Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The Enigma of Consciousness — challenges for Evolutionists and Materialists

I had accepted the evolutionary story since elementary school. I think I accepted it after seeing diagrams like and visiting the Air and Space Museum and learning of our supposed origins. I didn’t find the story revolting. I found it kind of cool we were evolving and getting better and better. But as a freshman in high school, I began to doubt evolution when I considered the problem of consciousness. I remember sitting in class and the biology teacher gave the standard talking points. But for some reason, the fact I was conscious did not seem reducible to evolutionary explanations. Strange that I would even be perplexed about it as a high school student, but I was. That was the Read More ›

Antarctic acorn worms break a “crucial evolutionary link”

Earlier this year, in March, Nature reported that soft-bodied worms from the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Canada, given the name Spartobranchus tenuis, have been identified as ancient examples of acorn worms. They were hailed as a “missing link” in the vertebrate family tree: “a crucial evolutionary link between two distinct living groups of animals: enteropneusts and pterobranchs.” The evidence supporting this was said to be the tubes constructed by Spartobranchus tenuis. Living enteropneusts (acorn worms) do not have tubes, whereas living pterobranchs (minute colonial organisms) do. Professor Simon Conway Morris affirmed the significance of the newly discovered fossil tubes with these words: “By finding enteropneusts in tubes we begin to bridge this evolutionary gap.” At the time, these issues Read More ›

Rethinking the consensus on coral reef talus

Whether you are a diver, a geologist, or simply someone with an interest in natural history, you are likely to have a misconception about the structure of coral reefs. The error is ubiquitous in textbooks and is reinforced by media treatments of the topic. Everyone ‘knows’ that coral reefs have a central zone of organically bound material (the reef core), a leeward zone of flat lying sediments (the back-reef lagoonal area) and a seaward zone of steeply-dipping rubble (the reef talus). The misconception relates to the reef talus. The source of the erroneous view can be traced to Charles Darwin, who sought to follow his mentor (Charles Lyell) in explaining the past by reference to present-day processes. “Darwin and his Read More ›

Re Jerry Coyne and buddy vs. Deepak Chopra: If rocks can be conscious, why can’t photons be?

Why pick on Chopra? Quite apart from the fact that great physicist have had some similarly forbidden thoughts about consciousness, where were Coyne and Salzberg when the latest new theory of consciousness whistled into town, announcing that humans, worms, and the Internet are all conscious? Read More ›

Is God a good theory? A response to Sean Carroll (Part Three)

In my final post on Dr. Sean Carroll’s video, Is God a Good Theory?, I’d like to respond to his claim that the occurrence of (i) injustice, (ii) senseless suffering and (iii) moral and intellectual confusion in our world, make the existence of God very unlikely. In his video lecture, after discussing the problem for theists posed by the low but non-zero entropy of the early universe (a problem I addressed in my previous post), Dr. Carroll goes on to point out that there are other arguments suggesting that the probability of God’s existence is low, given the kind of universe we observe. In each case, Carroll presents some data, and argues that the probability of this data given the Read More ›

Giving Alan Fox a chance to set the record straight

There is some dispute about whether I’m representing Alan Fox’s views about man-made designs accurately. He’s about the nicest guy I’ve met on the net with an opposing view — so sorry in advance to Alan for picking on him… The forum where we had the following exchange seems dead. Here is my summary of the salient points of the exchange: Sal: Is a man-made design an example of intelligent design? Alan Fox: NO!!! Sal: Given what you said, is the Space Shuttle an example of intelligent design? How about GMOs? Alan Fox: Nothing is an example of intelligent design unless you want to tell me what “intelligent design” is other than the creationist ploy we both know it to Read More ›

“Specified Improbability” and Bill’s letter to me from way back

I finally found the phrase “Specified Improbability” in Bill’s recent writings: The design inference, as I developed it, looks to a marker of design, what I call specified complexity or specified improbability, and from there reasons to a designing intelligence as responsible for this marker. – See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/10/design_inferenc064871.html#sthash.Af6bmEbu.dpuf I thought he used the phrase in a letter he wrote to me a long time ago which he gave permission to publish. He did not use the phrase in that letter, so my recollection was wrong. But the letter was interesting in its own right. The letter was trying to resolve 2 questions. Here is what I said: >There are 4 different diagrams of the EF: > >http://www.arn.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=13;t=001726#000034 > Read More ›

“it is useful to separate design from theories of intelligence and intelligent agency”

From Design Inference by Bill Dembski, page 36: The principal advantage of characterizing design as the complement of regularity and chance is that it avoids committing itself to a doctrine of intelligent agency…Nevertheless, it is useful to separate design from theories of intelligence and intelligent agency. There has been some disagreement about whether AI can be categorized as intelligence or not. In terms of a design inference, the question is formally separate.