As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“A seemingly ethical new technique for creating stem cells, described in Nature Biotechnologyin September, could be the most promising alternative approach to date.” WORLD
“For the first time, a primitive movie has been encoded in – and then played back from – DNA in living cells. Scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health say it is a major step toward a ‘molecular recorder’ that may someday make it possible to get read-outs, for example, of the changing internal states of neurons as they develop.” NIMH
Readers of Stephen Meyer’s two important books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, will know the name of Douglas Axe. Axe’s work on probability theory and gene folding feature quite prominently in those works. This book is a compliment to Meyer, but it is also a companion to William Dembski’s books, like The Design Inference and No Free Lunch. I suppose the nearest thing to it is Dembski’s book Intelligent Design.
But Undeniable is not simply a repetition of the type of arguments one will find in those books. In the first place, Axe’s main concern is to provide Joe Public with an assuring and accessible guide on his own ability to detect invention no matter what the Science pundits tell them.
This book tries to get behind the sane intuition all of us have that incredibly complex functionality is not, and can never be, a result of any kind of unguided randomization. It never is, in our day to day experience of living. Only in the imaginings of those who cannot see the difference between a scientific pronouncement and a metaphysical one does the idea gain currency and the power to veto competing ideas.
“[S]ound science is based on evidence and not climate scaremongering. … doesn’t work by consensus… tests theories and predictions against observations of the real world…doesn’t intimidate dissenters, manipulate data, attack critics, or play lackey to politics.”
“The researchers believe no bird would have such a long tail. But other studies, such as one published in EvoDevo in 2014, state that long-tailed birds with up to 23 vertebrae once existed.” WORLD
“In a recent edition of the journal Environment and Behavior, Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and her colleagues write that while religious views drive Americans’ rejection of evolution, skepticism about climate change is more a function of political views and lack of confidence in the work of scientists.” RNS
“In the March 16, 2016, issue of Forbes astrophysicist Ethan Siegel’s article The Next Great Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ is Coming!
“…not only is philosophy not dead, but without it, science itself is impossible. Philosophy tells us not only whywe do science—it gives us the assumptions that undergird the scientific method.” Bill Nye the Philosophy Shy
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