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Evolution without accidents

Despite advances in molecular genetics, too many biologists think that natural selection is driven by random mutations. https://aeon.co/essays/why-did-darwins-20th-century-followers-get-evolution-so-wrong?fbclid=IwAR0bsh7GT-ZrLWbVlIhoX8juSTAPy63IJnF4Zc-RTeCPwDkycGJIVrXHuJ8 What we know is finite, what we don’t will always be infinite. Me, just now. I never liked the idea of “junk DNA.” It always seemed lazy at best, and just arrogant to assert that since it […]

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Elementary, my dear Pauli…

Quantum computing, Bose-Einstein condensates, and other cool stuff I just learned… My friend and muse, Naomi, sent me this article: Is the black hole at our galaxy’s centre a quantum computer? https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-black-hole-at-our-galaxy-s-centre-a-quantum-computer Well, that’s the clickbait title, that actual title of the article was: “Black-hole computing – Might nature’s bottomless pits actually be ultra-efficient quantum […]

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A Critique of “The God Hypothesis”

God the Tinker. To a carpenter, everything looks like a hammer. Robin Collins, in his article “God, Design and Fine-Tuning,“ presents the observation that our physical universe is perfectly endowed with precisely those properties which allow life as we know it to exist. He then attempts to prove by means of logic, evidence and analogy […]

Conversations with a Conservative.

So I was on Facebook and one of the people I’m connected to re-posted a link to Rush Limbaugh’s site about how you shouldn’t trust the media when it criticizes 45. I felt compelled to comment that Rush IS the media. I feel it’s just disingenuous to suppose he’s somehow immune from the pressures to […]

Response to a climate denier who was smart enough to have noticed that our raw CO2 number is low compared with pre-history

And now to the erudite sounding numbers you posted. As you pointed out, absolute CO2 levels are a poor predicted of global temperature. But, all virtually all CO2 peaks in history are capped by mass extinction events, and virtually all mass extinction events occur at CO2 peaks. And much, much more importantly, CO2 levels are […]

The Mumonkan of Perception

So my friend Naomi posted a link to a TED talk by Donald Hoffman about what the tools of evolutionary theory have to say about how well our perception of reality can and should align with actual, objective reality. The surprising answer was, not well. Not only that, but that in all their math and models there […]

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Sufficiently Weird

“I” before “E” Except after “C” And when sounding like “A,” as in “Neighbor” or “Weigh” … Unless it’s Sufficiently Weird…