Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Darwinian atheist slams Harvard astronomer on our cosmically unique position

And guess why? From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: Writing in the Washington Post, Harvard astronomer Howard Smith forcefully blunts Stephen Hawking’s assertion that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.” Of course, it’s not only Dr. Hawking who says as much — denying human exceptionalism is close to universal orthodoxy among the socio-academic demographic he occupies. Carl Sagan put the same view a little more mildly: “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.” Smith points out, however, that science considered objectively is much closer to the exceptionalist conclusion. Sure, but… Atheists aren’t having any of it. At Why Evolution Is True, biologist Jerry Coyne hits back, Read More ›

Epigenetics: Retiring hoary Darwinian certainties

Whether anyone admits it or not. From Jef Akst at The Scientist on the recent appearance of many papers on epigenetics: Last week (November 17), the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC) published 41 papers in Cell Press journals and other high-impact publications. IHEC aims to provide researchers with a comprehensive epigenomic analysis of healthy and abnormal cells, and the new studies constitute major strides toward that goal. … “The number of papers and variety of topics addressed by this creative team of scientists from around the globe not only reflects the dynamic nature of this consortium, but is also evidence of the great strength that comes from bringing together complementary expertise, with the potential for far greater impact than an Read More ›

Poisonous amphibians face higher extinction risk?

From ScienceDaily: Amphibians which have a toxic defense against predators — such as the iconic poison dart frogs — have a much higher risk of extinction than species which use other types of defense mechanisms, research shows. The key finding of this study is that poisonous species are 60% more likely to be threatened than species without chemical defenses. … That might seem counterintuitive. Dr Arbuckle previously suggested three main possibilities to explain higher extinction rates in toxic amphibians, and figuring out which of these have been important are the focus of another study. The different ideas are: Costly chemical hypothesis: Chemical defense is energetically costly; Marginal habitats hypothesis: Chemical defense allows shifts to ‘marginal’ (low carrying capacity) habitats, which Read More ›

SciAm bloggers: Should we colonize Saturn’s moon Titan?

Science writer Charles Wohlforth and planetary scientist Amanda R. Hendrix argue at Scientific American that it’s pretty much the only place off Earth that humans could live. The idea of a human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn, might sound crazy. Its temperature hovers at nearly 300° below zero Fahrenheit, and its skies rain methane and ethane that flow into hydrocarbon seas. Just needs a bit of staging, as a real estate agent friend would say. Anyway, here’s the theory: It’s cold on Titan, at -180°C (-291°F), but thanks to its thick atmosphere, residents wouldn’t need pressure suits—just warm clothing and respirators. Housing could be made of plastic produced from the unlimited resources harvested on the surface, and could Read More ›

Speciation: Genome analysis shows Hen Harrier to be two separate species

From ScienceDaily: Deemed as one species spread across different continents, scientists confirm that the Eurasian Hen Harrier and the American Northern Harrier are in fact two distinct species. … “Before the advent of sequencing technology, species were categorised by shared and divergent morphological features. However, new technology allows us to quantify the amount of genetic change between populations and identify divergent lineages.” Paper. (public access) – Graham J. Etherington, Jason A. Mobley. Molecular phylogeny, morphology and life-history comparisons within Circus cyaneus reveal the presence of two distinct evolutionary lineages. Avian Research, 2016; 7 (1) DOI: 10.1186/s40657-016-0052-3 More. On wonders how many other speciation claims will be blown out of the water using such techniques. Nothing says “Darwin snob” like indifference Read More ›

Robin Collins on cosmological fine tuning

As a part of basic reminders, it is worth the effort to read and watch how Robin Collins put the case in summary, in a classic essay on The Fine-tuning Design Argument (1998): Suppose we went on a mission to Mars, and found a domed structure in which everything was set up just right for life to exist. The temperature, for example, was set around 70 °F and the humidity was at 50%; moreover, there was an oxygen recycling system, an energy gathering system, and a whole system for the production of food. Put simply, the domed structure appeared to be a fully functioning biosphere. What conclusion would we draw from finding this structure? Would we draw the conclusion that Read More ›

Aeon writer asks: Has dogma derailed the search for dark matter?

Probably, but let’s let him tell it: From Pavel Kroupa at Aeon: The issues at stake are huge. Acceptance of dark matter has influenced scientific thinking about the birth of the Universe, the evolution of galaxies and black holes, and the fundamental laws of physics. Yet even within academic circles, there is a lot of confusion about dark matter, with evidence and interpretation often conflated in misleading and unproductive ways. … The first step is that we need to revisit the validity of Newton’s universal law of gravitation. Starting in the 1980s, Mordehai Milgrom at the Weizmann Institute in Israel showed that a small generalisation of Newton’s laws can yield the observed dynamics of matter in galaxies and in galaxy Read More ›

Ideological Turing Test

To all of our friends who subscribe to materialist accounts of evolution: Here is an interesting little test. The Ideological Turing Test is a concept invented by Bryan Caplan to test whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries. The partisan is invited to answer questions or write an essay posing as his opposite number; if neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan’s answers and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side. Now most folks in the ID movement can pass the test when it comes to materialist evolutionary theory.  After all, it is the dominant paradigm, and it has been Read More ›

Husband of new US education secretary once promo’d ID in schools?

First: So? From Rebecca Klein at Huffington Post: While running for governor of Michigan in 2006, Dick DeVos ― whose wife, Betsy, is now President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. secretary of education ― said that schools should have the option of teaching intelligent design alongside evolution. … To be sure, DeVos’ comments were made 10 years ago, and his wife has given no indication that she’d like to use her position in the Trump administration to promote intelligent design in schools. But Dick DeVos’ views on religion and education run parallel to his wife’s in many areas, and the couple’s family foundation has made donations that critics say have enabled the encroachment of religious education in the public sphere. More. Read More ›

Oxford conference to examine questions around fine-tuning of universe, Physics of Fine-Tuning, Crete, June 19-22 2017

Here. Our goal is to consolidate the idea of fine-tuning across disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and physics. Fine-tuning is often deemed a fact and used to reach grandiose metaphysical conclusions by philosophers, theologians, and even physicists, without a proper understanding of the underlying assumptions entailed by these arguments. As a consequence the physical and philosophical literature on this subject are rather confusing, leading to esoteric topics such as Boltzmann Brains. We intend to present a comprehensive review of the physics used for deriving fine-tuning arguments, scrutinising the current ones and uncovering new examples, thereby providing a solid foundation for future efforts to interpret this fascinating facet of Nature. We will produce a field-manual for fine-tuning and create an accompanying Read More ›

Doug Axe vs Keith Fox: Is design in nature undeniable?

Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, debates theistic evolutionist and biochemist Keith Fox debate the question at Unbelievable (radio). Fox is Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge. The comments are fascinating insofar as they reveal the obvious superiority of fully naturalist atheism to “theistic evolution.” If we can see no intelligence behind or within nature, that’s not only because there probably isn’t any but because, as the naturalist is happy to point out, we evolved so as not to be able to understand reality anyway. There is no intelligence in us either. There is only power and he, as it happens, exercises it. Of course, the naturalist succeeds in persuading his pop science media-driven crowd by ignoring vast Read More ›

Forever frozen: What happens when people stop believing in the existence of the soul

Or the mind, or the immateriality or consciousness or the resurrection of the dead… From Helen Thomson at New Scientist: “WE’RE taking people to the future!” says architect Stephen Valentine, as we drive through two gigantic gates into a massive plot of land in the middle of the sleepy, unassuming town that is Comfort, Texas. The scene from here is surreal. … After years of searching, Valentine chose this site as the unlikely home of the new Mecca of cryogenics. Called Timeship, the monolithic building will become the world’s largest structure devoted to cryopreservation, and will be home to thousands of people who are neither dead nor alive, frozen in time in the hope that one day technology will be Read More ›

Oldest alphabet from 4 millennia ago might be somewhat like Hebrew?

That would make it and other very ancient documents possibly decipherable. From Bruce Bower at ScienceNews: The world’s earliest alphabet, inscribed on stone slabs at several Egyptian sites, was an early form of Hebrew, a controversial new analysis concludes.Israelites living in Egypt transformed that civilization’s hieroglyphics into Hebrew 1.0 more than 3,800 years ago, at a time when the Old Testament describes Jews living in Egypt, says archaeologist and epigrapher Douglas Petrovich of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. Hebrew speakers seeking a way to communicate in writing with other Egyptian Jews simplified the pharaohs’ complex hieroglyphic writing system into 22 alphabetic letters, Petrovich proposed on November 17 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. More. Read More ›