Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Neuroscience: Skeptic Mag’s Review of The Spiritual Brain

Doug Mesner writes asking me to respond to a review of The Spiritual Brain which he published in Skeptic Magazine, and he has now helpfully made the review available on line. He writes,

The book distresses me in that I see in it an early Creationist assault on the Cognitive Sciences, and the formation of the false scientific arguments that may be brought to the stem cell debate in years to come.

Mesner appears to want to be the male Amanda Gefter. (Hey, I am all for gender equity.)

He wants a free exchange of views, but sadly, one thing that is not free is my time just now, so I must decline.

I am not sure why he references the stem cell debate, but if people like Gefter and Mesner are entitled to private definitions of creationism, I guess they can apply their definitions and worries to the stem cell debate, wind energy, or the assignment of parking spaces in municipally owned garages – or anything else they want to.

Having almost finished Alva Noe’s thoughtful Out of Our Heads Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness and having read Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself, I would say that the skepticism (= materialism) espoused by Mesner is dead in the water and electrification of the corpse by a long discussion will not help. Things have just moved on.

And we all should too. Read More ›

Materialist Concede that Holocaust was Permitted if Materialism is True

In my “Bleak Conclusions” post I quoted kairosfocus who was in turn quoting Hawthorne for the following: Assume: (1) That atheistic naturalism is true. (2) One can’t infer an “ought” from an “is.” If these two things are true, nothing exists from which we can infer any moral principle. If moral principles cannot be inferred, nothing is prohibited by any moral principle and therefore all things are permitted. This leads to the conclusion that the Holocaust was permitted. I asked our materialist friends to explain to me how, if their premises are true, they can avoid the conclusion that the Holocaust was permitted. The nearly 300 comments boil down to indignation mixed with the childhood rejoinder – “Oh yeah, same Read More ›

The FANTOM designer

Nature FANTOM studies networks in cells  “An international consortium has released an analysis of unprecedented detail showing the genes and proteins that guide an immature cell to its final identity. The models show that a complex network of transcription factors is responsible for a cell’s differentiation, with no one ‘master regulator’ in control. “It’s like a transcription-factor democracy,” says Harmen Bussemaker, a computational biologist at Columbia University in New York. From an evolutionary standpoint, distributing responsibility is a good strategy, he says: “It would not be a good design principle to have an Achilles’ heel.” (Don’t they mean “From a design standpoint”?) Piero Carninci of Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), in Yokohama found that RNA is produced Read More ›

Bleak Conclusions

In an earlier post I lamented the apparent extinction of what I called “Nietzsche atheists,” by which I meant atheists with the courage and honesty to accept the bleak conclusions logically compelled by their premises. Some of our atheist friends seemed to not know what bleak conclusions I was referring to. Here is a comment that sums it up nicely. This post is adapted from kairosfocus’ comment to that earlier post. He refers to Hawthorne on ethics and evolutionary materialist atheism and writes: Make two assumptions: (1) That atheistic naturalism is true. (2) One can’t infer an “ought” from an “is.” Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions. Given our second assumption, there is nothing Read More ›

Extra Characters to the Biological Code

Even if compressed I’ve always thought that the known informational content was not enough data. This makes sense because from an engineering point of view because there doesn’t seem to be enough data storage space in a few billion base pairs of nuclear DNA to specify all the detail in a mammal or similarly complex animal. It’s enough room to store a component library of the nuts and bolts required to build individual cells of different types but not the whole animal.

Obviously no one can argue against the assertion that we do not fully comprehend the biological code. Unlike with computer code we cannot simply determine at a glance which informational content defines what biological function. The title of geneticist Sermonti’s book is “Why a Fly is not a Horse”. In it he writes the only thing we know for certain about why a horse is a horse and not a fly is because its mother was a horse.

Thus, based on our current level of knowledge, any calculations that quantify biological informational content are going to be rough estimates. Personally, when measuring the functional sequence complexity of code encoding proteins I’ve long biased any calculations I do by rounding up to several extra informational bits. And this action seems justified by this recent news: Read More ›

Quote of the Day

Some [men] kill because their faiths explicitly command them to do so, some kill though their faiths explicitly forbid them to do so, and some kill because they have no faith and hence believe all things are permitted to them. Polytheists, monotheists, and atheists kill – indeed, this last class is especially prolifically homicidal, if the evidence of the twentieth century is to be consulted. Men kill for their gods, or for their God, or because there is no God and the destiny of humanity must be shaped by gigantic exertions of human will . . . Men will always seek gods in whose name they may perform great deeds or commit unspeakable atrocities . . . Then again, men Read More ›

Darwinism: Latest installment in the Darwin legend

Australia’s Hiram Caton writes to say,

Hello Denyse!

I’m sending you this latest version of my synopsis of the Darwin Legend. There are two new entries since our last contact–Darwin’s Biggest Fib, and Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln and Race. The fib is his claim, in the 6th ed of Origin, to have been the first to have argued the case for evolution. The other article draws attention to belief in the superiority of the Caucasian race espoused by Darwin and Lincoln. Darwin also believed that the lower races were on the path to extinction. Any comments will be appreciated.Cheers! – Hiram Caton

Synopsis of the Legend

++Belief that the Origin was a ‘revolutionary’ scientific breakthrough conflicts with the fact that public opinion was at the time saturated by the evolution idea. It was so widespread that in 1860 the showman P T Barnum put on display a freak, Zip the Pinhead, alleged to be the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans. In the Historical Sketch preface to the Origin, Darwin acknowledged 34 prior evolutionists.

[When I was in school 45 years ago, we learned that Evolution was a big, general idea in mid-nineteenth century Britain. It wasn’t until I had to listen to wearisome rants by new atheists and Darwin lobbyists seeking funds that I discovered that Darwin had supposedly invented the idea.] Read More ›

Skepticism in all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons

Skepticism Examiner has attempted (April 13, 2009) to shed some light on why Amanda Gefter’s recent, foolish story on why materialism is right and design is wrong was pulled from New Scientist. The only copy I have been offered has a problem with its security certificate, so I cannot recommend going there, unfortunately.

I still don’t understand what the problem with the story is.

I thought the story silly, but considered pulling it a gross shame. As I have made clear in all communications on the subject, despite the fact that Gefter misrepresents me and has persistently done so, I was not the person who complained.

I have no idea what happened, but fear that the most likely answer is – yet another cock-up due to Britain’s unreformed libel laws. Today, people troll the planet looking for foolish jurisdictions that do not have clear libel laws.

Let me recommend a sound, traditional English Common Law approach: Read More ›

Your bloody free speech zone

Bill Dembski asked me to post something on this at Uncommon Descent a while back, but hassles prevented me from getting to it until now:

From Canadian civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant, author of Shakedown:

“That’s your bloody free speech zone”

By Ezra Levant on April 8, 2009 9:40 PM

A reader sent me this letter to the editor that appeared in the Southern Utah University newspaper. Here’s the link; allow me to reprint it in its entirety:

In light of SUU officials plan to designate “Free Speech Zones” on campus, I thought I’d offer my assistance. Grab a map. OK, ready?

All right, you see that big area between Canada and Mexico, surrounded by lots of blue ink on the East and West? You see it?

There’s your bloody Free Speech Zone.

Jeffrey Wilbur
Senior communication major from Bountiful

Something tells me that Young Jeffrey is the type of guy who, if he were a Canadian, would attract human rights commission busybodies like flies. And he wouldn’t bow down to them for a minute, either.

I look forward to the day — not long from now, I hope — when such a clarion call would resonate in Canada in the same way. It ought to — free speech is as much our legacy as it is America’s. We just need to remind ourselves that, despite thirty years of being told we’re actually a censored people, we remain a free people.

Yes, we do.

From Denyse: Lo, I tell you a great mystery! There is a giant hockey heaven – far bigger than anything you could ever imagine or believe – north of the United States. In Hockey Heaven, many of us have recently started shoving “human rights” nannies hard into the boards. You’ve no idea how quickly that reduces their numbers.

As we say here: Fine, whatever. See you on the ice tomorrow.

Or, if you need me to put it in a more elegant way: Here we discuss ideas, and maybe reject them as out of bounds, but we don’t declare them illegal, unless they involve seriously advocating a crime.

Or at least, we didn’t used to. And we are in the process of ridding public life of the people who have started social engineering our society so that all sorts of ideas that do not involve advocating a crime are forbidden … .

Or, even more elegant still (you people really must have the most elite tray of tea sandwiches, must you? Very well, … Waiter!, the top tier tray, please. No canned tunafish. All fresh salmon!!): Read More ›

Will Texas Face Court Challenges to the New Science Standards?

Now that the moaning and hand-wringing are over, there’s talk of mounting some legal challenges to the new science standards in Texas. At issue aren’t the standards themselves, but the personal motivations of some of the Board members who advocated for these standards.

Now the issue is whether there is enough prima facie evidence to challenge the Constitutionality of the wording now, or wait for the textbook review process in two years.

“They have shown clear religious motivations that certainly raise some questions,” Quinn said. “But if the board requires phony religious arguments in the science textbooks, I can’t imagine somebody won’t challenge it.” Publishers may end up producing a textbook for Texas and other conservative states and a separate version for other states—because under the new guidelines, a Texas textbook “will be poison in states that value education,” [Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network].

Read More ›

In other words, phylogenetic reconstruction is sheer fantasy …

Here’s some research done 100 miles down the road from me. Note the sentence highlighted. The actual phylogenies here were experimentally known and yet standard evolutionary theory drew completely wrong conclusions. Oh, but it was a small population, small genomes, and intense selection pressure. Spare me. “Exceptional Convergent Evolution in a Virus” Bull JJ, Badgett MR, Wichman HA, Huelsenbeck JP, Hillis DM, Gulati A, Ho C, Molineux IJ. Department of Zoology, Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas, Austin 78712, USA. bull@bull.zo.utexas.edu Replicate lineages of the bacteriophage phiX 174 adapted to growth at high temperature on either of two hosts exhibited high rates of identical, independent substitutions. Typically, a dozen or more substitutions accumulated in the 5.4-kilobase genome Read More ›

That uncomfortable subject, religion …

Things have been a bit quiet here recently, but in case you wondered, that’s because most list authors are Christians and this is the Triduum (last three days) of Holy Week.

Some are busy with religious matters and others won’t post on principle. I am also indexing a book (always a rush job in principle because the index is the only thing that keeps a book from the press at that point – so no one cares that it’s Holy Week for me).

But as this is Holy Saturday, I am going to talk briefly for a moment about … Religion.

One of the dumbest things I hear “new atheists” say is that faith means “belief without evidence.”

I don’t know what kind of a sheltered life such people can have lived, but their views might have something to do with tenure at tax-supported universities.

Religious doctrines are believed for a variety of reasons. For convenience, I’ll refer only to my own, Catholic Christian, tradition, and this is by no means an exhaustive list, just five reasons for now: Read More ›