Post-Darwinist

The real crime is having an opinion not sponsored by a government-approved source of propaganda.

2011-08-15T15:25:00.000-04:00

Excellent friend Franklin Carter at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee writes to tell me about this: In “Government crackdown on hatred goes a link too far” ( Kingston Whig-Standard, August 15, 2011), Alan Shanoff asks, “Is the federal government proposing to make hyperlinking a crime?”

That seems to be the case when you read Bill C-51, a federal bill called Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act.

The stated purpose of Bill C-51 is the modernization of certain criminal offences. One of the offences to be modernized is the offence of public promotion of hatred against an identifiable group. ...

The new and improved modernized definition makes it crystal clear that hyperlinking is a form of communication. After all, what better way to make something available than providing a link to it, a link you can access with the click of a mouse?

He asks, “ ... many of these sites contain hurtful language but should anybody linking to such sites for any reason be at risk of prosecution?”

Yes indeed, depending on what one means by “Investigative Powers for the 21st Century.” The real crime is having an opinion not sponsored by a government-approved source of propaganda.

If it passes, here is what can happen to the blogger:

1. Lillian Rose is a garden maven whose blog frequently features links to botanist John Turricle’s wonderful work on mildew-resistant blooms. Retirees, into gardening, love her blog.

Rose doesn’t know it, but Turricle is also an avowed racist, and features his eruptions on race in the “Other” section of his blog - stuff she has never so much as looked at, because she and her readers are totally focused on winning the flower show.

Sorry, Rose. Someone complained, and linkers like you were then eagerly sought, by armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do. So, GAVEL!! Guilty! of spreading hate, with all the fines, adult reform school, and humiliation that implies. Gardening blog hobby, ... toast.

2. Honest John Deal runs a business catering to amputees. Some of his assisted living devices come from a site whose owner insists, from time to time, on featuring anti-Muslim editorials.

Honest John doesn’t agree with the site owners’s views, but that guy is the one distributor who ships to John’s area with no hassles, and amputees hobble by every single day to see if their life-assisting shipments are safely in.

Sorry, John. Someone complained, and linkers like you were then eagerly sought, by armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do. So, GAVEL!! Guilty! of spreading hate, with all the fines, adult reform school, and humiliation that implies. Business helping others, ... toast.

3. Annie Sellfridge owns and operates an appliance store in a multicultural area. She puts her inventory on line, and also features a popular site section on Saving on Electricity Bills. She doesn’t know it, but one of the sites she linked to is run by “climate change deniers,” who provide their free opinion on that subject, along with advice about energy-efficient appliances. (All Sellfridge was interested in was the fact that they provide multinational numbers , so new immigrant customers can relate to the numbers they best understand.)

Sorry, Annie. Someone complained, and linkers like you were then eagerly sought, by armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do. So, GAVEL!! Guilty! of spreading hate, with all the fines, adult reform school, and humiliation that implies. Business providing a needed service, ... toast.

4. Blogger O’Leary was interviewing the author of an anti-eugenics book, and - to clearly demo the fact that antique forms of racism survive to the present day - she links to one of them.

Sorry, O’Leary. Someone complained, and linkers like you were then eagerly sought, by armies of bureaucrats with nothing better to do. So, GAVEL!! Guilty! of ...

Spreading: yuh, whatever.

If government cannot do better than this, let’s just dispense with government. Okay? How much worse off would we be without it? Alternatively, write to your Member of Parliament. Tell them you think the Internet should be free, like the press.

And read Tyranny of Nice, Shakedown, and America Alone. And any book on civil liberties.

Protestors of Muslim prayer in secular public schools - don’t be swayed by this false argument

2011-08-08T11:41:00.000-04:00

Those who gather to protest the mosqueterias tonight at the Toronto District School Board offices may hear this: “For many years, Christian prayer - and only Christian prayer - was allowed because you were a majority. You only care now because in some districts, another religious grooup is a majority and wants the same thing.”

The people who might say such a thing are appallingly ignorant, but there is no law against that.

The skinny: When Canada was founded in 1867, it had two strong religious cultures at loggerheads, Protestant vs. Catholic. And churches were largely responsible for education back then.

Disunity could have destroyed the country, so a political compromise created “Protestant” schools vs. “Catholic” schools - each supported by its own taxpayers. No, it ain’t pretty, but religious civil war is uglier, and in any event, it worked.

Over 150 years, the Protestant system gradually morphed into the “public,” secular system, with no religious orientation now preferred - both by law and by general preference.

History doesn’t matter in this situation, because a choice has been made against it. Anyone who brings it up is introducing a red herring that might divide people who should work together.

Toronto District School Board’s plan for peace re sharia-compliant schools

2011-07-17T08:34:00.000-04:00

Re the Mosqueterias in sharia-compliant school districts, like the biggest school board in Canada: A proposed

Draft message from the Toronto District School Board to students:

To: students, parents, ratepayers

Date: [tbd]

Subject: Complaints received re sharia schools

--

We feel your pain.

Ever aiming at new levels of balance and diversity, we plan to address the complaints by shortly instituting "Spirituality for gay/lesbian/transgendered/queer/exploring/uncertain teens," proving them with appropriate worship and clergy counselling in previously public space.

[Politician: Good! Balance out the only lobbies that matter.]

We will, of course, continue to suppress observant Christian and Jewish teens who want access to spiritual counselling, lest their harmful culture is propagated. They could end up concluding that some lifestyles are bad for them and that they have the power to decide for themselves.

We want to take this opportunity to reassure our whole community that that goes against everything we believe here at the Board. Fact and rationality are “out the window” now, in favour of diversity studies, post-modernism, deconstruction, victimhood, and plunging IQs.

[Union head: Great! More shight, less fear of an “incompetence” evaluation. Bring it on.]

We pledge to promote any weirdness or hatred whatever, as long as you think you can’t help yourself or your family is forcing you to. We are especially supportive if someone will kill you if you don't go along with the [shight]. We’ll help you adjust to the terror.

[Editor: How did “shight” get in here? We certainly need a better word than that. How about “life affirmation”? Too woo-woo? Wait! Try “peace amid diversity”? Yes, that’s it! Put it in!]

Finally, we promise to continue to shake down the public to support your oppression. Human Rights Commissions have the authority to persecute anyone who thinks you should have a second look before you jump. They've gone after very prominent Canadians, so there is no fear that you will ever get out from under Trudeaupia.

[Recommendation from equity reviewer O’Leary, just before slitting her throat: To drive the point home, make the little serfs study Canadian Icon Margaret Atwood’s horror novel about “Gilead,” a mythical theocracy in the southern United States. We can’t permit the young swine to realize that theocracy is happening here, and not there. For effect, throw in another compulsory Atwood three-loon special, will you? Just to teach them to ALWAYS point the finger abroad, to distract attention from what's happening at home.]

Note: Everything above is fiction except for the facts.

To my school board trustee: On the tax-funded sharia “public” school, in Toronto

2011-07-12T08:33:00.002-04:00

On the tax-funded sharia “public” school, featuring compulsory attendance for those who can’t afford private or home schooling:

I used to work with the Toronto District School Board as an equity reviewer. Seeing this, and reading background information, I must ask, Is there some reason that the Board should continue to exist? Couldn’t we have female "uncleanness" and exclusion of those who don’t adhere to the correct religion without a school board?

There are lots of places where nobody goes to school and everybody behaves that way and thinks it is right. What are you trustees adding besides my tax dollars at work?

You, at least, I trust to help put a stop to this.

sincerely,
Denyse O’Leary
(a taxpayer compelled to fund exalting one religion over others and female uncleanness over equality - just think, the City could seize my property if I refused to fund what we all fought all our lives against ... what I was paid by the Board to work against! When did the war that we lost even happen? Where? Memory loss on my part?)

Note: Here are the trustees.

Note 2: Yes,the blog is still on hold, as I got a much-needed extension for the book till November 1, 2012.

A second open letter to Guy Earle

2011-04-24T20:54:00.001-04:00

Guyzini, old cat, you might remember me, the Toronto granny who encouraged you in the early stages of what has now become a five-star “human rights tribunal” debacle. Good for you, pursuing it to the Supreme Court and I’ll back you. But couple things first:

First, you may lose the case, which further endangers the civil rights of everyone who does NOT live by the growing monster of government. Still, you might win. But either way, Five Feet of Fury is doubtless right in thinking that no help can come from the political class itself now. The revolt must begin from below and be fueled by the monstrosities people like yourself endure.

The key hope is, know the territory and its inhabitants. See, you’ve now learned what it really means to be “transgressive.” Your friends thought transgressive is a tee shirt titter, but you were transgressive, and are you laughing now?

No, please listen: Many think they are “transgressive” when they offend people who have no social power. People like that used to be called “snobs” and “bullies.” But times change, and so do values and terminology. Now those people are culture heroes, and you are a villain who must be humiliated, degraded, and rendered penniless, as crowds cheer.

And what did you really do? You transgressed “group rights”, the key Nanny State concept. What are you, compared with an aggrieved group, whose grievances cash out into ever more power over all of our lives for governments that rule by shakedown?

Second, please let’s face real enemies, not pretend ones. Recently, I was listening to someone carry on about growing religious power in politics, and he opined that one couldn’t make a Monte Python “Life of Brian” film today. I hit the remote. Why? Because that’s not true. The Next Big Thing might well be a lavish big screen porno flick on Jesus. And if the producer’s idea of persecution is some fundies helping his box office by picketing on the sidewalk, couldn’t he better understand what persecution really means by walking in your shoes for, oh, ‘bout the decade it’ll take you overall?

Meanwhile, if he tried that with the life of Mohammed, he’d be head-absent, but he’s too much of an oops-on-the-carpet to admit that. Guy, people who can’t say “radical Islam” or “gay fascism” are AWOL, and you can’t afford them right now.

Some claim you made a mistake by trying to reach out to grievance groups. If so, past is past. In general, such groups can’t accept peace offerings; they understand and live by plunder.

We press on, keep me posted. My blog really is on hold till I get a very challenging book off my back, but be sure I will do what I can. And I fear no one but God.

Here are links to key media, and here is American Spectator.

In the Vancouver Sun, Tiffany Crawford reports

In Yahoo! News Canada, Marc Weisblott reports

Comedian Guy Earle intends to appeal the ruling.

Video: Ezra Levant speaks to Guy Earle about the ruling:

Blog on hold till June 15

2011-02-02T23:59:00.000-05:00

Because I am writing a book and working for a living, I have regretfully decided that the only time management solution is to put this blog on hold until June 15, 2011.

I thank all regular readers and occasional donors.

Always glad to share a good read and thoughts thereon. The blog search box at the top left will give you access to all past stories.

I will still be blogging at Access Research Network (bottom row of headlines), Salvo, and Uncommon Descent.

Good luck to all in the happy hunting ground of materialist nonsense that so much pop science has become.

Design of his body gives injured pantheist shivers

2011-02-02T22:00:00.000-05:00

A friend notes this pantheist discovering what design means:

ecause I had just been reading Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box where he explains the obstacles to Darwin’s theory of evolution, namely gradualism in the face of all the scientific advances since the discovery of the microscope, DNA etc., I was particularly interested by the way a health professional such as Doctor #2 phrased his explanation of why I shouldn’t be too worried about the blow to my side: “Whoever designed us has done an excellent job of hiding most of the liver behind the ribcage…”

. I had just been reading hundreds of pages proposing an alternative to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, namely the argument for intelligent design and what he was saying convince me that we were on the same page. Of course the argument for design vs undirected process has been going on long before Darwin but the word "design" triggered something in me. The fact that this doctor was talking about our ‘design’ as if it was purposefully done by someone (or something) gave me a shiver.

Hope his liver recovers. That's the design of life.

Open letter: Do you want to pay each time you look at my blog, or any blog?

2011-02-02T21:00:00.002-05:00

Think of the implications ...

While this is happening in Canada, it could certainly be happening where you are too. Find out.

Go here for context.

A friend writes,

I wanted to pass along something I read today... As you are aware, my line of work greatly depends on Internet access. Please take the time to read this and at the very least, sign the petition at http://openmedia.ca/meter if you agree that this issue must be quashed.

Originally all ISPs in Canada were using Usage Based Billing (UBB) models for dial-up access. The large providers like Bell and Rogers argued to the CRTC that they should be able to provide unlimited access. This was allowed, and it effectively put all the small independent ISPs out of business because they couldn’t compete with companies the size of Bell. Now, they are arguing the opposite.

Bell wants to be able to charge UBB not only to home owners, but also small ISPs who rent lines from Bell. Bell’s plan is to charge the same rate to both. How would a small independent ISP be able to offer competitive rates if they are paying the same as the customer base? In a recent appeal Bell offered ISPs a 15% discount. Sadly most businesses need at least a 24 - 28% profit margin in order to cover costs.

Rogers, Shaw and Cogeco have always had unlimited download capacity. In fact, I remember a series of TV ads a number of years ago where they flaunted this as a selling feature. My own ISP (Cogeco) started this in January of this year, and I was switched over from an unlimited plan to a UBB plan. When I called to inquire, I was told by customer service that this is the way it is now, and Bell is doing it too — too bad. When I checked Bell’s web page they had already started their UBB. My Internet rate WAS $34 per month for unlimited. I know pay $60 a month for 125g per month. The worst of this is that they WILL NOT guarantee transfer speed. They can only promise that speeds “can be UP TO 30mbps”.

According to Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, the true cost of supplying bandwidth to users is about $.01 per gig. True, he probably has an agenda, so lets multiply that by 10 and say its really $.10 per gig. If I am receiving 125gig per month, then the cost to Cogeco is $12.50 for bandwidth, if I use ALL of it. The remaining $47.50 is money in the bank for Cogeco.

Why else should you care?

Well, Bell, Shaw, Cogeco, and Rogers are all multi-service providers. They provide TV, Internet, Phone, and a couple provide cell phones. As media providers they all have a vested interest in eliminating as much outside competition as possible.
Because the CRTC will not let them throttle service to Netflix (and maybe someday Hulu), the best way to get Netflix out of Canada is to limit the potential use of the service. Netflix service is $8 per month for unlimited viewing (commercial free). The closest Bell can get to this is pay per view movies at about $5 a shot. If more services like Netflix move into Canada, Rogers, Bell, etc may as well close up their Tv services today.

Why else should you care?

As I mentioned above, the large corporate ISPs in Canada are multi-service providers. It’s not outrageous to imagine that in a few years ALL TV and phone services will be provided digitally through their available Internet lines. If they make this move, then it basically allows these companies to begin metering your TV viewing and phone calling, as well as your Internet services. Essentially you would have a monthly financial cap on how much TV you watch before you have to start paying overage fees.

Why else should you care?

Because Canada has some of the slowest Internet speeds in the world, and we have been paying some of the highest rates world wide (between $24 - $40, but about $6.50 per mbps) a month for it since the mid nineties. Bell has barely upgraded any of their transfer lines in about 15 years. WTF? We have been paying for a premium service to a company for all this time, and now the arguments they make (to charge us more money) is that providing any available bandwidth is too expensive for them. Why is it our problem that they took the profits from 15 years of Internet usage and blew it on cell phone towers, satellites and movie rental stores.

Japan

has recently upgraded their lines to the fastest in the world. Transfer speeds are 160mbps. The total cost to J:com was apparently about $20 U.S. per household for the lines and an additional $60 per modem.

Additionally, Canada is one of the only countries which does not provide unlimited data plans for cell phones. It took years for the iPhone to make it into Canada because Rogers REFUSED to offer an unlimited data plan, and Apple insisted on it.

Usage Based Billing is like the Holy Grail for huge Internet providers. They have been trying to get us to pay per use since phones were fist invented. Bell happily got long distance calling all to themselves many many years ago and companies like Rogers have been trying to get a piece of the action ever since.

The reason you should care is because this issue is the tip of the iceberg.

If you want to help squash this, visit http://stopusagebasedbilling.wordpress.com/ and start writing emails or, at the very least, sign the petition at http://openmedia.ca/meter.

Shut up and pay, you morons ...

2011-02-02T18:00:00.000-05:00

Here, British physicist David Tyler asks, "Are 72% of biology teachers hindering scientific literacy in the US?"

Some have described the survey as shocking. The authors of the report are gloomy about their findings. The perceived problem is this: evolutionists have won court cases bearing on the teaching of evolution in schools; state curricular standards have been revised to reinforce the status of evolutionary theory in biology - but despite all this, "considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America's classrooms". The problem is that only 28% of teachers are forthrightly explaining evolutionary biology.

The fact that the 60% who teach microevolution (minor, demonstrated instances of evolution) are called "the mushy middle"makes the agenda clear: Tax funding to and court judgments, to teach Darwinism as a belief system about life when it is less and less supported by evidence.

... they want to target teachers in training:

"More effectively integrating evolution into the education of preservice biology teachers may also have the indirect effect of encouraging students who cannot accept evolution as a matter of faith to pursue other careers. Effective programs directed at preservice teachers can therefore both reduce the number of evolution deniers in the nation's classrooms, increase the number who would gladly accept help in teaching evolution, and increase the number of cautious teachers who are nevertheless willing to embrace rigorous standards. This would reduce the supply of teachers who are especially attractive to the most conservative school districts, weakening the cycle of ignorance."

For more, go here.

So shut up, you morons, and pay. Your science-talented kids can mow lawns for mediocrities shouting the shoot for Darwin. It's not your money and they're not your kids, and all truth is Darwin's truth.

Or not.

Readings for Evolution Sunday I

2011-02-02T14:42:00.000-05:00

Via this:

Here's what atheist evolution gurus think of Christian Darwinists:

I, at least, think the NCSE shouldn’t take the theological position that faith is consistent with science. And the NCSE should limit its discussion about faith to saying that there are a variety of views about the consilience of science and faith and somebody in conflict should consult his/her minister. People like Larry Moran, P.Z., and I have been saying this for years, but it doesn’t seem to have penetrated Josh’s consciousness.

"Josh" is a professional Darwin lobbyist who carries out boss Eugenie Scott's dictum that a dog collar is worth two white coats, when working the crowd.

The inimitable Jerry Coyne, attack by under-Darwin lobbyist Josh, roars back:

Having read my post from last Sunday, in which I discussed—civilly!—science and religion with a reading group at Chicago’s First United Methodist Church, Rosenau has somehow concluded that I’m an accommodationist!

But why are they all so upset? Does anyone imagine that the people who sit through Evolution Sunday and twiddle their cause-of-the-month buttons, placid and questionless, would be troubled by the idea that they are despised? Accommodationists expect to be despised when they join what they think is the winning side.

I don't despise them; I am concerned for their future.

Design without creation? Sure.

2011-02-02T12:26:00.000-05:00

The Darwin lobby insists that design in nature must mean "creationism", which is currently as popular among Our Moral and Intellectual Superiors as any kind of actual dissent from their easily falsified nostrums.

Philosopher of science Del Ratzsch, whose work first inspired me to write By Design or by Chance?, offers an example of design without creation, where origin of life is concerned:

For instance, suppose that we finally discover that life can arise spontaneously but only under exactly one set of conditions. One must begin with 4003.6 gallons of eight specific, absolutely pure chemicals, exactly proportioned down to the molecule. The mixture must then be sealed into a large, light green Tupperware container with one sterile copy of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Do that, and life develops spontaneously by natural means (catalyzed by the precise surface characteristics of "Sgt. Pepper"). Its development, subsequent reproductions and characteristics are completely according to normal natural laws. And life in this case was not directly specially created. But those initial conditions involve interjection of deliberate intent and design with a vengeance." (Ratzsch D., "Design, Chance & Theistic Evolution," in Dembski W.A., ed., Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design, InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 1998, p. 291)

Now, a dullard might object that Del's is an unlikely recipe for life; his point is, of course, that a recipe is design using existing ingredients, not creation ex nihilo of the ingredients along with the design.

Intelligent design theorists are harassed, in my view, for the precise reason that the origin of life really is best attributed to design, not law or chance, as Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009) affirms.

The law and chance people know well that that is what it looks like, and are constantly advising the rest of us not to trust our lyin' eyes.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Edge Question: Which science concept would make everyone think better?

2011-02-02T08:33:00.000-05:00

Here is the "Edge World Question Center", a leading materialist think tank, with 2011's Question:

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER

James Flynn has defined "shorthand abstractions" (or "SHA's") as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ("market", "placebo", "random sample," "naturalistic fallacy," are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.

The Edge Question 2011

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world.

[Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's Edge Question and to Daniel Kahneman for advice on its presentation.]

164 contributors, many whose names you will recognize, participated.

Any thoughts of your own? Go here to comment.

Note: Interesting, how many key words from medicine easily come to mind, yet medicine has slowly been moving away from a materialist paradigm, as Mario Beauregard and I noted in The Spiritual Brain.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Excitable DNA: Could design have predicted that?

2011-02-02T07:54:00.003-05:00

Here, Jonathan McLatchie comments on the new finding of the “excited state” of the double helix:

An interesting paper published in Nature by Evgenia et al. documents the ability of the DNA double helix to exist in a functional alternative form for 1% of the time, called an "excited state." What does this mean for neo-Darwinism?

[ ... ]

As the papers' authors suggest, those results may imply that the DNA molecule is responsible for coding for excited state Hoogsteen base pairs as a means by which it can expand its structural complexity beyond that which it is able to achieve through classical Watson-Crick base-pairing.

If this prediction is correct, then it succeeds in adding a whole additional layer to the information enigma. This, of course, raises the pertinent issue of whether this discovery sits more comfortably with a neo-Darwinian paradigm or with an ID paradigm. Since neo-Darwinism, to date, may be considered to be demonstrably impotent to account for that specific property of living systems -- namely, information -- I would be inclined to significantly favour the latter.

Okay, but - what Jonathan and others need is to make successful predictions in advance. That’s what gets people’s attention.

Fact is, neo-Darwinism is a shambles, except for the taxpayer and the friendly judge. And for that very reason any fact, fiction, or nonsense can be cited as supporting it. Successful advance predictions are one of the few ways to break through in such cases.

This is the sort of thing I mean:

The 3 fundal height measurement techniques studied were: a tape measure method that included the upper curve of the uterine fundus in the measurement; a second tape technique that did not include the upper curve; and a caliper technique measuring from the symphysis pubis to the uterine fundus. Blank tapes were used so that clinicians were blinded and the numerical markings on the caliper were concealed with tape. Fundal height measurements were obtained in succession using the 3 techniques and each was obtained twice by 2 different examiners. The clinician marked the tape with ink at the appropriate point and, once all of the measurements had been obtained, the data collection material was placed in a sealed envelope until all of the participants had been assessed.

How to get moderated for making a polite request at Fox News

2011-02-01T09:48:00.000-05:00

A friend tells a familiar story:

I see in today's FOX science/tech section, there's a blurb about how creationism is still being advocated in H.S. biology classes. Predictably, the author has equivocated creationism with ID. I sent the author of the article this very brief message, and also posted it on the comments section, but somebody flagged my message and all future attempts to post were thwarted by a moderation notice. [emphasis added]

Here’s the offending notice:

Ms/Mrs Jennifer Welsh, if you will kindly look at the definition of Intelligent Design put forth by its main proponents (www.intelligentdesign.org is a good place to start), you will see that ID does not depend on any religious narrative (as found in the Bible) and thus has no religious premise. In contrast, creationism is a creation account that depends on some religious creation narrative (like in the Bible) and begins with a religious premise (God created). As you can see, ID is distinct from creationism, and is thus not religious or creationism.

Please, stand up for intellectual and journalistic integrity. Please correct your article to reflect the actual definition of Intelligent Design.

My friend misunderstands the nature of popular media. Ms. Welsh and colleagues have zero interest in knowing that design no more means creation, than painting a picture means creating the paint and canvas from thin air before one begins. Evidence of design is not evidence of creation, but it is real and detectible because it adds high levels of information.

But a whole generation was raised on elephant art, chimpanzee trample art, food fight art, “whatever he did is art”. No wonder they wouldn’t understand that design is not creation, just as art is about design, not making a “creative” mess.

Common sense distinctions that seem evident to my friend are way above the pop science media IQ grade.

For example, here’s a generic story: "Origin of life scientist says final answer expected in next decade" (= recycle the story from 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010 ..., same schtick, new white coats)

Success in the pop science business depends critically on either not being smart enough to ask the obvious question or - as I suspect - being smart enough not to ask.

Just go elsewhere for your news.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Social changes that may impact the intelligent design community: Media

2011-02-01T08:48:00.000-05:00

American scholar Victor Davis Hanson recently pointed out that the university as a standard setter of any kind is coming under well-deserved scrutiny, along with its instruments, such as peer review and tenure.

But he also mentions the obvious,

Americans no longer count on their news to be filtered and shaped by the Associated Press or the New York Times. Nor do millions have it read to them in the evening by CBS, ABC or NBC anchorpersons -- not with the Internet, cable news and talk radio. Matt Drudge's website, "The Drudge Report," reaches far more Americans than does CBS anchor star Katie Couric.

That’s true, but a broader way of looking at it is, today the news audience decides what is news. When I was young, there were only a few established news sources other than rumour. Now there are hundreds. If CBS anchor star Katie Couric isn’t today’s Huntley-and-Brinkley, it’s because her audience is limited to those who agree with her interpretation of news. Those who don’t can find the basic facts, but differently interpreted, elsewhere.

There was a time when, if you wondered whether the multiverse or the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution or “you’re nothing but a pack of neurons” view of the mind make any sense, you would not have had access to the scholarly literature that provides another look. Or only with considerable effort. So it just sunk in. Now, alternative viewpoints are easy to find.

Put simply, the mere fact that pop science rags are smitten with ultra-Darwinists, cosmology cranks, and mind-is-mud zealots no longer means you can’t find an informed alternative perspective on these issues.
There was never a better time for constructive takedowns of nonsense.

But Hanson warns,

... we also are seeing the waning of an old established order. And the resulting furor suggests that the old beneficiaries are not going quietly into that good night.

No indeed. True to form, they want the government to fund and protect them. Which amounts to saying that old media want the people who pointedly don’t watch , listen, or read them to pay for the right to ignore them.

Repeatability in studies falls over time: Can you give this phenomenon a name?

2011-01-31T20:29:00.000-05:00

In “The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” (New Yorker, December 13, 2010), Jonah Lehrer reported,

Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.

[ ... ]

... now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

[ ... ]

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved?

Suggestions for names, with rationale, gladly accepted at Uncommon Descent. Also, any idea why it is happening?

Intellectual freedom: New Media and Suicide Accusation

2011-01-31T19:11:00.000-05:00

Recently, “Karajou” from Conservapedia contacted me regarding a claim that their site caused a suicide.

Imagine, if you will, that this is real, that the suicide had actually happened. It would be in the newspapers. It would be on TV. The news about it would be viral, and it would be nation-wide. How do I figure that? "CONSERVATIVE WEBSITE CAUSES MAN TO KILL HIMSELF" would be the screaming headline in big block letters; the mainstream media would have a field day from New York to Los Angeles; and Keith Olbermann would be in such a lather about it on his PMSNBC show that you could see the foam dribbling down the left side of his mouth. If there's anything to make conservatives look bad, this would be it. I can see Stephan Colbert staring down Andy again, with that goofy eyebrow of his lifted above those horn rim glasses.

Yes, I can imagine. We live in the age of truthing, birthing, grassy knolls, tinfoils, and people who think the government should run the media because US vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin (2008) is supposedly responsible for a far-off madman’s murders. There appears to be no substance to the claim, but why would that matter these days?

As I have said elsewhere, free media actually reduce political violence, at least in North America:

... assassinations have declined markedly in the past three decades in the United States, due in no small part - in my view - to the rise of new media, including personal social media like the now much-blamed Facebook. People who can just say it, overwhelmingly, tend to just forget it after a while.

Yes, better security played an important role. But, in reality, a free world politician can’t just hide from the public. Elected representatives have logged how many minimal security public appearances across the United States, with how many assassination attempts? Let’s do the math: Very few attempts.

Probability thinking has its uses, and freakout avoidance is one. That is, if avoiding a freakout, rather than cultivating it, is what we want to do.

But, as I told Karajou, suppose there was even a possibility that reading something that upset him tipped a high-risk suicide over the edge? Some thoughts:

- People often act irrationally in the aftermath of a loved one’s suicide. Blaming a third party is common. It’s almost as common as pretending it wasn't really suicide.

In a way, one can see why people do it. It's almost like transferring suicide to the "murder" category. And what better way than pinning the "murder" on someone you don't like anyway?

It amounts to: "I can't cope with this terrible loss but I can link it to one of my existing hatreds."

Emotionally, it doubtless feels great for a while; as a way of coping, it's terrible.

- Of course a Web site was not to blame. If the posts depressed the man, he should have avoided them in principle, the way an alcoholic should avoid bars: Not bad for everybody, but bad for him.

News.gov is most certainly not the answer. Government-friendly media are lazy media, and they certainly won’t represent you.

Retired science teacher wants Darwinism banninated

2011-01-31T17:01:00.000-05:00

A friend worries that this won’t help the cause of science education:

A retired science teacher believes the teaching of evolution is "bad science" and has asked a federal court to declare it illegal to teach the subject in public schools.

Tom Ritter, a former physics and chemistry teacher of over 10 years, filed a lawsuit earlier this month against evolution in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, the same court that ruled that teaching of intelligent design in public schools is unconstitutional.

Ritter told The Christian Post this week that he didn't pay too much attention to biology before, but now in retirement he saw problems that he couldn't overlook any longer.

"It kind of got to be like picking a scab," he said.

In his one-page brief and one-page suit, Ritter argues that the Blue Mountain School District in Orwigsburg, Penn., is an illegal body because it teaches evolution.

A local resident, Ritter wants the district to stop collecting taxes from him until such teaching is halted. This is one scheme in his plan to get rid of public schools altogether, which he considers to be a waste of taxpayer dollars.

I agree that Darwinism, as fronted to students, is a screaming scandal, based on evidence issues. That said, it’s not about one guy’s taxes.

I should stop paying my taxes due to the City of Toronto’s idiotic handling of garbage issues.

Seriously, it takes more than a gadfly to restore the priority of evidence over theory.

Intellectual freedom: David Warren’s take on the uprisings in the Muslim world

2011-01-31T05:32:00.000-05:00

He’s somewhat pessimistic, and I would say, for the right reasons:

From what I can make out, in Egypt and elsewhere, the people on the streets are the "accredited" -- the bourgeoisie. They are the ones who could most benefit from western-style constitutional government and would suffer most if the government falls into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. They are, in terms of "class," the same people who have revolted in Iran -- haplessly against the Islamist regime of the ayatollahs.

[ ... ]

While I recognize that support for "democracy and freedom" is substantial, within each Arab national society - that the middle class is not a nothing; that each economy depends on it - I doubt this "faction" can prevail. Worse, I think we are watching its final, hopeless bid for power.

The key fact, in Egypt (paralleled in Yemen and elsewhere), is that the Muslim Brotherhood has not declared itself. The Islamists could put vastly more people on the street. They could subvert the loyalties of policemen and soldiers, who already resent the moneyed middle class. They could generate just enough heat to make large districts of Cairo and Alexandria, now simmering, boil over.

It’s a much darker and more dreadful version of what we find in Canada: The protest of people who remember a political order in which reason was a valid concept is easily swamped by angry affirmations of God or Government from those who never, ever had a truly dissenting thought to begin with.

My mental picture of that last has always been yuppie moms who parade their tots in adorable little Che Guevara tees and drop cliche after cliche on the world about non-violence, appealing for “understanding” of other cultures’ mistreatment of women, while professing to be feminists themselves. They like to think of themselves as “transgressive,” but have actually never been good enough to be bad.

Now that we have got to “pre-selection”, even Darwinians must be wondering ...

2011-01-30T08:53:00.000-05:00

In “Evolution by Mistake: Major Driving Force Comes from How Organisms Cope With Errors at Cellular Level” ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2011), Joanna Masel and Etienne Rajon posit “pre-selection” by error in order to explain how natural selection works its Darwinian wonders:

In nature, it turns out, many new traits that, for example, enable their bearers to conquer new habitats, start out as blunders: mistakes made by cells that result in altered proteins with changed properties or functions that are new altogether, even when there is nothing wrong with the gene itself. Sometime later, one of these mistakes can get into the gene and become more permanent.

"If the mechanisms interpreting genetic information were completely flawless, organisms would stay the same all the time and be unable to adapt to new situations or changes in their environment," said Masel, who is also a member of the UA's BIO5 Institute.

Living beings face two options of handling the dangers posed by errors, Masel and Rajon wrote. One is to avoid making errors in the first place, for example by having a proofreading mechanism to spot and fix errors as they arise. The authors call this a global solution, since it is not specific to any particular mistake, but instead watches over the entire process.

The alternative is to allow errors to happen, but evolve robustness to the effects of each of them. Masel and Rajon call this strategy a local solution, because in the absence of a global proofreading mechanism, it requires an organism to be resilient to each and every mistake that pops up.

Offhand, this sounds a lot like design. Would anyone like to calculate the probability of such a process forming by Darwinian means (natural selection acting on random mutation)?

The authors are faithful Darwinists, and true to form, Masel has advice for the world, based on her work:

"We find that biology has a clever solution. It lets lots of ideas flourish, but only in a cryptic form and even while it's cryptic, it weeds out the worst ideas. This is an extremely powerful and successful strategy. I think companies, governments, economics in general can learn a lot on how to foster innovation from understanding how biological innovation works."

Well, when I was a textbook editor, we weeded out the errors before the manuscript was published as a book, instead of trusting the reader to find them. We didn’t call it evolution, we called it production.

David Coppedge comments here, noting that the cost to a cell of accumulating a lot of junk would be fairly high, cautioning that what the popular science press made of the story isn’t really in the paper (breaking news, breaking news ... ). Here’s the paper.

To a bystander, it’s increasingly obvious that convolutions like “pre-selection” to protect Darwinism resemble the constant little adjustments (epicycles) that had to be made to Ptolemy’s Earth-centered model of the solar system. Copernicus recognized that, considered globally, they were making the problem more and more obvious, and a different orientation was called for. Astronomers pretended to the public that everything was normal, and it was very dangerous to dissent. Sound familiar?
Dava Sobel’s book, Galileo's Daughter, gives a good picture of that era.

Social changes that may impact the intelligent design community

2011-01-29T12:00:00.012-05:00

American scholar Victor Davis Hanson points out that the university as a standard setter of any kind is coming under well-deserved scrutiny, along with its instruments, such as peer review and tenure.

The old notion that America's most successful citizens are turned out by prestigious four-year universities -- the more private and Ivy League, the better -- overseen by disinterested professors is also nearing an end. Private for-profit trade schools and online colleges are certifying millions in particular skills.

Meanwhile, the high jobless rate among recent college graduates, who are burdened by thousands of dollars in student loans, is starting to resemble the Freddie Mac- and Fannie Mae-spawned financial bubble of 2008, in which millions of indebted and unemployed borrowers could not pay back exorbitant federally insured home loans. The notion that parents are going to keep borrowing $200,000 to certify their children with high-prestige BA degrees that don't necessarily lead to good jobs seems about as wise as buying a sprawling house that one can't afford.

[ ... ]

A therapeutic college curricula and hyphenated "studies" courses have not made graduates better-read or more skilled in math and science. For many employers, the rigor of the new BA is scarcely equivalent to that of the old high school diploma. The global warming/climate change/climate chaos "crisis" has reminded Americans that careerist university Ph.Ds can be just as likely to fudge evidence and distort research as political lobbyists. The old blanket respect for academia and academics is eroding.")

Last year, at a science journalists' conference at Carleton University, a lobbyist dismissed Climategate to the gathering as just routine private correspondence.

That just showed the distance between his assumptions and mine. The climate group came off sounding like a stinkpot cabal who should all be reassigned separately to unrelated projects and kept away from manipulating news. If we can't get better interpreters than that, we may as well not hear climate news. (Whatever happens will happen anyway, but there would be one fewer toxic workplace in the meantime.)

Evolution: Study shows why rapid development not likely an advantage, study shows

2011-01-29T06:00:00.001-05:00

Spotted salamander, Camazine

Recent studies of evolution, such as Lenski's, have focused on bacteria because they replicate quickly. These findings offer insight into at least one reason why quick development would not benefit most life forms, suggesting time constraints on how rapid evolution could be.

"Faster Early Development Might Have Its Costs, Study in Salamanders Suggests"(ScienceDaily, Jan. 25, 2011), researchers found recently:

Fast development is often perceived as an advantage, as it enables better harmony with one's environment and readiness to cope with the challenges that it poses. However, research conducted at the University of Haifa, Israel, and University of California, Santa Cruz, and published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE, found that the acceleration of developmental rate incurs potentially lethal physiological costs for the developing individual. "Our findings are consistent with research findings on other animals and call for further research on rates of development in humans," said Asaf Sadeh who led the study.

[ ... ]

... accelerated development carries costs: larvae that developed more quickly suffered greater rates of mortality. Larvae that falsely perceived the pond environment as long-lasting, and thus started life with a slow developmental rate, but then realized their misperception and compensated with significant acceleration, suffered the greatest rates of mortality. The physiological mechanisms underlying these costs are unknown, but are thought to involve both cellular causes such as oxidative damage from increased metabolic rates, and tissue-level causes such as overexploitation of undifferentiated stem cells or disrupted balance between the differentiation and growth of different tissues in the body. These physiological costs may also lead to increased vulnerability to environmental stresses other than drying, such as heat, disease and parasites, and might result in death.

It almost sounds as though they should be talking about "pysychological" development, but how the salamander "knows" all this is a puzzle for another day.

Biography of Darwin's co-theorist Wallace, proposed patron of design, released

2011-01-28T12:00:00.002-05:00

Over a century after the publication of World of Life, science historian Michael Flannery has just published a new biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, whom he has suggested as a proper patron of the intelligent design community. Wallace, Darwin's co-theorist (who had twice Darwin's field experience), was shunned by the Victorian science elite gathered around Darwin because he was not a materialist atheist.

Discovery Institute Press announces

In a new biography published by Discovery Institute, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, University of Alabama science historian Michael Flannery tells how Wallace grew disenchanted with natural selection as a theory capable of explaining life's complexity. Wallace (1823-1913) concluded that many features of living organisms could best be explained as the product of design by a "directive Mind."

Critics of ID frequently attack the theory as a "science stopper." Flannery shows that on the contrary, it was Alfred Wallace's commitment to open inquiry that led him to the conclusion that far from being random and undirected, as Darwin insisted, evolution manifests scientifically detectable evidence of intelligent guidance. Biology, Flannery argues, is in the process of catching up with the prescient Wallace.

[ ... ]

Unlike Darwin, Wallace was also a vocal opponent of pseudo-scientific racism and eugenics.

(Wallace had actually lived among people living in nature; he did not view them from a distance and then go home to write about their similarities to baboons, as the upper crust Darwin did.)

This brief excerpt gives a sense of the book:

Can the real Wallace be found? If so, what might we learn in that rediscovery? It is worth stating the thesis hee at the outset: Wallace, in developing his unique brand of evolution, presaged modern intelligent design theory. Certainly no Christian creationist, Wallace's devotion to discovering the truths of nature brought him through a lifetime of research to see genuine design in the nat1 world. And this indeed became Wallace's heresy, a heresy that exposes the metaphysical underpinnings of the triumphant Darwinian paradigm more than it does Wallace's commitments to spiritualism or science. The image of Darwinism reflected in the image of natural selection's co-discoverer is indeed an interesting one. But it all began oddly enough in an obscure village far from th seats of learning or science.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Lighter Moment: We turn the lights on the dark corners of tenure and the fever swamps of peer review, and what do we find?

2011-01-28T06:00:00.001-05:00

We are agents of endarkenment ...

Nowadays, in thrall to constituencies of unreason, zealots of all stripes are chipping away at evolutionary science. In our own country, 'creationism' and 'intelligent design' are now considered suitable topics for instruction in science, as if these notions were as testable as the perfect gas laws of Boyle (pV = nRT) or the Hardy-Weinberg equation (p2 + 2pq + q2 = 1) of population genetics. (p. 10)

Of course, evolutionary theory may be only one of several explanations for life on our planet, but it's the only theory that has held up against disproof. And however much we think we know of evolution today, it must be a minute faction of what remains to be discovered tomorrow. Finally, I'd argue that the facts of evolution impose a kind of necessity on the chance of our imagination, they cut short many a tall tale. Experimental science is our defense - perhaps our best defense - against humbug and the Endarkenment. (p. 12)

- Gerald Weissmann from his book, Galileo's Gout (Science In An Age of Endarkenment)

Hat tip: Stephen E. Jones.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Flying reptile egg soon to be a major movie ...

2011-01-27T15:00:00.003-05:00

Adult pteranodon fossils from Royal Ontario Museum.
Courtesy Kenn Chaplin from Toronto

Jonathan Amos reports at BBC News (20 January 2011) on a "Fossil female pterosaur found with preserved egg". Wonderful news, and note this:

The egg indicates this ancient flying reptile was a female, and that realisation has allowed researchers to sex these creatures for the first time.

Writing in Science magazine, the palaeontologists make some broad statements about differences in pterosaurs, including the observation that only males sported a head-crest.

"Broad" statements indeed, about the head-crest. They couldn't really be sure unless they could sex a flock, and there's a risk of being led off course.

The state of the egg's shell suggests it was well developed and that Mrs T must have been very close to laying it when she died.

CreationSafaris has an interesting comment on the risks of storytelling:

Actually, it was Daddy Darwinopterus taking his turn sitting on the egg. Back then, you see, pterosaurs shared parenting responsibilities. How do we know? We don’t, and neither do the reporters ...

The sad thing is, this find is so good, why mess with empty speculations?

Good reads on ID, especially for Baptists

2011-01-27T08:49:00.003-05:00

Al Mohler, President

I see where Southern Seminary has a new .pdf magazine out, on the Darwin vs Design issue. Here's the table of contents:

24 the New Shape of the Debate

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

"The debate over Darwinism rages on, with almost every week bringing a new salvo in the great controversy. The reason for this is simple and straightforward – naturalistic evolution "the great intellectual rival to Christianity in the Western world. It is the creation myth of the secular elites and their intellectual weapon of choice in public debate."

[Glad someone has noticed. That’s always been true. It was true in the days of Thomas Huxley’s (Darwin’s bulldog’s) X-Club through his grandson’s Julian Huxley’s proposed religion of evolution when he was UNESCO director, and - as Darwinist Michael Ruse notes - it’s true today. The difference is that today’s taxpayer funds the Darwin cult and it is forced on students at "secular" schools. The Darwinist counts on Christians to holler for Jesus, and fail to organize to do something of consequence. - d. ]

28 the New Atheism and the Dogma of Darwinism

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

33 All Things Dark and Terrible: Our Fearful Fascination with Wild Things and Other Monsters of God

Russell D. Moore

36 Evolution and Creation in Higher Education

Mark T. Coppenger

40 Creation and American Christianity

Gregory A. Wills

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

New Wallace biography shows great biologist's journey to appreciating intelligence

2011-01-27T06:00:00.000-05:00

Michael Flannery, who thinks that Darwin's co-theorist Alfred Russel Wallace should properly be acknowledged as a patron of the intelligent design community, advises that his biography, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, is now available:

New Biography Reveals Evolution's Co-Discoverer as Early Intelligent Design Advocate

David Klinghoffer January 21, 2011 12:00 PM | Permalink

In a sparkling, concise and controversial new biography of the co-discoverer of evolutionary theory, historian Michael A. Flannery tells a largely unknown story that has been embarrassing Darwinians in the know for almost a century and a half.

In Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, published by Discovery Institute Press, Flannery shows how Wallace ultimately came to reject the sufficiency of his own theory of natural selection to explain what he called in the title of his final work and magnum opus, The World of Life (1910).

The title was a double entendre. In considering the evidence from biology, from the world of life, Wallace perceived that the world must also be permeated by life and intelligence not perceptible directly to our senses but whose existence may be inferred from biological phenomena -- human consciousness above all, but also the intricate functioning of the living cell and the hemoglobin molecule, bird wings and feathers, butterfly coloration and insect metamorphosis, and much more.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

The sound of warfare within the camp: And it's about ants

2011-01-26T17:00:00.000-05:00

At AccessResearchNetwork, British physicist David Tyler writes about the latest division in the orthodox Darwin camp:

Towards constructive discourse in science

Inclusive Fitness Theory (IFT) is of considerable importance to Darwinian evolutionists. The theory is concerned with the phenomena of altruistic behaviour and eusocial societies, both of which involve the willingness of some animals to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the group. Darwin struggled to provide a rationale, and so did those who followed him. It was Bill Hamilton who put together a coherent theory and Richard Dawkins who popularised it in The Selfish Gene. For many, IFT has achieved the status of orthodoxy. It was an intellectual and an emotional shock, therefore, when a paper appeared in Nature (August 2010) from three prominent evolutionary biologists saying that the IFT paradigm is unproductive. Responses were immediate and much of it was hostile. Science journalist Roger Highfield provided an overview of the controversy:

"The mainstream media often like to portray the scientific community as regularly riven by blazing rows. Scientists, understandably, complain: after all, if you go to any mainstream academic conference, you won't find any hint of controversy about the MMR jab or the reality of climate change, let alone argy-bargy over the basic facts of evolution. But in the past few weeks, I have witnessed a bare-knuckle brouhaha that would make an uninformed outsider gasp at how bloody a battle over a seemingly arcane issue can be. The row was triggered by a paper in Nature by Martin Nowak, Edward Wilson and Corina Tarnita of Harvard University. While some hailed it as "revolutionary" and a "return to rigour", others condemned it as "sad", "baffling", "irritating" and "unscholarly"."

Readers of this blog might be interested in the reactions of Jerry Coyne, who was mystified by Ed Wilson's participation in the paper.

"I don't know what's gotten into E. O. Wilson. He's certainly the world's most famous evolutionary biologist, and has gone from strength to strength over the years, winning two Pulitzer Prizes, writing great general books on not only ants but conservation and social behavior. [. . .] But now Wilson, along with some collaborators like David Sloan Wilson and Martin Nowak, is definitely heading off on the wrong track. They're attacking kin selection, maintaining not only that it has nothing to do with the evolution of social insects, but that's it's also a bad way to look at evolution in general. And they're wrong - dead wrong."
Coyne is also outraged by the publication of this paper in a prestigious journal ... (links at site)

Oh, where have we heard that before? Any time anyone who doubts Darwin gets a paper published, we hear the Darwin lobby booing and hissing.

But now that they are divided among themselves, they may not be able to drown out everyone else.

Starting to drag the carcass of Darwinism off the scene?

2011-01-25T17:10:00.000-05:00

I've long suspected that the carcass of Darwinism is finally getting dragged off the scene, and with any luck, the career atheists and the Christian Darwinists will be fighting over it full time, with few onlookers, and Templeton funding the whack. Have a look at this roundup of abstracts a friend sent me:

Forthcoming articles about Darwinism in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences:

1. The Mastodon in the room: how Darwinian is neo-Darwinism?

Daniel R. Brooks

Abstract Failing to acknowledge substantial differences between Darwinism and neo-Darwinism impedes evolutionary biology. Darwin described evolution as the outcome of interactions between the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions, each relatively autonomous but both historically and spatially intertwined. Furthermore, he postulated that the nature of the organism was more important than the nature of the conditions, leading to natural selection as an inevitable emergent product of biological systems. The neo-Darwinian tradition assumed a creative rather than selective view of natural selection, with the nature of the organism determined by the nature of the conditions, rendering the nature of the organism and temporal contingency unnecessary. Contemporary advances in biology, specifically the phylogenetics revolution and evo-devo, underscore the significance of history and the nature of the organism in biology. Darwinism explains more bio logy better, and better resolves apparent anomalies between living systems and more general natural laws, than does neo-Darwinism. The “extended” or “expanded” synthesis currently called for by neo-Darwinians is Darwinism.

Hmmm. No idea what he is talking about except that the "neo-Darwinians" (now the bad guys) made the mistake of assuming "a creative rather than selective view of natural selection". In other words, they thought natural selection could create information and it can't.

So, when the debts are called ... Darwinism couldn't create a small part of the hind end of a flea?

2. What was really synthesized during the evolutionary synthesis? a historiographic proposal

Richard G. Delisle

Abstract The 1920-1960 period saw the creation of the conditions for a unification of disciplines in the area of evolutionary biology under a limited number of theoretical prescriptions: the evolutionary synthesis. Whereas the sociological dimension of this synthesis was fairly successful, it was surprisingly loose when it came to the interpretation of the evolutionary mechanisms per se, and completely lacking at the level of the foundational epistemological and metaphysical commitments. Key figures such as Huxley, Simpson, Dobzhansky, and Rensch only paid lip service to the conceptual dimension of the evolutionary synthesis, as they eventually realized that a number of evolutionary phenomena could not be explained by its narrow theoretical corpus. Apparently, the evolutionary synthesis constituted a premature event in the development of evolutionary biology. Not only are the real achievements of the evolutionary synthesis in need of reevaluation, but this reassessment also has important implications for the historiography of Darwinism and the current debates about the darwinian movement.

So there isn't really a grand synthesis that was supposed to shut up all critics already. Figures. The only synthesis I ever heard of was, "We all agree to keep our jobs fronting this nonsense. After all, the pop science press are all on our side, and everyone else is scared shiftless."

3. Adaptation as process: The future of Darwinism and the legacy of Theodosius Dobzhansky

David J. Depew

Abstract Conceptions of adaptation have varied in the history of genetic Darwinism depending on whether what is taken to be focal is the process of adaptation, adapted states of populations, or discrete adaptations in individual organisms. I argue that Theodosius Dobzhansky’s view of adaptation as a dynamical process contrasts with so-called “adaptationist” views of natural selection figured as “design-without-a-designer” of relatively discrete, enumerable adaptations. Correlated with these respectively process and product oriented approaches to adaptive natural selection are divergent pictures of organisms themselves as developmental wholes or as “bundles” of adaptations. While even process versions of genetical Darwinism are insufficiently sensitive to the fact much of the variation on which adaptive selection works consists of changes in the timing, rate, or location of ontogenetic events, I argue that articulations of the Modern Synthesis influenced by Dobzhansky are more easily reconciled with the recent shift to evolutionary developmentalism than are versions that make discrete adaptations central.

So, modern Darwinism is a huge, tax-funded failure?

Yes, lots of us thought that but thanks for coming 25% of the way to spelling it out, Dr. Depew.

4. Darwinism after Mendelism: The case of Sewall Wright’s intellectual synthesis in his shifting balance theory of evolution (1931)

Jonathan Hodge

Abstract Historians of science have long been agreeing: what many textbooks of evolutionary biology say, about the histories of Darwinism and the New Synthesis, is just too simple to do justice to the complexities revealed to critical scholarship and historiography. There is no current consensus, however, on what grand narratives should replace those textbook histories. The present paper does not offer to contribute directly to any grand, consensual, narrational goals; but it does seek to do so indirectly by showing how, in just one individual case, details of intellectual biography connect with big picture issues. To this end, I examine here how very diverse scientific and metaphysical commitments were integrated in Sewall Wright’s own personal synthesis of biology and philosophy. Taking as the decisive text the short final section of Wright’s long 1931 paper on ‘Evolution in Mendelian populations,’ I examine how his shifting balance theory (SBT) related to his optimum breeding strategy research, his physiological genetics, his general theory of homogenising and heterogenesing causation and his panpsychist view of mind and matter; and I discuss how understanding these relations can clarify Wright’s place in the longue durée of evolutionary thought.

"There is no current consensus, however, on what grand narratives should replace those textbook histories." How about a quarter page of blank space, to remind students how little we know?

Couple years ago, I talked to a young oceanographer who told me that about 96% of the ocean was unexplored. That alone should give pause for thought.

5. Is Darwinism past its “sell-by” date? The Origin of Species at 150

Michael Ruse

Abstract Many people worry that the theory of evolution that Charles Darwin gave in his Origin of Species is now dated and no longer part of modern science. This essay challenges this claim, arguing that the central core of the Origin is as vital today as it ever was, although naturally the science keeps moving on. Darwin provided the foundation not the finished product.

Ruse! Ruse! Thanks! Be a pal and publicise this to the Fashion & Relationships editor of Famous Hair News. I sold her a whack of really ridiculous stories about "The evolutionary psychology of hair" and like, I need the money and she needs the copy. So ... keep pumping the Darwin tub loud, louder, loudest, will you, till my cheque arrives in the mail. I turned up the heat in the recent cold snap due to global warming, and I'm freaked about the next utility bill. Yrs. - d.

After that, my editor can devolve back to the Age of Aquarium or whatever, but for now.

6. Phylogenetic inertia and Darwin’s higher law

Timothy Shanahan

Abstract The concept of ‘phylogenetic inertia’ is routinely deployed in evolutionary biology as an alternative to natural selection for explaining the persistence of characteristics that appear sub-optimal from an adaptationist perspective. However, in many of these contexts the precise meaning of ‘phylogenetic inertia’ and its relationship to selection are far from clear. After tracing the history of the concept of ‘inertia’ in evolutionary biology, I argue that treating phylogenetic inertia and natural selection as alternative explanations is mistaken because phylogenetic inertia is, from a Darwinian point of view, simply an expected effect of selection. Although Darwin did not discuss ‘phylogenetic inertia,’ he did assert the explanatory priority of selection over descent. An analysis of ‘phylogenetic inertia’ provides a perspective from which to assess Darwin’s view.

So, evolving and not evolving both prove Darwinism? Nice work if they can get it.

And they can. So now what?

If you ever wondered why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Catholics: No, Thomas Aquinas did believe we can see design in nature

2011-01-25T06:00:00.002-05:00

In recent years, one has heard much from Darwinists dismissing the pious yokels with “the Catholic Church supports evolution Darwinism.”

evolution Darwinism’s three characteristics are that it is blind, purposeless, and the only kind Darwinists force on the school system and science in general. How how likely is it that the Catholic Church supports it>

Hardly likely, but as Logan Gage puts the matter in Touchstone,

Given the active role of God in nature in Thomas’s system, one might think today’s Thomists would encourage the pursuit of signs of intelligent design in nature. Yet in recent years, some Thomists have shied away from ID. They do so not only because of lax scrutiny of the tensions just discussed but also because of three major misperceptions of intelligent design: first, that ID is “mechanistic”; second, that ID is a “God of the Gaps” theory; and third, that ID is inherently “interventionist.” While many Thomists harbor doubts about the more extravagant claims of Darwinian science, taken together these three factors make it almost impossible for some Thomists to embrace intelligent design. That is as unnecessary as it is unfortunate.

Unfortunate for whom? Thomists will get desirable advancements and rewards from benefactors such as the Templeton Foundation if they can see their way toward embracing Christian Darwinism, and ostracism if they don’t.

So yes, there are Catholic academics attempting to make the case that Thomas Aquinas himself would pretend to see no design in nature. Touchstone is offering online Gage’s article on Thomism, Darwinism, and intelligent design, explaining - for anyone with a taste for traditional philosophy - Thomas’s actual view:

As Alexander Pruss, an analytical Thomist and former Georgetown colleague of John Haught, writes, “On the compatibility between Thomism and ID, the answer is surely positive. Thus, one might think that the irreducible complexity types of arguments provide a strong probabilistic case for design and that the existence of teleology provides a sound deductive argument for a first cause.”

Despite the different subject matter and styles of argumentation, Thomists and ID theorists have, as we have seen, much in common. The dismissal of intelligent design by some contemporary Thomists is unfortunate. For if reality is a unified whole, that is, if it stems from the divine mind, as Thomas believed, would it not be odd if good philosophy concluded that life was designed but good science concluded that it was not?

Yes, but don’t forget that religious academics benefit from the possibility that the Christian public will indeed be sold on Darwinism, along with Christian weight loss and Christian recovered memories therapy - and they then have a huge asset in the form of a public to be brokered with the real Darwinists - the subject become, how many Christian beliefs must we lose or empty of all value in order to preserve Darwinism.

It’s no new thing, getting brokered that way by the clerisy - the intellectual stars. The key is to see it coming and get out of the way.

New book does not use Darwin as light source for universe ...

2011-01-24T16:00:00.000-05:00

It's only 78 pages. The only thing that concerns me is that so few career Darwinists have brayed against it. Maybe they got the guy confused with Stephen Hawking. Lots of people have, if you google his name.

At Amazon:

Do we understand how evolution works? In this book Steven Hawkins outlines various possible mechanisms of biological evolution - the Neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis, Symbiogenesis and Developmental Systems Theory. He contrasts and compares these various theories and proposes a view of evolution in which all three mechanisms have a role to play. In this schema 'natural selection' only has a minor role to play in biological evolution. In the final chapter Hawkins considers non-biological evolution and is drawn to conclude that we are unable to understand the fundamental nature of both non-biological evolution and biological evolution.

From the Publisher

"the interpretations surrounding the brute fact of evolution remain contentious, controversial, fractious, and acrimonious." Simon Conway Morris

"if selection could be somehow dispensed with, so that all variants survived and multiplied, the higher forms would nevertheless have arisen." H. J. Muller

"most evolutionary novelty arose and still arises directly from symbiosis." Lynn Margulis

"The universe, non-biological evolution and biological evolution are all fundamentally mysterious to us, and will remain so in the future." Steven Hawkins

In this timely work Steven Hawkins considers our current state of knowledge of the mechanisms which underpin the evolutionary process. If you currently believe that you have a good understanding of how evolution works then there is a good chance that this book will change your beliefs. After reviewing the current dominant views of how evolution works, Hawkins outlines his own favoured view according to which natural selection is not the main mechanism of speciation. However, Hawkins finally concludes that the view of evolution that one has is a sign not of how evolution actually works, but of how one conceives of oneself and of how one conceives of the universe around one.

That last sentence shuldbe enough to sink Darwinism.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Sensitive to the “offended” = indifferent to violence?

2011-01-24T06:00:00.004-05:00

Blazing Cat Fur tells me about the unsettling connections of a Canadian Muslim magazine:

TheMuslim.ca Publishes a HIZB UT-TAHRIR Terrorist Screed calling for Islamist Rule in Tunisia.

[ ... ]

Jawed Anwar, publisher of TheMuslim served as a chair of the Thorncliffe Park Elementary school through 2010.

An ... elementary school?

Like many who have followed the show trials of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, I am most dismayed by the ease with which violent politics is now accepted in Canada, when initiated by disaffected groups professing Islam - yet, right as rain, the official promoters of anti-racism and diversity persecute prominent figures over trifles.

Of course, the reason is obvious: The “human rights” establishment can quite safely ruin a person’s life and reputation over nothing because everything thinks either “at least it’s not me they’re after”. Or “he must have done something bad to deserve it.” Or maybe, “I’m too smart for that.” Or “I’m too nice.” This is how a country quietly divest itself of democracy - it breeds citizens who don’t deserve freedom and cannot live up to the obligations of maintaining it.

This is not a question of the right to publish Islamist literature, but rather of the fact that there is no social accountability for doing so. That is, no one must retire voluntarily from public life as a result of displays of anti-Semitism or advocacy of legal systems that offer fewer rights for women. That has been the problem all along. Legal accountability alone will not save freedom, even if it were exercised.

Blazing also asks me to link to this Pro-Israel blog contest.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Kafka's bureaucrats search between the lines

2011-01-23T18:57:00.001-05:00

David Warren writes in "Free Hit for Free Speech" (Ottawa Citizen, January 23, 2011),

The issue here is, “freedom of speech.” Do we have it in Canada, or do we not? This would once have been a rhetorical question, but isn't today. The existence of numerous so-called “human rights” commissions, and other legal and administrative machinery for the prosecution of the “politically incorrect,” has brought the whole question back to life -- after centuries of freedom from formal state censorship, and star chambers.

It would be wrong to say that censorship has been re-imposed. But instead, perhaps something worse is happening. With formal censorship, a journalist or anyone with something to say, could know where he stood. I have witnessed at first hand journalism operating under censorship requirements, in Third World countries, and it struck me that both writer and reader knew what the rules were. It thus remained possible to put things “between the lines.”

Even in Soviet Russia, readers knew how to understand, for instance, an item in Pravda that declared, “There have been no riots in Gorki, and all rumours to that effect are false.” Translation: there have been riots in Gorki, and all the rumours are true.

The problem deepens when, as in Canada today, we have deeply committed ideological activists, embedded in our “human rights” bureaucracies, who are looking specifically for messages that have been planted “between the lines”; and who are armed with the power to mount show trials, in which the truth of an assertion is no defence (as it always was in legitimate courts, when charges were brought for libel or slander).

Podcast: When biology meets math ... (but biology is just the "social science" of the hard sciences anyway, right?)

2011-01-23T15:00:00.001-05:00

Here's Baylor University computer science prof Robert J. Marks II's interview with Tom Woodward, on “Darwin or Design?”

I hear good things about it, but my computer sound system is bust.

I hope he still has a job tomorrow.

Real reasons why science education might be declining

2011-01-23T08:00:00.007-05:00

Ed Sisson

Jeremiah the doomster insists that science education has been going downhill ever since it started, so presumably there is no bottom to the hill. That said, any kind of education could in fact be declining at a given time, and Jeremiah fulfills his duty in causing us to pause to wonder.

Here, for example, is the report by13 Howard Hughes Medical Institute professors on how to “change the culture of science education.” Their concern is commendable, but their report is the usual wish list for things that won’t and can’t happen. For example, they quote

“We’re trying change the mindset of the research faculty. There’s a sense that teaching isn’t important in review or promotion or tenure, and unless research universities take a role in making teaching important, it’s going to be very difficult to get faculty to invest more and change their methods.”

- Jo Handelsman

No research university is likely to do this. Star researchers want to research and will go elsewhere if they are cumbered with teaching - except when teaching essentially means recruiting reliable postdocs.

Friend Edward Sisson has a somewhat different, thoughtful take on it:

A major goal of their initiative is "to help ignite the spark of excitement in their undergraduates."

Science first got exciting to a large percentage of young people in the late 1940s. This was due to its role in the following:

1) communications: television, bringing entertainment and news into the home, and transistor radios, making music (via radio stations) portable in small objects

2) defense: atomic weapons and jet aircraft, and rockets
3) transportation, via jet airliners (spin-off from defense work in jets)

4) exploration of the planets and the moon, via rockets (spin-off from defense work in rockets)

5) cheap widespread electricity from atomic power plants (spin-off from defense work in atomics)

6) health discoveries: drugs (antibiotics) and machinery (artificial hips, etc.)

Science has become unexciting because all of these have either slowed down, or produced uninteresting results. To whit (in a different order):

4) the planets are boring to almost everyone. Now that we've checked them all, we find just rocks and gas. The most interesting, Mars, has its counterpart on Earth in the Atacamba Desert of Chile & Peru. The Atacamba interests the public not at all. To the public, the most interesting things on Mars are the things we have put there: the two Rovers in particular. The entire planet is basically a large yard for us to drive remote-controlled cars around.

2) defense lost its urgency once it was clear we had outclassed the Soviet Union in technology, and even moreso after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Plus the long-standing anti-military fervor of the left, which largely sways academia, has damped-down the excitement level. A university that has barred the ROTC for years is in no position to tell students that it is exciting to do science for the purposes of aiding military progress.

5) civilian atomic power-plants and widespread cheap electricity was shut-down by scare-mongering: Three-Mile Island, the movie "The China Syndrome," then Chernobyl.

3) transportation hasn't changed significantly since the 1970s. Shutting-down the SST (i.e., Concorde) ensured that. It may well be that shutting down the SST, due to environmental factors and noise, was the right thing to do; but its effect in stopping development of faster transportation ought not be denied, and thus its effect on the excitement of science as applied to transportation. Automobiles are basically the same as in the 1970s. A generation that as kids in the 1960s watched the cartoon Jetsons traveling in flying cars, and in the 1960s and 1970s watched the Star Trek crew "transporting" from starships to planets and back, is not too excited by what we have today.

1) communications: television has remained basically unchanged since the early 1970s. We have more channels, but each is basically the same as the original "three." The significant new element is computers and "smart phones" which do excite the young -- as I know from my own two teenagers. The young find it exciting to use them, but do not find it exciting to design them. If the science community had social savvy, it would be publicizing the individuals who design these, making them into public heroes. This is not happening.

6) health discoveries: the human genome was sequenced 10 years ago, yes? I saw an article recently that noted that this has not resulted in genetics-based miracle cures, or indeed any cures, contrary to predictions and hopes at the time. Cancer is still not solved.

On top of this, we read stories today of the glut of PhDs who can't find work; the drudgery of life as a post-doc; the boringness of life in the lab; the nasty politics of tenure-getting. Pharmaceutical companies are demonized because drugs are too expensive for the third-world and the fixed-income elderly; who then wants the name of a pharmaceutical company as their employer? The anti-military movement, the environmental-protection movement, and the third-world-redistribution movement each send out a powerful message that denigrates th major institutions that employ scientists, and thus tarnishes the reputation of people who choose to go into science.

And on top of that, we have a biological science community devoted to telling us we have no divine spark, we are just advanced apes, sprung accidentally from mud.

Is it any wonder that the intelligent young people who would make the best scientists take a look at this and, applying their intelligence, decide that science is not a field they want to choose? Do they not make the very rational conclusion that a life spent in science would not be exciting? That in fact, it would be a life of drudgery, disappointment, and denunciation?

Women science bloggers: Some thoughts

2011-01-22T17:04:00.001-05:00

Robin Lloyd explains in “Woman science bloggers discuss pros and cons of online exposure” (Jan 18, 2011),

Blogging and other Web activities have allowed members of many marginalized communities to open previously locked media doors. But women still rely more on back channels and ask for less help than men do in the digital realm. This tendency and other issues of concern for women bloggers were discussed Sunday at the ScienceOnline2011 conference in Durham, N.C., primarily in a session called "Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name."

Huh?

Experiences varied among attendees on whether blogging under a real name did indeed present perils. Miriam Goldstein (@oystersgarter), a doctoral student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and blogger at Deep-Sea News says she has never had a negative experience. But stories surfaced regarding inappropriate comments by male readers. And one attendee voiced concerns about being emailed by a reader who said he was near her campus and about to stop by her office. Christie Wilcox (@NerdyChristie), a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who blogs at Observations of Nerd, said she only received nasty comments when she blogged on the science of make-up—and the anger came from women. Tribalism takes many forms.

Well, if you have dealt with minor Darwinists, as I have, and are not one of their companions, you get to hear how some of them talk about women. But God or nature or the guardian angel of marriages - or somebody or other anyway - invented a back browser button and a delete key.

I guess the big time Darwinists approve of all that stuff. I've never heard of them telling those dudes to smarten up, or slide their keesters to the low class boozehole down the road. I once had a problem with a guy who professed support for ID who behaved like that, but I heard vaguely that he had his can kicked six ways to Sunday over it. Nothing to do with me.

Actually, we had a problem with Darwinmouth here in Canada, but a smart blogger chick discovered and publicized the guy's true name. Worked wonders. (= One reason I don't like avatars is ... )

About real names: I blog under my real name. Yes. Can we get past that? (After all, if I had to consult the police station down the street about a truly difficult person, what is the first thing they would ask me?) I kind of miss the days when writers insisted on their byline.

I can't relate to all the questions raised in the article because they involve concerns about tenure or promotion tracks that elude a career freelance hack like me. But this gets better:

The entire concept of a woman science blogger overturns various long-held assumptions about science and gender.

Shoot, the first blogging software hit the market in 1999. How long-held a prejudice can it be? I don't doubt the first woman on a tractor pulling a plough overturned lots of things ...

Epigenome: Better find a new use for that pocket CD of your genome

2011-01-22T08:09:00.002-05:00

Remember when, as sociologist Dorothy Nelkin tells it,

The language used by geneticists to describe the genes is permeated with biblical imagery. Geneticists call the genome the “Bible,” the “Book of Man”and the “Holy Grail.” They convey an image of this molecular structure as more than a powerful biological entity: it is also a mystical force that defines the natural and moral order. And they project an idea of genetic essentialism, suggesting that by deciphering and decoding the molecular text they will be able to reconstruct the essence of human beings, unlock the key to human nature. As geneticist Walter Gilbert put it, understanding our genetic composition is the ultimate answer to the commandment “know thyself.” Gilbert introduces his lectures on gene sequencing by pulling a compact disk from his pocket and announcing to his audience, “This is you.”*

At ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2011), we learn that after the complete draft of the human genome was released in 2003, of the growing focus on is on the epigenome:

Whereas the genome is the same in every cell of an organism, the epigenome of every cell type is different. It is because of the epigenome that a liver cell is not a brain cell is not a bone cell.

From the genome, we learned? ...

"We learned many things from the Human Genome Project," Elgin says, "but of course it didn't answer every question we had!

"Including one of the oldest: We all start life as a single cell. That cell divides into many cells, each of which carries the same DNA. So why are we poor, bare, forked creatures, as Shakespeare put it, instead of ever-expanding balls of identical cells?

"This [epigenome] work," says Elgin, "will help us learn the answer to this question and to many others. It will help us to put meat on the bones of the DNA sequences."

You, know, it almost makes one go all religious and say: Re the “Bible,” the “Book of Man”and the “Holy Grail,” worship the creator not the creation. And recycle your CDs.

*Dorothy Nelkin, “Less Selfish Than Sacred? Genes and the Religious Impulse in Evolutionary Psychology,” in Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, eds., Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (London: Random House, Vintage, 2001), p. 18. Quoted in Beauregard & O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain, p. 52.

Consensus science: Voyage of the Dumbed

2011-01-21T07:43:00.000-05:00

Recently, historian of medicine Michael Flannery, author of World of Life, remarked on the lack of informational value of “99% of biological community disagrees with ID”:

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the New England divine, actually proposed a germ theory of medicine when 99.9% of the medical community disagreed with him. Conversely, Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) proposed a "phlogiston" theory to explain combustion (burning) and rusting that nearly every scientist of the day (including Joseph Priestly [1733-1804]), hailed.

More recently, when Joseph Goldberger (1874-1929) suggested that pellagra was a nutritional deficiency disease he was dismissed because the Thompson-McFadden Commission had "proven" pellagra to be infectious. History is replete with such examples.

In fact, I would suggest that history indicates that consensus per se merely confirms periods of stability within the scientific community NOT necessarily validity of the concepts around which that consensus has formed.

Science is not entirely cumulative. Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) told us this before Kuhn. "The philosophy of nature," he wrote in 1959, "evolved by occasional leaps and bounds alternating with delusional pursuits, culs-de sac, regressions, periods of blindness, and amnesia. . . . The mad clockwork of epicycles was kept going for two thousand years; and Europe knew less geometry in the fifteenth century than in Archimedes' time." The invocation of consensus in matters of science can be a very fickle friend.

Indeed, real science involves a willingness to break with consensus.

Heck, I’d go further. As I told a group last October, any mediocrity can be a career lecture room Darwinist. It requires only the skill set demonstrated by some low level bureaucrats: Defend the system; resist evaluation.

Darwinism best career choice for aspiring influential atheists?

2011-01-20T21:26:00.001-05:00

Of the 25 most influential atheists featured at a student homework help site, it’s curious how many are best known or widely known for pushing Darwinism.

(I’m sure Larry Krauss, at #11, is as solid a brass-footed fish as you could hope for, but he is best known for preaching the end of all things, including science, so he’s not in tonight’s lineup.)

How about, instead:

#1 Richard Dawkins (“Darwin’s Rottweiler”, ‘nuff said)

#4 Daniel Dennett (winner of Darwin look-alike contest) and the Darwinist education award: “If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods- that the earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection-then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity.”)*

#7 Michael Shermer (skeptical of everything except Darwinism, I gather, but as Dennett would assure him, Darwin answers all needs)

#12 Edwin O. Wilson, prophet of Social Darwinism, oops, make that sociobiology, no wait, “evolutionary psychology”is the new brand name. To see the reason for continual rebranding, see #4 above.

#13 P. Z. Myers, who finds time from his busy agenda teaching and researching at a Minnesota university to trash ID - also to rant, blaspheme, get tossed out of family friendly movie screenings, and desecrate Eucharists. (I’m told he’s good to kids and cats, but the cat who said so is not trustworthy.)

#19 Barbara Forrest has forged an academic career out of opposing the design of life. It’s okay, all right? Some people have made a career out of 9-11 truthing or “Oswald didn’t act alone.” Look, she probably gets better benefits. But, apart from ID, who would ever have heard of Barbara Forrest?

#20 David Sloan Wilson, who "argues for the pervasiveness of selection in the evolutionary process. In consequence, he sees religion itself as an adaptation that can motivate humans to cooperate and behave altruistically." Okay, presumably, if he forsook atheism and joined a traditional religion, volunteering and donations would head south? Well, for sure, nobody these days would want to convert the guy; too busy, too many hungry mouths to feed.

# 22 Will Provine made clear that most of today’s evolutionary biologist are pure naturalists - no God and no free will.

And they will all promote their religion through the school system, enforced by courts, never short of a standby chorus of Christian Darwinists wittering onbehalf of a Jesus whom Darwin could explain.

And, by the way, when Evolution Sunday rolls around in 2011, all Christian Darwinists should pause to reflect on how much their faith owes to these people. (I mention this because I am knee-deep in these blessed dimes of Darwin, for some project I am stuck with.)

* It feels offensive, hearing someone like this arrogate to himself some role in free speech. I have toiled undeservedly alongside heroes of free speech, like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant. Dennett is at least more honest than the Islamic fascists; he makes clear that his version of free speech means forcing his views on your children..

How science sense becomes popular nonsense, later fishwrap

2011-01-20T08:11:00.001-05:00

Here biophysicist George Hunter offers some helpful explanations of how honest research findings become nonsense in the pop science press:

Is it conceivable that so many scientific papers and reports, with their conclusions about evolution, are making the same mistake? Before answering this we first must understand the hierarchy of the evolution apologetics literature.

At the base of the pyramid are the scientific papers documenting new research findings.

Next up are the review papers that organize and summarize the state of the research.

And finally there is the popular literature, such as newspaper and magazine articles, and books.

Across this hierarchy evolutionists make different types of claims that should not be blindly lumped together. Yes, there are problems across the spectrum, but they tend to be different kinds of problems.

So, for example (this is my simplified example, his is more complex),

- The honest scientist spends a third of his career with his face jammed down a mole hole. He discovers that those moles who did not eat their granddams outnumber those who do, over time. He cobbles together some “I can PROVE Darwin!” explanation, publishes, and moves on.

- A review paper, glowingly prepared by a professional Darwin enthusiast (an evolutionary biologist), lumps his finding in with other “evidence for a selfish gene.” In fact, that there is no evidence for a selfish gene. There is a group of papers with some relevance to the concept he espouses, which he cobbled together for a review, producing a citation for each happy author.

(It turns out years later that, down the mole tunnel, the moles that did not munch their granddams are stronger and quicker than the others, and do just fine on bugs. The others also stay alive, using granddam as a diet supplement. So the “selfish gene” is of no explanatory value. But anyone who introduces such a bone-headed fact is denounced as a “creationist” - meaning someone who introduces legitimate doubt about how much of the real world Darwinism explains.)

- The Lifestyle & Relationships editor of the Sunday rag sees an opportunity to quote the Hundert Fundert Professor of Bioethics who reassures us that these moles’ “undisputed facts about evolution” do not mean that we shouldn’t throw granny under the bus.

After all, we must learn to understand and respect our place in the cosmos as just another animal ...

Thus science observations go in one end and nonsense or scandal comes out of the other.

In these times, if you want to know what really happened, stay as close as possible to the facts and avoid the explanations.

Breaking, breaking: University of Kentucky Pays “potentially evangelical” astronomer $100, 000 settlement

2011-01-19T15:38:00.002-05:00

University of Kentucky Pays $100,000+ to Settle Gaskell Discrimination Lawsuit

According to news articles, the University of Kentucky (UK) has settled the discrimination lawsuit filed against it by Martin Gaskell, an astronomer who was denied a job due to his perceived doubts about neo-Darwinian evolution. The case was scheduled to go to trial on February 8th, but today counsel for both sides filed a joint motion to dismiss the case pursuant to the settlement. According to the Associated Press:

The university has agreed to pay $125,000 to Martin Gaskell in exchange for Gaskell dropping a federal religious discrimination suit. Gaskell claimed he was passed over to be director of UK's MacAdam Student Observatory in 2007 because of his religion and statements that were perceived to be critical of evolution.

Court exhibits showed Gaskell was a top candidate, but some professors called him "something close to a creationist" and "potentially evangelical" in e-mails.

Gaskell was represented by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which said:

"The standard of suspicion -- rightly described as a 'McCarthyism of the Left' by one UK professor -- applied by some to Gaskell because of his religious writings and statements should have no place in universities of all places," Manion added. "The ease with which some of the people involved in this process were willing to tar Gaskell with the labels of 'scientific creationist,' 'evolution-basher,' and other pejoratives based on half-remembered hearsay and extremely selective reading of his non-professional writings was truly disturbing to witness. We can only hope that this case will send a message throughout academia that religious intolerance is just as unlawful as other forms of prejudice and bias."

For more, go here.

Interesting: In general, the astronomers haven’t done too badly out of the Darwin troll attacks. Guillermo Gonzalez got a new observatory and Martin Gaskell got a nice (unintended) ssendoff.

Will the University of Kentucky be adding the cost of Darwin troll maintenance to their budget soon?

Intellectual freedom: The reformed Huckleberry Finn - all whine all the time, I guess

2011-01-19T12:00:00.004-05:00

Ruben Bolling - the cartoonist who draws Tom the Dancing Bug - gives the new revised [politically correct] edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn comic book treatment. Political correctness is easier mocked than blocked, and mockery is the best strategy in the long run.

Hey, it works. People of my 60-ish generation retired the chronic “I cam from a broken home” whine, not so much because many of us also came from broken homes, but because it was a sacrosanct whine. Getting whining out of earshot was easier than getting whinemeisters out of their jobs.

Curiously: Where I grew up, the N-word was treated as a sign of low class upbringing. An "in" person knew that other people could come from different places and look different.

Hat tip: Franklin Carter at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee

Intellectual freedom: Friends have been asking if this is the most asinine newspaper column ever written

2011-01-19T08:36:00.000-05:00

Can you offer me a better one?

A Brit graces the world by emitting:

Free speech can't exist unchained. US politics needs the tonic of order

If America is to speak in a way that heals, as Obama wishes, it needs the curbs and regulations that make freedom of expression real.

The scary thing is that journo Simon Jenkins probably even knows who George Orwell is and what Newspeak is.

And in the new muffle-topia, he’d have which big job, I wonder?

Foreign papers please copy: Since Obama properly put an end to the blame circus, rare moments of sanity on the subject have become general.

Better still, It’s now apparent just who supports thought control for abetter world, precisely because they were free to say it.

Online game helps predict how RNA folds

2011-01-19T08:24:00.001-05:00

The folding of RNA molecules is difficult to predict, because each molecule is a long string of units, or bases, that can pair up with each other in many different ways. Because of this, even the best computer algorithms do badly at predicting the shape a molecule will actually take.

A team led by computer scientist Adrien Treuille at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, turned the problem over to online gamers to crack.

- Bob Holmes, "Online game helps predict how RNA folds" Neww Scientist (13 January 2011 )

What does it mean if the gamers beat the computer, the scientists, or nobody at all?

Separation of science and state suggested

2011-01-18T09:13:00.001-05:00

A kind reader writes,

I just watched ‘Dinosaur Wars’ on PBS. Wow. They should have had Ben Stein narrate it and called it a prequel to Expelled.

He adds, “Makes me think that the US should have a separation of science and state as well as church and state. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you take the time to watch.”

Alas, reader, my computer’s sound system is currently playing deaf, so “watch” is all I can do. With most TV, that’s a blessing, not with this though.

From the site,

In the late 19th century, paleontologists Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh uncovered the remains of hundreds of prehistoric animals in the American West, including dozens of previously undiscovered dinosaur species. But the rivalry that developed between them would spiral out of control, permanently damaging their careers and threatening the future of American paleontology.

Good to talk about, but remember, no one was proposing to subject Darwinism as the mechanism of change over time to a detailed audit. That unforgivable betrayal of "atheism on the public payroll" what will get a scientist expelled today.

Oh, by the way, an accompanying backgrounder article at the site is called "Darwinism and the American West." Remember that next time you hear the claim that Darwinists "don't call themselves Darwinists. Creationists invented the term to discredit them." So PBS is "creationist" then?

So much too-hot-to-handle news early in the day, I better have another cuppa ...

PS: Here’s a man who was long the odd man out for doubting the popular modern dino-bird theory of the origin of birds, but was vindicated when the history turned out to be messier than the story.

Read it here now! ID’s MOST dangerous innovation

2011-01-17T20:51:00.002-05:00

At Bounded Science: No Free Lunch for Intelligent Design, computer guy Tom English pinpoints what, to him is “The most dangerous innovation of ID creationism” (January 11, 2011),

So what is the most dangerous innovation of ID creationism? The movement stopped trying to overturn methodological naturalism, and adopted a new perspective on the nature of nature. The physical Universe is now comprised not just of matter and energy, but also of information. There is conservation of mass-energy, but not of information, which is created (only) by non-material intelligence. Six years ago, the design inference was to non-natural (i.e., supernatural) cause, and mainstream scientists were denigrated as naturalists. Now intelligent design is a non-material, though natural, cause, and mainstream scientists are denigrated as materialists.

The change in ontology makes IDC much more slippery than it was in Kitzmiller. On a verbal level, IDC has stepped entirely within naturalism. It does not obviously appeal to supernatural explanations. Many physicists accept the notion that information is in some sense physical. Thus it is much harder today than it was six years ago to argue that IDC is not science and that teaching of IDC as science does not serve a secular purpose.

Oh, so now you must focus on the issues, Tom? Can Darwinism create information?

Better go back to “It’s all a plot,” I suppose.

English’s understanding seems to be all mixed up but never mind. He got half of one thing right; I keep missing which half.

Thought for the week: Imagine no re-smidgeon ...

2011-01-17T06:00:00.003-05:00

No more smidgeons of evidence puffed up and blazoned everywhere, then retakes and this-time-it's-trues, all in the glorious cause of lighting a shining path to the future - endless worship at Darwin's shrine!

This Tiktaalik story, for example, mainly shows how much hasty-wrong-conclusion evolutionary science is simply a Darwin cult (too bad the cult practises human sacrifice too).

Skinny: "Missing link "Tiktaalik was actually Johnny come lately, the new kid in town.

So where are the fish that turned into tetrapods? According to Nature, they must exist in the "'ghost range' — that is, a period of time during which members of the groups should have been present but for which no body fossils have yet been found." Shubin's arguments that these fossils confirm a "specific prediction" of evolution appear to have been wrong. (But don't expect a correction from PBS anytime soon.)

No, because the yuppie public believes, and what else matters?

What if we just "Dimenticare Darwin", as geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti advised (= forget the guy; he's past tense). How much mental energy would be freed from defending the ol' Brit toff from racism and wrong predictions and such, and put toward figuring out what really happened?

Different species show identical patterns?

2011-01-16T12:00:00.001-05:00

At honest broker of media releases ScienceDaily (Jan. 11, 2011), we learn that

"Catfish Study Reveals Multiplicity of Species" — Peer into any stream in a South American rainforest and you may well see a small shoal of similar-looking miniature catfish. But don't be fooled into thinking that they are all the same species.

Promise, I won't be fooled.

An extensive investigation of South American Corydoras catfish, reveals that catfish communities- although containing almost identically coloured and patterned fish, could actually contain three or more different species.

Establishing for the first time that many species are mimetic; that is, they evolve to share the same colour patterns for mutual benefit- the research also established that each individual community of similar looking fish comprised species belonging to different genetic lineages, but still adopting similar colour patterns.

What theory of species formation would this find best support? Plato's theory of forms?

Intellectual freedom: When “silent no more” morphed swiftly into “silent, no kidding!”

2011-01-16T09:24:00.000-05:00

On recent legacy media demands for more government control of new media, on the undemonstrated (and undemonstrable) ground that new media spurred the Tucson assassin, Ottawa Citizen columnist David Warren writes,

We stand against the politics of the guillotine, or The Politics of Procrustes, as the British analytic philosopher Antony Flew explained, in a wonderfully clear book (1981). His title referred to the Greek myth of Procrustes, who assigned himself the task of making all who came his way “equal” -- either by stretching them on his metal bed, or by chopping down their limbs.

And words, too, have come to be tortured, so that in current radical parlance, “diversity” means everyone must have the same opinions, or be subject to stretching or chopping by the machinery of the “human rights” industry.

And, “paranoia” means, unwillingness to be so stretched, or chopped.

- “Unwilling to be chopped”, January 16, 2011

It amounts to making government our zookeeper. He adds,

While Hofstadter was not the ultimate source of this “meme” -- which goes back in some respects to the apes of Darwin -- he was there at the birth of a “New Left” in the 'sixties, a strange new slurry of Marxist, Freudian, feminist, and hippiesque notions which by increments seized the American liberal mind. And so completely that today, the attitudes of the Kennedy generation of American liberals seem indistinguishable from those of the Tea Party.

Yes. What many younger people mayn’t realize is that liberalism back then did not mean freedom only for the zookeeper, and enclosures for everyone else.

Let freedom zing.

At this time of night? You really want another cup of coffee?

2011-01-15T22:44:00.000-05:00

It’s so hard to keep up with the way ID concepts zip around popular culture now. Doesn’t matter what people think of them, it seems they do.

So load up on something a friend noticed:

There was a TV programme in the UK over Christmas called 'Unintelligent Design'. It was nothing to do with ID - in fact, it was a documentary about a situation comedy! - but it's encouraging that the makers clearly assumed that most viewers would be familiar with the term.

As I said, logging another find,

I can remember googling “intelligent design” a decade ago and coming up with the Web sites of firms selling non-walloping window blinds.

Now I am practically drowning in relevant info. The reality is, no one person can keep up.

Meanwhile, here’s a fun snark: A gelaskin featuring that fast food god we had to fire ...

Coffee!! Cloning extinct species: Jurassic Parking lot closer than we think?

2011-01-14T21:00:00.006-05:00

Mammoth from La Brea tarpit

“Mammoth could be reborn in four years"Julian Ryall reports for Britain's Telegraph (13 Jan 2011):

The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology.

Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.

But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

[... ]

"The success rate in the cloning of cattle was poor until recently but now stands at about 30 per cent," he said. "I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years."

What would it mean if humans recovered (not just discovered) a number of extinct species?

Note: Photo is by WolfmanSF, Wikimedia Commons

How realistic is the film "Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin"?

2011-01-14T18:00:00.000-05:00

Well, don’t go without two hankies, says Michael Flannery,

I saw the movie some time ago and some of the details are a bit hazy but my general impression of the film was that it was heavy on psycho-drama and lite on facts.

The film portrays Darwin as fixated, even hallucinatory, over the death of his beloved daughter Annie. The death of Annie is seen as a crisis of faith for Charles, which some historians would agree with. But the film shows Darwin going in and out of reality ... There's little to substantiate this level of mental disturbance, although a good many very credible historians regard Darwin as surely a troubled neurotic (as do I).

My real problem is that the chronology seems out of order. In particular, the film shows Darwin getting Wallace's famous Ternate letter laying out his theory of natural selection much earlier than he really did. In the film Darwin gets the letter and lapses into a deep and prolonged depression.

In fact, there wasn't time for any of this. Darwin received Wallace's letter on June 18, 1858.

Rather than falling into a funk, as portrayed in the movie, the actual events suggest that Darwin flew into a panic. Calling in his close friends Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, he asked them what to do. They (all members of the Linnean Society) decided to read Wallace's letter along with Darwin's 1844 sketch and an 1857 letter between Darwin and Asa Gray at the next meeting.

The whole thing was crafted to give Darwin priority, with excerpts from his sketch and letter read first and Wallace's last. That meeting on July 1, 1858 can be regarded as the birth of evolution by natural selection. Obviously, Darwin had to cobble all this together on very short notice.

To make matters worse, Charles and Emma had illness at Down House at the time. His 15 year-old daughter Henrietta would recover but 19 month-old Charlie would die of fever. In fact, Darwin was burying his baby son and couldn't attend the Linnean Society meeting.

NONE OF THIS is in the movie. Instead Darwin is shown moping around depressed over Wallace's preemption until Emma snaps him out of it. Actually, to me the real history would have been far more interesting than this melodrama.

And, cough!, more realistic too. Parents of large families like Charles and Emma were likely well prepared for the fact that some children would probably die, and they deserve credit for sticking it out, not the easy implication that they collapsed like jilted movie stars in the face of an all-too-common heartbreak.

ID theorist Mike Behe tries to keep Darwinist Jerry Coyne focused

2011-01-14T16:30:00.001-05:00

Mike Behe

Society must, after all, continue the fight against ADD (attention deficit Darwinism):

Try as one might to keep Darwinists focused on the data, some can't help reverting to their favorite trope: questioning Darwinism simply must be based on religion. Unfortunately Professor Coyne succumbs to this. Introducing his blog post he writes:
What role does the appearance of new genes, versus simple changes in old ones, play in evolution? There are two reasons why this question has recently become important.... The first involves a scientific controversy.... The second controversy is religious. Some advocates of intelligent design (ID)--most notably Michael Behe in a recent paper--have implied not only that evolved new genes or new genetic "elements" (e.g., regulatory sequences) aren't important in evolution, but that they play almost no role at all, especially compared to mutations that simply inactivate genes or make small changes, like single nucleotide substitutions, in existing genes. This is based on the religiously-motivated "theory" of ID, which maintains that new genetic information cannot arise by natural selection, but must installed [sic] in our genome by a magic poof from Jebus. [sic]
Jerry Coyne

Anyone who reads the paper, however, knows my conclusions were based on the reviewed experiments of many labs over decades. Even Coyne knows this. In the very next sentence he writes, inconsistently, "I've criticized Behe's conclusions, which are based on laboratory studies of bacteria and viruses that virtually eliminated the possibility of seeing new genes arise, but I don't want to reiterate my arguments here." Yet if my conclusions are based on "laboratory studies," then they ain't "religious," even if Coyne disagrees with them.
Professor Coyne is so upset, he imagines things that aren't in the paper. (They are "implied," you see.)

For more, go here.

Intellectual freedom: Truly dangerous media ignored while meddlesome government fusses about trifles, until ...

2011-01-14T12:00:00.000-05:00

Until the truly dangerous stuff becomes required reading, of course.

Media watchdog Brent Bozell thinks the storm of hogwash that social media inspired Tucson mass murderer Jared Loughner is dissipating.

None too soon. Bozell also raises the fact that Loughner was a heavy consumer of violence-themed music, and “troother” films

The wire services added that Loughner liked government-conspiracy documentaries like the 9/11-truther films "Loose Change" and "Zeitgeist," and bizarre cult films like "Donnie Darko," a 2001 movie summarized as "A troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes."

Bozell does not advocate banning troothers and nutters; his message is “News media, shape up and do your homework!” For example, “It took 72 hours for Loughner's entertainment appetites to enter the media mainstream,” - sure, because the media mainstream was awash in junk rather than story research, so too busy to notice.

And those are the people who would control other media for everyone’s good?

On that last point, I’d also like to observe that truly dangerous media usually do not rate the attention of government before they emerge in calls to mass murder numbering in the millions.

Das Kapital, Mein Kampf, and Mao’s Red Book suited the purposes of government very well, for example, and thus became required texts.

The human suicide bombs of today are most likely reading material approved by the government where they live.

By contrast, the troother documendacities around 9-11 inspired no violent popular movement. And if a band’s music directly, unambiguously causes homicides, the band could be got on a number of charges (inciting criminal activity comes to mind), with no risk of infringing the free speech of many others.

When business tries Darwinism ...

2011-01-14T09:19:00.000-05:00

What you get is Enron, a friend writes,

Just watched "The Smartest Guys in the Room" (about Enron's downfall). Two things you might be interested in from the movie:

1. Skilling made *explicit* use of Darwinian principles in running the company. He was inspired by The Selfish Gene, and had an employee review process which mimicked natural selection to remove the least fit employees.

2. The stock price was kept high simply because no one ever took a serious look at their books. Anyone who did was threatened, and then bought out, and lone voices were silenced (I think there was a mention of a Merrill-Lynch person who downgraded Enron's stock, and Enron made them fire the employee, and afterward gave them lucrative deals). When people asked them how they made money, there was a lot of handwaving (similar to how Darwinists respond when people ask how natural selection produces information).

3. The company itself was propped up by its own rising stock price. This was similar to how Darwinism is propped up by everyone simply making the appeal to "evolution", and how "nothing makes sense except in light of evolution." The bigger claims make people think it is okay, and therefore, no one actually looks at the books.

4. The company booked profits before they were made. Again, kind of like Darwinism. Every discovery is attributed to natural selection, but often later, close evaluation reveals that it was not natural selection at all responsible for the change.

When a company controls public perception, is propped up by its own rising stardom, and is able to book profits in advance, then it is setting itself up for a huge failure. That failure comes about when there is an auditor that others take seriously who start to question the books.

Yes, and it all gets a lot worse if government is fronting the enterprise. Then, it's like Darwinism in the school system - rules against questioning dogma that is easily questioned..

Coffee!!: Pop science flexes its flab - “Christians” vs “science” on ... spanking

2011-01-13T19:38:00.001-05:00

What happens when pop science usurps reason in the public sphere? Not always what you would expect. Here’s a great example, courtesy Jewish Canadian civil rights lawyer and publisher Ezra Levant: “Liberal Senator thinks spanking is the cause of all violence” (January 4, 2011)

“I'm not even kidding,” he begins.

Ez, no fear you’d be kidding. A fellow Norther, I accept that any lunacy may phosphoresce suddenly from our unelected Senate (a gravy heaven for past-their-sell-date partisans).

And, like, what hoo-hoo this time?

So she wants to make it a crime to spank your kids. That's right: get a criminal record for it. And mandatory, government parenting classes.

Read her nutty speech here. My favourite part is when she cites an animal biologist to say no animals are naturally violent - it's taught.

As if carnivores in nature would naturally negotiate with their dinner-to-be, as opposed to hunting them.

Wowza, Ez. Wonder what other animal biologists will say - never mind fans of Taylor Mitchell (folk singer killed by coyote attack). What restrains a wild animal from gratuitous violence is the need to fill the belly quickly and move on.

Now, what about Christians, Ez? Where we come in?

He goes on:

Canadian parents who spank, even in accordance with the Supreme Court’s rule about gentleness, are “violent,” she says.

But she goes much further, and weirder. She claims spanking is “the root cause of the violence in our society.” [Hint: Check world violent crime stats for Canada’s ranking, to see how much time to spend on this problem. Decide whether to sponsor an invasion or ... have another lemon fizz. - d.]

Hervieux-Payette rails against Christianity, specifically denying its doctrine of original sin, and its belief that all boys and girls have some evil tendencies within them that have to be controlled. According to her, “parental authority” is just a Christian superstition. Badly behaved children, especially ages three to six, simply need to be persuaded “through argument in order to bring them under control.”

Are you ready to take mandatory parenting classes from her? [asks proud father Ez]

Hervieux-Payette says “beliefs are slow to die and churches do not intend to surrender so readily to science.”

Who is this woman? Some one-term backbencher? Nope. She’s a high-ranking Liberal.

The moral of this story is that when pop Darwinism (we are just animals) flows through a culture, it evolves into whatever is "needed", not necessarily what your local Darwin lobby currently rants.

By the way, does anyone know much about animal behaviourist John Paul Scott, Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University, whom Hervieux-Payette cites as a source re all those peacenik wild animals?

Could he be serious?

Materialist philosopher “disconcerted” by medical students’ assumption of design

2011-01-12T15:00:00.002-05:00

A friend writes to say that in a forthcoming article in Biology & Philosophy, materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett recounts:

"I was disconcerted to overhear some medical students talking in a bar recently. One exclaimed: ‘How could anybody believe in evolution after learning about the intricacies of the DNA replication machinery?' To the extent that well-meaning evolutionists had inadvertently convinced them that Darwinians are eager to gloss over or deny these facts, this is evidence that the political tactic of denying teleology root and branch is apt to be self-defeating.

Okay, so what now? It looks like design but current philosophy can’t accept that, so Dennett's solution, outlined in his essay review of Peter Godfrey Smith's 2009 book, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection
(Oxford U Press) “is to argue that design does not always need a designer, i.e., that selection can play the role of faux designer. Yes, that’s been the Darwinist creed for years, and it couldn’t even be demonstrated in Lenski’s bacteria and even people uninterested in a design hypothesis acknowledge that, insofar as they are prepared to discuss actual problems with current theory (as opposed to faux problems).

The friend adds,

But I think Godfrey Smith has the stronger naturalistic intuition: never let a hint of design waft through the window. Once it does, any curious person (such as the medical student in the bar) is going to follow the hints where they lead."

Where they lead? For now, but not forever, ask the Expelled.

2011-01-12T12:00:00.003-05:00

A friend writes with this stop-the-presses news:

Philosopher Keith Parsons, from the University of Houston, has given up doing philosophy of religion.

According to Julia Galef, writing at Religious Dispatches, Parsons found the case for God to be insupportable. As Parsons wrote on the website The Secular Outpost:

"I have to confess that I now regard “the case for theism” as a fraud and I can no longer take it seriously enough to present it to a class as a respectable philosophical position—no more than I could present intelligent design as a legitimate biological theory. BTW, in saying that I now consider the case for theism to be a fraud, I do not mean to charge that the people making that case are frauds who aim to fool us with claims they know to be empty. No, theistic philosophers and apologists are almost painfully earnest and honest… I just cannot take their arguments seriously any more, and if you cannot take something seriously, you should not try to devote serious academic attention to it"

If a guy does not know the difference between fraud and self-deception, I am glad he is no longer in the philosophy of anything.

I wonder if he is giving up his salary as ill-gotten gains. Oh well, in such cases one makes no such serious requirement.

Another friend offers this interpretation:

I find the choice of the word "fraud" in respect to an argument most interesting. Notice Parson's doesn't say he considers that the arguments for theism have been soundly refuted. No...rather he just can't take them "seriously" anymore. So, by implication then, Parson's would consider, say, Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism a fraud...even though it has never been refuted, despite many attempts. Parson's just couldn't take that "seriously" any more.

I wonder if what he really means is he's tired of trying to defend atheism against all these arguments and coming up empty, so he's just going to cling to his atheism and leave the game.

Intellectual freedom in Canada and elsewhere ...

2011-01-12T07:59:00.000-05:00

As Americans cope with the recent assassination attempt (?) on an Arizona Congresswoman, there are predictable demands for “control”: Jonah Goldberg notes,

Misplaced panics like this have a momentum and logic all their own. Already, Rep. Bob Brady (D-Pa.) has drafted legislation to ban the use of symbols (crosshairs on a map, for instance) or language ("lock and load!") that could foster violence. "The rhetoric is just ramped up so negatively, so high, that we have got to shut this down," he told CNN.

That opens the bidding. The question is, where will it end?

If the alleged shooter had been inspired by a movie or TV show -- as any number of murderers have been over the years -- would those blaming the tea parties join with social conservatives in blaming Hollywood? Would they celebrate new laws to "shut down" such fare?

Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, claimed to be in part inspired by "Catcher in the Rye." Should that be banned? Or if not banned, should we "dismiss" from public life anyone who doesn't denounce J.D. Salinger?

Funnily enough, I remember when J. D. Salinger was denounced by little old ladies in church hats who did not want his works available in school libraries. That seems like a golden age now, because we were free to just ignore them. No so with those who would bring about a near-utopia through legislation, who have a panicked public demanding that the government “do” something.

As I observed earlier, assassinations have declined markedly in the past three decades in the United States, due in no small part - in my view - to the rise of new media, including personal social media like the now much-blamed Facebook. People who can just say it, overwhelmingly, tend to just forget it after a while.

Yes, better security played an important role.* But, in reality, a free world politician can’t just hide from the public. Elected representatives have logged how many minimal security public appearances across the United States, with how many assassination attempts? Let’s do the math: Very few

Probability thinking has its uses, and freakout avoidance is one. That is, if avoiding a freakout, rather than cultivating it, is what we want to do.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg on the smiley-face fascism of “let’s-just-ban-whatever” that poses a significant concern today.

*As a young teenager, I saw the Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot by local “hanger about the police station” Jack Ruby in Dallas while he was in custody. (It was accidentally captured on TV.) The consensus then - since acted on - is that security matters. But other things matter too.

Just up at The Mindful Hack

2011-01-11T10:00:00.001-05:00

My blog on neuroscience and spirituality issues

Coffee!! Is peer review the wheel of life or the Wheel of Fortune?

2011-01-11T08:56:00.000-05:00

Bit of both. Neuroskeptic offers:

In the spirit of the 9 Circles of Scientific Hell, and inspired by the evidence showing that scientific peer reviewers agree only slightly more often than they would by chance, here's a handy tool for randomly generating your review.

How's this one:

4. Cite Me, Me, Me!: The problem with this paper is that it doesn't reference the right previous work... yours. Unless the authors change it to cite everything you've written in the past 10 years, they can get lost. If they do, the paper will be immediately accepted - to reject it would harm your citation count.

Some readers may wish to try it on one of their work in progress or on this week's grocery flyer.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

More peer review stories:

Everyone hates the blogosphere and loves peer review, right, but ...

Early coffee: Traction, retraction, and self-plagiarism (when scientists retread what they should retire)

Peer review: have we run out of polish for the iron rice bowls?

Just up at Colliding Universes

2011-01-11T03:21:00.001-05:00

(my blog on theories about our universe)

· Coffee!! Flat earth award

· Coffee!! I get more mail: Extraterrestrials and the super-rich

· Philosopher responds to Hawking's "philosophy is dead

· I get mail: Wallace on Mars's canals

· 2010: Scientists on God: Wit vs. insight

· From the “What Is Life?” coffee club: What isn’t life?

· Hawking’s Grand Design: See, one icon is ALLOWED to diss another.

· Paul Davies on avoiding a hullabaloo when the flying saucer land

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Toxic politics and control of the Internet

2011-01-10T12:27:00.003-05:00

Canadian free speech bloggers have been watching, with growing concern, the developments in the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and, as Glenn Reynolds puts it in The Wall Street Journal,

With only the barest outline of events available, pundits and reporters seemed to agree that the massacre had to be the fault of the tea party movement in general, and of Sarah Palin in particular. Why? Because they had created, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's words, a "climate of hate."

- “The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel”, subhedded “Those who purport to care about the tenor of political discourse don't help civil debate when they seize on any pretext to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.” (January 10, 2011)

No, they don’t help civil debate, but they do help create the sort of climate that leads to demands for control of the Internet.

In Canada, that is no mean threat. Franklin Carter, at the Book and Periodical Council's Freedom of Expression Committee, sends me this helpful link to updated Internet-related court cases.

Anyway, I get ruddy tired of the whole business sometimes, and wrote to friends,

Stories like the one above frustrate me.

The problem is NOT what some GreenJet talk show host says, but the fact that so many listen to him uncritically or with approval.

Sure some political operative might be responsible. So could space aliens hiding in our DNA. Whoops! Don’t give the host ideas.

We should address his comments in no other terms than "Who is paying for this merde and why? Not me, I hope." Anything else is just scratching a rash and spreading the itch.

Responsible government is more often abandoned than overthrown. - d.

Today, the Toronto Star chimed in with “Could toxic politics have fuelled shooting rampage?”, with their Washington bureau’s Mitch Potter asking

Is Jared Lee Loughner a solo psychopath detached from the national reality, or the violent consequence of a rage-filled commentariat that spits a daily barrage of rhetorical bullets at the U.S. government?

Okay, at this point, a reasonable person over fifty years of age can dismiss the whole foofaraw about toxic politics in three words: Aw, get real!

I’m old enough to remember the assassination of John Kennedy, of Robert Kennedy, and of Martin Luther King, as well as the attempted assassinations of Gerald Ford and Pope John Paul II. One didn’t wonder whether, in those days, but when. Since the early 1980s, in North America we have enjoyed a long period of relative freedom from assassin politics. In no small part, that is precisely due to the proliferation of media that some want policed or controlled by government - cable TV, talk radio, and the Internet.

As Mark Steyn told the Ontario Legislature two years ago,

... free societies should not be in the business of criminalizing opinion. When you go down that road, all you do is lead to the situation that you have in, say, Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, you can't print a newspaper and say what you think, so if you object to the House of Saud, the only thing you can do is blow stuff up. I think, actually, we don't need sensitivity training in this jurisdiction, we need insensitivity training. We need to learn to rub along in a much more agreeable, rough-and-tumble fashion.

So when people say, “The government has got to put a stop to this toxic politics ...”, say a little prayer of thanks that character assassination is all it is, only rarely the real thing.

(Note: I report on this growing intelectual freedom controversy mainly for non-Canadians checking notes between assaults on free speech vs. where they are. For breaking news, go to Five Feet of Fury, Blazing Cat Fur, Small Dead Animals, or Deborah Gyapong. )

Typical Christian Darwinist evolves into 2011

2011-01-10T12:00:00.001-05:00

And perhaps deserves, like his patron, to be called a theist.

This series of 2011 Christian Darwinist events, hosted by Rev. Michael Dowd, landed in my mailbox. The press release for the 2011 events informs,

The six-part series on EvolutionaryChristianity.com will explore what it means to be Christian in a myth-busting age of scientific discovery. Guests will include prominent, and often controversial, Christians, such as:

Professor Ken Miller, co-author of the most widely-used biology textbook in America, and lead witness in the Dover ‘intelligent design’ trial.

Karl Giberson, vice president of the BioLogos Foundation, an organization that helps conservative Christians integrate their faith with contemporary science.

Brian McLaren, a pastor named by Time magazine as one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals.

Ian Lawton, a radical pastor whose church recently made national headlines for removing its cross.

Gail Worcelo, a Catholic nun and co-founder with the late Thomas Berry of Green Mountain Monastery, a new monastic community dedicated to the healing and protection of Earth and its life systems.

Owen Gingerich, professor emeritus of Astronomy and the History of Science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and member of the American Scientific Affiliation, a society of evangelical scientists.
The Ian Lawton story above seems kind of odd when you consider how many Christians have been killed or maimed in recent years for attending places of worship that do have a cross. But I digress.

Overall, these and other Dowd-friendly bios I have seen so far leave little doubt that "Evolutionary Christianity" is, in general, a project for and product of what a friend calls "Churches Nobody Goes to Any More." A dead giveaway is that they're always "evolving" or "transforming themselves" or engaging in "creative destruction," or something or other.

Nothing is sure, not even unsureness - except about Darwin. He's a lodestone now.

Coffee!! Found: A use for junk DNA

2011-01-10T06:00:00.004-05:00

Cosmologist Paul Davies suggested, in a recent essay ("Is Anybody Out There?" Wall Street Journal (April 10, 2010), another way of finding space aliens:

Another physical object with enormous longevity is DNA. Our bodies contain some genes that have remained little changed in 100 million years. An alien expedition to Earth might have used biotechnology to assist with mineral processing, agriculture or environmental projects. If they modified the genomes of some terrestrial organisms for this purpose, or created their own micro-organisms from scratch, the legacy of this tampering might endure to this day, hidden in the biological record.

Which leads to an even more radical proposal. Life on Earth stores genetic information in DNA. A lot of DNA seems to be junk, however. If aliens, or their robotic surrogates, long ago wanted to leave us a message, they need not have used radio waves. They could have uploaded the data into the junk DNA of terrestrial organisms. It would be the modern equivalent of a message in a bottle, with the message being encoded digitally in nucleic acid and the bottle being a living, replicating cell. (It is possible—scientists today have successfully implanted messages of as many as 100 words into the genome of bacteria.) A systematic search for gerrymandered genomes would be relatively cheap and simple. Incredibly, a handful of (unsuccessful) computer searches have already been made for the tell-tale signs of an alien greeting.

But what if, as scientists are increasingly finding out, the so-called junk is actually functional.

That would increase the aliens' difficulty because they would need to use an existing useful structure to encode "Take me to your leader?" or "We are the voice of Unity". I wonder how they would do that.

WHOSE science implies that God does not exist?

2011-01-09T12:00:00.001-05:00

A friend points to an interesting question raised by committed Darwinist Michael Ruse (From a Curriculum Standpoint, Is Science Religion? Chronicle of Higher Education
December 22, 2010):

But now ask yourself. If “God exists” is a religious claim (and it surely is), why then is “God does not exist” not a religious claim?

And if Creationism implies God exists and cannot therefore be taught, why then should science which implies God does not exist be taught?

Now, at first glance, the answer seems pretty obvious: If "science" really implies that, it could only be taught as an optional philosophy area, not as a core curriculum subject. Darwinists know best whether what they mean by science means that and, in most cases, the answer is probably yes.

Science: Balancing curiosity with accountability

2011-01-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

Peter Aldhous, chief of New Scientist's San Francisco bureau, highlights the importance, in a time of recession, of scientists explaining the value of their work, as opposed to heaping abuse on the Tea Party:

Speaking the language of fiscal accountability will be crucial, and here many scientists have a good story to tell. Encouragingly, the researcher whose "questionable" work was highlighted in launching the YouCut Citizen Review has shown the way. Luís Amaral of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, was targeted because of a paper analysing the performance of soccer players. However, this project was a spin-off from a NSF-funded study of ways to make scientific research more efficient. Amaral estimates that it consumed no more than a few hundred federal dollars, and he points out that it provided a great hook to get sports-mad teens interested in data analysis.

Most importantly, Amaral has corrected the record with humility, stating on his blog: "I am a strong believer in accountability. I strongly believe that scientists must balance their intellectual curiosity with the costs to society of embarking on a given research direction."

Of course, most people are curious about the world around us. But deciding which projects to fund is a sure way to be somebody’s villain - so most decision-makers and lobbyists just shrug off abuse.

Birds squawk louder to be heard over traffic- evolution in action!

2011-01-09T03:00:00.001-05:00

"Hipster bird species evolving to tune out urban sounds", according to Wendy Zuckerman (New Scientist 07 January 2011):

Call them the urban new breed. We know birds raise their voices to make themselves heard in the noisy big city, but for the first time there is evidence that they may even be evolving as a result of city living.

"Urban birds might be becoming genetically distinct, which is the first step towards becoming a new 'urban' species," says Dominique Potvin of the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Apparently, urban birds sing more loudly to attract mates, and are assumed to be evolving as a result: "The city is pushing these birds to evolve."

Is it? Another scientist, Hans Slabbekoorn, suggest that it is possible that the birds "might be just calling louder under noisier conditions."

A friend has suggested moving the urban birds to a rural setting and seeing what happens.

Study of birds adapting to urban life is most interesting, but in most cases calling minor changes "evolution" seems a stretch to me. They are probably better seen as the way a hardy species avoids extinction or extirpation via minor, reversible adjustments.

I’d be interested to see what happens to the Toronto area Canada geese who no longer migrate and spend the winter gobbling lawns. In a century, will they otherwise differ significantly from their virtuous rural cousins?

Canada geese in pond near Ottawa, Wikimedia Cmmons

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2296

Insects’ remarkable non-Newtonian properties coming to light

2011-01-08T21:23:00.000-05:00

British physicist David Tyler writes, quoting a recent research study

Forest tent caterpillar, Agriculture Canada

Exquisite design drives biomimetic adhesion research

"Even back [in the 17th Century], scientists knew that there is more to insects than meets the eye. While the most basic system of mechanical interlocking found in arthropods is the claw, insects do not merely have a miniature version of this. Many surfaces in the natural world are simply not soft enough to allow claws to be inserted, or are too smooth to provide a safe grip. The question of how insects stick, crawl and run on vertical surfaces and even upside down remains as hotly debated between scientists now as it was in the 17th century."

[ ... ]

The authors confirmed that the adhesive secretion is a water-in-oil emulsion and that the two phases were essential to avoid sliding. They found that, on the nano-scale of operation, non-Newtonian effects were even more marked than anticipated.

Go here for more.

In the context, non-Newtonian just means that they are adherinig at the quantum level of the universe, which flips the bird at Newton’s laws of gravity.

Coffee!! Latest non-Cambrian non-explosion

2011-01-08T09:00:00.000-05:00

A friend asks a bunch of us if we are as incredulous of Darwinist attempts to explain away the Cambrian explosion as he is. Well, I always say, try me on some of the latest nonsense, and he did. It is conveniently here, in relations to the Dengying fossils in southern China (541 to 551 million years ago):

The first instance of biomineralization – i.e. the biologic use of minerals – was around 2 billion years ago when certain bacteria precipitated grains of magnetite to apparently help orient themselves in the Earth's magnetic field. However, the first animal skeletons didn't appear until right before the Cambrian explosion, at the end of the Ediacaran Period.

These early shell-bearing creatures help to resolve Charles Darwin's concern over the sudden appearance of so many new animal species during the Cambrian explosion. The fossil record gives the impression of a "Creation" event, but in reality, animals had evolved prior to the explosion. They just didn't leave much for paleontologists to find until they developed the skeleton-making trait.

Reminded me of something:

The first time anyone wondered about thefts from the liquor store was on March 22, when a couple of guys appeared to be loitering with intent. However, the first theft of cash and cases of liquor didn’t occur until June 29, at the end of the subsequent accounting period.

This reported theft helps to resolve management's concern over the sudden disappearance of so much cash and so many cases during the night of June 29. The inventory record gives the impression of a major theft, but in reality, lots of cash and cases had gone missing prior to the reported heist. They just didn't leave much for investigators to find because they weren’t logged into inventory in the first place.

Hardline Darwinists obviously fear the Cambrian explosion the way crooks fear an honest investigator. You can play their claim game yourself:

The first __________ was on/around ___________ when ______________. However, the first __________ didn't ___________ until _____________________.

This ___________ helps to resolve ____________’s concern over the sudden ________ of so many __________ during the ___________. The _________ record gives the impression of a __________, but in reality, ____________. They just didn't leave much for ___________ to find because they (in some way, you make it up, couldn’t be traced) ________________.

I guess in the world of Darwin, that counts for an explanation.

H. G. Wells: Popularizing Darwin, racism, and mayhem - the history you never learned in school

2011-01-08T06:00:00.006-05:00

It’s amazing what one can learn about the heroes of materialist science from their friends. In “Leftist Artists and Their Totalitarian Friends” ( c2c Journal: Canada’s Journal of Ideas , January 4, 2011) commentator Michael Coren quotes friends of the early twentieth century Darwin popularizer, novelist H. G. Wells:

In describing his fellow socialist and some-time friend, George Bernard Shaw wrote of Wells, “Multiply the total by ten; square the result. Raise it again to the millionth power and square it again; and you will still fall short of the truth about Wells – yet the worse he behaved the more he was indulged; and the more he was indulged the worse he behaved.” [ ... ]

At heart, he was a social engineer. In massively best-selling books such as Anticipations and A Modern Utopia, Wells wrote that he believed the world would collapse and from this collapse a new order should and would emerge: “People throughout the world whose minds were adapted to the big-scale conditions of the new time. A naturally and informally organised educated class, an unprecedented sort of people.” A strict social order would be formed. At the bottom of it were the base.

These were “people who had given evidence of a strong anti-social disposition,” including “the black, the brown, the swarthy, the yellow.” Christians would also “have to go” as well as the handicapped. Wells devoted entire pamphlets to the need of “preventing the birth, preventing the procreation or preventing the existence” of the mentally and physically handicapped. “This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and the sensual is possible. I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved.”

The people of Africa and Asia, he said, simply could never find a place in a modern world controlled by science. Better to do away with the lot. “I take it they will have to go,” he said of them. Marriage as it is known would have to end, but couples could form mutually agreed unions. They would list their “desires, diseases, needs” on little cards and a central authority would decide who was fitted for whom.

The interesting part is precisely the way Wells’s bad behaviour was indulged. Almost as if the “modern” 20th century public knew that people like him would be their new rulers, and adjusted to it. Good thing the trend blew itself up. Or did it?

This just in, with coffee: “Vast knowledge” brought to bear on the ID controversy

2011-01-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

Alternative headline: The mountains labor and bring forth a mouse. - Horace

Here, we learn From Stephen M. Feldman, Jerry W. Housel/Carl F. Arnold Distinguished Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, University of Wyoming, via Amazon, that

ID advocates insist that public school teachers should be required to teach ID whenever they teach evolution. Frank Ravitch brings his vast knowledge of these debates to bear in Marketing Intelligent Design and leaves the ID argument in tatters. With incisive arguments and historical understanding, Professor Ravitch demonstrates that the ID position is no more than an imaginative marketing campaign that repackages previous attacks on the teaching of evolution. But the substance of the attack is the same, and Ravitch shows why it must fail.

Frank who shows what? The best ID literature available today is the slowly accumulating - and unwilling - support for the central ID contention that Darwinism is not a magical process that produces high levels of information from nothing.

I can’t think why students mustn’t be allowed to know. Wait, I can. They are being indoctrinated into a culture where something really can come from nothing, and all publicly approved beliefs must support that.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

What Craig Venter actually accomplished with his synthetic cell

2011-01-07T06:00:00.000-05:00

In the wake of breathless news stories like

MSNBC: "It's alive! Artificial DNA controls life"

UK Sun: "'Frankenstein' doc creates life"

BBC: "'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists"

Comcast News: "A step to artificial life: Manmade DNA powers cell"

Vanity Fair: "Mankind Creates First Synthetic Genome, Officially Replaces God"

UK Daily Mail: "Scientist accused of playing God after creating artificial life by making designer microbe from scratch - but could it wipe out humanity?",

Don Johnson, at Science Integrity, explains the actual significance of Craig Venter’s “synthesized genome”:

The bottom line is that the Venter scientists accomplished something never before done. They put together components produced by living organisms, selected by genetic engineering to match a computer-specified sequence of digital information matching a target genome, in order to produce a genome matching that target. The resulting genome replaced the native genome of another bacterium of a different type, resulting in a "new" life form matching the target life. Perhaps the capability to build life for specific properties will follow, for example to destroy cancer cells or to eat oil from spills. Other capabilies may not be as attractive, such as creating a weapon destructive to human life, that would leave other life (and property) unharmed.

The purpose of his Web site is to expose unsubstantiated science claims.

Current pop media should keep him busy for the rest of his life.

2010 Coming down from the reductionism trip ...

2011-01-06T15:00:00.000-05:00

Animal cell, Wikipedia Commons

In (surprisingly) the New Scientist, Brian J. Ford observes, "The secrets of intelligence lie within a single cell" (April 25, 2010).

For me, the brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are transistors; rather it is as if each individual neuron is itself a computer, and the brain a vast community of microscopic computers. But even this model is probably too simplistic since the neuron processes data flexibly and on disparate levels, and is therefore far superior to any digital system. If I am right, the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we imagine, and "artificial intelligence" a grandiose misnomer.

I think it is time to acknowledge fully that living cells make us what we are, and to abandon reductionist thinking in favour of the study of whole cells. Reductionism has us peering ever closer at the fibres in the paper of a musical score, and analysing the printer's ink. I want us to experience the symphony.

I recommend avoiding the thoughts and works of reductionists.

Interpret the history of life how you will, reductionism as such has been the most spectacular failure since the perpetual motion machine. I wonder if there is a conceptual link between the two ideas.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Eugenics and the Firewall: Catching on in Canadian media

2011-01-06T09:32:00.002-05:00

Eugenics and the Firewall: Good discussion begins

Jane Harris-Zsovan writes to say that her just-published book Eugenics and the Firewall, about the history of social Darwinism in Alberta (province of Canada), has received favourable reviews so far.

Ian Stewart, reviewer for the Winnipeg Free Press opens,

IN this suggestive piece of investigative journalism, Albertan Jane Harris-Zsovan exposes one of her home province’s wretched little secrets.
Published, oddly enough, by a Winnipegbased house, Eugenics and the Firewall retells the story of how Alberta’s progressive and populist Social Credit government abused some of its most vulnerable citizens’ basic human rights for almost half the 20th century. Its message is clear: somebody’s Utopian vision can lead to another’s Orwellian hell.

In 1928, Alberta elected its first Social Credit government, led by the apocalyptic "Bible Bill" Aberhart. The government was under the sway of the burgeoning eugenics movement and quickly passed the British Empire’s first sexual sterilization legislation, which was not rescinded until 1972.

He also cheered her on personally, no surprise from a seasoned reporter who knows when someone is taking a risk to just start talking about the documentary evidence.

Similarly, Lana Michelin for the Red Deer Advocate did, in Harris Zsovan’s view, “an amazing job sorting out all those facts and figures I gave her in lightening time.”

While B.C. used eugenics sparingly, sterilizing only a few hundred citizens, Alberta seized the opportunity from 1928 to 1972 to target nearly 3,000 “undesirables,” including the mentally disabled, chronically ill and sexually promiscuous.

Many of these 2,832 sterilizations were done at Red Deer’s Michener Centre, said Harris-Zsovan.

The author has been interested in Alberta’s dark eugenics history since she overheard, as a young girl, her parents discussing a neighbour’s son who they suspected was sterilized.

I first became interested in the early1970s, when I noticed that the whole episode was a memory hole as far as just about everyone was concerned.

Why does it matter?, some ask. Compulsory sterilization was done in Alberta a long time ago, and the enabling laws were repealed in 1971. Well, two reasons it matters:

First, for the sake of the facts: Social Darwinism (the belief that a government-directed application of Darwin’s theory of evolution to a human population would produce a fitter human) is far more often denounced than it is explained. There is a good reason for that. As Harris Zsovan shows, progressives and evangelical Christians promoted and enabled it, not just goose stepping Nazis. Everyone was wrong, but the last group was socially despised, thus in line to take the fall. While everyone else acted self-righteous, false history drove out true history.

Second, social amnesia is no way to prevent a similar occurrence. Put simply, it happened because it was widely popular, and a similar event would happen today, if it were as popular. So we really must look at what made it popular and with whom. And that’s a fascinating read.

Many Canadians are in the process of recovering our history, and no, it is not always fun, but - as with our bodies - the less fun parts may be the most necessary.

Note: Eugenics and the Firewall, about the history of social Darwinism in Alberta (province of Canada), is distributed by University of Toronto Press.

Coffee!: If you are going to be a “denialist”, why not be an obesity denialist as well, ...

2011-01-06T06:00:00.001-05:00

If you read this blog, you are a denialist already, probably. You doubt that truth flows one way from the Establishment, and there is no hope for you. So, ... Here, Julie Gunlock comments on the response of professional busybodies to people who doubt that The Government Can Make Everybody Thin:

Hiatt also echoes the first lady’s warnings that fat Americans are all going to keel over from obesity-related diseases. This also doesn’t pan out. More recent research on obesity has found only a very slight (and statistically insignificant) increase in mortality among mildly obese people, and that in fact it is underweight individuals who have a higher rate of death than those in the “healthy” weight category.

But the real crux of Hiatt’s piece is to call into question the “obesity deniers” whom he says history will judge harshly (alongside global warming deniers, natch). He asks: Could anyone really be against children eating healthier food and getting more exercise?

Hiatt shouldn’t stoop so low as to question these so-called deniers’ motivations. We’re not some sort of anti-kid cabal set on ridding the world of these loud, sticky creatures. Instead, those who have been critical of the first lady’s mission simply question the efficacy of school lunches and are concerned about the decreasing role of parents in a child’s life. These “deniers” also see this effort to provide children more nutritious school meals as only treating the symptoms of childhood obesity, not the disease. In other words, Americans have to tackle the much bigger issue of just why so many children rely on these school lunches and why parents are so willing to cede this responsibility to the government.

- Julie Gunlock, "The Passion of the Obesity Deniers" (December 28, 2010)

Well, as I have written elsewhere, when I was a kid, it was hard to get fat:

. . . in that pre-microwave era, cooking was labor intensive, so children ate mostly at home at mealtimes. Between home and school we were largely unsupervised—definitely a no-no today—and we rode bikes, swam, or ran for hours on end.

Fat? Most of us couldn't get fat if we tried.

Today, by contrast, the internet turns out kids whose best-exercised body parts are their index fingers.

To say nothing of the fact that, if Mom couldn’t think up chores for kids, Dad sure could. Or Grandma, or ... So it was usually better to be out swimming or cycling beyond shout reach.

As a longtime denialist, I would say that if the government cannot restore those millennial childhood conditions, taxpayer-funded crabbing about the existence of French fries will hardly produce the desired results.

Intelligent design and popular culture: Art critic in the NY Times?

2011-01-05T12:00:00.001-05:00

A friend who receives the dead tree edition of the New York Times writes to comment on Ken Johnson’s thoughts about Vermeer's “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher”, on view at the Met

...Vermeer's young woman is bathed in the light of the Holy Spirit...All is painted with excruciating, reverential tenderness. To be sure, everything in the picture can be explained without invoking supernatural agency. In its slightly blurry, photographic realism, the painting presents an implacably empirical view of the world. The image looks almost as if it had been photo-chemically imprinted on the canvas without manual intervention, and the picture in turns stamps itself on our retinas. Optical nerves fire, neurotransmitters swarm and the image somehow appears in our minds. Whether you believe in intelligent design or Darwinian happenstance, it is pretty miraculous.(12/31/10)

Friend notes,

When ID wanders into the analysis of a NY Times art critic, the idea is making cultural inroads.

Yes, I think so.

I can remember googling “intelligent design” a decade ago and coming up with the Web sites of firms selling non-walloping window blinds.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Darrel Falk: You’re nothing but a pack of neurons and you must accept that

2011-01-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, responds to BioLogos (= Dawkins’s scissors, applied to Bible in Jesus’ name):

Then, after chiding the church for paying too much attention to anti-evolutionary voices, he offers a sentence which, taken seriously, represents a breathtaking intellectual commitment:

Scientific knowledge is not seriously flawed and we cannot allow ourselves to be led down this pathway any longer.

That is nothing less than a manifesto for scientism. Science, as a form of knowledge, is here granted a status that can only be described as infallible. The dangers of this proposal are only intensified when we recognize that “scientific knowledge” is not even a stable intellectual construct. Nevertheless, these words do reveal why BioLogos pushes its agenda with such intensity.

[ ... ]

Dr. Falk ends his essay with a paragraph that includes this key sentence: “If God really has created through an evolutionary mechanism and if God chooses to use BioLogos and other groups to help the Church come to terms with this issue, then three three huge challenges will begin to melt away as God’s Spirit enables us to look to him and not to ourselves.” I will simply let that sentence speak for itself.

Yes indeed. Let all mortal flesh keep silence.

Especially wise to keep silent when we consider that only a flawed understanding, not corrected by the truth of science, leads us to believe that there is a Holy Spirit. Just as the overwhelming majority of evolutionary biologists are pure naturalists (no God and no free will) and really believe in their rag and bone shop, the overwhelming majority of neuroscientists believe that the sacred calling identified for BioLogos is simply a meaningless dance of neurons in Darrel Falk’s brain. So why hasn’t he accepted the verdict of science yet?

Scientific knowledge is not, remember, seriously flawed.

From Science Daily: New genes as essential as old ones

2011-01-05T06:00:00.002-05:00

Evolutionary biologists have long proposed that the genes most important to life are ancient and conserved, handed down from species to species as the "bread and butter" of biology. New genes that arise as species split off from their ancestors were thought to serve less critical roles -- the "vinegar" that adds flavor to the core genes.

But when nearly 200 new genes in the fruit fly species Drosophila melanogaster were individually silenced in laboratory experiments at the University of Chicago, more than 30 percent of the knockdowns were found to kill the fly. The study, published December 17 in Science, suggests that new genes are equally important for the successful development and survival of an organism as older genes. (Dec. 16, 2010)

For more, go here.

This snippet underlines a key problem with Darwinism: When Darwinists make predictions that don’t pan out, their theory is by no means considered a less certain central dogma; rather, it elasticizes and expands to retrodict what happened. Each instance creates information loss for the theory.

Thus, the Darwinist can tell the public, in apparent good faith, that “overwhelming evidence” supports the theory. By “evidence” is meant only the decades-long series of special pleadings and patches, and occasional purgings of dissent.

Fruit fly: The fruit fly image was taken by Muhammad Mahdi Karim in Dar es Salaam and is offered here under the Gnu Free Documentation License.

Colliding Universes: Preview "The astronomer who paid dearly for dissing Carl Sagan settled in at new U"

2011-01-04T12:41:00.000-05:00

Colliding Universes: Preview "The astronomer who paid dearly for dissing Carl Sagan settled in at new U"

More on Israel as origin for human race

2011-01-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

Here:

Qesem Cave is dated to a period between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, and archaeologists working there believe that the findings indicate significant evolution in the behavior of ancient humans. This period of time was crucial in the history of humankind from cultural and biological perspectives. The teeth that are being studied indicate that these changes are apparently related to evolutionary changes taking place at that time.

Prof. Gopher and Dr. Barkai noted that the findings related to the culture of those who dwelled in the Qesem Cave -- including the systematic production of flint blades; the regular use of fire; evidence of hunting, cutting and sharing of animal meat; mining raw materials to produce flint tools from subsurface sources -- reinforce the hypothesis that this was, in fact, innovative and pioneering behavior that may correspond with the appearance of modern humans.

See also here.

Remember, this means we all have the right of return.

He said it: The importance of feeling confident where probability is concerned

2011-01-04T06:00:00.002-05:00

Personally, given the resources of geological time, I feel confident that
sooner or later that hypothetical chimpanzee sitting at a typewriter, will one day type Hamlet.

- D. V. Ager, The New Catastrophism: The Importance of the Rare Event in Geological History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1993, p. 149.

Confidence in confidence alone is a heartwarming thing if nothing depends on it.

Hat tip: Stephen E. Jones.

Ego tripology: "Science patriots" a step ahead of the bailiff this time

2011-01-03T15:33:00.000-05:00

In "Science Warriors' Ego Trips" (Chronicle of Higher Ed, April 25, 2010) Carlin Romano, who teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania, comments on ID opponent Massimo Pigliucci’s Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk:

In an even greater disservice, Pigliucci repeatedly suggests that intelligent-design thinkers must want "supernatural explanations reintroduced into science," when that's not logically required. He writes, "ID is not a scientific theory at all because there is no empirical observation that can possibly contradict it. Anything we observe in nature could, in principle, be attributed to an unspecified intelligent designer who works in mysterious ways." But earlier in the book, he correctly argues against Karl Popper that susceptibility to falsification cannot be the sole criterion of science, because science also confirms. It is, in principle, possible that an empirical observation could confirm intelligent design—i.e., that magic moment when the ultimate UFO lands with representatives of the intergalactic society that planted early life here, and we accept their evidence that they did it. The point is not that this is remotely likely. It's that the possibility is not irrational, just as provocative science fiction is not irrational.

[ ... ]

A sensible person can side with scientists on what's true, but not with Pigliucci on what's rational and possible. Pigliucci occasionally recognizes that. Late in his book, he concedes that "nonscientific claims may be true and still not qualify as science." But if that's so, and we care about truth, why exalt science to the degree he does? If there's really a heaven, and science can't (yet?) detect it, so much the worse for science.

[ ... ]

Long live Skeptical Inquirer! But can we deep-six the egomania and unearned arrogance of the science patriots? As Descartes, that immortal hero of scientists and skeptics everywhere, pointed out, true skepticism, like true charity, begins at home.

Well said, Romano.

First. In my experience, the "science patriots" are not really patriots or skeptics either (types one can always use). They are minor politicians barking the party line, in season or out.

It's out of season now. More and more people see full bore Darwinism for what it is, and either the Darwinists address the problem or someone else will. May as well be us.

Five years ago: Examples of regulatory gene change producing body change termed “scarce”

2011-01-03T12:00:00.003-05:00

From Science Daily (Nov. 14, 2006), we learned: Geneticists succeeded in getting fruit flies with two rows of bristles on the thorax to become flies with four rows of bristles on the thorax, by tweaking some control genes.

Then we read,

These results show that slight changes in the control regions of genes lead to slight changes in the organism, and accumulation of such small differences may result in the creation of a new species. While this is widely accepted by evolutionary biologists, actual examples directly linking small changes in regulatory parts of genes to morphological differences have been scarce.

Especially if no one is around to do the tweaking under laboratory controls.

It’s a good thing the bristles probably don’t matter much. The big news was when researchers altered useful fruit fly halteres and produced a useless second set of wings (photo) , and also produced legs where antennae should be. That’s not evolution or intelligent design, it’s a kludge.

The money shot would have been to produce flies that could carry off the whole fruit bowl instead of just flitting around your mouth while you are eating a peach.

Little admissions add up. The information deficit between what Darwinism needs to prove its case and what actually happens has only grown in the subsequent five years.

Note: The fruit fly image was taken by Muhammad Mahdi Karim in Dar es Salaam and is offered here under the Gnu Free Documentation License.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

He said it: Michael Behe on the endless moving of goalposts

2011-01-03T06:00:00.006-05:00

[O]ne needs to relax Darwin's criterion from this: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." to something like this:

If a complex organ exists which seems very unlikely to have been produced by numerous, successive, slight modifications, and if no experiments have shown that it or comparable structures can be so produced, then maybe we are barking up the wrong tree. So, LET'S BREAK SOME RULES!

Of course people will differ on the point at which they decide to break rules. But at least with the realistic criterion there could be evidence against the unfalsifiable. At least then people like Doolittle and Miller would run a risk when they cite an experiment that shows the opposite of what they had thought. At least then science would have a way to escape from the rut of unfalsifiability and think new thoughts.

(Michael Behe, "Answering Scientific Criticisms of Intelligent Design," Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute, Vol 9:146-147 (Ignatius Press, 2000))

Therein lies the key to much Darwinism today. Because Darwin must be right, any observation or information that can be gerrymandered to support his successors’ views trumps good evidence that Darwinism was not at work. And then the contrary evidence disappears down the memory hole. When the peacock’s tail did not turn out to support sexual selection, the fact disappeared from view so completely (along with the fact that natural selection does not explain the Monarch-Viceroy mimicry complex) that it is common to see them cited both by ardent Darwin believers as unqualified examples of Darwinism at work.

He said it: John Templeton on meaning and purpose

2011-01-02T18:22:00.000-05:00

Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose?

- Sir John Templeton, The Humble Approach: Scientists Discover God (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation, 1998)

Some of wouldn’t recognize that Templeton Foundation today. Curious to know what has changed.

He said it: Wait, shut up, believe, pay, wait, shut up, believe, pay, four easy steps ...

2011-01-02T06:00:00.001-05:00

Phillip [Johnson] is absolutely right that the evidence for the big transformations in evolution are not there in the fossil record - it's always good to point this out. It's difficult to explore a billion-year-old fossil record. Be patient!

- William Provine, evolutionary biologist, Cornell University*

- * quoted in Michael Powell, “Doubting Rationalist: 'Intelligent Design' Proponent Phillip Johnson, and How He Came to Be”, Washington Post (Sunday, May 15, 2005). For context, go here.

Oh, and did we mention that your kids are legally required to learn in school how to wait, shut up, believe, and pay too? Sure, because we may as well all be one big happy family in the Four Easy Steps plan. Maybe some of our children will be chosen for the noble task of suppressing doubt.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Y chromosome further evidence that human-chimp DNA similarity is in 70% range

2011-01-01T09:00:00.002-05:00

Not 98% or 99%, as every motor mouth on Hoax TV can tell you, between 9-11 hair fixes.

A friend writes to say:

In 2008 I made the prediction (based on data available from the draft chimpanzee genome) that the human and chimpanzee genomes were about 70% the same overall. This has now been confirmed for the Y chromosome in a detailed study.

The study found

As expected, we found that the degree of similarity between orthologous chimpanzee and human MSY sequences (98.3% nucleotide identity) differs only modestly from that reported when comparing the rest of the chimpanzee and human genomes (98.8%)15. Surprisingly, however, >30% of chimpanzee MSY sequence has no homologous, alignable counterpart in the human MSY, and vice versa (Supplementary Fig. 8 and Supplementary Note 3).

In aggregate, the consequence of gene loss and gain in the chimpanzee and human lineages, respectively, is that the chimpanzee MSY contains only two-thirds as many distinct genes or gene families as the human MSY, and only half as many protein-coding transcription units (Table 1).

He cautions that the authors of the Nature paper do not think that their findings for the Y chromosome are true for the whole genome.

Perhaps not, but it is nice to see sane people working on genetic similarity issues for once.

The paper is: Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure
and gene content, Nature 463, 536-539 (28 January 2010) | doi:10.1038/nature08700

The human Y chromosome began to evolve from an autosome hundreds of millions of years ago, acquiring a sex-determining function and undergoing a series of inversions that suppressed crossing over with the X chromosome1, 2. Little is known about the recent evolution of the Y chromosome because only the human Y chromosome has been fully sequenced. Prevailing theories hold that Y chromosomes evolve by gene loss, the pace of which slows over time, eventually leading to a paucity of genes, and stasis3, 4. These theories have been buttressed by partial sequence data from newly emergent plant and animal Y chromosomes5, 6, 7, 8, but they have not been tested in older, highly evolved Y chromosomes such as that of humans. Here we finished sequencing of the male-specific region of the Y chromosome (MSY) in our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, chieving levels of accuracy and completion previously reached for the human MSY. By comparing the MSYs of the two species we show that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content, indicating rapid evolution during the past 6 million years. The chimpanzee MSYcontains twice as many massive palindromes as the human MSY, yet it has lost large fractions of the MSY protein-coding genes and gene families present in the last common ancestor. We suggest that the extraordinary divergence of the chimpanzee and human MSYs was driven by four synergistic factors: the prominent role of the MSY in sperm production, ‘genetichitchhiking’ effects in the absence of meiotic crossing over, frequent ectopic recombination within the MSY, and species differences in mating behaviour. Although genetic decay may be the principal dynamic in the evolution of newly emergent Y chromosomes, wholesale renovation is the paramount theme in the continuing evolution of chimpanzee, human and perhaps other older MSYs.

Did you get that? “Wholesale renovation.” No doubt there’ll be more real news to come.

But don't expect to hear it from Hoax TV. 70%? Doesn't quite have the same ring as 99%, does it.

He said it: As a butcher eyes a sheep, so the Darwinists eyed paleontologist Steve Gould (1941-2002)?

2011-01-01T06:00:00.003-05:00

David Berlinski recalls Gould’s tetchy relationship with the iron rice bowls of the Darwin establishment:

Of course, if the fossil record does not fit the theory, it is always possible to adjust the theory to fit the record. In science, an enterprising theoretician has several degrees of freedom within which to maneuver before the referee reaches ten and the final bell comes to clang. Steven Jay Gould, who was trained as a paleontologist, surveyed the fossil evidence early in the 1970s and came to the obvious conclusion that either the theory or the evidence must go.
What went, on his scheme of things, was the neo Darwinian orthodoxy by which species change into different species by means of an endless series of infinitesimal changes, continuously, like the flow of syrup. Instead, Gould argued, biological change must have been discontinuous, with vast changes taking place at once. Such was his model of punctuated equilibria.
It fits the fossil record far better (if it makes sense, even, to talk of scientific fit here), but the model achieves faithfulness to the facts only by chucking out the chief concepts of the Darwinian theory itself, and while paleontologists have been glad to have had Gould's company, evolutionary theorists have looked over what he has written with the cool, slitted, appraising glance of a butcher eyeing a sheep.
- David Berlinski, "The Evidence for Evolution," in Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic, Luck," Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: Boston MA, Second Edition, 1988, pp. 300-302.

My impression is that Gould thought at first that revealing the facts of Darwinism’s failures (the trade secret of paleontology) would just be a lark. He soon learned otherwise, and ended up capitulating to the Darwinists in public while doubting in private. A friend told me he would not likely have signed the Steves list (Darwin lobby’s list of loyalist guys named Steve).

Well, he’s dead now, and we’ll never know, but I sense a story, and it would be interesting to hear more.

(Note: Here is an instance of Wiki Answers forced to admit, however evasively, that there was a serious issue there.)

Retrospective: No, you needn’t to think there is design in the universe to get mugged by Darwinists - recall this ...

2010-12-31T17:06:00.003-05:00

People who have seen the Expelled movie might go away thinking that only those who doubt Darwinism are persecuted. Then they most likely haven’t heard of Michael Reiss, the sinner in the hands of an angry god, the god being Darwinism.

He’d suggested teaching about creationism and intelligent design in school for the express purpose of stamping out any such idea, but was driven from his position by more pragmatic Darwinists than he is - much as Trotsky was killed by Lenin.

Anyway, here is his attempt to placate the angry god:

Evolution. 2009 Jul;63(7):1934-41. Epub 2009 Apr 13.

The relationship between evolutionary biology and religion.
Reiss MJ.

Institute of Education, University of London, London WC1H 0AL, UK. m.reiss@ioe.ac.uk

Abstract

Belief in creationism and intelligent design is widespread and gaining significance in a number of countries. This article examines the characteristics of science and of religions and the possible relationship between science and religion. I argue that creationism is sometimes best seen not as a misconception but as a worldview. In such instances, the most to which a science educator (whether in school, college or university) can normally aspire is to ensure that students with creationist beliefs understand the scientific position. In the short term, the scientific worldview is unlikely to supplant a creationist one for students who are firm creationists. We can help students to find their evolutionary biology courses interesting and intellectually challenging without their being threatening. Effective teaching in this area can help students not only learn about the theory of evolution but better appreciate the way science is done, the procedures by which scientific knowledge accumulates, the limitations of science, and the ways in which scientific knowledge differs from other forms of knowledge.

And here is David Tyler’s response.

Now that many people, not just ID folk, are beginning to actually question Darwinism openly and getting away with it so far, maybe the thugs will be occupied elsewhere and poor of Rev. Reiss can go back and preach the Darwin loves you gospel to kids in peace. I hope so because it is flamin’ awful what happened to him.

Human evolution: Oldest human remains found in Israel?

2010-12-30T20:18:00.002-05:00

Daniel Estrin reports for MSNBC ( 12/27/2010 ),

JERUSALEM — Israeli archaeologists said Monday that they may have found the earliest evidence yet for the existence of modern humans, and if the find is confirmed, it could upset theories of the origin of humans.

A Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of other remains of modern humans, known scientifically as Homo sapiens, found in Israel. The earliest Homo sapiens remains found until now are half as old.

"It's very exciting to come to this conclusion," said archaeologist Avi Gopher, whose team examined the teeth with X-rays and CT scans and dated them according to the layers of earth where they were found.

He stressed that further research is needed to solidify the claim. If it does, he said, "this changes the whole picture of evolution."

The accepted scientific theory is that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated out of the continent starting sometime around 80,000 years ago. Gopher said if the remains are definitively linked to Homo sapiens, it could mean that modern humans in fact originated in what is now Israel.

Well, then, we all have the right of return, I guess.

On the other hand, most of these types of claims, the early press notices are the last you ever hear of them.

From Uncommon Descent: Falls da rain. People are starting to talk openly about Darwinism’s failures

2010-12-30T16:59:00.000-05:00

30 December 2010

New Peer-Reviewed Paper Challenges Darwinian Evolution
Jonathan M

Over recent months, papers challenging key elements of Darwinian theory — the kind of papers which are supposed not to exist — have increasingly been slipping through the net and finding their way into the peer-reviewed literature. One such paper, “Is gene duplication a viable explanation for the origination of biological information and complexity?,” authored by Joseph Esfandier Hannon Bozorgmeh and published online last week in the journal, Complexity, challenges the standard gene duplication/divergence model regarding the origin of evolutionary novelty. Read more here

The basic idea is

Bozorgmehr winds up drawing similar conclusions to those drawn by Behe in his recent Quarterly Review of Biology paper: While many mutations can, at first glance, appear to have resulted in evolutionary novelty (such as in the case of antibiotic resistance), closer inspection reveals that the selected adaptations do not, in fact, result in novel genetic components. Bozorgmehr explains that "[i]n many instances...a loss of function and regulation in a harsh or unusual environment can have a beneficial outcome and thus be selected for -- bacteria tend to evolve resistance to antibiotics in such a way through mutations that would otherwise adversely affect membrane permeability," (see Delcour 2009). One example cited in the paper concerns the acquisition of organophosphorus insecticide resistance in blowflies, which is conferred by a single amino acid substitution in a carboxyl esterase. But this insecticide resistance -- though adaptively selected -- is not a case of neo-functionalization, but rather a loss in enzyme activity (Newcomb et al. 1997).

(Links at destination site.)

I wonder if they’ll force this guy to recant. Maybe not. It would sound a bit tinny just now, wouldn’t it?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Peeking through the Forrest to look at the trees ...

2010-12-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

Christian Darwinists are fond of reassuring us all that Christianity and Darwinism are a natural fit. They don’t seem to have taught the chant to everyone yet. Old Earth creationist Stephen E. Jones has noted,

Barbara Forrest, has explored what she believes are the religious implications of neo-Darwinism and astronomy in her article, “The Possibility of Meaning in Human Evolution,” Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 35.4 (Dec 2000), 861-889. She writes (p. 862, notes omitted):

We have established scientifically some disquieting facts: (1) human beings have evolved from nonhuman life forms, meaning that (2) at one time we did not exist, and that (3) according to paleontological and astronomical evidence, at some time in the future we shall cease to exist. Furthermore, from a scientific standpoint, there is no discernible reason that we had to evolve in the first place, and there is no guarantee that we shall continue to evolve successfully; more hominid species have become extinct than have survived. The price of such knowledge has been the gnawing question of whether human existence has genuine meaning if it was constructed with cranes rather than supported by skyhooks, as Daniel Dennett says.

The problem of meaning is easily resolved for those who embrace a preconstructed system of meaning such as religion. However, religion cannot help us find meaning in any honest sense unless it can assimilate the truth about where human beings have come from, and the only real knowledge we have about where we came from we have acquired through science.

It’s convenient for Forrest - who has been accused of making her living by bashing design principles without understanding them - that no religion other than Darwinism would thrive by assimilating the “truth” that she imagines to be established “scientifically.” Actually, Dennett, whom she mentions, doesn’t seem sure that the human mind really exists, a position which ends the problem altogether, I guess.

Has the growth in interest in design helped to chase blatant philosophical materialism out of textbooks?

2010-12-29T21:00:00.002-05:00

Has the growth in interest in design helped to chase blatant philosophical materialism out of textbooks?

Just wondering. Have you seen examples from recent textbooks that match these examples from the1990s through 2001?:

From Joseph S. Levine and Kenneth R. Miller, Biology: Discovering Life (D.C. Heath and Co., 1st ed. 1992, p. 152:

Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless--a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit.

Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.

(My source tells me that this language was not removed for the 2nd ed. in 1994.)

From Douglas Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5:

Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…

From William K. Purves, David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, H. Craig Keller, Life: The Science of Biology (2001, 6th Ed., Sinauer; W.H. Freeman and Co.), p. 3:

Adopting this view of the world means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that the living world is constantly evolving, and that evolutionary change occurs without any ‘goals.’ The idea that evolution is not directed towards a final goal state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.

Hat tip for excerpts Stephen E. Jones, pictured above.

Eugenics and the Firewall: History is about the future, not the past ...

2010-12-29T15:00:00.002-05:00

Jane Harris Zsovan, the author of a recent book on the surprising history of Social Darwinist eugenics (= forced sterilization) in Canada, talks about a recent interview (not available on line in total):

Paula Kirman interviewed me recently for her article: "A not so proud history." The interview appears in the Fall Winter 2010 issue of Prairie Books Now! As I told Paula, "History isn't about the past at all. It's about charting a future in which our children are not unwitting victims of our mistakes.``

The Province of Alberta’s Eugenics Board existed in the context of a populist political culture that viewed political dissent as something nearing treachery (eg: William Aberhart`s Accurate News and Information Act and the Manning government`s lawsuit against the IODE over its publication of criticisms of Alberta Social Services). That culture helped political `leaders` to create a dual sense of self-righteousness and victimization among the electorate.

As I tell Prairie Books Now!: ...

Well, hear it from her.

I’ve now read her book, and alert readers generally to it for this reason, among others: The key figures in making eugenics law in the Canadian province of Alberta were evangelical Christians. That’s not what people would expect based on recent history, but it demonstrates an important principle: People can be carried away by the idea of doing good, and find themselves locked out of their own culture without a key. Anyone interested in the history of dangerous do-goodism should get and read this book.

Intelligent design and common ancestry?

2010-12-29T12:00:00.000-05:00

... the Darwinian cosmological story is subjected to an equally thorough shredding at each stage-by Denton, Johnson, Behe, and now Wells. A rare variation in this shredding is Behe's acceptance of common ancestry. The fact that he provisionally accepts common ancestry and yet remains a star in good standing shows Design's flexibility in tolerating members' evolutionary beliefs on certain topics.

- T. E. Woodward, Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design (Baker: Grand Rapids MI, 2003) p. 199.

Of course, by far the most controversial claim is common ancestry between humans and apes.

Common ancestry with apes is a central article of the new Darwin religion. Darwin “freed” people to recognize their kinship with apes. Hence the 98% or 99% chimpanzee riff, replete with engaging images of wise-looking chimps, a staple of popular media. (How come they never show chimps devouring monkeys alive?) We now even have an evolutionary advice columnist, who can tell you what an ape would do in your situation (just the information you really need).

The actual percentage of genetic similarity is more like 72%, consistent with what we observe,however risky it may be tosayso.

Now, let’s contrast all that with a design perspective: From a design perspective, common ancestry is simply one factor to be investigated among others. In any given case, it might be true, but might not. There have been many examples of convergent evolution, where things that look very similar are not closely genetically related. Too common, in fact, for the bedrock certainties of popular culture and the Darwinism that it gladly funds.

Hat tip for Woodward, Stephen E. Jones

Last cup of coffee!! At last - a man for Misshelver!

2010-12-28T22:00:00.002-05:00

A friend has discovered another Darwin troll “reshelving” books:

Reshelving antievolution books in the name of science

Every time I go into the Hastings bookstore here in Butte, Montana, I get annoyed to see antievolution books in the science section, especially since these books are not scientific in their antievolutionism, but motivated by the intelligent design movement or other religious factors. So, I usually remove the books from the science section and reshelve them in the religion section. Usually I find the books eventually returned to the science section, and wonder if the bookstore employee returning them ever thinks, “Why do these particular books keep ending up in the religion section?”

So, I keep moving them. Today I went to Hastings and had my camera with me. The copy of Signature in the Cell I moved a few months ago was in neither the science nor religion section, and was probably purchased. Today I moved The Edge of Evolution and The Darwin Myth away from the shelve directly under where copies of Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth were, and placed them next to – I just had to – the Adventure Bible and the Princess Bible in the religion section. [links inserted by post author]

I bet the troll “just had to.” His selfish genes made him do it.

He should meet Misshelver, another self-absorbed Darwin nit who thinks little of other citizens’ rights.

By the way, spend your Christmas money on these books, given that they are an anxiety for trolls. If you could order from Hastings, all the better. Anyway, boasts like this tell you what to expect if Darwinists get to be even more of a power in the land. Take heed if your head of state announces an affection for Darwinism.

Coffee!! But the fake past was so much more FUN!!

2010-12-28T11:34:00.002-05:00

In Science , we read:

Altering the Past: China's Faked Fossils Problem

Richard Stone

Specialists and collectors around the world have long decried the flood of sham fossils pouring out of China. But Science has learned that many composites and fakes are now finding their way into Chinese museums, especially local museums. One paleontologist estimates that more than 80% of marine reptile specimens now on display in Chinese museums have been "altered or artificially combined to varying degrees." One consequence of the fakery is an erosion of trust in museums, which are supposed to enlighten—not con—the public. Scholars, too, pay a price: They waste time sifting authentic specimens from counterfeit chaff. And a genuine blockbuster fossil can be destroyed by attempts to enhance its appeal. (Caution: Subscriber wall)
Besides which, the past can be faked to support whatever thesis an establishment likes ...

And an erosion of trust in museums may be long overdue. As Michael Ruse has noted*, E

volution after Darwin had set itself up to be something more than science. It was a popular science, the science of the marketplace and the museum, and it was a religion—whether this be purely secular or blended in with a form of liberal Christianity.

*For an informative account of the role of museums in the spread of evolution as
a religion, see Michael Ruse, The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates (Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000), pp. 103–05. For his own ambivalent view, see pp. 113–14.

Photo: Piltdown Man, Creative Commons license.

Microbes helping shape the weather?

2010-12-27T15:00:00.001-05:00

Lots of things are up in the air these days, ...

Recent research published in PNAS suggests that the diversity of microbial life in the air is on par with the soil, at least in urban areas, yet the air remains vastly understudied in comparison.

"Just seven or ten years ago we didn't realize bacteria existed in clouds," said Anne-Marie Delort, professor of microbiology and organic chemistry at Université Blaise Pascal in France. Now researchers know microbes act as a surface for the condensation of water vapor in the atmosphere, thus forming clouds. Recent research publish in Science shows microbes also play the same role during snowflake formation and other types of precipitation. The next step, Delort said, is to uncover their metabolic activity in clouds and influence on atmospheric processes. If they are metabolically active, she added, microbes could not only be acting as cloud condensers, but affecting the carbon and nitrogen cycles as well.

It all rather reminds one of Michael Denton's view, in Nature's Destiny that just about all ecological niches are actually occupied (plenitude of life).

Can anyone think of a niche that could be occupied but isn't?

DarwinLeaks: New blog aims to leak Darwin stories, no jail time anticipated

2010-12-27T09:00:00.002-05:00

With a hat tip, one supposes, to Wiki Leaker Julian Assange, a friend alerts me to DarwinLeaks hoping it will "do the same to Darwin and disciples from a history of science point of view." The blog is in Portuguese, but can be translated at the site. It certainly looked interesting; when I checked in, the question was why the correspondence between Darwin and Mivart, the well-known anatomist with whom Darwin fell out, has never been released to the Internet. There is some thought that it may falsify some current explanations for the breach between the two men.

Well, there is only one way to find out about that ...

That said, Darwinism thrives on its cultural power. It wouldn't matter who said what or how it relates to reality. Most of the interesting revelations are pretty widely available, actually, but the cost of the cognitive dissonance of "Darwin was wrong about the key things" is much too high for many people. They suspect they look better in a monkey suit than they would in their own, and I am reluctant to offer an opinion.