2009

Here is my review of Alva Noe’s Out of Our Heads Out of Our Heads at MercatorNet: He raises vital issues but, unfortunately, he fails to offer a convincing solution. Arguing that consciousness must be understood as involving the body and the environment as well as the brain, he offers platitudes such as, “Where do you stop and where does the rest of the world begin?” An interesting question, but if consciousness is real — and not well described by materialist theory — we are no closer to an answer even if our brains, bodies, and environment are all one world. He offers only a different description of the problem. Noë seems to want to move away from reductive explanations, Read More ›

Robert Shapiro, noted Darwinist and professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University, says this of the recent Sutherland RNA world experiments: “‘Although as an exercise in chemistry this represents some very elegant work, this has nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth whatsoever,’ he says.   According to Shapiro, it is hard to imagine RNA forming in a prebiotic world along the lines of Sutherland’s synthesis.   ‘The chances that blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA is highly unlikely,’ argues Shapiro. Instead, he advocates the metabolism-first argument: that early self-sustaining autocatalytic chemosynthetic systems associated with amino acids predated RNA.” My question Read More ›

I’m just posting this to give people an update on what researchers are finding. More and more, so-called “junk DNA” is proving to be essential for life. Here, transposons, considered, generally, to be the “junkiest” of the “junk”, is found to have a rather central role in the development of a pond critter. Here is the write-up on PhysOrg. com.
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A Nature review that begins with the pronouncement that an experiment “has quashed” major objections to the RNA world of prebiotic origins (Ref 1) is bound to raise a few eye-brows.  It is a bold pronouncement indeed and one that must be accompanied by a water-tight set of evidences.  In his review of the work of John Sutherland and others at the University of Manchester, science writer Richard Van Noorden promised just that by declaring to his readers that these same scientists had achieved the ‘never-before-performed’ feat of making a ribonucleotide- one of the components of RNA- in the lab (Ref 1).  Key to the success of the experiment was the presence of a phosphate group that, in addition to serving as one of the final reactants in the ribonucleotide synthesis process, also functioned as a catalyst earlier on in the reaction (Refs 1-3).  This result was the culmination of twelve long years of laboratory-based research during which simple molecules had been shown to be the “unwitting choreographers” of ribonucleotide synthesis (Ref 1).

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There is a fascinating post about Snow Rollers: Roll ‘em Roll ‘em Roll ‘em…keep that snow a rollin! at WattsUpWithThat.com See: Are there ways to distinguish between a “SnowMan” and a “Snow Roller”?

This contest was posted 6 May 2009, and closed today.

The Uncommon Descent Contest Question 1 winner is #27:

To claim the prize, a free copy of Expelled, #27 John A Designer must send me a snail address at dodesignorchance@gmail.com Here is the entry: Read More ›

Michael D. Thomas, Ph.D. is a Professor and Director of the Division of Spanish and Portuguese at Baylor and is an ordained pastor.  On his BLOG,  he has a dialog between God and Evolution I found fun.  There are some other ID posts on his site that are worth perusing.

I have often been wearied by legends in their own lunchroom huffing that science differs from other endeavours because it is “self-correcting.”

To which I reply: Aw come off it, fellas. Any system that does not go extinct is self-correcting – after it collapses on its hind end. This is true of governments, businesses, churches, and not-for-profit organizations. I’ve seen enough of life to know.

Here’s a classic: At The Scientist’s NewsBlog, Bob Grant reveals (May 7, 2009) that

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted. Read More ›

A review of a book titled “The Universe: Order without design” appears in New Scientist. The summary of current ideas has a mythic sound to ordinary readers “a tiny piece of inflating “false vacuum” decays into a fireball, and stars and galaxies congeal out of the cooling debris”. Read it and see what you think. I have two questions. First, does description equal causation? Second, is the invoking of billions of theoretical and eternally undetectable other universes simply to give an atheistic explaination of our one tuned universe, more scientific or rational than believing in an Intelligent Fine Tuner?

For a fascinating misreading of what the recently announced Messel Pit fossil really shows, go here: Scientists have found a 47-million-year-old human ancestor. Discovered in Messel Pit, Germany, the fossil, described as Darwinius masillae, is 20 times older than most fossils that explain human evolution. That fossil doesn’t “explain” human evolution; it complicates the picture. The theory that was gaining ground was that humans were descended from tarsier-like creatures, but this fossil, touted as a primate ancestor, is a lemur-like creature. Often, I hear from people attempting to patch the cracks in the unguided Darwinian evolution theory, as follows: “We have more information than ever!” Yes, but what if it is – as in this case – the evidence is Read More ›

I know this is old news by now (I was teaching an ID-intensive last week at Southern Evangelical Seminary, so I’m only now getting caught up), but the following paragraphs in ScienceNews struck me: RNA molecules are formed from three components: a sugar, a base and a phosphate group. In past research, chemists developed each of the components and then tried to put them together to make the complete molecule. “But the components are quite stable, and so they wouldn’t stick together,” Sutherland says. “After 40 years of trying, we decided there had to be a better way of doing this reaction.” The team took a different approach, starting with a common precursor molecule that had a bit of the Read More ›

Check out the following at fedbizopps.gov (click here):

Solicitation Number:
DARPA-SN-09-35
Notice Type:
Special Notice
Synopsis:
Added: May 05, 2009 11:23 am

Special Notice DARPA-SN-09-35: Physical intelligence (PI);
Proposers’ Day Workshop, DATES: June 9th and June 11th, 2009;
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: May 29, 2009; TECHNICAL POC: Dr. Todd Hylton, DARPA/DSO, Email: Todd.Hylton@darpa.mil; URL: www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/solicit.htm

In anticipation of a potential program on the topic of Physical intelligence (PI), DARPA is hosting two Proposers’ Day Workshops that will provide critical information on the program vision, the milestones, and opportunities associated with the development of interdisciplinary teams to respond to an anticipated Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). The Physical Intelligence program aspires to understand intelligence as a physical phenomenon and to make the first demonstration of the principle in electronic and chemical systems. A central tenet is that intelligence spontaneously evolves as a consequence of thermodynamics in open systems. The program plan is organized around three interrelated task areas: (1) creating a theory (a mathematical formalism) and validating it in natural and engineered systems; (2) building the first human-engineered systems that display physical intelligence in the form of abiotic, self-organizing electronic and chemical systems; and (3) developing analytical tools to support the design and understanding of physically intelligent systems. If successful, the program would launch a revolution of understanding across many fields of human endeavor, demonstrate the first intelligence engineered from first principles, create new classes of electronic, computational, and chemical systems, and create tools to engineer intelligent systems that match the problem/environment in which they will exist. Concepts relevant to the objectives of the Physical Intelligence program can be found in numerous disciplines and areas of research including statistical physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, dissipative systems, group theory, collective behavior, complexity theory, consciousness theory, non-linear dynamical systems, complex adaptive systems, systems analysis, multi-scale modeling, control systems, information theory, computation theory, topology, electronics, evolutionary computation, cellular automata, artificial life, origin of life, microbiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary chemistry, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, brain modeling, organizational behavior, operations research and others. Read More ›

Further to Uncommon Descent Contest Question 3: Human evolution – What do we actually know? (13 May 2009), this article in Wall Street Journal by Gautam Naik (May 15, 2009) boosts the finding of the skeleton of an ancient primate from 47 million years ago as a “landmark discovery.” Why?

Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today’s lemurs in Madagascar.

Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.

In other words, the landmark discovery in an abandoned quarry near Frankfurt, Germany, keeps the controversy going by evening the odds. Read More ›

Walter ReMine once said to me, the supposed 99.5% identity between chimps and humans is like taking two books, creating an alphabetical listing of all the unique words in each book, and then comparing the lists of unique words derived from each book. It would be really easy then to use these lists to argue: “see the books are 99.5% identical!” Another ID proponent, David Pogge, argued that the sequence comparison are like comparing driving directions: two sets of directions can have 99% similarity, but a few differences can lead to radically different destinations. With this in mind, here is Rick Sternberg’s Guy Walks Into a Bar and Thinks He’s a Chimpanzee: The Unbearable Lightness of Chimp-Human Genome Similarity.

Yesterday, Intelligent Design critic and creationist basher, P.Z. Meyers, posted what he considers to be a real scientific challenge for ID proponents on his Pharyngula blogsite. The main thrust of his challenge is outlined in this Youtube video:

So, has Myers indeed stumbled upon a true significant challenge for ID?  Or, has he simply stumbled, as he so often does, over his own misconceptions and metaphysics?  I vote for the latter.