This discussion was spawned in the Artificial Life commentary and I think it deserves thread of its own. First of all Laws of Nature are those things which are observed over and over and over again without exception. We need not have physical theories to explain them. One such Law of Nature is the law of gravity. We have observed its effects countless times without exception. Mass is attracted to other masses. We don’t have a physical theory to explain the mechanism by which gravity works but due to empirical observations it is considered a law nonetheless. An exception may exist that disproves the law but until an exception is observed the law remains intact. Another law that doesn’t get Read More ›

Buffalo hit an all time record low high of 64 degrees for this day breaking the previous record of 66 degrees set in 1882. Global warming is MIA in this neck of the woods. I’m just sayin’.

An interesting article talking about the progress, or lack thereof, in evolution of computer “life”.

Can we make software that comes to life?

A few choice snips:

On January 3 1990, he started with a program some 80 instructions long, Tierra’s equivalent of a single-celled sexless organism, analogous to the entities some believe paved the way towards life. The “creature” – a set of instructions that also formed its body – would identify the beginning and end of itself, calculate its size, copy itself into a free region of memory, and then divide.

Before long, Dr Ray saw a mutant. Slightly smaller in length, it was able to make more efficient use of the available resources, so its family grew in size until they exceeded the numbers of the original ancestor. Subsequent mutations needed even fewer instructions, so could carry out their tasks more quickly, grazing on more and more of the available computer space.

A creature appeared with about half the original number of instructions, too few to reproduce in the conventional way. Being a parasite, it was dependent on others to multiply. Tierra even went on to develop hyper-parasites – creatures which forced other parasites to help them multiply. “I got all this ecological diversity on the very first shot,” Dr Ray told me.

Hmmm… starts out complex and then gets simpler and simpler. Yup. That’s how Darwin described it. Right? Oh hold it. That was our side who said life had to begin with all the complexity it would ever have because RM+NS can’t generate CSI. Read More ›

Warwick U sociologist Steve Fuller, author of Dissent over Descent, and I have been corresponding about how scientists who are sympathetic to intelligent design can make a bigger impact, and what the next generation of ID textbooks should look like. Me: So what should the ID guys do? Create a complex life form from scratch in under 100 days? That would show that intelligent design is required. Nature never done that. But if they can’t do it, does that prove intelligent design is not necessary? I don’t think so. He: First, ID needs to stop living up to its critics’ image of the movement as purely negative, i.e. ‘not-evolution’. Because ID has been largely cultivated in a US context, ID Read More ›

I’ve been reading Paul Davies’ book, The Goldilocks Enigma (published in the U.S. as “Cosmic Jackpot”) over the last week or so. I would recommend it to anyone who wants a full appreciation of scientist’s thinking about the world we live in. Davies is, IMO, the best expositor of the ‘popular science’ book. He blends, better than anyone else I’ve read, the more technical aspects of physics and real-world analogies that help one to grasp the technical depth he presents.

The Goldilocks Enigma is about what we would call the “anthropic principle”. But Davies, if you will, ups the ante with the inclusion of the implications he says derive from treating ‘dark energy’ in a quantum mechanical way (that is, including so-called ‘quantum fluctuations’). While all of life seems, from the free parameters that we measure, ‘fine-tuned’, the greatest ‘fine-tuning’ comes from the calculation that one does to determine the density of dark matter assuming quantum fluctuations all across the electro-magnetic spectrum up to, and including, EM waves having Planck length (about 10^-33 cm). This calculation results in a density figure of 10^93 grams/cubic centimeter. What is the actual density of dark energy as actually measured? 10^-28 gram/c.c. Thus, the calculation is off by a factor of 10^120. Davies also tells us that calculations have been made indicating that if the dark energy density was off by a factor of 10—that is, if it was 10^-27 instead of 10^-28, then galaxy formation would not be possible; and, hence, no life. This means that dark energy density is ‘fine-tuned’ to one in 10^120.

This last number gets Davies’ attention. Here is what he writes:

“Logically, it is possible that the laws of physics conspire to create an almost but not quite perfect cancellation [of the energy involved in the quantum fluctuations]. But then it would be an extraordinary coincidence that that level of cancellation—119 powers of ten, after all—just happened by chance to be what is needed to bring about a universe fit for life. How much chance can we buy in scientific explanation? One measure of what is involved can be given in terms of coin flipping: odds of 10^120 to one is like getting heads no fewer than four hundred times in a row. if the existence of life in the universe is completely independent of the big fix mechanism—if it’s just a coincidence—then those are the odds against our being here. That level of flukiness seems too much to swallow.” (italics in the original)

Well, anytime someone starts talking about science and coin flips, IDists are interested.
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Joel Verwegen, a University of Toronto psychology and biology student, hopes that regular Post-Darwinist and Uncommon Descent readers will respond to his invitation to view a PBS debate on the subject and answer a questionnaire. (The debate link is in the q-aire.) He tells me, a) This is a social cognition study for the ID-evolution community. d) Though no personal information will be collected or released, should individuals wish to insure anonymity, I will be accepting submissions from anonymous email services. b) The study involves viewing a short debate and completing a questionnaire. c) Time requirements are ~30 minutes. He assures me that no attempt will be made to shrink wrap your head. So do oblige him if you possibly Read More ›

Jeff Schloss, formerly an ID supporter and Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute (until August 2003 — click here for Way Back Machine), has since been distancing himself from ID and even going on the offensive against it. I witnessed the beginnings of this offensive at a symposium featuring Ron Numbers, Howard Van Till, Schloss, and me in 2007 at Grove City College (go here for the program). His criticisms of ID at that event seemed to me naive and ill-considered. Yet he did seem to advance them sincerely, and I hoped to have an opportunity try to persuade him otherwise, which unfortunately never happened. Schloss’s critical review of EXPELLED, however, raised his opposition against ID to a new level and Read More ›

If you are concerned over trillion of dollars of future “taxes” from climate policy and massive impact on the third world of high energy prices, Watts highlights a key opportunity for input by August 14th. NASA’s document currently claims climate change is due to anthropogenic causes and strongly advocates control. This parallels government policy on teaching evolution. DLH ————-

An important call for public comment on the NASA Climate Change Science Program

6 08 2008

Foreword: For all of my readers, I can’t stress enough how important Dr. Herman’s message is. Please consider his requests for public comments. Something that most people don’t know is that you do not need to be a citizen of the USA to submit a comment. Time is of the essence, as comments close on August 14th, and there will not be another opportunity. For other bloggers and website operators, this post can be duplicated verbatim, and I encourage you to do so. Thank you for your consideration. – Anthony Read More ›

Contrary to last year’s hysteric proclamations that arctic sea ice would completely vanish this summer it has instead increased to an extent not seen since 2004.
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Second Baptist in Houston (www.second.org) is a terrific church with a huge membership. My good friend Ben Young is a pastor there and runs two contemporary services at two different campuses Sunday mornings. I was there on Sunday, July 27th at those two services, with Ben and I having a conversation in front of the congregation and then fielding questions. The church is high-tech, so in addition to questions from the microphones, we were also taking text messages from people’s cell phones. Below are all the questions received (about 250 total). Such text message questions give people a fair degree of anonymity. It’s interesting what people ask when they feel less self-conscious: Read More ›

Tuesday Aug 05, 2008 Ultimate Issues Hr: The edge of Evolution Dennis Prager talks to Micheal Behe, professor of biology at Lehigh University and author The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Originally broadcast on July 03, 2007 Click here to listen to the podcast. Don’t miss the last several minutes where Dennis goes ballistic when someone claims that you can’t be a doctor or medical researcher if you don’t believe that random genetic accidents turned bacteria into bananas. It’s hilarious. I wish either Dennis or Mike would have informed the caller of the fact that no medical school in the world requires medical students to take a course in evolutionary biology. That serves to underscore Read More ›

www.uncommondescent.com/audios/Lilley_Firing.mp3

Recently, I have been reading Warwick U sociologist Steve Fuller’s Dissent over Descent: Intelligent Design’s Challenge to Darwinism, and was intrigued by his comments about “theistic evolution”, as understood by members of the American Scientific Affiliation and promoted by Francis Collins in The Language of God:

Theistic evolutionists … simply take what Collins calls ‘the existence of the moral law and the universal longing for God” as a feature of human nature that is entrenched enough to be self-validating. But is their dismissal anything more than an arbitrary theological intervention? If humans are indeed, as the Darwinists say, just one among many species, susceptible to the same general tendencies that can be studied in the same general terms, then findings derived from methods deemed appropriate to animals should apply to us as well. Collins’ own comprehensive but exclusive training in the hard sciences may explain why he believes in a God who communicates straightforwardly through the natural sciences but appears less willing to cooperate with the social sciences, including such biologically inflected fields as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Instead Collins finds intuition, anecdote, theology and sheer faith to be more reliable sources of evidence. Why God should have chosen not to rely on the usual standards of scientific rigour in these anthropocentric matters remains a mystery. (p. 104-5)

Collins is unlikely to understand the problem Fuller raises – why should anyone take Collins’s faith as anything more than an evolutionary glitch?

I am glad that a sociologist is researching the debate, because ASA-style theistic evolution makes sense only as sociology. It doesn’t make sense intellectually. As I have said elsewhere, it is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist (= how you can continue to believe in God even though the universe shows no evidence of design). But everyone realizes that the universe shows evidence of design. Design theorists must explain it, and materialists must explain it away.

The other, less benign role of theistic evolution is to confuse traditional religious people by implying that, for example, “you can believe in Darwin – and Jesus too!” Well, Darwin didn’t.

The way you believe in Jesus and Darwin too is by keeping yourself in a permanent state of confusion about the basic issues, or, Collins-style, not really understanding them. Some clergy are happy to help.

A friend alerted me to this article which nicely illustrates the muddle in progress. The article features the efforts of the Vatican to address the current Darwin cult. My friend asked me for a comment, and I replied, Read More ›

In case you missed it in the news or in SciAm: Mystery of the Montauk Monster is making the headlines.             Arthur Spiderwick’s Spitting Gargoyle               Man Bear Pig Chimera (art)           You decide.  🙂

Reader Randy writes me to say,

Given the hooplah over ice being found on Mars, Titan and other places, I wonder if any of the ID guys have come out with predictions that we will not find ancient lifeforms trapped there? Expelled and other venues make much hay out of the odds for randomly chaining amino acids into enzymes and then proteins, and “The Privileged Planet” for the seemingly unique position Earth is in for having life. If those numbers are anything like accurate it would seem absolutely safe money to bet that the next planet over never managed hitting that jackpot. So is anyone using ID to make just that prediction?

One could easily postulate a designer who liked creating life on many planets and thus get around this if extinct life is found on one or both or many planets or moons, but then what is the point in making such a fuss about the odds, if the designer routinely flaunts them?

I offered to start a discussion on it at Uncommon Descent, but replied on my own account:

Strictly speaking, I don’t know that ID predicts that life cannot be found elsewhere than on Earth. For all we know, life actually got started on Mars and came to Earth.

ID would predict that random chaining of molecules will not produce life for the same reason that scattering Scrabble pieces will not produce a novel. In both cases, design is required to arrive at a specific target.

That said, a designer might very well produce life on different planets for the same reasons as a novelist might very well write different novels.

But we usually find that works by a given novelist in a specific genre have key similarities. William Faulkner’s novels are easily distinguishable from those of Ernest Hemingway.

So an ID theorist would probably expect to see that life on other planets shares many characteristics with life on Earth – that is, there will be a similarity of themes and styles (assuming there is only one intelligence involved, but most theists will assume that of course).

See also:

So what if fossil bacteria are found on Mars? Polls show many Americans expect Star Trek!

Water? On the moon? And what else?

Water inferred on Mars

The image of life on Mars is from NASA.

Other recent Colliding Universes posts: Read More ›