Discovery Institute's Blog, page 173

Reading David Chalmers on the Coming "Singularity"

New York University philosopher David Chalmers is well known for critiquing the scientific materialist's vision of explaining, someday and somehow, the phenomenon of conscious experience in purely material terms. Chalmers has argued (now famously) that a philosophical thought experiment is fatal to materialist science: "zombies" are conceivable, and hence logically possible. Here he means by "zombie" a human whose outward behavior perfectly mimics people having consciousness, yet in fact the...

Death: The Final Frontier

Editor's note: Physicians have a special place among the thinkers who have elaborated the argument for intelligent design. Perhaps that's because, more than evolutionary biologists, they are familiar with the challenges of maintaining a functioning complex system, the human body. With that in mind, Evolution News & Views is delighted to present this series, "The Designed Body." Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

Death is something that most of us would ra...

A Mind/Brain Lecture and Darwin's Embarrassment

I attended a great lecture a few days ago at my university. Stony Brook University hosts a yearly Mind/Brain Lecture Series by a prominent neurobiologist or philosopher who has done important work on the relationship between the mind and the brain. There have been some excellent lectures in the past -- Patricia Churchland was here a few years ago (I disagree with her perspective, but she is certainly a prominent philosopher involved in the mind/brain issue, and her lecture was very interesti...

While Ranting about "Quote Mining" in "Creationists Texts," Paper in Scientific Journal Misquotes and Misrepresents Pro-ID Article

A few weeks ago, my colleague Dr. Logan Gage sent me an email highlighting a new peer-reviewed paper in the highly regarded scientific journal PLOS ONE, "Experiential Thinking in Creationism -- A Textual Analysis." The authors, Petteri Nieminen, Esko Ryökäs, and Anne-Mari Mustonen, purport to analyze the rhetorical tactics of those they call "creationists." They say they went through "creationist texts" and found that "quotations...were a major form of proof." We're told that "creationists"...

"Physiology Is Rocking the Foundations of Evolutionary Biology": Another Peer-Reviewed Paper Takes Aim at Neo-Darwinism

An article in the journal Experimental Physiology by the distinguished British biologist Denis Noble has the provocative title, "Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology." He argues that "[t]he 'Modern Synthesis' (Neo-Darwinism) is a mid-20th century gene-centric view of evolution, based on random mutations accumulating to produce gradual change through natural selection" but we now know that view is wrong because "genetic change is far from random and often not gradual....

How Goethe Set the Scene for Scientism, and Worse

You might think that the culture that allowed Nazism had been fully examined already, but M. D. Aeschliman, the distinguished American critic living in Switzerland, describes in the new St. Austin Review (edited by Joseph Pearce) the ways that Germany from the Enlightenment onward developed a truculent secularism that encouraged the National Socialists. See "Dissociation of Sensibility: The German Tragedy Revisited."

The most intriguing insight in this thorough essay is Aeschliman's observat...

Oxford University Physicist Ard Louis on Evolution as Self-Constructing LEGO Train

Recently I was reading a biographical sketch on Oxford physicist Ard Louis (not a fan of intelligent design), a fellow who some may recall debated Stephen Meyer a couple of years ago. The sketch appears in Tim Stafford's book The Adam Quest: Eleven Scientists Who Held on to a Strong Faith While Wrestling with the Mystery of Human Origins. While Louis dismisses William Dembski's arguments based upon logic and mathematics, he asks us to swallow almost any ridiculous claim so long as it support...

Hey, "These Sequences May Not Be Junk, After All"! Nature and Heredity Report Function for Non-Coding DNA

The latest issues of the journals Nature and Heredity contain multiple articles reporting function for non-coding DNA. The themes are consistent: types of DNA once thought to be junk now turn out to have function.

A "News & Views" piece in Nature, "Coding in non-coding RNAs," states: "The discovery of peptides encoded by what were thought to be non-coding -- or 'junk' -- regions of precursors to microRNA sequences reveals a new layer of gene regulation. These sequences may not be junk, after...

Why Is the Universe Overwhelmingly "Inhospitable to Life"?

A reader asks for a response to the following challenge to the theory of intelligent design:

If the universe was designed for life, it must be said that it is a shockingly inefficient design. There are vast reaches of the universe in which life as we know it is clearly impossible: gravitational forces would be crushing, or radiation levels are too high for complex molecules to exist, or temperatures would make the formation of stable chemical bonds impossible... Fine-tuned for life? It woul...

I, Robot -- You "Pet Labrador"? More Wisdom from Elon Musk

The Daily Mail reports:

Robots will use humans as pets once they achieve a subset of artificial intelligence known as 'superintelligence'.

This is according to SpaceX-founder Elon Musk who claims that when computers become smarter than people, they will treat them like 'pet Labradors'.

His comments were made in a recent interview with scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who added that computers could choose to breed docile humans and eradicate the violent ones.

What's interesting about Musk's...