Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Design of Life blog: Big Bangs in biology

Apparently, it’s not just physics that starts things off with a bang. Life forms have done that too, and with equal drama. Mammals, birds, and flowers have their big bang events. But here’s the difficulty: The science literature, as well as the popular science press, assumes that an adequate fossil record must show a long, gradual series of transitions from simple to ever more complex life forms, powered by survival of the fittest. That is what the Darwin’s theory of evolution predicts, and therefore it is what researchers are encouraged – and trained – to look for. When confronted by the sudden appearance of complexity, they assume that their evidence is exceptional, not normal. In reality, the only reason we have Read More ›

A Fact is a Fact is a Fact of Course; Unless it’s the Amazing Mr. Darwin

In the “Hail Darwin” link under “Additional Descent” we are told that the National Academy of Sciences’  “Science, Evolution and Creationism” gives  the following epistemological definition of “fact”:

“In science, a ‘fact’ typically refers to an observation, measurement, or other form of evidence that can be expected to occur the same way under similar circumstances. ”

 So far so good.  This is pretty much the same way I defined “fact” just a few days ago in Epistemology.  It’s What You Know

The NAS then says this:

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An Irony: Will Attempts to Enforce Darwinian Orthodoxy Serve to Diminish Public Trust in Legitimate Science?

This year should be an exciting one for ID. It sounds like Expelled, The Movie will have very wide distribution in major theaters all across the nation in April. One sad aspect of the Darwinian propaganda machine is that, once it is exposed to the general public for what it is (materialistic philosophy pretending to be science, and even in opposition to the evidence of modern scientific discoveries about the severe limits of the Darwinian mechanism that is presumed to explain everything in biology), the public may lose trust in legitimate science. This state of affairs is extraordinarily ironic. The claim is that denial of Darwinian orthodoxy will destroy science, but perhaps attempts to defend the indefensible claims of Darwinists Read More ›

Bill Greene Rips Wikipedia a New One

The Bill Greene Show Bill rips Wikipedia for about 5 minutes straight about how its liberal editors censor stuff they don’t personally agree with. He says anything remotely positive related to Intelligent Design is quickly and completely censored. Bill then goes on to interview Mark Mathis, the producer of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”.

Today at Design of Life: The Avalon explosion: Another intricate, Darwin-busting puzzle

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the history of life shows no steady Darwinian march of progress, and the recent discovery about the Avalon explosion is yet another blow to an idea that is kept alive only by ideology, not evidence (and perhaps because the Darwin bicentennial budgets have already been spent?): Excerpts:

Because the Ediacaran creatures are so little known, the significance of their sudden appearance and disappearance is often overlooked: Many scientists have been hoping to find a smooth, orderly transition from the earliest cyanobacteria to the Cambrian creatures, precisely the sort of transition that Darwin’s theory of evolution predicts. But the Ediacarans are not only no help to their theory, they are actually quite a setback. An entire complex fauna came into existence quite suddenly (in terms of geological time), and just as suddenly disappeared. Worse, the Ediacarans are NOT ancestors of the Cambrians.

[ … ]

There was no road between Avalon and Cambria at all. The most remarkable thing about Avalon life is that it strutted its strange stuff a while and then, as far as we know, just disappeared, as did the trilobite and the dinosaur.

For more go here.

Also:

Today at the Post-Darwinist:

Physicists’ latest toy: The large hadron collider – gateway to other universes? Read More ›

Blind cave fish see the light

Two blind fish can make sighted offspring. “The offspring of crossbred blind cave fish see like their surface-dwelling cousins. The results in Current Biology 1, show that the two populations took different evolutionary paths to blindness. “We’ve basically shown that these different populations have converged upon the same outward appearance independently, and that they use different genes to do it”, says Richard Borowsky of New York University.” This is the type of thing that RM and NS can do. I would say that they lose different genes to become blind, not use different genes.

Deep Blue Never Is (Blue, That Is)

In the comment thread to my last post there was a lot of discussion about computers and their relation to intelligence.  This is my understanding about computers.  They are just very powerful calculators, but they do not “think” in any meaningful sense.  By this I mean that computer hardware is nothing but an electro-mechanical device for operating computer software.  Computer software in turn is nothing but a series of “if then” propositions.  These “if then” propositions may be massively complex, but software never rises above an utterly determined “if then” level.    This is a basic Turing Machine analysis.  This does not necessarily mean that the output of computer software is predictable.  For example, the “then” in response to a particular”if” Read More ›

Arguments from Incredulity

We often hear that ID is an argument from incredulity. At this point I would tend to agree. That said, arguments from incredulity aren’t necessarily wrong but in fact are rather reliable and employed constantly and consistently by everyone every day. Let’s take the example that Granville Sewell offered in his most recent post here. He described Schrodinger’s equation and showed us that it’s theoretically possible for a pitched baseball to stop and hover in mid-air. A commenter who appeared to have a reasonable understanding of Schrodinger’s equation at first protested then ended up agreeing that it’s possible but the odds against it are long and for all practical purposes incalculable. They went on to agree that the quantum uncertainty Read More ›

Spread the word – Evolution is a scientific fact

Nature wants all science organisations to preach the word of evolution by natural selection. “Evolution is a scientific fact, and every organization whose research depends on it should explain why. Three cheers for the US National Academy of Sciences for publishing an updated version of its booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism (see www.nap.edu/sec). The document succinctly summarizes what is and isn’t science, provides an overview of evidence for evolution by natural selection, and highlights how, time and again, leading religious figures have upheld evolution as consistent with their view of the world. For a more specific and also entertaining account of evolutionary knowledge, see palaeontologist Kevin Padian’s evidence given at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial (see http://tinyurl.com/2nlgar). Padian destroys the Read More ›

The Schrodinger Equation

The goal of materialists is to reduce mind to biology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics, and physics to mathematics; they have obviously made considerable progress. At the very bottom of this chain, however, lies quite a surprise–the Schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics. A mathematics text I am reading states that the Schrodinger partial differential equation explains, in theory, all of chemistry, but must be viewed as “an axiom…rather than as an equation that can be derived from simpler principles.” In an n-particle system, whose potential energy (due to the electromagnetic, gravitational, and strong and weak nuclear forces between these particles) is given by V(x1,y1,z1,…,xn,yn,zn), the probability (per unit volume) of finding particle 1, of mass m_1, at (x1,y1,z1) and Read More ›

DCA – The Plot Sickens

About a year ago the chemical compound dichloroacetate was in the news as a potential miracle cure for cancer shortly after a scientist at the University of Edmonton published experimental results showing human cancers melting off of lab rats in a matter of a few weeks with virtually no adverse side effects. As it turned out the Edmonton scientist had kept his experiments confidential for two years while he filed patents and tried to find a pharmaceutical company to fund clinical trials. The fly in the ointment is that dichloroacetate (DCA) has been around a long time and used in the treatment of a rare mitochondrial genetic disorder. The drug itself isn’t patentable but technically the therapeutic procedure to treat Read More ›

Another Explosion of Life: Avalon

Similar to the Cambrian explosion of animal life, it appears there was an earlier similar explosion for plants, at least the Ediacaran variety.
In what the ScienceNOW Daily News is calling Another Big Bang for Biology, the oldest assemblage of macroscopic life forms on earth, Ediacaran plants, appeared suddenly and fully diversified.
This plant life “explosion” coincides exactly with a sudden rise in ocean oxygenation.
The study authors, paleontologists from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, call their findings The Avalon Explosion.
Read More ›

Today at The Design of Life: Can animals do math?

How much should we believe of what we read about animal number sense? Hype aside, the evidence points away from the assumption that abstract mathematics is simply the outcome of squabbles over bones. There is a gap that is simply not bridged by the studies of animal number sense, nor do available studies shed much light on the gap. For more, go here.

Intelligent design: Do the “unfalsifiables” get along with the “falsifieds”? If so, WHY?

Now and then I am assailed by people who insist that “intelligent design is not falsifiable.”

Well, put that way, it isn’t, right?

Politics, economics, and religion are not falsifiable either. Anything can escape falsification if it is put in broad enough terms. That’s because we all have overlapping – but not identical – definitions of what these abstractions mean.

However, specific ID hypotheses such as Mike Behe’s irreducible complexity, Bill Dembski’s specified complexity, and Guillermo Gonzalez’s privileged planet hypothesis can all be falsified by showing that the condition that cannot exist according to the theorist’s postulates does in fact exist.

So a specific hypothesis is – of course – falsifiable. That’s a key part of what a hypothesis is: A statement so specific that its contrary would falsify it.

But now here is something I would really like to know: Do people who claim to have falsified various intelligent design hypotheses ever get angry with the people who claim that intelligent design hypotheses are not falsifiable? Read More ›

Epistemology. It’s What You Know

BarryA’s definition of a philosopher:  A bearded guy in a tweed jacket and Birkenstocks who writes long books explaining how it is impossible to communicate through language without apparently realizing the irony of expressing that idea through, well, language. 

Seriously, I have read a lot of philosophy, and I find some of the philosophers’ ideas valuable (that is, when I can decipher them though the almost impenetrable thicket of jargon in which they are usually expressed).  In particular, epistemology (the theory of what we know and how we know it) is one of the most useful philosophical ideas for the ID – Darwinism debate.  Indeed, many of the discussions on this blog turn on questions of epistemology.  So I thought it would be helpful to give a brief overview of the subject in the ID context.  So here goes – 

Read More ›