Intelligent Design

First, imagining the unimaginable

American-born Warwick U sociologist Steve Fuller writes to share the news that his book was Book of the Week in Times Higher, where Keith Ward tries to give a reasonable though plodding account of what he is writing about:

… , Fuller argues that there is no reason to call ID non-scientific. It is a good integrating hypothesis - as good as astrology (now disproved) and Darwinian evolution (another grand theory that may soon be disproved). He provides interesting examples of how religiously inspired ID views have driven the work of many eminent biologists, and suggests that ID should be promoted as “an openly religious viewpoint with scientific aspirations”.

That’s certainly not something that the previous Guardian writer even tried to do.

It’s dull, but it’s progress. And it’s interesting that Ward can bring himself to think that Darwinian evolution “may soon be disproved.” I wonder how many Darwinbots will write to protest any such suggestion?

The problem right now is actually a bit deeper and wider though than Ward suggests: Darwinian evolution is in no fit state to be disproved. If it were so, that would be progress.

To some, it means “cosmic Darwinism,” to others, the “selfish gene” that creates “memes” that rule our minds, to others, group selection (long a no-no). To some, it still means a parsimonious, testable idea: Natural selection acting on random mutation to produce new species.

But there is only weak evidence that new species commonly arise that way. There are a number of ways that they might in fact arise, including gene-swapping, neoteny, and front-loaded design.

Some think that sexual selection, Darwin’s other theory, should be included, but the problem is that at least one of its legendary icons (the peacock’s tail) is in serious* trouble.

Similarly, even common ancestry, long accorded the status of a religious** belief, is showing cracks. For one thing, gene swapping, where it occurs, makes ancestry irrelevant, unless you mean where a given gene came from - information that may not be available or even important.

Terminology fog

And still others, like Olivia Judson of the New York Times, want to abandon the term altogether. For example, Judson writes,

I’d like to abolish the insidious terms Darwinism, Darwinist and Darwinian. They suggest a false narrowness to the field of modern evolutionary biology, as though it was the brainchild of a single person 150 years ago, rather than a vast, complex and evolving subject to which many other great figures have contributed.

In my view, the main reason Judson wants to abolish the terms is that terms – of any type – force us to at least try to define what circumscribes the field we are talking about. What, for example, is it not?

Is “evolutionary psychology”, as portrayed in Psychology Today, a science? In what way? Are evolutionary biologists prepared to say that it is not a science? Few seem to be.

Their problem is most likely this: Once we confess that the obvious flim flam is not science, we will inevitably go on to address other questionable items, like the peacock’s tale and the Monarch-Viceroy butterfly mimicry puzzle. To the extent that those proposed examples of evolution according to Darwin’s theories of sexual and natural selection respectively at least try to be science, the evidence against them must count, as well as the evidence for them.

As friend David Rice III writes to say,

I’m inclined to agree …. I really think that the reason they don’t like the term is precisely because it IS a term. If the Darwinists don’t like the word Darwinism then the burden is on them to come up with another term that suits them. Instead they want to talk about the ‘field’ of modern evolutionary biology…a ‘field’ suggests an entire panoply of possible options making it that much easier for the Darwinist to maneuver around arguments against it - just switch the emphasis and you’re all of a sudden off the hook. Real arguments don’t work that way.

A war over terminology is much safer for evolutionary biologists right now than a hard look at the true state of the evidence for and against Darwin’s account of the history of life. So, here’s a prediction: Expect many more efforts to make a smokescreen out of terminology.

Which reminds me: One possible sign of significant change is that unleashing a horde of Darwinbots to swamp a discussion of evidence with protestations of faith in faith may be a much less useful tactic now than it was five years ago.

(* I suspect other examples are in trouble too. For one thing, the theory requires us to believe that the females of many relatively stupid species are somehow able to assess male fitness using burdensome secondary characteristics that supposedly pose a handicap that only the strongest can bear. Such theorizing exists only to protect the theory from falsification, not to explain the behaviour of hen birds.
**as when someone writes to me to ask if I “accept” common ancestry, using the same idiom as the door-to-door evangelist who wants to know if I “accept” Jesus.)

Also, just up at the Design of Life blog

Cells: Scientists learning to tap cells’ regenerative power, to regrow organs, fingertips

First detailed map of the Grand Central Station of the brain

Animation of life inside the cell as high art?

Cladograms: Reconstructing evolution’s history depends on the assumptions you start with.

Learning biology is more fun with free virtual cell animations

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

After reading American journalist Pam Winnick’s A Jealous God (Nelson, 2005), I informed her that I wish I had written it.

Winnick and I both started writing a book on the intelligent design controversy at about the same time. My By Design or by Chance? is a closeup look; Winnick used the ID controversy as a jumping off point for a number of interrelated science controversies - and produced a highly informative, easy-to-read book as a result.

She may also have damaged her career, as the Expelled film suggests, because she did not stick to a party line on many topics, but looked at what the evidence actually showed.

Party line vs. evidence? In science? Yes indeed. A profoundly illiberal trend is growing up in science. Once a party line becomes widely accepted, not only are dissenters ostracized and punished but truth, fair comment, and good intent are not permitted as defenses. If that sounds like a Canadian “human rights” commission, the resemblance is not accidental. The trend in science is part of a larger trend in society, though it is expressed in different ways.

Winnick begins with the 1970s debate on the use of live human fetuses in research. She focuses in particular on the sudden importance of “bioethicists” - whose main job, it appears, was to construct justifications for what researchers wanted to do. (pp. 28-29) For example,

“Research on the Fetus” was filled with the moral doublespeak of bioethics, the intellectual shifting, the illogic and the numerous loopholes that soon would typify nearly all writings in the emerging field of bioethics. (p. 80)

These are the things that mainstream journalists like Winnick, who wrote for the Pittsburgh Gazette, are just not supposed to say.

One must rather speak of “anguished choices” and “no easy answers” - as if, in the entire history of the world, the word NO! had never been invented and there had never been a reason to use it. She adds:

Virtually unnoticed at the time was the sub-rosa dismantling of the Judaeo-Christian ethic, the “bias for life” that at least in theory, holds each life dear. (p. 29)

In my experience, that dismantling wasn’t so much unnoticed as impolite to mention. To notice such a thing implied the moral judgement that the loss of Judaeo-Christian ethics was a genuine loss. But our North American society has grown suspicious of moral judgments of any kind, especially judgements in favour of that kind of thing.

Significantly, foreshadowing later developments, advocates of live fetal research called their opponents “scientific know-nothings” who were “anti-research,” thus subtly positioning science itself as on the side of dehumanizing trends.

Next: Part One: Science as popular religion

All the parts:

Introduction A journalist tries to understand a jealous god - materialist science
Part One: Science as popular religion
Part Two: The social justice costs of glorifying “science”
Part Three: Celebrity cosmology and assorted flimflam
Part Four: The simple, basic information needed to blow it all up the river

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Click here to listen. On this episode of ID The Future we feature a short clip about homology -- the idea that there is structural identity and similarity of parts in distinct species such as the pentadactyl plan of...

In their PLOS One paper titled Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints, Douglas D. Axe, Brendan W. Dixon and Philip Lu of the Biologic Institute, introduced new software known as Stylus. Stylus is intended to more realistically model proteins and evolutionary constraints with more accurate linkage of protein structure to function. The nature of some current models, compromises accurate assessments of protein transition possibilities and the mapping of sequences to changes in function.

Human languages have been used for the purpose of analogy to biological polymers like polypeptides. The analogous nature of letters to amino acids and whole sentences to function, suggests linguistic models. Stylus however is based, not on alphabets common to European languages, but rather on characters of Chinese origin. This is intended to generate more relevant biological models.

The intent of Stylus is to represent proteins which have a 20 letter alphabet. Unlike DNA, the manner in which proteins fold is critical to their function because protein structure (a three dimensional protein property) is essential to understanding protein function whereas sequencing and nucleotide identity explain DNA coding properties. The utility of Chinese pictograms lies in their analogy to structure. Quoting from the paper:

One such insight is that protein-like models (in contrast to RNA models) tend to show sparse connectivity between regions of sequence space that encode different structures [1]. In other words, stepwise paths through sequence space that accomplish a structural transformation without passing through unstructured intermediates appear to be rare. This clearly fits expectations for real proteins, where reorganization of core structure would seem to require complete loss of structure (and therefore function) along the way [4]. It also fits experimental observations, which show that the expected deterioration is common not only for transitions between different folds [5] but also, more surprisingly, for transitions between different sequences encoding the same fold [6].

The authors are pointing out that gradual changes, that would produce new protein innovations, are made problematic by properties innate to proteins. Even small alterations of proteins can radically alter protein structure. Effects of slight sequence changes on protein folding also are difficult to predict. Differences between protein families can entail few transition possibilities. A natural inference is an expectation of distinct structural origins for different functional groups of proteins.

Mike Gene doesn't post here any more, for family reasons. So I thought I would post the latest from his blog, The Design Matrix:

Recent research concerning tyrosine kinases continues to strengthen the case for front-loading evolution:

When it comes to cellular communication networks, a primitive single-celled microbe that answers to the name of Monosiga brevicollis has a leg up on animals composed of billions of cells. It commands a signaling network more elaborate and diverse than found in any multicellular organism higher up on the evolutionary tree, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered.
[…]
This treasure trove of diverse and novel tyrosine kinases took the study’s lead author Gerard Manning, who heads the Razavi-Newman Center for Bioinformatics, by surprise since it was long thought that tyrosine kinases are restricted to multicellular animals where they handle communication between cells.
“We were absolutely stunned,” says Manning. “Based on past work, we had expected maybe a handful of these kinases but instead discovered that this primitive organism has a record number of them. Two other essential parts of the tyrosine kinase network - PTP and SH2 genes - are also more numerous than in any other genome, showing that it is the whole network that is elaborated here.”
[…]
The Monosiga kinases are more divergent than anything previously seen in animals, which may help scientists understand the fundamentals of how all tyrosine kinase signaling works. Despite their extreme diversity, Monosiga kinases time and again arrive at the same solution to a problem, as do animal kinases, but using a distinct method for instance to create a sensor structure that emerges from the cell, or to target a kinase to a specific part of the cell. “This convergent evolution suggests that there are only a limited number of ways build a functional network from these components,” says Manning.

With all this new information, one obvious question remains unanswered: what is a single-celled organism doing with all this communications gear? “We don’t have a clue!” says Manning, “but this discovery is the first step in finding out.”

That a single-celled organism contains a signaling network more elaborate and diverse than found in any multicellular organism clearly indicates the plausibility of such an ancestral, front-loaded state. What’s more, note that the system has been set up such that similar outputs are reached through convergent evolution. I’ll be commenting on this in more detail a little later.

This is off topic. Specifically botany and mycology. I thought some readers might find it of interest.

I’m vacationing for the summer up north, it’s been wet and warm, perfect for mushrooms so this morning my daughter and I went walking through some woods and fields looking for mushrooms. I really wanted to get a sack of table mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus; button mushroom; portobello) to cook up. All I found in that regard was one lonely old portobello long past its prime. We found lots of boletes, amanitas, lbm’s (little brown mushrooms), death caps, and one odd thing that was sort of mushroom shaped, lumpy, light violet, but no gills I could discern. Disappointingly, no puffballs.

We did find something fairly rare though that I’d seen once before but didn’t know what it was.

Turns out it was a cluster of these, scientific name Monotropa uniflora, common names “Indian Pipe”, “Corpse Plant”, and “Ghost Plant”. My daughter googled them up when we got back using the search term mushroom flower. They have “flesh” that seems indistinguishable from mushrooms, no chlorophyl whatsoever, but they also have unmistakable leaves, petals, pistils, and stamens so I knew they had to be a plant. These things parasitize a mycorrhizal fungus (a fungus that is symbiotic with plant roots). So their ultimate source of nutrients is a normal green photosynthetic plant but it gets those nutrients second hand by way of a fungus and except for the obvious plant parts you’d swear it itself was a fungus.

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Recent research concerning tyrosine kinases continues to strengthen the case for front-loading evolution:

When it comes to cellular communication networks, a primitive single-celled microbe that answers to the name of Monosiga brevicollis has a leg up on animals composed of billions of cells. It commands a signaling network more elaborate and diverse than found in any multicellular organism higher up on the evolutionary tree, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered.
[…]
This treasure trove of diverse and novel tyrosine kinases took the study’s lead author Gerard Manning, who heads the Razavi-Newman Center for Bioinformatics, by surprise since it was long thought that tyrosine kinases are restricted to multicellular animals where they handle communication between cells.
“We were absolutely stunned,” says Manning. “Based on past work, we had expected maybe a handful of these kinases but instead discovered that this primitive organism has a record number of them. Two other essential parts of the tyrosine kinase network - PTP and SH2 genes - are also more numerous than in any other genome, showing that it is the whole network that is elaborated here.”
[…]
The Monosiga kinases are more divergent than anything previously seen in animals, which may help scientists understand the fundamentals of how all tyrosine kinase signaling works. Despite their extreme diversity, Monosiga kinases time and again arrive at the same solution to a problem, as do animal kinases, but using a distinct method for instance to create a sensor structure that emerges from the cell, or to target a kinase to a specific part of the cell. “This convergent evolution suggests that there are only a limited number of ways build a functional network from these components,” says Manning.

With all this new information, one obvious question remains unanswered: what is a single-celled organism doing with all this communications gear? “We don’t have a clue!” says Manning, “but this discovery is the first step in finding out.”

That a single-celled organism contains a signaling network more elaborate and diverse than found in any multicellular organism clearly indicates the plausibility of such an ancestral, front-loaded state. What’s more, note that the system has been set up such that similar outputs are reached through convergent evolution. I’ll be commenting on this in more detail a little later.

Click here to listen. This episode of ID the Future features part one of an interview by Casey Luskin with CSC Fellow Charles Thaxton, co-author of The Mystery of Life's Origin (1984), a foundational work for the intelligent design...

PZ Myers and Abbie Smith have an hour-long video conference here. A few surprising things, not the least of which is neither of them thought to bolster their points with the cussing that characterizes their blogs.

Anyhow, the first 15 minutes they talk about epigenetics, the Altenberg 16 conference, Susan Mazur, and try to downplay the Altenberg theme that evolutionary biology is in a vast state of disarray. Abbie lets us know how little she understands epigenetics and is evidently still laboring under the outdated Dawkins era notion that genes and proteins are everything. PZ, who is more up on the subject, looks a bit aghast after Abbie describes her understanding of epigenetics. If Abbie had been one of us he’d have called her an idiot but since she’s on his side he gently tried to correct her, saying his students have the same misunderstandings and it’s difficult to teach. Abbie rudely interrupts over and over as PZ attempts to explain. Several epigenetic mechanisms were discussed. One that wasn’t touched on, remarkably, was RNA in the cytoplasm. When a cell divides the cytoplasm of the mother is divided up among the daughter(s) and the vast, complex assortment of RNA molecules which participate in and control a huge number of cellular processes (more roles for RNA are constantly being discovered) is inherited by the daughter. Ostensibly this process of dividing up the cytoplasm along with copying the DNA goes back in an unbroken line of cells for billions of years… but I digress.

The next 8 minutes focuses on the 20 year long Lenski experiment with E.coli. PZ at this point reveals how little he knows about E.coli mistakenly saying that it is characterized by its inability to metabolize citrate while many other microorganisms can. To be fair that’s sort of true. Unlike many other microorganisms E.coli can’t metabolize citrate in the presence of oxygen (aerobic) so that’s one of the tests you make to help identify it. That’s a convenient test because it can be done on a petri dish in room air. The part he left out is that E.coli can metabolize citrate anaerobically. It has everything it needs to do the job except a cell wall transport protein (a shuttle that ferries a citrate molecule from outside the cell to the inside called citrate permease) that functions in an aerobic environment. Getting the citrate molecule across the cell wall in the presence of oxygen is the only hurdle the organism had to overcome. The rest of the process is hugely complex and all the necessary pieces for it are already there. The most amazing thing about Lenski’s experiment is how long it took for his original culture to find the few mutations necessary to get citrate molecules across the cell wall. When the exact sequence of mutations is ascertained I’ll bet dollars against donuts it falls well within Behe’s “Edge of Evolution”. Lenski is going to end up providing yet another confirmation for Behe’s predictions in EoE. Mark my words. But I digress again.

The next 7 minutes is about the life of grad students. PZ teaches at an undergrad university so he’s curious if things are still the same - low pay, long hours, etc. Abbie says it is with an exception that the vast majority of biology students are now female while the professors are all male. I’m not sure how new that is. When I took Human Anatomy and Physiology in college in 1979 there were 25 students in the class and I was the only guy if you don’t count the professor. To be quite honest it was possibly the most enjoyable class I ever took. All those young women and me the only young man - plus I was the best student who always had the answers when the prof asked a question. That’s as close to what it must be like to be a prince with a harem as I’ll ever experience! But I digress once again.

The last half hour is creationist bashing. Science pretty much left the building at that point. This is an improvement however. Usually these people spend about 75% of their time whining about creationist this and creationist that. They’ve got creationists-on-the-brain. It reminds me of one of my dogs with his ball. He always has it close, carries it around everywhere, always wanting someone to play fetch or catch. Nothing much new there either.

One thing I did find interesting at the very end was PZ still being clueless about specified complexity. He uses a beach full of sand as an example in complexity. All those grains of sand in a very complex unique pattern but all placed there by storms and tides and other chaotic processes. Yes PZ, the sand on a beach is exceedingly complex. What you don’t seem to grok is that it has no specification. It doesn’t have component parts that function together in a machine that performs some specific task. There are no abstract codes in a pile of sand like there is in a strand of DNA. There is no ribosome translating those codes into instructions for assembling a protein. There is nothing like that in a pile of sand. There is no specification. Maybe pictures will help him:

Complex unspecified sand

Complex specified sand

What part of that don’t you understand, PZ?

Another surprise was that PZ and Abbie both think our little blog at Uncommon Descent is the most popular “creationist” blog on the web. I’m flattered but I don’t know if that’s true. However, they try to play it down by saying it’s dwarfed by their blogs and is really insignificant in comparison. That is probably both true and false. True in the sense that the traffic is scads lower but not true in the sense of insignificance. They wouldn’t have much to talk about on their blogs if you take away their obsession over intelligent design (like my dog with his ball) and they get much of their source material from us. We seem to have overwhelming significance in that respect and we don’t get the traffic because they reproduce it on their own blogs. We still get the eyeballs on our material just not direct from the source. If it wasn’t for scientists like PZ and scientist wannabees like Abbie Smith there’s a good chance we indeed would not be noticed. Thanks PZ and Abbie. We don’t know what we’d do without you!

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Historically, we have always assumed that an amputated finger, for example, could not be regenerated. However, medical scientists are now finding that certain cells actually have the necessary information for regeneration. The can even share this capability with other cells, tissues, and organs. The secret is coaxing them to do it, and this informative CBS report highlights significant advances: Here is the YouTube link and here's the Tube:

The scientists, it should be noted, are not creating this ability; the information was there in the cell already, but special techniques are required to enable it to be used.

I’ve been saying for a long time that the computer climate model predictions don’t match up to actual observations. The global warming hysterics have been in denial trying to find faults with the observations instead of admitting the plain truth that the models are flawed. Here’s an article by an Australian climate researcher that tells it like it is. Quite refreshing.

No smoking hot spot
David Evans | July 18, 2008
The Australian

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.

Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hot spot. If you believe that you’d believe anything.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the “urban heat island” effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician’s assertion.

Until now the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest. Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn’t noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don’t you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.

Dr David Evans was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005.

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

In the July 9 edition of The Ottawa Citizen, Michael Shermer published an attack on aspects of Intelligent Design. The article, with comments from readers, can be found at:

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/views/story.html?id=711a0b47-29d5-426d-a273-a270817b000e&p=1

Shermer’s attack was brought on by a comment of Rabbi Reuven Bulka, published in the Citizen on July 7. Bulka had written:

“By the way, for the record, I have no problem with evolutionary ingredients in creation. This can co-exist quite comfortably with intelligent design, or God’s design, which is stretched out on an evolutionary canvass.” http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=efe4cbf9-dd5d-4e33-b1ed-0c0334095047&p=2

Shermer appears to scoff at Rabbi Bulka’s position. He opens his article with these words: “Can you believe in God and evolution? Yes, if you keep the two separated in logic-tight compartments.” From there he goes on to elaborate his notion of the distinction between religion and science, and to employ that distinction to argue (a) that God’s intentions (supposing God exists) are indetectable by scientific means, and (b) that intelligent design purports to detect the scientifically indetectable, and therefore is not science.

For Shermer, religion deals with the supernatural, and science with the natural. To say of anything that “God designed it” is to invoke the supernatural, whereas science must always refer only to the natural. So if God did something, science wants to know how God did it, and that means enumerating the chain of physical causes by which God achieved his desired result. Any attempt to explain something without reference to such a chain of physical causes is, for Shermer, not science. Since Shermer believes that intelligent design theory refers causation directly to God, without specifying the natural causes through which God works, he concludes that ID is not science.

There are other things in Shermer’s article which could be discussed, such as his equation of “reality” with nature, and “unreality” with the supernatural. In such remarks, Shermer reveals his own religious biases. But these biases, while perhaps indicative of his underlying motivations, are not directly relevant to his argument, and so, in order to stay focused, we will concentrate on the notion of “science” which underlies his critique of ID.

Shermer does not appear to understand the difference between two different kinds of explanation: explanation in terms of efficient causes and explanation in terms of final causes. An efficient-cause explanation focuses exclusively upon reconstructing the series of prior energy/matter interactions which have led inevitably up to the thing that one is trying to explain. Borrowing an example (from a letter-writer to The Ottawa Citizen who was critical of Shermer), if I try to account for a shot which sinks the pink ball in a game of snooker, and leaves the cue ball perfectly positioned to sink the black ball on the next shot, I can do so in purely causal terms: force applied, spin applied, initial direction of shot, loss of velocity after collision, angle of reflection off the cushion, friction from the felt, etc. “Science,” in Mr. Shermer’s narrow conception of the term, offers only this sort of explanation.

Not all explanations, however, are couched in terms of efficient causes. I can also “explain” the result of the snooker shot in question in terms of the intentionality of the shooter: his goals or aims in light of the rules of the game, including the order in which the colored balls are to be shot once the red balls are gone, and his desire to leave himself in a good position for the black ball after the sinking of the pink ball. This sort of explanation, which is explanation in terms of “final cause,” provides information which the simple efficient-cause analysis cannot provide. It answers the question “why” the balls end up where they do on a different level from the “physics” sort of answer given by the efficient-cause explanation.

Note that these two explanations, both of which answer the question “Why do the balls end up where they do?” are not incompatible. In fact, the efficient-cause explanation is in an important sense subordinate to the explanation in terms of the shooter’s designs: it is only because the shooter planned his shot in a certain way, that the chain of efficient causes took place. Had the shooter intended something different, the balls would have ended up in a different place. The “physics” explanation for the snooker shot is, therefore, in an important sense, not a full or satisfactory explanation for what occurred.

Intelligent design, as Mr. Shermer and almost all critics of ID fail to perceive (or pretend to fail to perceive), is not an explanation in terms of efficient causes. It is an explanation in terms of final causes. It argues that, whatever the chain of physical causes which led to the first formation of, say, the cardio-vascular system or the DNA-protein machinery, those causes were somehow orchestrated towards an end, and that this orchestration can be demonstrated by a mathematically precise science of design detection. ID does not attempt to reconstruct the series of efficient causes by which the emergence of biological structures was first orchestrated; however, if it is true that design is inherent in certain biological features, and that design cannot be explained without intelligence, then “intelligent design” is a legitimate cause of the biological system, just as it is the cause of the snooker shot which sinks the pink ball and leaves a person perfectly positioned for the black ball.

Further, since intelligent design is not wedded to any particular causal story, it can be understood in such a way as to leave the chain of efficient causes untouched; it doesn’t require any miraculous breaking of Mr. Shermer’s precious natural laws, any more than the snooker shot does. As snooker shots can re-arrange the balls, making use of fixed laws of physics, so biological systems can be arranged, through the fixed laws of chemical bonding and the motions of matter established at the beginning of the universe.

Thus, the rabbi’s original contention, to which Mr. Shermer objected, is correct: without keeping one’s mind in “logic-tight compartments,” one can believe simultaneously both in “evolution,” as a process of natural development, and in design by a brilliant mind of some kind, which in religious thought is usually termed “God.” Evolution and design, on such a view, are not contradictory but complementary and mutually reinforcing modes of explanation. Evolutionary explanation, couched in terms of mechanistic physics and chemistry, can suggest to us how the atoms in living things came to be arranged in the way that they are, but cannot explain to us the happy circumstance that atoms have just exactly the right set of properties to produce carbon-based life on earth. The design hypothesis accounts for why the atoms have just exactly those properties. Just as a full set of snooker balls thrown randomly on a pool table don’t sink themselves in the right order, so a set of chemical elements that was not carefully designed would not have produced life on earth or a genetic code capable of modification to form new species.

Thus, Mr. Shermer is wrong to suggest that “science” and “religion” necessarily either contradict one another, or must be kept in separate compartments. Science, in setting forth the efficient causes by which evolution proceeds, is only fully intelligible in light of an overarching design, which religion interprets as proceeding from the mind of God, and religion, which with the aid of mathematical analysis perceives the overarching design, can give no account of how the design was executed without science. The two work together hand in glove, efficient causes realizing the goal established by the final causes discerned by the religious thinker (or for that matter, by any truly rational philosopher or scientist).

To the view that I have sketched above (that a guiding mind or intellect works through natural laws to produce the designed phenomena of life), there is a putatively scientific alternative: the Neo-Darwinian theory. Neo-Darwinism asserts that the apparent designs in living things are produced, ultimately, by chance (for even chance filtered by natural selection boils down to chance). In other words, at the heart of the apparent rationality of the universe is a fundamental irrationality. Unreason produces reason; chaos produces order. By a strange cosmic irony, blind efficient causes (which cannot see or feel or plan or think), have produced living things (which have such abilities). Mr. Shermer does not appear to blink an eye as he endorses these improbable claims as the irrefutable results of “science.” It would appear that, when Mr. Shermer reads Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas or William Paley or Michael Behe, he reads with ruthless skepticism, but when he reads Carl Sagan or Michael Ruse or Will Provine or Richard Dawkins, he swallows pretty well any unsubstantiated efficient-cause speculation with complete credulity.

 

 

 

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Mike Gene authored a short blog item at The Design Matrix entitled Evidence and Truth. Quoting:

Yes, evidence is important when making decisions about our natural and social world, but relying solely on the evidence may very well deliver only a superficial, or even false, understanding of the world. We know this simply from the fact that in court rooms around the world, judges and juries have followed the evidence before them to determine guilty people are innocent and innocent people are guilty. This holds true even if we rule out corruption and biases.

With advances in DNA technology there have been headline stories recently of convicted criminals cleared of serious charges like rape after having spent years in prison. New technology produced new evidence clearing them of a crime for which juries, lacking such evidence, had voted for conviction. Advances in scientific research are made possible by technological progress. That in turn leads to more and sometimes contrasting evidence that can impact theories. More from the link:

Right there, in that scene, we see the difference between evidence and truth. Relying solely on the evidence may very well deliver only a superficial, or even false, understanding of the world.

Our understanding is shaped by our preconceptions. Here are some questions:

* If you are an ID critic the confirmation of what types of hypotheses would convince you that ID was a scientifically valid theory? What predictions?

* If you are an IDist what type of evidence would convince you that ID has no plausible future in the realm of science? Philosophy?

* Make two assumptions regardless of what you believe. Assume that evolution occurred as specified by mainstream theory but also assume that it was front loaded in that from the very first cell to the present time key phenotypic innovations were enabled by genomic features found in ancestral organisms. If we replayed the tape of natural history from the begining what would have to be front loaded at the outset to enable adaptation; evolution? Surely a capacity to replicate but what if anything else? Mechanisms that maintain genomic integrity? A genetic code? Mechanisms that enable gene expression; regulation? What?

And if initial cellular properties were specified but different from those actually found in earthly primordial cells, what would a replayed tape look like? Were eukaryotic life forms inevitable?

Here’s the closing disclaimer on a GodTube video about evolution (hat tip to bornagain77):

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

Paul Giem’s comment to my Faith and Reason post below is so good, I thought it deserved its own post. Read on to see how Paul demonstrates decisively that in the origin of life context (OOL) the materialists’ faith commitment is the sort of blind-leap-in-the-dark-in-the-teeth-of-the-evidence stretch of which they delight in accusing theists of making.

Paul is responding to a comment from Tom MH:

Tom MH,
It does seem like we share the axiom that the universe is rational, although we need to explore precisely what that means.
Does that mean that the universe is self-explanatory? If Big-Bang cosmology is correct, then there was a time when the universe was not self-explanatory. One can postulate a God, or multiple universes, or a super-universe. But the universe we know cannot explain itself, when pushed back beyond some 13.7 billion years. So, unless one is prepared to challenge Big-Bang cosmology, one must admit that rationality (for the universe) does not entail complete obedience to natural law (the laws of physics as we understand laws) and nothing else. For the laws of physics fail at the moment of the Big Bang. That’s why it is called a singularity.
Are there any other times at which there is evidence for a singularity? Are there any other times when the laws of physics fail to explain the observed phenomena? Probably the best candidate for such a time is at the origin of life. Consider three postulates:
1. Life exists at present.
2. Life could not have existed for a substantial period of time after the Big Bang.
3. Life comes only from life.
I believe we can agree on the first postulate. I believe that, given the Big Bang, we can agree on the second postulate. The real question is whether the third postulate is secure.
As you know, there was a time when the third postulate was believed to be demonstrably false. That time is gone. In fact, the whole point of evolution would be moot if the third postulate were routinely violated. Need some new phyla in the Cambrian? No problem. Trilobites, starfish, clams, hallucinogenia, and hagfish can just spontaneously pop into being. No need to postulate, let alone find, intermediates between ediacaran life and trilobites, for instance. For that matter, no need to find intermediates between reptiles and birds, or between chimpanzees and humans. They just spontaneously generated. The point is that it is generally recognized that the spontaneous generation of life is at least difficult and rare.
Is it even possible without the intervention of some kind of intelligence? We certainly don’t know the answer is yes by any kind of scientific experimentation. In fact, all our experiments to date argue that the answer is no. So if there is to be any evidence for the belief in abiogenesis, it must (at present) come from theory.
But as you also probably know, there is no coherent theory that explains the origin of life from non-life without intelligence either. Otherwise, Harverd scientists would not have gotten their grant to produce such a theory.
And the obstacles in the way of such a theory are formidable. They include (not an exhaustive list):
1. Miller-Urey apparati do not produce all the amino acids used in life.
2. Miller-Urey apparati produce numerous other compounds not used in life, and some that are toxic (the most prominent one being hydrogen cyanide).
3. Miller-Urey apparati do not produce sugars in the presence of ammonia, which is required for producing amino acids.
4. Miller-Urey apparati do not produce all the bases needed for DNA and RNA (Adenine, (HCN)5, being the only one made in appreciable amounts).
5. No known reaction will add bases to the 1-position of ribose (even living organisms do not synthesize the nucleosides that way, using either a complicated synthesis for adenine and guanine, or orotic acid for uridine and cytidine).
6. There is no known process for consistently forming one chirality (left-handed versus right-handed) of biochemical compounds from racemic (non-chiral or mixed chiral) reagents, outside of life itself.
7. There is no known way to get nucleoside triphosphates from nucleosides other than biochemically.
8. When nucleosides polymerize naturally into RNA, they form 2?-5? linkages rather than the 3?-5? linkages normally found in RNA.
9. When RNA is formed by RNA polymerase, shorter RNA molecules outcompete longer ones.
10. Reasonable requirements for the specificity of RNA required for the origin of life are vastly beyond the probabilistic resources of the universe.
11. Even given all the ingredients for life, life will still not spontaneously reorganize. That is why canned fool can sit on the shelf indefinitely without spoiling.
Thus all the evidence we have points to postulate 3 above being correct; life only comes from life. This appears to point to another singularity, this time after the universe began.
Postulating a material intelligence (as Dawkins allowed) doesn’t solve the problem. For then that intelligence must have arisen via some mechanism also. If it is life, then we still must allow for its spontaneous generation, or else a singularity for it. Non-living intelligence is even more of a reach. To postulate that computers, for example, can evolve without intelligent (e. g., from people) input completely strains credulity. And computers cannot have made it through the Big Bang.
So we are left with three alternatives.
1. There are laws of which we are totally ignorant that can produce life from non-living material, without the intervention of intelligence.
2. Life arose through a singularity with no cause, sometime after the universe was formed (implying a break in rationality).
3. Life arose through the action of an intelligent agent, whose intelligence is not dependent upon the organization of matter (which would make that agent supernatural).
Option 2, it seems to me, is irrational, and concedes a universe that is at least partly irrational. Option 3 is not irrational, but is not materialistic, postulating an entity or entities that is/are not restricted to the material. That is, it is rational, but not materialistic.
Option 1 is rational in one sense; we know that our information is incomplete, and this could be one more area where our information is incomplete. And belief in abiogenesis allows us to view the universe as completely (well, except for quantum mechanics and the Big Bang itself), explained by cause-effect relations.
But it is heavily faith-based. We have no experimental evidence for this belief, and the theoretical problems appear insoluble. We have here belief against all the evidence, analogous to the most daring leaps of religious faith imaginable, that is to say, faith not only without evidence but in the teeth of evidence. And it is even worse; there is no appeal to a God Who could reasonably do the feat that needs explaining. It is a miracle without God.
The rationale that I have seen for this leap of faith is usually that “science” has solved all previous problems and will solve this one too. But this argument is wrong, on two counts. First, even if successful, it would only establish that there was relative parity between the argument for the supernatural origin of life and those for abiogenesis. We would still be completely dependent on faith to believe in abiogenesis.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, “science” has in fact not solved all previous problems. Science has come up to a stone wall regarding the origin of the universe. In fact, “science” has come up to several difficult obstacles, issued promissory notes, and moved on without actually solving the problems. The origin of the Cambrian fauna is something that non-interventionalist evolutionary theory has simply postulated without fossil evidence. The origin of the flagellum in a step-by-step manner has never actually been demonstrated (the best try, that of Matzke, was actually a leap-by-leap explanation, and even then without any experimental evidence to back up his scenario). This insistence that nature must be self-contained is in fact faith against the weight of evidence.
Now if you want to believe in abiogenesis by faith, I won’t begrudge you. But some of us prefer to be a little more evidence-based.

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

We have previously seen that insulin obtained from cows has the ability to induce cellular changes in Hydra. This led someone to ask me whether Hydra itself produces insulin. While it is assumed that Hydra must produce some insulin-like molecule to react with its insulin-like receptor, no evidence for such an intrinsic ligand has yet to be discovered.

That bovine insulin can activate a cnidarian RTK is intriguing enough, as it opens up some doors from the perspective of front-loading evolution, but what if we traveled further back in time? Could mammalian insulin have an analogous effect on something that is not an animal?

Here is a link to a review article from several Brazilian labs that argues for the presence in insulin in plants. Let me pick out some interesting excerpts.

First, there is evidence that extrinsically added bovine insulin does indeed influence plant development. The authors first cite some earlier work:

After a long period in which no report is found in the literature of any plant physiological work related to insulin, Goodman and Davis (1993) reported that added insulin, insulin like growth factors I and II (IGF-I and IGF-II) accelerate the post-germinative development of fat-storing seeds (sunflower, watermelon and cucumber). They also measured increased activities of enzymes necessary for the conversion of fat to carbohydrate like fatty acyl CoA dehydrogenase, citrate synthase, malate dehydrogenase, isocitrate lyase, and malate synthase. No mechanism is suggested by the authors to explain this increase in enzyme activities although they hint at the possible increase in protein synthesis. The authors call attention to “the possibility that there are hormones and/or growth factors that have a regulatory role in both plants and animals” and some of these could be insulin-, and IGF-like proteins (Goodman and Davis, 1993).

They then cite some of their own work:

We found by immunofluorescence microscopy analysis that insulin, insulin receptor and phosphoserine proteins are localized to an internal tissue layer of the seed coat but not in cotyledon tissues of C. ensiformis. This region is assumed to be important in sugar transport to the embryo. We then employed bovine insulin to test if it has any effect on germination of C. ensiformis seeds. The results showed that insulin, vanadyl sulfate (an insulin mimetic compound), pinitol (a chiro inositol analogue) and glucose were able to accelerate C. ensiformis seed radicle and epicotyl development and on the contrary, tyrphostin (an inhibitor of insulin receptor kinase activity) inhibited these processes (Oliveira AEA, Ribeiro ES, da Cunha M, Gomes VM, Fernandes KVS, Xavier-Filho J - Insulin accelerates germination and development of Canavalia ensiformis (Jack bean) seeds. Submitted for publication).

C. ensiformis is an annual, semi-domesticated legume with long germination and developmental times making it a less than ideal model for germination and developmental studies. Therefore we utilized common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) as a more convenient model plant. We showed that increasing concentrations of added bovine insulin (for 72 h) promote an increase in the mass and size of radicles and epicotyls of P. vulgaris and also in the number of lateral roots. Additionally we extracted and purified a protein from embryonic axes (48 h), which cross-reacted with an anti-human insulin antibody (Santos, 2003).

Thus, not only does cow insulin influence development of Hydra, but it also influences the development of plants. And it gets even more interesting.

Our laboratory has mostly been directed to the elucidation of the biochemical basis of bruchid (insect) resistance shown by some legume seeds (Macedo et al., 1993; Fernandes et al., 1993; Xavier-Filho et al., 1996; Sales et al., 2000). As such, investigation of potentially toxic proteins from the seed coat of the legume Canavalia ensiformis to Callosobruchus maculatus (cowpea weevil) led Elenir Oliveira to isolate and purify a number of proteins from this material. One of these purified proteins was submitted to sequencing as an assignment for a training course. The resulting analysis showed unambiguously that the protein had the same amino acid sequence as bovine insulin (Table 1). To control for potential contamination, the analysis was repeated with different samples of the protein obtained from different batches of seeds and the amino acid sequencing analysis was also performed by two independent laboratories. After obtaining a total of seven analyses for the sequence we were convinced that the seed coat of C. ensiformis indeed contained a protein with a sequence equal to that of bovine insulin (Oliveira et al., 1999a). In this manuscript we suggested that molecules of insulin in seed coat tissues survive desiccation after maturation of the seed and, together with other proteins can be easily extracted. The high solubility of these proteins is certainly due to the lack of tannins and pigments in this tissue (Oliveira et al., 1999a; Oliveira et al., 1999b). These insulin molecules (and also a peptide fragment of a receptor-like-kinase accompanying the protein, see Table 2) in the seed coat seemed to be remains of constituents of signaling pathways probably involved in the transport of carbohydrate (Oliveira et al., 1999a). Contrary to our expectancies our results were received with disbelief.

and

We also choose a second fast growing plant, cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) to test for the presence of insulin during development. The protein was detected (by Western blotting) both in empty pods and seed coats but not in the embryo. Insulin was measured by an ELISA assay using an anti-human insulin antibody. The highest concentrations (about 0.5 ng.mg-1 of protein) of this protein were found in seed coats of 16 and 18 DAP (days after pollination) in which case the values were 1.6 to 4.0 times higher than the values found for isolated pods of any day. Insulin was isolated from 10 DAP empty pods by the method of Khanna et al. (Khanna et al., 1976), purified by C4-HPLC and submitted to N-terminal amino acid sequencing. The amino acid sequence was found to be equal to the sequence of bovine insulin and to the sequence of the insulin isolated from C. ensiformis seed coat (see above and Table 1) (Venâncio, 2001; Venâncio et al., 2003).

Here is Table 1:

Yet despite all these data, the authors acknowledge:

We know that up to now no gene sequence was found for insulin in the genome of Arabidopsis (Anon, 2000) or in any other plant genome already published. We do not have any explanation for the conflicting results and the others already referred to above.

This raises the interesting question of conflicting evidence. On one hand, we have a good bit of biochemical and cytological evidence that indicates insulin plays a role in plant development and that some plants not only possess insulin, but their insulin is the same as bovine insulin. On the other hand, sequence data to support this activity does not exist. When it comes to the sequence dilemma, one must ask whether this is this one widespread, yet subtle, contamination problem. Or is this an annotation problem? Or, if you really want to bake your noodle, might some plant genomes code for pieces of insulin sequence, such that insulin is created through elaborate RNA-processing events?

Whatever the answer, what does appear to be on solid ground is the theme whereby a mammalian hormone has the ability to influence not only the development of a simple animal like Hydria, but also of some plants. Yet does the story stop here?

Olivia Judson is on a mission to control the damage to Darwin’s hemorrhaging theory. Her latest at the NYTimes is to suggest that we stop using the term “Darwinism” because the field of evolutionary biology is so much richer than what Darwin gave us. Others have tried that strategy with equal laughable disingenuity (e.g., Paul Gross in criticizing David Berlinski for Berlinski making Darwinism the target of criticism).

CAPTION: OLIVIA JUDSON BUSY AT HER RESEARCH

But Judson gives the game away:

[Darwinism] suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn’t changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the “Origin.” He wasn’t, and it has. Although several of his ideas — natural and sexual selection among them — remain cornerstones of modern evolutionary biology…

Excuse me? Cornerstone? Christ is identified as the cornerstone of a well-known religious faith, so that faith is rightly called “Christianity.” Does Judson propose replacing “Darwinism” with “Darwinianity”?

Could we please dispense with any patronizing nonsense about Darwin being less than the messiah of a materialistic religion that pretends to find its justification in science. If Darwin was not the alpha and omega of evolution, then he was either a knave or a fool or a madman. Darwin did not leave us any other options. He did not intend to. [Hat tip to C. S. Lewis.]

If Judson is serious about dethroning evolution’s messiah, she needs to have a talk with University of Chicago’s Jerry Coyne, who writes:

There is only one going theory of evolution, and it is this: organisms evolved gradually over time and split into different species, and the main engine of evolutionary change was natural selection. Sure, some details of these processes are unsettled, but there is no argument among biologists about the main claims. . . . [W]hile mutations occur by chance, natural selection, which builds complex bodies by saving the most adaptive mutations, emphatically does not. Like all species, man is a product of both chance and lawfulness. [“Don’t Know Much Biology,” June 6, 2007, www.edge.org]

Coyne, of course, is here merely echoing Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. But if Judson remains unconvinced by Coyne, she might want to summon up the departed spirit of Stephen Jay Gould. In his STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY, Gould admitted that anything Dawkins really cares about regarding biological structures–their origin, function, complexity, adaptive significance–is the product of natural selection [see ch. 3 of THE DESIGN OF LIFE]. Gould was as much a Darwinist as Dawkins.

Judson really needs to work on demonstrating the proper respect for Darwin as his bicentennial approaches next year.

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

A friend writes to say that nonsensical materialism is now being marketed to engineers, via IEEE, the largest professional engineering society in the world, with over 365 000 members.

This article, “I, Rodney Brooks, am a robot”, appeared in the IEEE Spectrum which is the magazine that goes to all members:

I am a machine. So are you.

Of all the hypotheses I’ve held during my 30-year career, this one in particular has been central to my research in robotics and artificial intelligence. I, you, our family, friends, and dogs—we all are machines. We are really sophisticated machines made up of billions and billions of biomolecules that interact according to well-defined, though not completely known, rules deriving from physics and chemistry. The biomolecular interactions taking place inside our heads give rise to our intellect, our feelings, our sense of self.

Accepting this hypothesis opens up a remarkable possibility. If we really are machines and if—this is a big if—we learn the rules governing our brains, then in principle there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to replicate those rules in, say, silicon and steel. I believe our creation would exhibit genuine human-level intelligence, emotions, and even consciousness.

There is no single, simple set of rules that governs the operations of the human brain or the mind that inhabits it.

It would make as much sense to say, “I am a tree” as “I am a robot.” In some ways, more. Trees are life forms, like humans. There are at least some qualities that we share with trees (we need water, nutrients, and oxygen, and we grow, reproduce and die. We have roots and branches. And the older we are, the harder it is to move us without excessive damage.

Still, we are not trees. And we certainly are not robots.

The fact that we can say “I am” anything at all, or “I am not” that thing certainly apprises us that we are not trees or robots. Philosophers call it the “hard problem” of consciousness, the sense of self.

As Mario and I pointed out in The Spiritual Brain, the “computer” theory of how the human mind works is badly in need of an early retirement.

Note: I don’t know where the sign is from, but am told it is somewhere in Britain.

Also from The Mindful Hack

How not to study science …

God is not dead yet - but some haven’t gotten the memo

And from Colliding Universes,

Berlinski: Creation of everything out of nothing - a clinical level of self-delusion?

And what if the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t find the Higgs boson … ? Philosophy time!

Philosopher: God is not dead, and physics arguments are one of the reasons

Stephen Hawking, miffed over science funding cuts, to move to Ontario, Canada?

And from the Post-Darwinist,

When people laugh, fascists fear for their livelihoods

God is not dead yet, and in fact …

I must reserve a ticket for the Canuck Comics’ rally for freedom

Why would Brazilians want to hear from a chemist who thinks there is design in nature?

Enron and Darwinism - a perfect fit?

Trying to understand intelligent design? I see a hatchet in your future.

Look, you have lots of reasons to avoid pulling the quackgrass this weekend. Pull some of it anyway. It gets uglier every time you look at it. The act of looking at it unpulled makes it uglier.
 

<

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana

The American Physical Society alleged that Lord Monckton’s paper Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered was not peer reviewed when Monckton in fact thoroughly revised his paper in response to APS peer review. Monckton immediately demanded retraction, accountability and an apology.

The Editor of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics and Society launched a debate on global warming, inviting Lord Monckton to submit a paper for the opposition. After news that a major scientific organization was holding a debate on IPCC’s global warming, someone at the APS posted an indirect front page disclamation plus two very bold red disclamations in the Forum’s contents, and into the paper itself:
————————-

Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered Email | Print

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley . . .”

————————-

Alleging that a Peer of the Realm violated scientific peer review - when in fact Lord Monckton had spent substantial effort responding to the APS’s peer review - is just not done! As circulated by Dr. Benny Peiser to CCNet, and as noted by Dennis T. Avery at ICECAP,Lord Monckton responded immediately, emphatically demanding redress and an apology as follows:
—————————
19 July 2008

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Carie, Rannoch, PH17 2QJ, UK
monckton@mail.com

Arthur Bienenstock, Esq., Ph.D.,
President, American Physical Society,
Wallenberg Hall,
450 Serra Mall, Bldg 160,
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA 94305.
By email to artieb@slac.stanford.edu

Dear Dr. Bienenstock,

Physics and Society

The editors of Physics and Society, a newsletter of the American Physical Society, invited me to submit a paper for their July 2008 edition explaining why I considered that the warming that might be expected from anthropogenic enrichment of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide might be significantly less than the IPCC imagines.

I very much appreciated this courteous offer, and submitted a paper. The commissioning editor referred it to his colleague, who subjected it to a thorough and competent scientific review. I was delighted to accede to all of the reviewer’s requests for revision (see the attached reconciliation sheet). Most revisions were intended to clarify for physicists who were not climatologists the method by which the IPCC evaluates climate sensitivity - a method which the IPCC does not itself clearly or fully explain. The paper was duly published, immediately after a paper by other authors setting out the IPCC’s viewpoint. Some days later, however, without my knowledge or consent, the following appeared, in red, above the text of my paper as published on the website of Physics and Society:

“The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.”

This seems discourteous. I had been invited to submit the paper; I had submitted it; an eminent Professor of Physics had then scientifically reviewed it in meticulous detail; I had revised it at all points requested, and in the manner requested; the editors had accepted and published the reviewed and revised draft (some 3000 words longer than the original) and I had expended considerable labor, without having been offered or having requested any honorarium.

Please either remove the offending red-flag text at once or let me have the name and qualifications of the member of the Council or advisor to it who considered my paper before the Council ordered the offending text to be posted above my paper; a copy of this rapporteur’s findings and ratio decidendi; the date of the Council meeting at which the findings were presented; a copy of the minutes of the discussion; and a copy of the text of the Council’s decision, together with the names of those
present at the meeting. If the Council has not scientifically evaluated or formally considered my paper, may I ask with what credible scientific justification, and on whose authority, the offending text asserts primo, that the paper had not been scientifically reviewed when it had; secundo, that its conclusions disagree with what is said (on no evidence) to be the “overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community”; and, tertio, that “The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions”? Which of my conclusions does the Council disagree with, and on what scientific grounds (if any)?

Having regard to the circumstances, surely the Council owes me an apology?

Yours truly,
THE VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY
———————————–

Monckton’s demand for redress and an apology from the APS is being picked up on the internet.

How will the American Physical Society respond to Lord Monckton’s procedural and scientific gauntlets?

As of noon on Saturday July 20, 2008, the offending paragraph in the table of contents had been removed. However, this offending paragraph was still very much evident in Monckton’s paper Climate Sensitivity Revisited. It was also evident in the Forum’s full PDF of its July, 2008 newsletter Physics and Society Vol 37, No 3, p 6.

The APS’s PeerGate scandal may well prove to provide much greater publicity and serious examination of Monckton’s thesis than if the disclaimations had never been posted. It also exposes the superficiality of statements by executives of the American Physical Society and other scientific organizations supporting the IPCC’s global warming. Those statements were typically not submitted to the rank and file for scientific peer review, nor were they typically voted on by the rank and file. Whatever will come out of this PeerGate Scandal?
{PS DLH corrected Applied Physics Society to American Physical Society}}

Copyright © 2008 Uncommon Descent. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@www.uncommondescent.com so we can take legal action immediately.
Plugin by Taragana