Discovery Institute's Blog, page 49

Artificial Intelligence and Its Limits

As distinct from fear-mongering about "Terminator," thinking about Artificial Intelligence and its future appears to be entering a new, more sober phase. Google recently released a blog post, and a backing research paper, detailing their concerns over AI safety. New research will concentrate on five broad areas:

Avoiding Negative Side Effects: How can we ensure that an AI system will not disturb its environment in negative ways while pursuing its goals, e.g. a cleaning robot knocking over a v...

Jerry Coyne: "Reason Is No Different from a Kick"

Atheist free will denier Jerry Coyne has a bizarre take on justice. He believes that there is no free will, and therefore that there is no moral culpability. Thus, he believes that no one is ever guilty or innocent of wrongdoing. We are, in his view, meat robots controlled by our genes and our environment.

Despite Coyne's denial of justice as a meaningful principle, he believes in social engineering to accomplish goals he deems desirable. But he sees no fundamental difference between the us...

Causation and the Free Will Debate

In the debate over free will, free will deniers invariably offer three arguments against the reality of libertarian free will. They argue that nature is deterministic, that the mind is wholly a material phenomenon, and that "causation" is an incoherent concept if we accept indeterminism and free will.

The error in their first two arguments -- that nature is deterministic and that the mind is wholly material -- is obvious, as I have pointed out. Now I'll address their third critique of free w...

Rotary Engine Technology in Living Cells

Gone are the days when evolutionists asserted that life would never produce wheels or gears. It was impossible, they thought, for structures like that to arrive by natural selection, because too many coordinated mutations would be required. A wheel without an axle would provide no fitness advantage. One gear could achieve nothing without a matching gear. That was before we learned about the planthopper with its gear-driven jumping feet and the exquisite rotary engines of cells: the bacterial...

Theory or Fact?

In a post, "Climate facts versus climate theories," at the Watts Up With That? blog, petrophysicist Andy May expresses skepticism about man-made global warming. In his analysis, he compares aspects of the climate change issue to evolution, and states that evolution is a fact.

What exactly is meant by evolution? Evolution can refer to change over time (micro and macro evolution), universal common descent, or the mechanisms by which change occurs. May has the first definition in mind.

Here's...

The Neuromuscular System: Your Body's Balancing Act

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 is delighted to offer this series, "The Designed Body." For the complete series, see here. Dr. Glicksman practices palliative medicine for a hospice organization.

The nerves and mus...

It's Undeniable -- Doug Axe Is a Hit with Readers; #1 Evolution, #69 Overall Bestseller at Amazon

Correction: Undeniable is now #69 on Amazon's bestseller list! The headline has been amended.

Correction: Undeniable is also now #1 on Amazon's overall Evolution bestseller list. The headline has been amended.

Douglas Axe wrote his new book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed to reach the widest possible readership -- not just fellow scientists, but everyone who shares what he calls the universal design intuition. Guess what? He's knocking it out of the park....

It Came from the Lab -- On the Origin of Doug Axe's Evolution Doubts

This is fascinating and important. The myth about evolution skeptics is that their doubts emerge either from ignorance or from a failure to reconcile science with their religious beliefs, in which case the religious beliefs win. But the myth runs up against reality.

With molecular biologist Douglas Axe, it was precisely from his lab work at Cambridge University, back in the 1990s, that the failure of Darwinian theory started to become clear. Why? It was the experimental evidence that evoluti...

Scientism, Values, and the Public Interest

Over at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher comments on a recent post by John Michael Greer, who writes The Archdruid Report. Despite their vastly differing worldviews (conservative Christian vs. druid!), Greer and Dreher agree on this: There are many questions that science can't answer, not least about politics. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a case in point. Dreher's headline says it all: "Scientists Make Terrible Politicians."

Why should this be?

First, scientific and political reasoning are ve...

After Fifty Years of Searching for ETs, Materialists Won't Take No for an Answer

Ideas have consequences. If your idea is that life on Earth is nothing special, it follows that life should be plentiful in the cosmos. If you believe life and intelligence are accidental byproducts of matter and energy, you would probably want to communicate with others like us -- that is, unless (like Stephen Hawking) you think aliens might be as dangerous as we are to each other. Optimists in the SETI community outnumber pessimists. So they search.

And search. Half a century later, no si...