’m sure he will agree that the principle is Read More ›

Along with anyone who buys into it. Someone brown-bagged me the Canadian Christians in Science publication, Perspectives’s review of William Dembski’s Being as Communion. That took me back a ways. To the days when I used to listen to those clever people, and their immense betrayal of basic principles: Like it matters whether human beings can think or not. This is what it seems like: They wanted jobs in a system run by materialist atheists. And meeting the system most of the way was the only way to get them. That was their right. Christians for Darwin are mostly decent people, but have no idea that they do not need to grovel anymore. Raise your heads. To say nothing of Read More ›

As has come up as pivotal in recent discussions here at UD, we must recognise that logic and first principles underlie any serious discussion, including origins science, and in sciences  — especially those addressing origins — the issue of chains of cause will be pivotal. The two are connected, as can be seen by first examining chains of warrant: Now, Peter D. Klein, in the Oxford Handbook of Skepticism, highlights: The epistemic regress problem is considered the most crucial in the entire theory of knowledge and it is a major concern for many contemporary epistemologists. However, only two of the three alternative solutions have been developed in any detail, foundationalism and coherentism. Infinitism was not seriously considered as a solution Read More ›

Discussion here. Kicked off here: Well, this has been an interesting discussion! Much thanks to BA77 for useful background info. Recommended. Some respondents also attempted to interject the claim that ID does not have a valid research program (RDFish?) First, whether any intellectual enterprise has a “valid” research program isn’t a reasonable question unless the public is being asked to buy in (public funding, legislation, curricula, etc.). Private parties should be free to spend their money on any not-obviously criminal enterprise they wish. Is it valid to spend (waste?) money on the search for ET? Origin of life? In the absence of useful answers, that must remain an open question. My own view (O’Leary for News) favors spending a certain Read More ›

Darwinian evolution is not a valid research program I do not have a cat entered in the fight, so I don’t really care that much. But look at this post, and the ensuing comments, and ask yourself, why should any of Darwin’s followers’ rubbish be publicly funded? If you were an investor, would you invest? Note: Your money, not the government’s (= other people’s) Follow UD News at Twitter!

In two comments attached to his latest post over at Sandwalk, Professor Larry Moran argues that even a very unlikely naturalistic scenario would be a better explanation of irreducible complexity than a vague Intelligent Design hypothesis. Taken to its logical conclusion, Moran’s argument implies a paradoxical result (which I’ll refer to as Torley’s paradox): that for any specified pattern which we find in Nature, no matter how complex it may turn out to be, any naturalistic explanation of that pattern which appeals to specific processes – even astronomically unlikely ones – will always be superior to an explanation which invokes Intelligent Design in purely general terms (“Some intelligent being produced this pattern”). As we’ll see, the reason why Moran’s argument Read More ›

If you listen to Darwinblather, you’d never think to ask. (As the rest of us face the road ahead. Yes, it is all as out of touch as it sounds.) Meanwhile: BEACON Researchers at Work: The Origin of a Species? [D]espite all the fantastic work done since Darwin’s day, speciation is still mysterious. Speciation is complex, multifaceted, tricky to study, and, most importantly, hard to “catch in the act.” It would help if we had a model system in which we could study speciation in fine detail as it occurs, examine and manipulate the processes involved, and to do so over a humanly reasonable time scale. More. In short, no one knows. But courts and governments demand public funding for Read More ›

In his The Evolution Revolution, Lee Spetner has collected a number of Dawkins squawks in favour of natural selection (the fittest at any given time survive) as a mystical explanation for everything that happens on the only planet we know of that has life, for sure: One cannot honestly say evolution in the sense of Common Descent is a scientific theory, despite the Darwinists’ hyperbolic statements about evolution — the kinds of statements no scientist would think of making in another field. RichardDawkins wrote about evolution (Dawkins 2009) It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur Read More ›

A friend kindly linked us to a Reason feature on the alternative medicine “racket:” Behind the dubious medical claims of Dr. Mehmet Oz and Deepak Chopra is a decades-long strategy to promote alternative medicine to the American public. Twenty-three years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began to investigate a wide variety of unconventional medical practices from around the world. Five-and-a-half billion dollars later, the NIH has found no cures for disease. But it has succeeded in bringing every kind of quackery—from faith healing to homeopathy—out of the shadows and into the heart of the American medical establishment. … The OAM’s stated mission was to investigate the medical value of alternative therapies. Despite its minuscule budget, its mandate was Read More ›

From Scientific American, we learn that we mustn’t be too hasty: How Do We Fix the Liberal Slant in Social Psychology? Not by adding more conservative voices, but by subtracting out bias Ah, how convenient. One does not need to add voices that might provide a check/balance effect. There is no way of “subtracting out bias”; bias is where people stand when they gather information. The normal way of ensuring fairness is to add more voices to the discussion, something author Piercarlo Valdesolo is clearly not anxious to do. Fine. The smelly little social psych clique will continue to brew more scandals. When people start fancy-dancing like this—when we ask them to just be honest—we know something is up. Let’s Read More ›

A series of articles by philosopher of biology James Barham on key new thinkers, collected together on his blog.: His first reflection concerns The gradual crumbling of the Darwinian consensus, and the rise of a new theoretical outlook in biology is one of the most significant but under-reported news stories of our time. It’s a scandal that science journalists have been so slow to pick up on this story. For, make no mistake about it, the story is huge. In science, they don’t come any bigger. Aw, in that case, the typical pom pom-wavings pop science writer would be the last to know. The story is this: The official explanation of the nature of living things—and therefore of human beings—that Read More ›

Here: Two theorists recently proposed a way to find evidence for an idea famous for being untestable: string theory. It involves looking for particles that were around 14 billion years ago, when a very tiny universe hit a growth spurt that used 15 billion times more energy than a collision in the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists can’t crank the LHC up that high, not even close. But they could possibly observe evidence of these particles through cosmological studies, with the right technological advances. More. All such claim fly in the face of the main point: If everything is true somewhere, tests are meaningless. Tests belong in universes where only some things are true, not a multiverse where everything is. But Read More ›

From Nature: An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor Here’s the abstract: Neanderthals are thought to have disappeared in Europe approximately 39,000–41,000 years ago but they have contributed 1–3% of the DNA of present-day people in Eurasia1. Here we analyse DNA from a 37,000–42,000-year-old2 modern human from Pestera cu Oase, Romania. Although the specimen contains small amounts of human DNA, we use an enrichment strategy to isolate sites that are informative about its relationship to Neanderthals and present-day humans. We find that on the order of 6–9% of the genome of the Oase individual is derived from Neanderthals, more than any other modern human sequenced to date. Three chromosomal segments of Neanderthal ancestry are over 50 Read More ›

Further to The toaster oven origin of life theory (But if it was this simple, why isn’t it happening all the time on Earth, favoured for such ventures? There is a taxpayer born every minute in some places): From New Scientist: Watery time capsule hints at how life got started on early Earth Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and her team discovered the water a few years ago oozing from rocky fractures 2 kilometres below the surface at the Kidd mine near Timmins in Ontario. The water, which is about 1.5 billion years old, appears to show no signs of life – an extremely rare find. … Her team has previously found a wealth Read More ›