2009

Computers are becoming faster and more powerful all the time and those improvements have been mainly due to better hardware. Future improvements, however, may well rely increasingly on better architecture and software. One reason why this seems likely is that the human brain, with its very different architecture, dramatically out performs computers in performing various tasks (such as perceiving an object in a complex visual scene). If computers are to match the brain’s performance, they likely will need to exploit features of the brain’s design.   Read more

Stuart Kauffman, a big name in complexity theory, is leaving the University of Calgary for the University of Vermont . He used to be at the Santa Fe Institute.

I’m not clear on what he actually did at the University of Calgary, Canada, that attracted much attention but you can read more about him at Edge.

He wrote a book called Reinventing the Sacred, but he could have written it in Death Valley or Alaska. I am told it is the usual science-religion Templeton style book.

The press release informs me that Kauffman is ”one of the world’s most eminent scientists” and that the MacArthur foundation has officially labelled him a “genius,” stuff I could never have imagined from reading his first book, At Home in the Universe. But then I had no idea that Richard Dawkins (a guy who can’t even find his own computer code) is, by his own admission, “the most formidable intellect in public discourse” either.

Obviously, these people take the concept of humility much more seriously than most people I run into.

An interesting coincidence is that Kauffman shared the 2005 Trotter Prize at Texas A&M with our own Bill Dembski, often sighted here. Does that make Bill a genius too?

I hope not. Co-blogging with a genius, I might feel intimidated (something you sure don’t need in this business) or else start to give myself airs (“the most formidable intellect in raccoon riddance on Latimer Avenue in Toronto”). Hey, I want a more fashionable hairdresser already.

Details: Right now Read More ›

Clearing out the Inbox, I find this item, “Charles Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’” A British film about Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer (Anita Singh,The Daily Telegraph, 11 Sep 2009). Utter rubbish. Most likely, the film – which led off the Toronto International Film Festival – was rejected because it is a bore. No one here cares about Charles and Emma Darwin. A tell-all about Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack and Michelle Obama, now …. This whole fake uproar* reminds me of a recent occasion when some pundit from the States claimed that Canadians have a growing fear of Read More ›

Here’s an intriguing article about origin of life researcher Lynn Margulis in the University of Wisconsin alumni news magazine, “Evolution Revolution” by Eric Goldscheider. We learn, among many other very interesting things,

Symbiogenesis theory flies in the face of an accepted scientific dogma called neo-Darwinism, which holds that adaptations occur exclusively through random mutation, and that as genes mutate in unpredictable ways, their gradual accumulation sometimes results in useful attributes that give the organisms an advantage that eventually translates into evolutionary change.

What tipped Margulis off that new traits could arise in another way was the fact that DNA, thought to reside only in the nucleus, was found in other bodies of the same cell. This realization led to research showing not only how crucial symbiotic relationships can be to the immediate survival of organisms, but also that one of the most significant sources of innovation — indeed, even the origins of new species — occurs when, over time, symbiotic partners fuse to create new organisms.

In other words, complexity at the cell level is not the result of lethal competition from lucky mutants, but rather interactive chemistry that begins as symbiotic relationships between gene sets that together accomplish things that would otherwise have been impossible.

That sounds more plausible to me, though it all but wrecked her career.

Margulis’s observation that constituent parts of the same cell had different genetic histories was largely written off as crank science in 1964 when she started submitting her paper on the topic to academic journals. No one wanted it. After more than a dozen rejections, the Journal of Theoretical Biology published “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells” in 1967, and then something very interesting happened. Requests for reprints started pouring in, more than eight hundred in all. “Nothing like that had ever happened in the Boston University biology department,” Margulis says. Although she was a part-time adjunct professor there at the time, she won a prize for faculty publication of the year. Eventually, a full-time position that lasted twenty-two years followed.

But in spite of, or maybe because of, this modicum of recognition, the scientific establishment viewed her skeptically, if not with outright hostility. Her grant proposals weren’t funded. Margulis tells of being recruited for a distinguished professorship at Duke University, only to have it subverted at the last minute by a whispering campaign.

She ended up at the University of Massachusetts, so at least she had a job.

One thing that mars her theories, in my eye, is is statements like

“Man is the consummate egotist,” Margulis has written. “It may come as a blow to our collective ego, but we are not masters of life perched on the top rung of an evolutionary ladder.” Instead, she likes to say that “beneath our superficial differences, we are all of us walking communities of bacteria.”

. Aw c’mon! I’m always hearing from enviro-fruitcakes and anti-nuclear nutcakes who think humans will soon destroy the planet. So walking communities of bacteria will destroy the planet? I am sure not getting involved in the squabble. I can only communicate with creatures that have brains.

A question related to this interesting article will shortly be posted here as Contest Question 11 at Uncommon Descent.

Also just up at Colliding Universes, my blog on theories about our universe: Read More ›

Excerpted from The Greatest Show on Earth Richard Dawkins 2009

“It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.

Creationists are deeply enamored of the fossil record because they have been taught that it is full of “gaps”. Actually, we are lucky to have any fossils at all. The massive numbers we now do have document evolutionary history. Large numbers by any standards constitute beautiful “intermediates.” The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong.

We don’t need fossils. The case for evolution is watertight without them, so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution. There is more than enough evidence for the fact of evolution in the comparative study of modern species and their geographical distribution.

Read More ›

Press release issued 25 September 2009 From the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists annual meeting at the University of Bristol, UK Chinese scientists today reveal the discovery of five remarkable new feathered dinosaur fossils which are significantly older than any previously reported. The new finds are indisputably older than Archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, at last providing hard evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Read more…

Chuck Colson at Break Point discusses Dr. Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell: In recent years, there have been several important books about intelligent design that go to the debate about evolution and the origins of life. Bill Dembski’s The Design Inference was first. Then along came Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, showing the irreducible complexity of the cell, which casts grave doubts on Darwinian evolution as an explanation for life and higher life forms. Now we’ve got Signature in the Cell by the Discovery Institute’s Dr. Stephen Meyer… But here is your takeaway, and I’ll let Dr. Meyer do the talking: “Our uniform experience affirms that specified information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, encoded in Read More ›

As I have observed in these pages before, the United States Supreme Court has a very uneven record on the issue of eugenics.  Indeed, one of the justices we lawyers are taught in law school to revere without question, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was an uber-Darwinist and philosophical materialist who also happened to be, not coincidentally, a great admirer of the American eugenics project of the 1920’s.  In the infamous case of Buck v. Bell the court considered a Virginia law authorizing the forced sterilization of mentally challenged people.  The state proposed to use the law to sterilize Carrie Buck on the ground that she was feeble minded and thus a genetic threat to society.  The court upheld the law, and Read More ›

For those still clinging to the risible notion that scientists are above petty self-interest there is this.  Note especially this response from a leading climate researcher to another researcher’s request for his raw data:  “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”  Science is not, as some would have it, an automatically self-correcting enterprise.  As with every other human intellectual endeavor, science has entrenched orthodoxies that seek to perpetuate themselves at all costs.  Note to non-US readers:  The title does not refer to German National Socialists.  It is an allusion to a famous Seinfeld episode.  See here. Update:   Berlinski is scintillating on the silly notion that unlike other Read More ›

You’ve got to wonder what an organization that touts itself for critical thinking is thinking when it sponsors a BLASPHEMY CONTEST: Since Darwin is their god, it would be interesting to submit to this contest true statements about Darwin’s less than divine attributes.

In an earlier post (go here), I relayed to UD readers two programs that had been emailed to me by someone named Oxfordensis. After careful scrutiny, my colleagues and I at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab concluded that these are by far the best candidates that we have to date for Dawkins’s original WEASEL program(s) (as I note in the previous UD post, it appears that there were in fact two programs, one described by Dawkins in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, the other appearing in his BBC video about the book). Are these in fact the original WEASELs? When I contacted Richard Dawkins to confirm their authenticity, he replied, in an email dated 9.21.09, “I cannot confirm that either of them is mine. They don’t look familiar to me, but it is a long time ago. I don’t see what more I can say.”

In that email, Dawkins rightly raised the question of these program’s provenance and the fact that UD had issued a reward for them. Yet the reward was so small (a mere book) that this hardly seems sufficient for someone to write these programs as a hoax. The question of provenance is more worrisome, but then again so is the failure of Dawkins to keep copies of the program, especially when they are of such historical interest in ongoing debates over evolution. Are, then, the programs listed in my previous post in fact the originals? Even if this question cannot be answered with iron-clad certainty, we submit that they deserve to be taken as originals. Why? Three reasons:

1. They are written in PASCAL and they compile in the PASCAL compilers available in the mid- to late-80s.

2. These programs were widely circulated at the time. Charles Thaxton informs me, in an email dated 8.27.09, “As for the Dawkins program, I picked up a copy in 1989 at Princeton from a physics grad student after my talk there.” Like Dawkins, he adds, “But Bill, I have no idea where it is.” Presumably, these programs are still out there on people’s computer memory (or floppy disks). So why can’t an anonymous person like Oxfordensis have the originals?

3. Their performance is precisely what we would expect given the historical record that we have of these programs.

This last point has been the main sticking point keeping critics from embracing these programs as the originals. As Wesley Elsberry put it to me in an email dated 9.21.09: “Putting mutation on a per-copy basis rather than per-base would be rather unlike the biology.” And yet, Dawkins does indeed seem to have made this non-biological assumption in programming his WEASELs. In what follows, I draw from my consultation with a programmer colleague: Read More ›

StephenB, at 50, won, for the appended comment in response to the question: Is accidental origin of life a doctrine that holds back science?

The prize? A free copy of Steven Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009). (But StephenB must send me a working postal address at oleary@sympatico.ca)

The accidental origin of life idea Read More ›

This week, Simon Conway Morris visited Australia. The following are extracts from a talk he gave in Sydney on Monday 21 Sept. They indicate how he sees ID and Dawkins.

“I suspect, having re-read the Origin from cover to cover, that the Origin is as much to, not only attempt, but in fact to destroy creationism irrevocably. In as much as, as a young man Darwin was hugely influenced by Paley, who we can describe if you like, as the grand daddy of creationists, in as much as he is the person who points to biological structures and organisation and says “look these things are so ludicrously complex, that they must surely represent the hand and authority of a designer.” Paley was of course was referring to the action of God. This is effectively the position which remains to the present day in intelligent design, which I think is non sense.

What I think is interesting is that at each point Darwin simply says “Look nobody is going to accept this as evidence for a creationist argument.” But he does it with enormous subtlety, and he doesn’t have this belligerent sort of “How could you be so stupid as to believe something like that?” But I think it is as clear as I can make out that Darwin really did want to undermine permanently the notion that God was involved, if you like on a day to day action. He had perhaps in the end an almost deistic view of the world which revolved around the primary laws so established that then led to as he said himself “this grandeur of life”.

I think these attitudes, if you like really go very deep and these tensions remain with us today.”

Q. How do you differ from Dawkins?

  Read More ›

In light of Judge Jones coming to Southern Methodist University today and tomorrow, for what seems to be an unbalanced discussion of ID, I thought I would add some clarity to the affair with these remarks by Nick Smyth  from the blog 3quarksdaily pertaining to Jones’s poor reasoning in his 2005 Kitzmiller decision as to what constitutes science: For any formal definition of science, it either excludes too much, or includes too much, or both. It is enough to say that today, even those writing anti-pseudoscience manifestos concede that it is not possible to give a complete definition of what constitutes science or pseudoscience. Rather, they tend to revert to weak, vague and totally indefensible “ballpark” definitions that are designed Read More ›