A colleague of mine posted this on list to which I subscribe. It raises some interesting questions about the limits of adaptability, the limits to preadaptation/exaptation, and the extent to which selection presupposes adaptability. I’m not sure I buy the entire argument here (see the post on this blog about the evolution of nylonase), but I would like to see the insights below vigorously discussed on this blog. Are organisms simply more adaptable than can ever be explained on a purely evolutionary basis? For example, we’ve all heard of the experiments where human subjects wear goggles that flip their visual experience upside down. After some period of time the brain/mind/soul flips things upright. Since never in evolutionary history could anything Read More ›

Arthur Asuncion sends some links about the recent University of California, Irvine ID colloquium. I had the opportunity to attend, and reported on the event in a previous UD blog posting. Gil Arthur’s informal summary: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~aasuncio/2006/05/colloquium-on-origins-was-success.htm Arthur’s colleague’s informal summary: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~aasuncio/2006/05/thoughts-on-wednesdays-origins.htm The New University Article (campus newspaper): http://www.newu.uci.edu/article.php?id=4742 Daily Pilot Article (affiliated with LA Times, and more pro-evolution): http://www.dailypilot.com/education/story/45788p-69359c.html Perspective from Robert Camp (a skeptic): http://litcandle.blogspot.com/2006/05/what-if-they-held-colloquium-on-id-and.html

Nanotube bundles could be used as motors for nanodevices from PhysOrg.com
Even the smallest devices, assembled at the molecular level, need motors and oscillators. UC Riverside Mechanical Engineering Professor Qing Jiang thinks bundling groups of carbon nanotubes together could make an ultra-efficient and accurate nano-oscillator.
[…]

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Good news Haeckel lovers and everyone else who is fascinated by morbid 19th century charlatans. We all know Ernst Haeckel’s ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny/ embryonic recapitulation/doctored drawings. But one of his lesser known contributions to literature is a book called The History of Creation (this is the short title; the long title is set forth below), in which he divides people up into different species. The book was on most Nazis’ “must read” list. Dr. David C. Bossard has graciously scanned in both volumes of the massive work. It is very interesting reading. Here’s the full title of the book Dr. Bossard has scanned in: Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: Or The Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by Read More ›

J.B.S. Haldane first described the ‘cost of substitution’ and its limitation on the speed of evolution. That gave rise to a problem (see, for example, Dodson), known today as Haldane’s Dilemma. The problem is more severe in organisms with low reproduction rate and long generation time, such as the higher vertebrates: elephants, whales, apes and humans, etc. Evolutionary geneticists saw this as a compelling issue. Maynard-Smith and Kimura each cited it as the main reason for their revolutionary new views of evolutionary process.
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This weekend I received the following letter (reprinted here in its entirety) as a pdf file from Kevin Padian: Dear Bill, The May 10 posting on your weblog makes a vicious, false, and defamatory accusation against me based on factual errors and a thorough distortion of my actual statements. Your smear of my character demands an immediate retraction and apology. In the first place, you completely distorted what I said by quoting out of context. The contrast that I drew between the demographics of your audience and mine made a point completely different than your insinuation. What I said (in toto, not simply in the isolated snippets that you distorted) is that your audience – which I described accurately and Read More ›

Question: What is a sure sign that a scientific methodology has a big problem?
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“Quote Mining” is a pejorative term used to refer to the practice of compiling quotations, often from one’s opponents. As anyone who has studied evolution for any length of time knows, one need not quote ID proponents or creationists for authority against evolution or Darwinism. The Darwinists themselves can be quoted for practically every proposition that an ID proponent or a creationist would advance. When this is done, however, Darwinists often level the charge of “quote mining,” and accuse their opponents of taking the quotations out of context. For example, in his 1973 article “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote:

Their [i.e., creationists’] favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin.

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May 2006, Scientific American, Letters

Assessing Deadly Certitude

In “Murdercide” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer is once again dead-on (forgive the pun): it is inapt to think of suicide bombers as typical suicide victims. Rather than succumbing to despair and depression, they are committing what they consider affirmative acts of faith. In short, they are religious fanatics, hardly different from the murderers of abortion doctors, except that the latter zealots don’t kill themselves as well.

Shermer cites Princeton University economist Alan B. Kreuger’s finding that some countries that have spawned many terrorists (Saudi Arabia and Bahrain) are economically well off yet lack civil liberties, whereas poor countries that protect civil liberties are unlikely to spawn terrorists. That might be a good correlation, but a better factor than civil liberties is probably the degree of fundamentalist religious extremism present in a country. The murderers of 9/11 were Islamic jihadists first, citizens of their various nations second.

Kevin Padian
Kensington, Calif.

It appears Kevin hates and fears religious fundamentalists of all stripes and considers them murderous fanatics. Note how he equates suicide bombers with those who kill abortion doctors saying only killing themselves afterward is what separates the two. Kevin Padian is one sick puppy with an irrational hatred of religious fundamentalists.

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The Biological Frontier of Physics Rob Phillips and Stephen R. Quake PHYSICS TODAY May 2006, page 38 http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-5/p38.html … The cell’s nanometer-scale machines are mostly protein molecules, although a few are made from RNA, and they are capable of surprisingly complex manipulations. They perform almost all the important active tasks in the cell: metabolism, reproduction, response to changes in the environment, and so forth. They are incredibly sophisticated, and they, not their manmade counterparts, represent the pinnacle of nanotechnology. Yet scientists have no general theory for their assembly or operation. [AND YET …] It is surely one of the triumphs of evolution that Nature discovered how to make highly accurate machines in such a noisy environment.

Here is a substantially expanded version of my theodicy paper that was earlier discussed on this blog (go here for the earlier discussion): http://www.designinference.com/documents/2006.05.christian_theodicy.pdf.

I had a great time last night at the ID colloquium on the UC Irvine campus, and had the opportunity to meet Paul Nelson for the first time. He is an extraordinarily bright, articulate, insightful, and congenial fellow. The thought-provoking and information-filled seminar was excellent in every way, and I was particularly impressed with the UC Irvine professors on the opposing side (Walter Fitch, Timothy Bradley and Gregory Weiss). The debate focused on science, logical inference from the evidence, and state-of-the-art scientific research — with, of course, occasional and inevitable detours into the philosophical and theological implications of the issues — but always in a very respectful and civilized manner. Would that the ID/Darwinism debate be this civilized and informative Read More ›

This might be one of those relatively “simple” systems that could–like the bacterial flagellum–become a primary example used by ID proponents.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-05/cp-nro050306.php

By using an electronic ultra-high-speed camera, researchers have characterized the explosive discharge of stinging jellyfish nematocytes and show that this event represents one of the fastest cellular processes in nature. The research is reported by Thomas Holstein of the University of Heidelberg and his colleagues in the May 9th issue of Current Biology. Read More ›

[From a colleague:] Last night author Tom Wolfe gave the annual Jefferson Lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. His two hour long speech was entitled “The Human Beast.” In more words (sometimes explicitly stated) he said that determinism is true, there is no free will, there is no I , evolution is a fact, there is no nature to man, and God is dead. He spoke of Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche as if speaking of a beloved children. The interesting part was that he slammed the neo-Darwinian synthesis. He said that it’s not all in the genes. According to Wolfe (paraphrasing from what I remember) “Evolution ended 11,000 years ago when man acquired language. Once man Read More ›

(In an effort to help my IDEA comrades at Cornell I revisit the issue of Genetic-ID. My previous post on the issue caused some confusion so I’m reposting it with some clarifications. I post the topic as something I recommend their group discuss and explore.)

The corporation known as Genetic-ID (ID as in IDentification, not ID as in Intelligent Design) is able to distinguish a Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) from a “naturally occurring” organism. At www.genetic-id.com they claim:

Genetic ID can reliably detect ALL commercialized genetically modified organisms.

I claim that detecting man-made artifacts (like a GMO) is a valid instance of applying the Explanatory Filter.

The Explanatory Filter is used all the time (implicitly):

The key step in formulating Intelligent Design as a scientific theory is to delineate a method for detecting design. Such a method exists, and in fact, we use it implicitly all the time. The method takes the form of a three-stage Explanatory Filter.

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