2006

Coulter Does NYT a Favor; Reviews Own Book
by Ann Coulter

HIGHLIGHT: Students are actually required to wear “Creationism Is Shameful” T-shirts in Dover, Pa., where — thanks to a lawsuit by the ACLU — the liberal clergy have declared Darwinism the only true church, immunized from argument. Ye shall put no other God before it. Not one.

Liberals believe in Darwinism as a matter of faith, despite the fact that, at this point, the only thing that can be said for certain about Darwinism is that it would take less time for (1) a single-celled organism to evolve into a human being through mutation and natural selection than for (2) Darwinists to admit they have no proof of (1).

If only Darwinism were true, someday we might evolve public schools with the ability to entertain opposable ideas about the creation of man.

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The long-anticipated book Godless: The Church of Liberalism was finally released this week. If the New York Times reviews it at all, they’ll only talk about the Ann Coulter action-figure doll, so I think I’ll write my own review. Read More ›

New mathematical method provides better way to analyze noise http://www.physorg.com/news69001445.html Humans have 200 million light receptors in their eyes, 10 to 20 million receptors devoted to smell, but only 8,000 dedicated to sound. Yet despite this miniscule number, the auditory system is the fastest of the five senses. Researchers credit this discrepancy to a series of lightning-fast calculations in the brain that translate minimal input into maximal understanding. And whatever those calculations are, they’re far more precise than any sound-analysis program that exists today. In a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marcelo Magnasco, professor and head of the Mathematical Physics Laboratory at Rockefeller University, has published a paper that may prove to be a Read More ›

Gold Strike in Science World, June 06, 2006
Source: University of Adelaide
URL: http://www.physorg.com/news68816511.html

A University of Adelaide PhD physiology researcher has discovered a world first: a diving insect that can regulate its buoyancy in water, just like a scuba diver.

The findings of Phil Matthews, 24, in relation to the backswimmer (Anisops deanei) were published in the prestigious international science journal, Nature, last month.

When Mr Matthews submitted the findings of his research in January, he was convinced “it would trickle down the tree and get buried under hundreds of other submissions.”

Instead, his paper was accepted by Nature and published on 9 May, immeasurably boosting the young physiologist’s career prospects on an international scale.

The paper discusses a significant finding in the physiology world relating to the backswimmer. It appears that these bugs use haemoglobin-containing cells in their abdomen to supply oxygen and regulate their buoyancy, a quirk of nature unique to backswimmers. Read More ›

Over at antievolution.org Wesley Elsberry tries to write an obituary for ID. Arden Chatfield faithfully rewords and repeats his master’s hallucination in the next comment. The kicker is a cat named GCT who asks if anyone has heard from Behe or Gonzalez lately? No, I haven’t really heard from Behe or Gonzalez lately but maybe I missed Behe and Gonzalez because I was preoccupied in hearing ID recently supported by the President of the United States, the Governor of Texas, and the Governor of Florida as well as some U.S. Senators and other state governors. What Wesley and his motley crew just don’t get is that the science argument in ID vs. NDE is over. ID may or may not Read More ›

Joe is an archaeologist at a major university. Not long ago, he came across evidence which was strong enough to convince him that there lies somewhere in the Andes a fabulous ancient city which has since been lost and forgotten. Confident that he knew the location of the city, Joe was able to acquire a grant to fund an excavation and traveled to a village not far from where he had planned to dig. However, after lengthy conversation with the villagers, Joe discovers that the lost city is most likely not where he had originally planned to dig and could very well be at either of two other locations–both of them far less easily accessible than the original site.
Read More ›

Definition: The amount of energy exerted by an average-sized Darwinist (5′ 5″, 200 lbs) freaking out for 60 seconds at 70 degrees Fahrenheit on visiting the Discovery Institute website. Exercise: Convert this unit to proper SI metric units. Exam question: What mean rate of darwins over what length of time is required for Darwinism to implode and be a thing of the past? Justify your answer.

In my previous post, I attributed a deliberate misquote to the author of a PT blog posting. The PT author gave no citation for the quote (why was that??), so I took it to come from my book NO FREE LUNCH, which it did, though the quote as given at PT left out some crucial portions of text. As it turns out, the quote in question appeared in an earlier paper of mine (unpublished except on the web, portions of which were then incorporated into NFL) exactly as it appeared at PT (see http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_idcomingclean.htm). I therefore withdraw the charge of egregious quotemining. On the other hand, I don’t at all withdraw charge of needless crowing about a nonexistent physics error. Read More ›

In still another post at PT (go here), I’m charged with committing a basic physics error in my book No Free Lunch, much to the delight of the gallery that comments there (based, by the way, on a deliberate misquote — see below). Too bad that Freeman Dyson agrees with me and not with them. Here, then, is the pearl: http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt. Go trample on it. And having trampled on it, go email Freeman and get him to distance himself from my views even though the section of NFL cited merely expands on his and Frank Tipler’s ideas.

The light from the distant galaxies will be strongly red-shifted. But the sky will never become empty and dark, if we can tune our eyes to longer and longer wavelengths as time goes on. –Freeman Dyson

In addition, the author of the PT post deliberately misquotes me, juxtaposing two passages from my work without any indication that several pages of text intervene between the passages. Here is the passage attributed to me at PT exactly as it appeared there (at the very least, there should have been an ellipsis before “Certainly quantum mechanics …” as well as an indication that his actually is not the start of a sentence):

What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all. Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not ultimately the issue here. Certainly quantum mechanics is much more hospitable to an information processing view of the universe than the older mechanical models. All that’s needed, however, is a universe whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to deterministic natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus have the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the backdrop of randomness).

And now here is the full text with the two passages marked in bold. Note that the PT post simply kludges those passages together (you’ll have to scroll down quite a ways to see the connection). By the way, I’ve saved the page at PT just so that they don’t insert ellipses and say there never was a problem:

How much energy is required to impart information? We have sensors that can detect quantum events and amplify them to the macroscopic level. What’s more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart information into the universe without inputting any energy at all.

Limits, however, are tricky things. To be sure, an embodied designer could impart information by employing arbitrarily small amounts of energy. But an arbitrarily small amount of energy is still a positive amount of energy, and any designer employing positive amounts of energy to impart information is still, in Paul Davies’s phrase, “moving the particles.” [[In contrast to the PT post, the possibility of infinite wavelength, zero energy, and zero bandwidth therefore never arises. –WmAD]]. The question remains how can an unembodied designer influence the natural world without imparting any energy whatsoever. It is here that an indeterministic universe comes to the rescue. Although we can thank quantum mechanics for the widespread recognition that the universe is indeterministic, indeterminism has a long philosophical history, and appears in such diverse places as the atomism of Lucretius and the pragmatism of Charles Peirce and William James. Read More ›

A post at PT (go here) claims that recent work supporting a naturalistic origin of single chiral forms for amino acids (as exist in extant organisms and presumably had to occur under prebiotic conditions) constitutes a false positive for the design inference. The post also cites a case of someone using my design inference apparatus to argue for design from homochirality, but I personally have never done so (to the best of my knowledge, you won’t find any mention of “chirality” in the papers on my designinference.com website). Even if this research were entirely successful at showing how to get high concentrations of single chiral forms (at this point the research merely shows a statistically significant bias), it would not Read More ›

Get a load of this journal’s title: Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. Who or what is doing the inspiring? A bottlenose dolphin exhibits porpoising in the wake of a boat, a behavior that increases the animal’s swimming efficiency. The dolphin’s spindle-like body shape, along with other characteristics, continues to inspire marine vessel design. Photo credit: NASA. — According to Gray’s paradox, dolphins swim faster than they should be able to. Since Gray, scientists have discovered flaws in the details of the paradox, although some explanations of these creatures’ aquatic grace have proven to hold more water than others. . . . Citation: Fish, Frank E. “The myth and reality of Gray’s paradox: implication of dolphin drag reduction for technology.” Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. Read More ›

There is a growing body of experimental knowledge about the evolution of genomes, which shows that decidedly directed forces at work. The genome is best viewed, not as a happenstance gathering of parts, but as a holistic mechanism which functions as a whole. A good summary paper of these sorts of ideas is Mutation is modulated: implications for evolution. While the author does attempt to reconcile this directed view of evolution with Darwinism, ultimately it is the directed mutation, not the reconciliation with Darwinism, which is supported experimentally. Some interesting points about the genome: Tandem repeats can be used as tuning knobs to quickly and reversibly adjust biological function of genes The vertebrate immune system has “an integrated set of Read More ›

Look at the following abstract of a paper posted today at astro-ph: Message in the Sky S. Hsu, A. Zee To appear in Mod.Phys.Lett.A http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0510102 ABSTRACT: We argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a stupendous opportunity for the Creator of our universe (assuming one exists) to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. Our work does not support the Intelligent Design movement in any way whatsoever, but asks, and attempts to answer, the entirely scientific question of what the medium and message might be IF there was actually a message. The medium for the message is unique. We elaborate on this observation, noting that it requires only careful adjustment of the fundamental Lagrangian, but no Read More ›

(January 3, 2004) Linguistics in the US is now controlled by a single satrap and his school — Noam Chomsky at MIT. No one placed him in a position of power; and no one — not me, for sure — questions his brilliance or the remarkable nature of his work; nonetheless, Chomsky and his students and associates have placed a literal strangle-hold on linguistic research in the US, amassing for themselves all of the available prestige. When on very rare occasions, the satrap proposes to question doctrines held further up the Mandarin ladder, he is promptly rebuked. The process is interesting to observe; it is, in fact, fascinating. I happen to know that Chomsky has long been a skeptic about Read More ›

This movie review may seem off topic, but it raises important questions about the abuse of science in our culture.

GORE’S HOT AIR
By KYLE SMITH

May 24, 2006 — AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
http://www.nypost.com/movies/66485.htm

AL GORE’S global-warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is sure to get an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, but Gore should campaign for Best Actor, too.

Avoiding the usual vein-popping diatribes, he comes across as learned, calm and folksy. But much of what Gore says in this slide show he gives to people whose minds are not yet fully formed (undergraduates, actors) is absurd, and his assertions often contradict each other.

He implies that no reputable scientists dispute anything he says – basically, that the ice caps are melting and people on the 50th floor of the Empire State Building had better learn to swim. But there is wide disagreement about whether humans are causing global warming (climate change preceded the invention of the Escalade) and about whether we should be worried about the trends. Look carefully at Gore’s charts and you’ll see that the worst horrors take place in the future of his imagination. Read More ›

Scientists take cues from nature to solve modern tech mysteries
GREG BLUESTEIN
Associated Press
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/14740340.htm

EXCERPT: On his Web site, William Dembski, a leading activist for the intelligent-design movement, cattily dissected the Georgia Tech center. “Here’s how it works: we find some amazing system in the biological realm, determine how to reverse engineer it, and then design and build a parallel system to serve our needs. But of course, the original system evolved by blind trial-and-error tinkering … To think that it was actually designed because we had to design its human counterpart is just plain stupid.”

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ATLANTA – One of the greatest challenges for robotics engineers is building a machine that actually walks like one of us. Capturing the organized fall that allows humans to get around rather gracefully has, in most cases, come off as – well – rather robotic.

Scientists in the rapidly maturing field of biologically-inspired design believe in turning to organic processes and embracing biological principles to solve such scientific stumpers. They argue that technology can learn much from the world’s most rigorous process: Evolution.

“If you think of organisms as products, all the bad ones have been recalled. Those that have survived evolved over millions of years,” said Marc Weissburg, a biology professor and co-director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design.

Man has always looked to nature for its inspiration, capturing the sun to create fire and copying birds to achieve flight. But in the last 30 years, that tendency has been honed into a scientific field that is enjoying a growing number of devotees.

Two centers dedicated to the field have opened up within the last year, one at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and another at the University of California, Berkeley. And last month, dozens of researchers in the field gathered in Atlanta to share their experiments, in what observers said was an encouraging sign of its coming of age.

A range of projects probing rat whiskers, fish jaws and worm brains made up a Noah’s Ark-sized display of the innovations the field could yield. Read More ›