When I first encountered epigenetic research, some 10 years ago, (where epigenetics is the modification of the genome by environmental factors) I remember the thrill of seeing Darwinism being disproven, well, the Neo-Darwinist Theory (NDT) synthesis anyway. Darwin himself had this archaic idea of “gemmules” carrying traits from the body to the gametes, but Mendel blew all that nonsense out of the water. Not until 50 years after Darwin’s death did his theory get resurrected with the discrete gene as the bearer of the all-important genetic blueprint. This led to the central dogma of NDT, that genes are the DNA blueprints for the cell, producing the RNA transcriptions that get converted into the proteins that make up a cell, a Read More ›

Michael Shermer and I are taking our ID versus Darwinian Evolution show back on the road, this time at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The date is Tuesday, November 16, and the venue is Prochnow Auditorium; here are some details: Debate on Evolution vs. Intelligent Design with Michael Shermer and Paul Nelson. This event is only open to NAU students, faculty and staff and is free with a ticket and ID. Tickets can be picked up at the NAU Central Ticket Office starting October 26. A limited number of tickets will be available at the door. Please… bring NAU ID with you to the event. This event is part of SUN Entertainment’s Lecture and Debate Series. Here’s the Facebook entry Read More ›

It is all over the news, “Scientists discover Liberal Gene!”  All my colleagues had the same question, “Does that mean there is a cure?” This is a serious question, and one that has wide repercussions. If there is a gene for homosexuality, then that means it can’t be cured, right? And groups such as Exodus Intl, which specialize in curing it, are acting contrary to nature, as is the DSM (prior to IV edition) which recommended a cure. Of course, Darwin would be spinning in his grave if someone had told him that sterilization could be an inherited trait. Nevertheless, if by some rationale (which merely demonstrates just how infinitely flexible is the Darwinian faith) we could find a gene Read More ›

Check out the following paper at arXiv. It gives yet another incarnation of Dawkins’ WEASEL. Let me suggest that Darwinists next try a horror version of it: “The WEASEL That Wouldn’t Die.” Perhaps Michael Moore can help make it.  There’s plenty of time for evolution Herbert S. Wilf Department of Mathematics, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6395 wilf@math.upenn.edu> Warren J. Ewens Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6018 wewens@sas.upenn.edu> October 28, 2010 Abstract: Objections to Darwinian evolution are often based on the time required to carry out the necessary mutations. Seemingly, exponential numbers of mutations are needed. We show that such estimates ignore the effects of natural selection, and that the numbers of necessary mutations are thereby reduced Read More ›

Sir Roger Penrose, the brilliant Oxford mathematical physicist, who has made contributions to cosmology (in a famous paper with Stephen Hawking where he disproves the oscillating Big Bang [BB] theory), to the mind-matter problem (The Emperor’s New Mind), recreational mathematics, five-fold symmetry in crystals, and now revisits the Big Bang. In an interview with BBC HardTalk, he defends his book thesis (Cycles of Time) that the BB, despite never oscillating, can continue expanding and recycling forever. As Sir Roger puts it (at the 0:50 mark) “it is crazy enough to have a chance,” which echoes the comment the grandfather of Quantum Mechanics, Niels Bohr, made at a Columbia University meeting in 1958, when Wolfgang Pauli said he knew his theory Read More ›

Philippa Foot (1920-2010) was one of the greatest moral philosophers of the 20th century, but she insisted that she was “not clever at all” and “very uneducated.” She was greatly influenced by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, whom she described in an interview as “more rigorously Catholic than the Pope,” but she herself was a card-carrying atheist. She was also one of the founders of Oxfam, a life-long socialist, and the grand-daughter of U.S. President Grover Cleveland. To the public, she is best known for her formulation of the trolley problem, a moral dilemma which she first raised in a now-famous essay. The recent death of such a great philosopher should make us pause and ask: what did she live for? Foot finally revealed what drove her in an interview in 2003: a life-long quest to show that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong. Throughout her academic life, she was passionately opposed to subjectivism in ethics. The story of how she got into moral philosophy is a fascinating one:

“I’ll tell you a bit of biography. During the war I went to London to work as an economist as war work, and then I came back and started to work on philosophy. I was just really getting going on moral philosophy when the photographs and films of Belsen and Birkenau came out, and it’s really not possible to convey to people who are younger what it was like. One would have said such a thing on that scale could not happen, human beings couldn’t do this. That was what was behind my refusing to accept subjectivism even when I couldn’t see any way out. It took a long time and it was only in the last fifteen or twenty years that I managed it. But I was certain that it could not be right that the Nazis were convinced and there was no way that they were wrong and we were right. It just could not be.

“That’s why I could never accept Charles Stevenson, say, whose emotivism implies that in the end that you simply express one attitude and I express another… That is what has driven all my moral philosophy.”
(Excerpt from an interview with The Philosophers’ Magazine, originally given in 2003 and republished on October 6, 2010.)

Foot made several attempts to answer the question “Why be moral?” on rational grounds, and in this post, I’d like to discuss her last and most systematic attempt. In 2001, Foot wrote a book called Natural Goodness. She has given an account of the central thesis of her book in interviews. What I propose to do is quote a few choice excerpts and then throw the floor open to readers. Do you think Foot’s naturalistic ethics succeeds in establishing that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong?
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In the couple of weeks since I posted a summary of my work on self organisation, I’ve been hoping to receive criticism – none so far unfortunately.  However, by trawling the web I did find some anonymous comments.  While these were mostly of low quality, some recurrent objections have made me want to clarify a couple of points.

Clarification #1  “Quantheory”, a grad student in physics, criticises the applicability of the results to evolution.  He writes:

“… evolution is not described by the search for one specific target. Rather, there is a large range of living things that can exist in many different environments”.

Of course this is true.  Nevertheless it doesn’t contradict anything I say in my paper.  I’m examining the claim that living organisms (more generally, large and irregular objects) can self organise.  The number of possible living organisms simply isn’t relevant to this question, and so isn’t considered in the paper.  Recall that a self-organising object is strongly preferred by the dynamics, so that it appears much more quickly and probably than it would in a purely random system.

The author may be suggesting that evolution isn’t a case of self organisation, after all.  Perhaps there are so many possible kinds of life that some kinds at least are likely to have emerged even by pure chance, given a few billion years?  I hope s/he is not, for this notion is ridiculous, as for example Richard Dawkins has pointed out:

“It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living – flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on.  But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.  You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.”

(R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, p. 9)  Read More ›

Friends tell me that British theistic evolutionist Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute spoke at Baylor University recently on the “Very Weak Anthropic Principle.” I’ve heard of the Anthropic Principle, which essentially means that the universe appears fine-tuned for intelligent life. I’ve also heard of the Weak Anthropic Principle, namely, The weak anthropic principle states that the ways that the universe might be observed to be is limited by the fact that observation requires the existence of observers. It is impossible to observe a universe that does not permit the existence of observers; only a universe that permits the existence of observers could be observed. So what’s the Very Weak Anthropic Principle, I wonder? The observers are a buzz of Read More ›

A friend points to a popular overview of current ideas in theoretical physics on pre-Big Bang cosmology, check out “What Happened Before the Big Bang?” a recent episode of the BBC’s Horizon series.

It’s on YouTube in six parts, featuring Michio Kaku, Neil Turok, Lee Smolin, Andre Linde, Roger Penrose, and Laura Mersini-Hougton.

What do you think? Is this science or wishful thinking?

See also: Read More ›

It is a classic problem in the field of computer science: In what order should a salesman visit his prospects? The traveling salesman problem may appear simple but it has engaged some of the greatest mathematical minds and today engages some of the fastest computers. This makes new findings, that bees routinely solve the problem before pollinating flowers, all the more remarkable.  Read more

Well, believe something anyway, subject to rapid change.

Once, years ago, I got a rather long phone call from a Christian evolutionist who wanted me to know that Darwin had added to the second edition of his Origin of Species the words “by the Creator” to imply that evolution was God-directed. That was supposed to show that Darwin was really, at heart, a theist.

That Christian evolutionist must have thought I an one of those dim, wimpy Christian writers who nod appreciatively, make vacuous statements about “faith and science,”and worse, make cute little jokes, and then just run off to cover a praisefest somewhere.

Sorry, chump. You dialed the wrong number. Read More ›

Sure. Why waste a failure?

In “The imperfect universe: Goodbye, theory of everything” (New Scientist, 10 May 2010, Magazine issue 2759), Marcelo Gleiser mourns,

FIFTEEN years ago, I was a physicist hard at work hunting for a theory of nature that would unify the very big and the very small. There was good reason to hope. The great and the good were committed. Even Einstein, who recognised that our understanding of reality is necessarily incomplete, had spent the last 20 years of his life searching for a unified field theory that would describe the two main forces we see acting around us – gravity and electromagnetism – as manifestations of a single force. For him, such a mathematical theory represented the purest and most elegant expression of nature and the highest achievement of the human intellect.

Fifty-five years after Einstein’s death, the hunt for this elusive unified field theory continues. To physicist Stephen Hawking and many others, finding the “theory of everything” would be equivalent to knowing the “mind of God”. The metaphor is … subject to you buying an online subscription to New Scientist.

Maybe it’s worth it. I mean, so rich a source of authentic pop culture rebranded as science, how can you resist? If you want to know what politicians and pundits fund and defend and why they do, read NS – on someone else’s dime, to be sure.

Why is a theory about the Theory of Everything so important? As soon as you think you’ve worked everything out, it all changes again. Personally, I’d rather have a sound theory of something in particular.

Gleiser argues, says endorser Stuart Kauffman,

… that there is a profound link in Western science between monotheism and the scientific search for a Theory of Everything. He argues persuasively that we must give up this dream. This may augur a profound transformation in our understanding of the world.”

—Stuart Kauffman, Fellow of the Royal Society, Canada, Author of Reinventing the Sacred

Oh, I see now. Read More ›

Newton’s theory of gravity, Wegener’s theory of continental drift and Darwin’s theory of evolution all have one thing in common: they have all been ridiculed as impossible at one time or another, because they lacked a plausible mechanism. So which theory is different from the rest? I shall argue that Darwin’s theory is unique, in that it has won widespread acceptance despite the existence of weighty scientific arguments showing that its mechanism is incapable of accounting for the phenomena that it purports to explain. However, if Darwin had formulated his theory of evolution in the same way that Newton formulated his theory of gravity, Darwin’s theory would have been invulnerable to these scientific difficulties. It is also a curious fact that although Darwin’s original theory has undergone radical transformation, like those of Newton and Wegner, many scientists and philosophers are proud to call themselves “Darwinists,” whereas no modern scientist would refer to him/herself as a “Newtonian” or “Wegnerian.”

In this short essay, I also address the fierce resistance in scientific circles to teaching Intelligent Design in high school classrooms, and I propose a legal strategy for neutralizing the Darwinian crusade.
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Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, reviews Paul Davies’s latest book, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence/Are We Alone In The Universe? , which argues that we should expand the hunt for intelligent life:

McKay considers why we should look closer to home — perhaps even in our DNA.

Although supporting the current quest, Davies recommends bold and sometimes bizarre avenues of exploration. For example, if migratory Galactic civilizations passed this way some time ago, they might have posted an alien message in our DNA or depleted our region of the Universe of some resource, such as (undiscovered) magnetic monopoles. Perhaps they left a device in the Solar System as a calling card, and are patiently waiting for us to discover and activate it. There are many places to look, many ways to expand the search.

Davies devotes pages to what will happen if a signal is received and how we should respond. Most readers will find these questions remote and hypothetical — not least because once a signal is received, events are likely to be quickly taken out of the hands of the astronomers.

The greatest joy of The Eerie Silence is the ending, in which Davies gives his own perspective. He splits his personality into three: scientist, philosopher and human. As a scientist, he is sceptical that we will detect extraterrestrial life, yet he finds that possibility plausible as a philosopher and longs for it to be true as a human. Read at least this page, even if you do not have time for the rest of this excellent book.

– Chris McKay, Is there anybody out there? (Nature, 464, 34 (4 March 2010) doi:10.1038/464034a)

Why does all this remind my of a woman wittering alone at home by the telephone (Why doesn’t he call? Why doesn’t he text?) waiting for a familiar knock on the door and checking her e-mail every two minutes. No one can cure anyone else of this romantic disorder just by talking sense to them. Usually, women cure themselves when they are ready by asking a simple question: What would happen if I just forgot about him and lived my life and was happy?

Well, he’s already forgotten her, so ….

But she, at least, knew for sure that he existed.

So, now, what’s the matter with Paul Davies? SETI? Why can’t they just let go?

And don’t tell me that this is all just about finding bacteria on another planet. That’s like the lonely, pacing woman claiming she’s really only worried about him. Sure.

Comments?

Here’s more on extraterrestrial life: Read More ›