February 2008

Is is said that in the USA one can criticize politics but not evolution, while in Russia one can criticize evolution but not politics. The Russian author Alexey Melkikh provides the most spectacular improbability of Darwinian evolution that I have seen. He then proposes a mode of evolution without mutation. As some readers have asked for more science based posts, enjoy. ————-
INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLE AND POSSIBLE DETERMINISTIC MECHANISM OF BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION Alexey V. Melkikh, (Ural state technical university, Molecular physics chair,) Entropy 2004, 6, 223–232

It was shown that the probability of new species formation by means of random mutations is negligibly small. . . . The problem is that the Darwin mechanism of the evolution (a random process) cannot explain the known rate of the species evolution. In accordance with the very first estimates, the total number of possible combinations of nucleotides in the DNA is about 4^(2×10^9) (because four types of nucleotides are available, while the number of nucleotides in the DNA of higher organisms is about 2×10^9). . . . Thus, finally we have P = 10^57000000. This figure is vanishingly small. Therefore, a conclusion may be drawn that species could not be formed due to random mutations.

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From The Boston Globe: Can expectations influence how we judge the evidence?

SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices.

The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.

[…]

What they saw was the power of expectations. People expect expensive wines to taste better, and then their brains literally make it so. Wine lovers shouldn’t feel singled out: Antonio Rangel, the Caltech neuroeconomist who led the study, insists that he could have used a variety of items to get similar results, from bottled water to modern art.

[…]

After the researchers finished their brain imaging, they asked the subjects to taste the five different wines again, only this time the scientists didn’t provide any price information. Although the subjects had just listed the $90 wine as the most pleasant, they now completely reversed their preferences. When the tasting was truly blind, when the subjects were no longer biased by their expectations, the cheapest wine got the highest ratings. It wasn’t fancy, but it tasted the best.

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The latest issue of the on-line journal Anti-Matters published by the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education in Pondicherry, India, includes reviews of Wells and Dembski’s “The Design of Life” and Mike Gene’s “The Design Matrix”, as well as my article “Is God Really Good?”. How is this question relevant to ID? The article makes the connection at the beginning: In debates over the theory of intelligent design, the “problem of evil” is frequently brought up by opponents of design: if we are the products of intelligent design, why is there so much evil and misery in the world? From a purely logical, or scientific, perspective, this problem is easy to deal with: Nature offers evidence of design–the question of Read More ›

Read the review and insightful excerpts about me at TheBRITES.org.

“5th Feb 2008 Dr Francis Collins discussed his views on science, faith, and the ease with which the two can be reconciled through a rejection of extremes, and an embrace of “harmony in the middle”. Collins emphasized that science does not provide us with the right instruments to prove the existence of God because God is outside of nature. Collins cited pointers to God in nature such as the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” and the precise tuning of physical constants during the Big Bang. Examples of such improbability suggest that there is a creator God. To justify a creator God that actually cares about humans, though, requires more than just science. Collins’ attack on Intelligent Design was one of the Read More ›

In any debate, it is always good strategy to acknowledge your opponent’s strongest points up front, effectively taking those points off the table. The evolutionist’s strongest points are the fact that science has been so successful to date in finding “natural” (unintelligent) causes in other areas of science, and the fact that the development of life, in many ways, simply “looks like” it was due to natural causes. On the other hand, there is virtually no evidence that natural selection can explain anything more than trivial changes, and the idea that it can account for the complexity of life is patently absurd. In all debates over evolution, our opponents emphasize the features of evolution which, admittedly, suggest natural causes (“a Read More ›

North America undergoing religious revolution? No way. Atheism is not growing significantly. Anti-depressant are definitely NOT the death of the soul, as Tom Wolfe thought Templeton Foundation offers L2 million pounds to find a non-spiritual source of belief in God

Global average temperature in the past 12 months plummeted precipitously erasing all the global warming in the previous century. Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling Well now, this proves I do make mistakes. My mistake was thinking it would take longer than this for me to be proven right.

 The second part of the headline is false.  The first part is true.  See the article in the Daily Tech here.  Excerpt:  All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

The George C. Marshal Institute‘s 3rd edition of Climate Issues and Questions is a refreshing effort to provide a dispassionate evaluation of 29 major questions regarding the science of “climate change”, and to separate those from political agendas. Their method and effort is well worth considering in light of the current debate over origins of biological systems and of the universe. In particular, consider their examination of how “scientific consensus” is achieved (vs political hegemony by special interests). Their observation that climate science is relatively new parallels the current developments in origin theories. Note particularly the current explosion of knowledge about the genome and the incredible information rich complexity of biochemical processes. Compare that to the paucity of scientific hypotheses (let alone theories) that predict that knowledge and complexity. ——————————————-

Climate Issues & Questions

The debate over the state of climate science and what it tells us about past and future climate has been going on for twenty years. It is not close to resolution, in spite of assertions to the contrary. What is often referred to as a “consensus” is anything but. In many cases, this consensus represents the “expert judgment” of a handful of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) authors, which other researchers can and do disagree with. For many, especially those engaged in advocacy, the claim of consensus is a device used to advance their agenda.
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I recently assisted my daughter with a most interesting project for her 8th grade science class. The assignment was to learn about a Biome, write a report on it, then design an animal to live in it.
The students were to provide a description of the characteristics of their animal which suited it to life in the Biome they selected, and make a model of the animal for display. My daughter selected arctic tundra for the Biome. We read up on it, she did the report, then the fun began.

She has a housecat, (felis-catus) named Chester of whom she is very fond. He seemed a good starting point. We designed several adaptations to Chester to enable him to thrive in the arctic tundra. First, and most obviously, we made him all white to blend into the snow. Then we regressed his legs to vestigial stumps and flattened him out dramatically so he could hug the ground and better avoid being picked off by predators, as well as stay low out of the wind. His species is therefore felis-flatus. (That’s “flatus” as in flat to the ground, rhymes with “catus” not the other meaning which my son already had fun with.)
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 The Reason for God by Timothy Keller is No. 18 on the NYT bestsellers list.  Over at First Things Anthony Sacramone has a great interview with Keller that includes this on the evolution debate:

 In The Reason for God, you make a very brief argument for the validity of evolution within a limited sphere. It would seem to me that apologists for the faith must address this issue at some point. But doing so can call into question the historicity of the Fall and the very need for a savior. How do you talk about evolution without confusing people?

Oh, it’s a little confusing, but actually I’m just in the same place where the Catholics are, as far as I can tell. The Catholic Church has always been able to hold on to a belief in a historical Fall—it really happened, it’s not just representative of the fact that the human race has kind of gone bad in various ways.

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Why do scientists sometimes ignore warnings that theories are wrong? Even great scientists can get it all wrong, and it is interesting to see how and when they do.

Here.

New Scientist February 16, 2008 Dan Jones Pg. 40-43 heavily edited. Full text here. “William Paley, who argued that the natural world is full of designed complexity which must have a creator, would have considered the bacterial flagellum an excellent example. The flagellum, with its intricate arrangement of interconnecting parts, looks no less designed than a watch. Modern biology, of course, has no need for omniscient designers. Evolution – Richard Dawkins’s blind watchmaker – is all that is needed to explain the origin of complexity in nature. The bacterial flagellum has become a focal point in science’s ongoing struggle against unreason. The study of complex molecular systems has been given added impetus by the ID movement. ID claims that such Read More ›