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From the “More stuff we know that ain’t so” files: Nobelist Tinbergen

From Nature:

Classic behavioural studies flawed

Nobel prizewinner took short cuts to show that the way gulls feed is instinctive.

John Whitfield

One of the most famous experiments in biology isn’t the solid piece of work it’s usually portrayed as, say Dutch researchers who have replicated the study. Instead, it’s more like an anecdote that became slightly more legendary each time its author retold the story.

The work in question was done in 1947 by the Dutch researcher Niko Tinbergen on the begging behaviour of herring-gull chicks. At the time, the dominant idea in animal behaviour was that learning was all-important. Tinbergen argued that animals come into the world with instincts already adapted to their environments.

Adult gulls have a red spot on their lower bill. Tinbergen, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973, presented wild chicks with model birds bearing spots and measured how much they pecked at the model.

The story that made it into the textbooks is that chicks have a powerful innate tendency to peck at red dots, which has evolved as a way of getting their parents to feed them. The original paper, however, shows that Tinbergen found that chicks actually pecked more at a black dot than a red one.

In a follow-up paper written in 1949, Tinbergen concluded that this strange finding resulted from a mistake in his methods. He had tested red, black, blue, white and yellow spots, but he presented the ‘natural’ red spot much more often than any other. The chicks, he decided, became habituated to the red spot and stopped pecking at it.

Of course, Tinbergen has his defenders: Read More ›

Evolutionists’ careers built on plagiarism?

A recent article in Cracked, discussing plagiarism, used the careers of Richard Owen and H.G. Wells – both important evolutionists – as 40% of “Five Great Men who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism.” Read it and see what you think.

Science fiction finding religion?

What make you all of this, in City Journal?: How Science Fiction Found Religion Benjamin A. Plotinsky Once overtly political, the genre increasingly employs Christian allegory. Winter 2009 There is a young man, different from other young men. Ancient prophecies foretell his coming, and he performs miraculous feats. Eventually, confronted by his enemies, he must sacrifice his own life—an act that saves mankind from calamity—but in a mystery as great as that of his origin, he is reborn, to preside in glory over a world redeemed. Tell this story to one of the world’s 2 billion Christians, and he’ll recognize it instantly. Tell it to a science-fiction and fantasy fan, and he’ll ask why you’re making minor alterations to the Read More ›

‘Analyze and Evaluate’ Are the New Code Words for ‘Creationism’

By now most of you are probably aware of the news from Texas and the new science standards there. Apparently, the new standards don’t sit well with Dr. Eugenie Scott and her friends at the NCSE, (National Center for Saving Evolution).

“The final vote was a triumph of ideology and politics over science,” says Dr. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). “The board majority chose to satisfy creationist constituents and ignore the expertise of highly qualified Texas scientists and scientists across the country.” NCSE presented the board with a petition from 54 scientific and educational societies, urging the board to reject language that misrepresents or undermines the teaching of evolution, which the board likewise ignored.

Although the “strengths and weaknesses” wording that has been part of the standards for over a decade was finally excised–wording that has been used to pressure science textbook publishers to include creationist arguments–a number of amendments put the creationist-inspired wording back in.

One can almost see Dr. Scott wringing her hands as she says this. Read More ›

Outsider Meddling — Skeptics Need Not Apply (or, Just Have Faith)

Someone by the name of skeech is cluttering up UD with impervious sophistry and wasting a lot of our time.

His/her latest thesis is that “according to biologists…” there is a “credible possibility that small incremental changes could have developed massive increases in biological information in a short time — followed by stasis.”

So, skeech assures us that “biologists” are universally agreed upon this proposition?
Read More ›

The Darwinian Mechanism as the Grammar-Checker of Biology

After giving his famous METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL computer analogy to evolution in his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins remarks, “Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distant target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection.” I would dispute that there are no targets. Certainly no human has imposed biological targets on nature. But the fact that things can be alive and functional in only certain ways and not in others indicates that nature sets her own targets. The targets of biology, we might say, are “natural kinds” (to borrow a term of use from philosophy). But let’s grant that the evolutionary process, as governed by the Darwinian selection Read More ›

Dogs more like humans than chimpanzees are?

Dogs, not chimps can help us understand human behaviour?

Well, this moved recently at msnbc.com:

Dogs (not chimps) most like humans

Man’s best friend serves as model for understanding human social behavior

By Jennifer Viegas

Discovery Channel
updated 11:58 a.m. ET, Thurs., March. 26, 2009

Chimpanzees share many of our genes, but dogs have lived with us for so long and undergone so much domestication that they are now serving as a model for understanding human social behavior, according to a new paper.

Cooperation, attachment to people, understanding human verbal and non-verbal communications, and the ability to imitate are just a handful of the social behaviors we share with dogs. They might even think like us at times too, according to the paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Advances in the Study of Behavior.

While there is no evidence to support that dogs and humans co-evolved their laundry list of shared behaviors over the past 10,000 to 20,000 years, the researchers believe adapting to the same living conditions during this period may have resulted in the similarities.

Well, I am glad someone noticed that dogs are way better at understanding and living with humans than chimpanzees are. It sure beats this (horrific chimp rampage). Read More ›

Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability–Don Johnson

Don Johnson (PhD in Computer Science from Univ. Minnesota, another PhD in Chemistry from Michigan State) has just published a pro-ID book, “Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability: A Call to Scientific Integrity” amazon.com link here . My question to readers: how many scientists have to reject Darwinism before there is a “scientific controversy”?

Canadian science minister vs. the puff dino suits: A story with, um, legs?

I see where Nature News published (2009 03 25) an item about Canadian science minister Gary Goodyear vs. the puff dino suits in downtown Toronto (young researchers with nothing better to do (?), claiming that he doesn’t believe in evolution – like it was some kind of religious experience he never had, but was supposed to have had). You’d have to pay to read the story, and I certainly won’t. It was never a story in the first place but, as I point out here, activists and academics, hard up for work, have been trying to commercialize the ID controversy in Canada. It’s not easy because the way the Canadian public divides on the issues makes commercialization difficult. They should Read More ›

Cook the primeval soup for billions of years and Voila!

Check out this video. It’s amazing the confidence Alan Boss has that the primeval soup will generate life. Interesting that he sees the soup needing to simmer for billions of years for life to emerge. It seems to have emerged much faster on the Earth.

Harvesting – An Alternative to Natural Selection

Natural selection is posited as the only mechanism to lead to differential survival among individuals of varying fitness. However, if selection pressures cause mortality to occur in individuals who would soon be dead anyway, then natural selection is not really operating. The hypothesis of the Harvesting Effect in epidemiology leads to this conclusion. I think this has so far only been explored in respiratory epidemiology, but hats off to them for bringing it up. If the Harvesting Effect is real, then Darwinists must differentiate its effects from that of natural selection. So far this issue has not been addressed. Harvesting or the Harvesting Effect is a hypothesis in epidemiology. It occurs when an agent causes death in an individual who Read More ›

News from Texas

It appears we have some good news in Texas: Big Win in Texas as State Now Leads Nation in Requiring Critical Analysis of Evolution in High School Science Classes Robert Crowther In a huge victory for those who favor teaching the scientific evidence for and against evolution, Texas today moved to the head of the class by requiring students to “critique” and examine “all sides of scientific evidence” and specifically requiring students to “analyze and evaluate” the evidence for major evolutionary concepts such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations. “Texas has sent a clear message that evolution should be taught as a scientific theory open to critical scrutiny, not as a sacred dogma that can’t be questioned,” said Dr. Read More ›

Co-option, Berra’s Blunder, and Speculation Presented as Fact

In Bill Dembski’s thread, No Major Conceptual Leaps, I posted a comment about the evidential, logical, and probabilistic vacuity of the Darwinian co-option hypothesis. (I use the word hypothesis with reservation. A hypothesis in a domain such as this should at least be based on a minimal, mathematical probabilistic analysis.)

In response to my comment, another commenter offered this as a refutation.

This text from Deborah A. McLennan, of Evo Edu Outreach, is utterly embarrassing for her cause, because it makes the case for design, just as Tim Berra did with his infamous blunder.
Read More ›

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We Have No Excuse- A Scientific Case for Relating Life to Mind (PART II)

By Robert Deyes And John Calvert

PART II: THE ULTIMATE RELATIONSHIP – ANALYZING PATTERNS THAT COMPRISE LIFE

 

Many scientific disciplines that seek to determine the relationship of an existing pattern to past events analyze them as we analyzed the letters on the drawing board (See PART I).  Coroners seek to know the cause of a death – is the death related to a mind or a natural or accidental cause?  Those searching for extraterrestrial intelligence seek to know whether a sequence of radio waves from outer space is related to an intelligent rather than a natural or accidental cause.  Archeologists seek to know whether a hammer shaped rock got its shape from a mind or a stream.  

 

Our analyses show that the determination of causal relationships involve three inquiries.  First, does the pattern manifest a function or purpose – an effect to occur in the future, such as the meaning of the word “Think?” If not there is no necessity to infer a mind.  Second, are the various components of the pattern related to or dependent on material causes driven by physical and chemical forces – by necessity?  A snowflake looks designed, but its beautiful hexagonal symmetry simply reflects the way water molecules necessarily organize under certain conditions.  If chemical necessity can explain the pattern, there is no necessity to infer a mind.  Third, if a functional relationship reflected in the pattern is physically independent (not necessary like the snowflake), can chance explain it?  If not then a mind – an intention becomes the best explanation for the functional relationship reflected in the pattern.  The methodology is explained with great precision by William Dembski in The Design Inference (Refs 1,2). Read More ›