Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Apparently, US Republicans (39%) doubt humans evolved from an earlier species of animals

but it turns out, most Democrats could not correctly answer both that the Earth goes around the Sun and that this takes a year. The two divergences are treated as if they are exactly the same, of course, and guess which gets the more publicity? Read More ›

Flash news!: 100 percent of our genome is identical to chimp genome ;)

Is the point of Mooney's claims to constantly diminish the claimed figure but never quite get there? All he is really diminishing is the apparent value of the genome as a source of information about life forms. If he never quite gets to 100%, he still has a story. Read More ›

Intelligent design vs. Darwinism turns on the centrality of information

A friend writes to say that, listening to the Steve Meyer vs. Charles Marshall radio debate, he sensed that the message regarding the centrality of "information" to the history of life is starting get across. Read More ›

Darwin, Kingsley, evolution and racism

Did Charles Darwin ever invoke his own theory in order to justify the extermination of one race by another? If the term “extermination” refers to systematic genocide, the answer is an emphatic “No”; but if “extermination” is defined more broadly to include the displacement and consequent extinction of one race by another, more technologically advanced race in the battle for scarce resources, then I would argue that the answer is “Yes.” I recently came across some highly revealing correspondence between the celebrated author and Anglican divine, Charles Kingsley (see here) and Charles Darwin, whom he greatly admired, (see here) indicating that Darwin, like Kingsley, looked forward to “the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the Read More ›

If an entity is complex and specified like life, but just too different, what would we call it?

How about a rock that does not have an aging process and has negligible metabolism, but does have a brain composed of non-living elements? ... To avoid needless novelization, let’s assume that it is of low, not high intelligence, something like that of a turtle. Read More ›

Geneticists use code words for race, science writer says

To the Darwinist, it looks like selfish genes (but then everything does). The rest of us would not put that much faith in the gene alone as the unit of inheritance. Separated from the rest of the story, it is probably usually meaningless. Read More ›

Richard Dawkins: How Could Anyone “Possibly Doubt the Fact of Evolution”

Evolutionists like to say that there are mountains of evidence for evolution, but what is the best evidence? What would make a creationist think twice? Twenty five seconds into this video evolutionist Richard Dawkins answers this question. His killer evidence is the congruence between the genes of different plants and animals. Compare the genes across a range of species and you’ll see a “perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree.” In fact, you’ll see the same result for evolutionary trees using just single genes—the so-called gene trees. It works “with every gene you do separately.”  Read more

Another Question for Matzke

Dear Nick, We’ve had this exchange: Barry Arrington: “If you came across a table on which was set 500 coins (no tossing involved) and all 500 coins displayed the ‘heads’ side of the coin, would you reject ‘chance’ as a hypothesis to explain this particular configuration of coins on a table?” Mark Frank: “. . . they might have slid out of a packet of coins without a chance to turn over.” Sal Cordova: “Which still means chance is not the mechanism of the configuration.” Matzke: “Not really.” Now Central Scrutinizer suggests: If I were a software engineer commissioned to write the best random number generator possible, and after I delivered my product, the first set of results that my Read More ›