When a thing is false, is false from all points of view. In fact it cannot exist a point of view from which the thing becomes true, given it is false, rather each view point manifests a particular aspect of the falsity of the thing. As a consequence, when a thing is false, whether we suppose it is true we get contradictions, one for every point of view we consider the thing from. All that is simple logic. Read More ›
In the Darwinism debates, ‘peer review’ is often invoked as a panacea – quite mistakenly, since these debates presuppose a much more free-ranging intellectual universe than the one in which peer review is effective. By ‘peer review’ I mean the process by which colleagues in the field to which one aspires to contribute vet articles before they are published. To be sure, peer review has its uses. It catches obvious errors of fact, curbs overstretched inferences and enables an author to phrase things so that the intended message is received properly.
In other words, peer review is a kind of specialist editing – full stop. It is not the mechanism by which disputes concerning overarching explanatory frameworks are usefully settled, since these typically involve judgements about the relative weighting given to various bodies of evidence that one would explain in a common fashion. Substantial disagreements over such judgements typically have less to do with factual issues than deeper, philosophical ones about what a field is ultimately about.
Recently, we asked Uncommon Descent Contest Question 8: Do the “new atheists” help or hurt the cause of Darwinism?
The new atheists’ impact in general is often debated. What exactly have they contributed to atheism? Many traditional atheists or their sympathizers think not much.
Bryon R. McCane, Professor of Religion at Wofford College, asks,
Has something gone wrong with the new atheism? For awhile, it was really on a roll. Several best-selling books aggressively attacked religion, calling it a “delusion” (Richard Dawkins), and a “spell” (Daniel Dennett) that “poisons everything” (Christopher Hitchens). Bill Maher’s movie “Religulous” warned that humankind must get rid of religion or die. New atheism looked like the wave of the future. But not anymore. “Religulous” got mixed reviews and disappeared quickly. Rebuttals to Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens have appeared, culminating with Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God. Sales of atheist books have fallen off the charts, literally. Months have gone by since one appeared on the best-seller list.
To me, the key problem was that they had a new level of hate, not a new idea. I wrote about that here.
Winner announcement: Jerry at 91. I especially enjoyed this observation:
There is an old maxim in marketing. Nothing kills a bad product faster than extensive advertising and good distribution. The faster people realize how bad a product is, the quicker it is rejected. The new atheist movement has accelerated the communication and distribution of their product but in the process open themselves up for intense scrutiny.
I must arrange for more prizes, as I would have liked to offer StephenB and Adel DiBagno a prize for their entertaining and useful discussion; however, I have only five copies of Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), hardcover, and if I burn through 60% of them in one contest, the publisher might not be very anxious to help me restock.
Jerry, I need a snail address for you, at oleary@sympatico.ca.
I am a bit behind, judging contests, due to unrelated uproars. But here are the entries that seemed, to me at least, to shed light: Read More ›
The fossil record reveals a history of life characterized by the abrupt appearance of new species followed by no change and eventual extinction in most cases. Needless to say, abrupt appearances and no change is not exactly what evolution expected. Much of this was known in Darwin’s time and he figured that the fossil record was incomplete. Today such speculation doesn’t work anymore. The evidence reveals even more clearly this pattern of abrupt appearances followed by stasis. As one recent paper explained: Read more
A friend wrote to ask me about “evolutionary” psychology claims that humans are promiscuous because of our evolutionary history with chimps and bonobos.
I replied:
Those people stoop to just about anything, don’t they?
As per your summary, “Evolutionary biologists consider that bonobos and chimps are the most closest species according to our evolutionary tree or bush, and since both species are very promiscuous, they infer that this behaviour was present in our common ancestor with them, and that promiscuous behaviour among modern humans is therefore an inevitable consequence of our evolutionary history. ”
Let’s picture ourselves in the Toronto Zoo’s primate sanctuary. It comes out that one enterprising bonobo male has impregnated all the females, willing or no. So? It’s inconvenient, because the zookeepers will need to find new homes for most of the expected offspring. If they think it’s a big enough problem, they can always put the females on the Pill hereafter, right? Or put him in a separate enclosure. Otherwise, as we say here, that’s just life wandering its way through time.
Okay, now let’s picture ourselves in a courtroom at the Old City Hall Courthouse. The judge is hearing oral arguments from the defense lawyer for a serial rapist. The defendant’s lawyer says that due to the behaviour of chimpanzees and bonobos, “promiscuous behaviour among modern humans is therefore an inevitable consequence of our evolutionary history,” so we should go easy on his client.
I think the judge and the prosecution would be competing to interrupt at that point, and most local jurors and onlookers would be aghast.
What’s missing from the analysis is that lots of characteristics may be part of our evolutionary history, but humans uniquely possess the ability to select among characteristics which ones we think we should encourage.
A guy could be a serial rapist – or he could take a folk dancing class and meet a nice girl. The former choice will likely get him a set of leg irons at the Courthouse and the latter a rental tux and free carnation at the City Hall wedding chamber.
It is not an argument for any form of human behaviour whatever that it may have been in our evolutionary history, because all sorts of behaviour has been in our evolutionary history, including a great many behaviours never practiced by chimps or bonobos.
Also, at The Mindful Hack: Read More ›
Thousands of DNA segments have been found to be nearly identical across a wide range of species including human, mouse, rat, dog, chicken and fish. Evolutionary theory expected no such high similarity for species that are supposed to have been evolving independently for hundreds of millions of years. The only explanation could be a super strong functional constraint requiring the very unusual similarities, but none was found. Now new research is adding a twist to the story. Read more
So how did these nitric oxide-producing enzymes arise? By Darwinian processes? …Nudler’s team found that many antibiotics kill bacteria through the production of harmful charged particles known as reactive oxygen species, otherwise called oxidative stress. “Antibiotics cause bacteria to produce a lot of reactive oxygen species. Those damage DNA, and bacteria cannot survive. They eventually die,” Nudler said in a telephone interview. “We found nitric oxide can protect bacteria against oxidative stress.” He said bacteria produce nitric oxide to resist antibiotics. The defense mechanism appears to apply broadly to many different types of antibiotics, he said. Nudler said many companies are testing various nitric oxide-lowering compounds called nitric oxide synthase inhibitors for use as anti-inflammatory drugs. He thinks a compound Read More ›
Last week’s review of Richard Dawkins’ new book in the Economist hit all the usual chords. Dawkins’ purpose is to demonstrate that evolution is a fact–as incontrovertible a fact as any in science, and the Economist is only too happy to propagate the absurdity. First, there are the usual silly evidential arguments that only work with the uninformed, of which there are apparently many. True, species appear abruptly in the fossil record but, explains the Economist, “That any traces at all remain from so long ago is astounding, and anyway it is not the completeness of the fossil record but its consistency that matters.” After all, there are no fossil rabbits in the ancient strata. That’s right, no rabbits before Read More ›
Every Friday, the BBC-TV’s flagship public affairs programme, Newsnight, broadcasts ‘Newsnight Review’, which covers the week’s worth of cultural events. This week’s was devoted to Things Darwin-ish. The panel consisted of Richard Dawkins, the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood (whose latest book, The Year of the Flood, is about an Ultra-Green cult that, amongst other things, turns the sociobiologist and biodiversity guru E.O. Wilson into a saint), the poet Ruth Padel (who happens to be a descendant of Darwin’s) and the writer on religious and cultural affairs, the Rev. Richard Coles (who was half of the 1980s synth-pop group, Communards). As I’m writing this, I realize just how ‘postmodern’ Britain must seem to people who don’t live in this country. To me, this line-up looks pretty normal.
I want simply to highlight some remarks that were made on this programme because it gives you a sense of how well-behaved cultured liberals understand Darwin’s significance.
Robert Deyes
A sound approach to scientific investigation does not necessarily bring with it a mandatory requirement to be a ‘nose to the grindstone’ experimentalist. Indeed scientists can and often do take data that others have amassed and interpret it in light of their own understanding of the matter at hand. Therein lies a lesson that, as science historians will note, is backed by an impressive list of prominent cases. In fact Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and even Charles Darwin challenged the viewpoints of their day through their own theoretical interpretations of reality. For Darwin this meant for the most part collecting data from botanists, breeders, ecologists, and paleontologists and constructing a paradigm-shifting synthesis on the evolution of life that did not necessarily hinge on his own data. Both Einstein’s two papers on relativity and Newton’s opus Principia were theoretical manifestos that at the time they were published had little experimental support.
The 2005 signal processing review by Berryman, Allison, Wilkinson, and Abbott provides a fascinating insight into how cells operate and how similar they are to human and computer processing! 🙂 Or did all this functionality this come about by “evolution”? 🙄 Consider:
Signal processing is the use of mathematical techniques to analyze any data signal. This data could be an image, a sound, or any other sequence of data, such a sequence of nucleotides. The sequences of interest could be protein coding regions, repeating elements that may be associated with various diseases (such as Huntington’s disease[7]) or regions rich in some set of complementary bases, such as A and T, which can give information on evolutionary history including lateral gene transfer in bacteria [8]. . . .
Signal processing is not just a human enterprise – even individual cells process signals in the form of mRNA, protein, and more general chemical levels (for example sugars in the environment) [16, 17, 18, 19]. As with conventional computers, cells can be genetically programmed to process signals [20, 21, 22]. Read More ›
Some readers may know that, here in Canada, I am a free speech journalist. That is, I think public discussion of any issue is distorted by the currently rampant Offended lobby.
My own view is simple: If you are selected to attend a university or smart enough to find and read a magazine or blog, then get used to the fact that you will encounter ideas you strongly dispute. Otherwise, I recommend a good trade school where you can learn how to earn a decent living – and the subject matter will not likely offend your beliefs. Read More ›
Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (1903 – 1957) was one of the more powerful scientific mind of the 20th century. His works span from functional and numerical analysis to quantum mechanics, from set theory to game theory, as well as many other fields of pure and applied mathematics. He was a pioneer in computer science, the first real computers were developed according to a basic model that takes his name (“von Neumann architecture”). Read More ›
Jerry Coyne visited the University of Alabama last week to explain why evolution is true. Of course the “truth” of evolution comes from religious conviction. With religion one can say that evolution is as much a fact as is gravity. The claim makes no sense from a scientific perspective. It is not that evolutionists have made an error. They did not make a mistake in their calculations or misread a scientific observation. Their claim that evolution is as obvious as gravity is not really a mistake at all. It isn’t even wrong–it simply is not scientific. Evolution is as obvious as gravity just like astrology is as obvious as gravity. These people clearly are playing by a different set of Read More ›
In case you missed this blog (and now that The Brites are no longer in existence): http://satirizingscientism.blogspot.com