’bout time for this BhTV dust-up to exit, stage left. Before it does, however, a few observations:

1. Don’t worry, Bob, George, Sean, Carl, et al. — “respectability” is not transitive.

If it were, what Francis Bacon (1620) called “the kingdom of opinions” would be a lot more fluid than it is. Let’s suppose A knows B, and B knows C. And let’s define “respectability” as “no smart person I admire will ever think I’m crazy or a crackpot.” Read More ›

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 1: Evolution’s Glass Ceiling Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 2: Rebutting Methodological Materialism: Interview With Angus Menuge, Part Two Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 3: Agents Under Fire: Part One With Angus Menuge Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 4: Hitler’s Ethic and the Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress in Nazi Policy Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 5: Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 6: Back to school with real science

The “fact” of Darwinian evolution finally has some support, or so they say at ScienceDaily This is a significant study, but what did they actually find? Darwinian Evolution can break complex productive genetic networks  resulting in “morphological degeneration”. “change recorded in both the fossil record and the genomes of living organisms  … shows  simultaneous molecular decay of the gene that is involved in enamel formation in mammals.” Mammals exist without mineralized teeth (e.g., baleen whales, anteaters, pangolins) and  with teeth that lack enamel (e.g., sloths, aardvarks, and pygmy sperm whales). “Mammals without enamel are descended from ancestral forms that had teeth with enamel,” Mark Springer of UC said. “We predicted that enamel-specific genes such as enamelin would show evidence in Read More ›

In my last post I commented on Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner’s article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in which Wigner describes as “miraculous” (1) that “laws” of nature exist; and (2) that we should be able to discover those laws.

 In this post I will use an exchange in the comment section of that post between ID proponent “StephenB” and Darwinist “Delurker” to illustrate the utter vacuity of Darwinist argumentation, or at least the vacuity of the arguments of this particular Darwinist.  It is not my purpose to pick on Delurker per se.  I am using his arguments, because they are quite representative of the type of arguments Darwinists make on this site. 

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With my new book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY coming out shortly and with the publisher positioning it as a counterblast to the neo-atheist literature, I’m boning up on that literature as well as on the responses to it. Dinesh D’Souza’s response has much to commend it, but he drops the ball on evolution. Not only is his scholarship sloppy on this point (for instance, he fails to distinguish the younger C. S. Lewis, who largely had no problem with evolution, from the later C. S. Lewis, who did), but he justifies taking the side of evolution on the basis of an argumentum ad populum: I am not a biologist, but what impresses me is that virtually every biologist in the Read More ›

This very interesting article by Steve Silberman in Wired (“Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why,” 08.24.09) notes

True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison. The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people’s health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology.

Ultimately, Merck’s foray into the antidepressant market failed. In subsequent tests, MK-869 turned out to be no more effective than a placebo. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the futility boundary.

MK-869 wasn’t the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone in recent years by the placebo effect. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

More:

After decades in the jungles of fringe science, the placebo effect has become the elephant in the boardroom.

Although longish, this article is indispensable in understanding the damage that materialism and mechanism has done to medicine. The placebo effect should never have been either a problem or an embarrassment. It only became so because of a need to pretend that the patient’s mind does not matter, because mind is an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in the brain and causes nothing. It is increasing only because its potent effects are ignored.

Well, they are paying for their mistake now.

The good news is that a new approach is developing, one that harnesses both the placebo response and pharmaceuticals. As Silberman says,

The placebo response doesn’t care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That’s potent medicine.

Of course, that means that your mind exists and is doing the heavy lifting. But so? If you’re better, you’re better. You want to complain about that? Save it for when you are sick and not getting better. That happens too.

Go here for the rest.

See also:

Mario Beauregard on “The Neuroscience of Spirituality”

Big mystery [not!]: Why you feel sick when doctors tell you you are Read More ›

In “Restating the case for human uniqueness,” in Spiked* (Issue 25, June 2009), managing editor Helene Guldberg reviews Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human by Jeremy Taylor (Oxford University Press 2009):

She notes that

Taylor sets out to argue that it is ‘as wrong as it is misguided’ to ‘exaggerate the narrowness of the gap between chimpanzees and ourselves’: ‘It plays into the hands of our natural propensity to anthropomorphise our pets and other animals, and even our inanimate possessions, and it has allowed us to distort what the science is trying to tell us.’ His aim is ‘to set the record straight and restore chimpanzees to arm’s length’.

Good idea that. Remember the horrific case of Travis the chimp? Travis would have been a fine chimp, left to himself in a natural environment. But he went on a rampage and horribly maimed and mutilated the employee of the owner of a towing company, who was keeping him. Her family are now suing for $50 million.

This is the tragedy of anthropomorphizing animals. They neither become people nor fit in with other animals of their kind. Travis was shot by a police officer. But had he lived, one may wonder whether he could even adapt to life in a troupe of chimpanzees, after a career in show business and later as a pet whose mistress thought he was like a son.

In the chapter titled ‘Povinelli’s Gauntlet’, Taylor outlines the fascinating work of the comparative cognitive psychologist Daniel Povinelli, who runs the Cognitive Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana. Povinelli is unequivocal in arguing that no test to date has reliably demonstrated that chimpanzees – or any other primate for that matter – have an understanding of the mental life of others or an understanding of causation in the physical world.

To investigate chimps’ so-called understanding of ‘folk psychology’, Povinelli tested whether chimps understood that their begging gestures will only be effective if the person they are begging from can see them. When one of two experimenters either wore a blindfold, held their hands over their eyes or wore a bucket over their head, the chimps showed no preference for whom they made their begging gestures to.

No surprise there. Chimpanzees do not usually perform as well as dogs in reading human gestures.

Even more interesting:

In order to demonstrate that far too much has been made of the tool-using abilities of chimpanzees in the wild, Taylor outlines recent discoveries showing that the tool-making of some birds equals, or in many cases betters, anything observed in chimpanzees. ‘In two species that parted company 280million years ago, performance is either very similar, or corvids might even have an edge. Bird brains, in specific contexts, are a match for chimp brains’, he writes. What this shows is that chimpanzees may not tell us that much more than corvids about the evolution of our unique genetic make-up, he argues.

Now that is a story that should be investigated more openly than it is. Why are some birds so smart, yet they have key brain differences from the animals that are supposed to be smart – mammals? Clearly, intelligence is not what we have assumed.

I will spoil no more for you; go here for more.

See also:

Dogs more like humans than chimpanzees are? Read More ›

In 1960 Nobel prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner published a brief article entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” See it here. In this article Wigner describes as “miraculous” (1) that “laws” of nature exist; and (2) that we should be able to discover those laws.

vjtorley has taken the time to give us a nice summary of and commentary on the article:

BEGIN QUOTATIONS FROM ARTICLE:

…The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. Second, it is just this uncanny usefulness of mathematical concepts that raises the question of the uniqueness of our physical theories….

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The one on the left is a coyote and the one on the right is a wolf. Hybrids can be anywhere in between. Does anyone remember when “speciation” meant something? Here’s an item from the Toronto news: “Meet the coywolf: A newly emerging species is behind the brazen attacks in Durham”: The predators that are plaguing Durham Region and showing up in urban areas appear to be an emerging species resulting from wolves and coyotes interbreeding. The larger, highly adaptable animals “have the wolf characteristics of pack hunting and aggression and the coyote characteristics of lack of fear of human-developed areas,” says Trent University geneticist Bradley White, who’s been studying the hybrids for 12 years. We’re seeing “evolution in action,” Read More ›

In a just published article in Plos Genetics, Merdith, et. al., study the enamilin gene (ENAM) in four different orders of placental mammals having both toothless and/or enamelless taxa. Their results show that, indeed, the enamelin gene is basically in place in the toothless taxa, but that either “frameshift mutations and/or stop codons” are found in the toothless and enamelless taxa. They then use a “novel method based on selection intensity estimates” to determine whether molecular evolutionary history of ENAM would ‘predict’ the occurence of enamel in “basal representative of Xenartha (sloths, anteaters, armadillos)”, which contains many frameshift mutations. Their conclusion? Our results link evolutionary change at the molecular level to morphological change in the fossil record and also provide Read More ›

Dawkins’ new book is reviewed in the Economist. How humans are related to chimpanzees—and to cheese mites and cherry trees too, Sep 3rd 2009, The Economist, From the review there are no new arguments, just more of the same polemical rhetoric and the same tired old evidences. If this is the best RD can do then Darwinian evolution is clearly on its last legs. Does Dawkins really appeal to the homology of skeletal plan which could be equally evidence of common design, or to the fossil record with all its out of place fossils including a Jurassic Beaver, Carboniferous dragonflies and Cambrian vertebrates. Does Dawkins really retreat to the rhetoric and polemics of a schoolyard bully again by misrepresenting arguments Read More ›

As an old proverb has it, first they’ll reject the truth and then they’ll appropriate it and say they knew it all along. Enter Paul Kammerer, the Austrian biologist who almost a century ago was assailed as a fraud for his anti Darwinian findings. His crime: he found evidence for Lamarckism–the idea that organisms can pass on traits they have acquired to their offspring. Kammerer ended up committing suicide and now, almost a century later, evolutionists are figuring out that he was right. Guess what they’re calling him now? That’s right, Kammerer has now been crowned an “evolutionist.” Today’s Orwellian headline reads:   Read more

The recent brouhaha concerning Mike Behe at BloggingHeads got me to thinking. (I do that from time to time.) I finally figured out why the incensed Darwinists who resigned from BH did so: They are the equivalent of alchemists who have been confronted with knowledge about the nature of the nucleus of the atom. Alchemists thought that they might be able to turn lead into gold through chemistry. (After all, lead is heavy and dense, and gold is too.) Darwinists propose that inanimate matter — coupled with the laws of chance, chemistry, etc. — can produce information-processing systems of incredible sophistication. The alchemist and the Darwinist have been seduced into pursuing analogous rainbows, based on a fundamental misunderstanding about how Read More ›

Congressman Pete Stark is an MIT and Berkeley graduate as well as a former banker. He regards himself as an expert on economics and is one of the main guiding forces behind ObamaCare. This interview demonstrates the perverse effect on one’s thinking of residing too long in a fevered swamp, in this case, Washington DC. His unbridled contempt for Jan Helfeld reminds me of the Darwinists’ contempt for lay people when they ask simple probing questions about their theory. Darwinism has a similar addling effect on even the best-educated minds. It too is a fevered swamp. SOURCE