2007

The blog, Anarchic Harmony , operated by William J. Murray, is worth a look. About many world’s theory (= every time you turn right instead of left, a new universe is created in which you turned left) Murray writes,

I thought you might be interested in an argument I came up with in a new blog about how the MWI theory, which scientists are now starting to invoke in order to explain the anthropic principle and the origin of life, supports ID theory and indicates it would in fact be a better scientific model to use in many cases.

Say what? [also, links to Mindful Hack stories below] Read More ›

Friends draw my attention to this Banned Books Week event at Baylor, and this hasty reassurance that we are NOT supposed to think that there is any clear comparison between the suppression of Bob Marks’s evolutionary informatics lab and the banning of books. (Hat tip Anarchicharmony’s William J. Murray.)

No, there isn’t. At Banned Books Week, so far as I can tell from the advertising, you mostly snore through old chestnuts whose ideas have long been accepted or dismissed by most of society. You don’t learn about dangerous ideas that genuinely threaten the CURRENT establishment. Oh, and you might hear calls for violent jihad, et cetera, that some have tried to ban.

The jihadis actually do pose a physical threat to subway, train, and airline passengers, as well as restaurant and supermarket patrons. But whether the best way to address the problem is by banning access to detailed information is a question of security strategy rather than ideas as such. I have yet to hear of anyone who wanted to be a jihadi’s blast victim – but complained that the government was somehow interfering with that individual’s personal liberty by preventing terror attacks … (Oh, make my day … surprise me. Tell me about such a case … )

The best way to see what happens when someone genuinely threatens the current establishment’s illusions is not to look at ID guys like Guillermo Gonzalez or non-Darwinists like Rick Sternberg – interesting as their cases are. I always say, look at Larry Summers, once Harvard prez, now Unperson. His crime? Only to say what every thinking person actually knows: That the preponderance of men in maths and hard sciences is most likely based in nature, not social prejudice.

It is instructive to note that the vast majority of the people who would nod approval at propositions as foolish as the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution probably purse their lips at Larry Summers, who has nothing on his side but the preponderance of the relevant evidence. However human evolution happened, it left more men than women with the types of aptitudes that are rewarded in math and hard sciences.

So the tendency for Banned Books Weeks to be, essentially, dinosaur halls of the mind, is part of a trend, actually. Go here, here, and here for recent examples of the pervasive and growing problem that genuinely challenging ideas are increasingly banned or shunned. And go here if you want to help do something about it.

How bad has it got? Pretty bad, actually.

In The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I chuckled at the ideas that The Edge (Wedge the Edge! – d.) thought “dangerous” in 2006: Read More ›

[Comp Sci. /Eng, Informatics] I felt compelled to offer a tribute….. A great pioneer of Intelligent Evolutionary Design and non-Darwinian evolutionary computing passed away September 20, 2007. See this Washington Post Article: Ryszard Michalski; Shaped How Machines Learn. Michalzki created the notion of Intelligent Evolutionary Design and advanced the hypothesis of non-Darwinian evolutionary computing. From Foundations of Intelligent Systems: 12th International Symposium In contrast to Darwinian evolution, an intellectual evolution is guided by an “intelligent mind,”…. Every Easter at George Mason, Campus Crusade would flood the campus bulletin boards with a list of professors offering to share their wisdom and knowledge with students. Ryszard S. Michalski’s name was always on the list.

A couple of days ago I received the following email from a student in France:

 Hello,First of all, please excuse my poor English (I am a French native).  I am currently writing an essay in epistemology with two of my co- students (I’m in second year of M.Sc in research, specialized in Evolutive Ecology and Epidemiology of Host-Parasites relationships), in which we focus on the gloabl acceptance by society of different models to explain evolution. More than the models (we choose the “original” theory of Charles Darwin, the transformist theory of Lamarck, the “balanced equilibrium” theory of Stephen Jay-Gould, and the more recent Intelligent Design), we are interested in the people who believe in them.I contact you because the blog “Uncommon descent” states you as a friend of them. This blog is well known in France as one of the main information stream on Intelligent Design. My question is: how do you comme to trust in Intelligent Design? What do you think to be the most important flaws in the modern theories describing the course of evolution?

Read More ›

Some years back a colleague from England emailed me about an article by Paul Gross against intelligent design. He wrote: This is loaded with extreme polemical language almost from the first sentence. I find it so biased that I simply cannot get beyond the first page. That the editor is proud to present this polemical babble is astonishing. If this is the best that the ‘scientific establishment’ can do, then that establishement is culturally decadent. It confirms what I have worried about for a long time: that science today simply does not have the cultural depth, the conceptual and linguistic resources, to conduct civilized scholarly debate about its foundational commitments and assumptions. Thomas Huxley would be deeply embarrassed by this Read More ›

Needless to say, I loved this new review of The Spiritual Brain by Bryan Appleyard in the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he says of my lead author Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard: The great strength of his position is the folly of the materialists. Beauregard continually draws attention to the scientifically dubious basis of their leap of faith. They argue that it must be so and then set about proving it. Their triumphalism – driven by big publishing deals – is their greatest weakness. There are plenty of examples … The nicest thing about a review like Appleyard’s is that, agree or disagree, he sees what WE see – plenty of bumph marketed as the “assured results of modern science.” As applied Read More ›

That’s the thesis of a deeply interesting paper by Momme von Sydow, cognitive psychologist and philosopher of science at the University of Göttingen. In his analysis, “Charles Darwin – A Christian Undermining Christianity? (in D.M. Knight and M.D. Eddy, eds., Science and Belief: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 [Burlington: Ashgate, 2005], pp. 141-156), von Sydow shows how the construction of Darwin’s theory “essentially hinges on religious or metaphysical tenets” (p. 141). These tenets, “which initially appeared to him to have strong ethical and religious appeal” (p. 155), were the following: …three of the main influences on Darwin’s biological theory which had a direct or indirect religious origin: Paley’s belief in the divine design of nature, secondly, the conviction Read More ›

It’s not turtles all the way down; it’s design all the way down: from the constants of physics, to the production of life-permitting chemical elements in supernovae that are coincidentally unstable and spew out these elements to produce rocky planets on which life can exist, to the characteristics of carbon formed in a very narrow window of opportunity in stars, to the characteristics of water and light, to the fact that metals can be refined and smelted in temperatures reachable in carbon-based fire which made technology possible, to the electrical properties of conductors and semiconductors that made electronics and computers possible, to the fact that habitable planets represent the best platforms for cosmological discovery, to the fact that living things Read More ›

In the popular media, the picture that we get of the ID controversy is this: primitive man attributed many phenomena in Nature to design, science has progressively removed the need for the design hypothesis from these phenomena one by one, and now a group of religious fanatics is trying to make a last stand in biological origins, where things are most difficult to explain. The true story is very different; in fact, we are discovering that primitive man was NOT wrong in attributing many phenomena to design, the design just dates back much futher than he imagined, to the origin of the universe. Science is discovering that not only life itself, but a wealth of chemical phenomena that makes life Read More ›

Ben Stein to battle Darwin in major film Actor-commentator stars in ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’ Ben Stein, the lovable, monotone teacher from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “The Wonder Years” is back in the classroom in a major motion picture release slated for February 2008. But this time, the actor will be on the big screen asking one of life’s biggest questions: “Were we designed, or are we simply the end result of an ancient mud puddle struck by lightning?” That’s right. Evolution – and the explosive debate over its virtual monopoly on America’s public school classrooms – is the focus of the film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” In the movie, Stein, who is also a lawyer, economist, former presidential Read More ›

When I first encountered Biola adjunct prof Cornelius G. Hunter’s Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), I was intrigued by the possibility that it might help me understand the people who want to destroy the careers of anyone who doubts that Darwinian evolution can produce mind from mud, and ultimately you from goo. I fear it is somewhat like trying to understand the jihadis. Friends have told me that, to understand jihadis, I must try, at least briefly, to see the world as they do. Similarly, to understand Darwin’s most committed followers, I must undergo a similar mental exercise. For me at least, such exercises do not result in conversion to the Read More ›

Heard about the Council of Europe’s draft resolution against ID. Sighed. Smiled to myself. And then I took my worn paperback copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance down from the shelf: The real University…has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real Read More ›

Here are extracts from the Council of Europe’s Draft Resolution against ID, Creation, and anything that does not toe the materialist line. Note the passages in bold.

A. Draft resolution

1. For some people the Creation, as a matter of religious belief, gives a meaning to life. Nevertheless, the Parliamentary Assembly is worried about the possible ill-effects of the spread of creationist ideas within our education systems and about the consequences for our democracies. If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights which are a key concern of the Council of Europe.

5. We are witnessing a growth of modes of thought which, the better to impose religious dogma, are attacking the very core of the knowledge that we have patiently built up on nature, evolution, our origins and our place in the universe.

6. There is a real risk of a serious confusion being introduced into our children’s minds between what has to do with convictions, beliefs, ideals of all sorts and what has to do with science, and of the advent of an “all things are equal” attitude, which may seem appealing and tolerant but is actually disastrous.

7. Creationism has many contradictory aspects. The “intelligent design” idea, which is the latest, more refined version of creationism, does not deny a certain degree of evolution but claims that this is the work of a superior intelligence. Though more subtle in its presentation, the doctrine of intelligent design is no less dangerous.

17. Investigation of the creationists’ growing influence shows that the arguments between creationism and evolution go well beyond intellectual debate. If we are not careful, the values that are the very essence of the Council of Europe will be under direct threat from creationist fundamentalists. It is part of the role of the Council’s parliamentarians to react before it is too late. Read More ›

I can’t say I feel sorry for these atheistic scientists in agreeing to interview for EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED. When the BBC interviewed me for their Horizon documentary on ID (Horizon = the UK version of PBS Nova), they gave the ID side no warning that the program would be titled A WAR ON SCIENCE (I wouldn’t have agreed to be interviewed had I known that was going to be its title). What goes around comes around. September 27, 2007 Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin By CORNELIA DEAN A few months ago, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins received an e-mail message from a producer at Rampant Films inviting him to be interviewed for a documentary called “Crossroads.” Read More ›

Okay, here at last is Jerry Bergman’s review of Stuart Pivar’s Lifecode. Yes, Stu Pivar was the friend of Steve Gould who was suing and then unsuing PZ Myers. Also, note the new book announcement about Jerry Bergman.