2010

Two research psychologists have contributed an Opinion paper based on the empirical finding “that individuals presented with unfamiliar moral dilemmas show no difference in their responses if they have a religious background or not”. The data used was obtained from an online web questionnaire which is open to any volunteer participants (including myself). Findings are reported elsewhere and in their Opinion paper the authors provide only a summary: “These studies, carried out using the web-based Moral Sense Test (http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/), recruit thousands of male and female subjects, with educational levels that range from elementary school to graduate degrees, with political affiliations that range from liberal to conservative, and religious backgrounds that range from devout to atheist. In each of these studies, Read More ›

In modern mathematics fractals are complex objects generated from simple formulas. Some have found also in biology forms that seem to have fractal shapes. Before the astonishing geometric shapes of fractals one might argue something like this: as the complexity of the fractal geometries arises from simple formulas, analogously the fractal biological complexity could come from simplicity and as a consequence intelligent design is not necessary to explain it.

A century ago physics faced a problem. Its two-hundred year foundation of Newtonian thought was showing signs of weakness. In the seventeenth century Newton had overthrown the physics of another great thinker, Aristotle, but now Newton’s time had come. The quantum revolution was coming, but as with most revolutionists there would be tumult.  Read more

Part of Al Gore’s credibility problem is his blatant conflict of interest, having profitted enormously from pushing AGW. Fortunately, ID proponents can’t say that we’ve lined our coffers pursuing ID. Sure, Barbara Forrest, Eugenie Scott, and Ken Miller constantly proclaim the contrary — from their well-heeled positions, funded largely by public moneys. In any case, this just in regarding our former vice president: A Blizzard Of Lies From Al Gore Posted 03/01/2010 06:41 PM ET Climate Fraud: Al Gore resurfaces in an op-ed to say that nobody’s perfect, everybody makes mistakes and climate change is still real. And he has some oceanfront property in the Himalayas to sell you. If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening Read More ›

When Britain’s Guardian newspaper first introduced its “evolutionary agony aunt”, this writer thought – a spoof for sure. But where evolutionary psychology is concerned, it can be genuinely hard to tell. No spoof. The Guardian burbled proudly, “A mere 150 years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, we are proud to introduce our very own Evolutionary Agony Aunt” in the person of Carole Jahme, author of Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and Evolution and star of comedy Carole Jahme is Sexually Selected, described as a combination of Charles Darwin and Charlie Chaplin. We were told that her column will shine the “cold light” of evolutionary psychology on readers’ problems, in sharp contrast to the glossy magazines. Carole Read More ›

This is the first of probably three posts on applied Intelligent Design. This is not an extensive list of applications of ID concepts, but I thought that giving people examples of how ID can be not only interesting and informative but actually useful in solving both biological and engineering problems.
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Apparently, according to an article in Current Biology,

Polyandry [a girl gets married to a bunch of guys at once] can regulate the frequency of a sex-ratio-distorting meiotic driver This can prevent extinction in populations and potentially species Reduced extinction risk may help explain why polyandry is so widespread in nature

I hold no brief for fruit flies, whose behaviour the authors purport to explain, but in humans, polyandry is almost always a result of extreme hardship.

I am told that, in former times, polyandry sometimes happened in the Far North in Canada. Due to famine, girl babies mysteriously found their way through a hole in the pack ice.

Whodathunkit? … and 15 years later …

Most human cultures think marriage should be Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

But very, very few human cultures have EVER thought that marriage should be Adam, Louie, Luigi, Sig, Syed, and … (organ music) Here comes the bride, here comes the bride!! … one little Eve for all of them.

Try selling that in the locker room … so long as you do not share a health insurer with me.

Most guys still want their own Eve, in the end.

Anyway, here’s the official stuff: Read More ›

As Francis Bacon pointed out so long ago, a key strategy in scientific research is to narrow the problem. Remove unknowns, freeze variables and pare back extraneous components. Often the best way to learn how nature works is to focus in and isolate one aspect of the problem. Once that aspect is understood, then freeze it and move on to the next. So when it comes to figuring out how the living cell works, one strategy is to begin with the simplest of cells to be found in nature. Enter Mycoplasma pneumoniae—a bacteria that causes a type of pneumonia.  Read more

According to Jerry Coyne, atheistic evolutionists and ID proponents have at least this in common — they can expect no bribes from the Templeton Foundation. Read Coyne’s post on the topic here.

The supposed conflict between science and religion is not only bad history, it also goes unsupported by on-going polls of the religious beliefs of scientists. As the story goes, empirical science uncovers inconvenient truths that religious people resist in a losing battle. But if there was a conflict between science and religion, and furthermore if science has uncovered findings inimical to religion, then one might expect a small and dwindling fraction of scientists who are religious. But a recent poll showed that a majority of scientists (51%) say they believe in God or a higher power. And that is up from the 42% who responded similarly almost a century ago in 1914.  Read more

Yours? His? Theirs? Anyone’s?

I’ve known Todd since we were graduate students in the 1990s, and have a hardbound copy of his UVA dissertation (Theory and Application of Protein Homology, 1999) sitting on my office shelves. Todd knows more evolutionary biology than many evolutionary biologists. Yet, perversely, or inexplicably, in the eyes of his critics and growing number of blog readers, Todd is also a young-earth creationist (YEC). What’s up with that?

But he’s not much of an admirer of ID. Think about it this way.

Suppose you visit Stonehenge with a group of “Stonehenge is naturally caused” theorists, who vigorously dispute that ancient humans built the monument. No intelligence was involved, they say; some yet-to-be-discovered evolutionary scenario did the building. Stonehenge-is-natural research (or science) thus consists of looking for the unknown natural mechanisms or processes, which shaped the monoliths, caused them to aggregate into a circle, and so on. No “intelligence of the gaps” need apply.
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It is well known that Darwin speculated on what might happen in “some warm little pond”. But it was not until 1929 that J.B.S. Haldane developed a testable hypothesis involving a “prebiotic broth, or primordial soup”. He proposed that organic compounds were made when methane, ammonia and water reacted as a result of energy supplied by ultraviolet radiation. The reaction products were suggested to have accumulated in a “hot dilute soup” in the primeval earth. In this scenario, further reactions led to macromolecules, protocells and then life. “Backed up by Stanley Miller’s (1953) inorganic synthesis of organic molecules in the laboratory, it seemed to generations of scientists that Haldane’s narrative was basically right, and all that was left was to Read More ›

Proteins are the cell’s special machines that perform a variety of tasks. Some of them help to regulate the production levels of other proteins by influencing the transcribing of the DNA genes that code for the proteins. New research is investigating how one such transcription factor, GATA-1, works and, as usual, it isn’t simple.  Read more

Santa Fe Institute economist Brian Arthur believed that much of what we see in global economic patterns can be explained by a process of ‘locking in’ of historical events (1).  Notably, the success of the QWERTY keyboard or the increased sales of the VHS video system over its arch rival Beta Max did not depend so much on any inherent better quality of the winning system but rather on small details in the history of innovation that, over time, lead to the establishment and the overwhelming success of particular technologies (1).  Once such winning technologies became wide-spread, they became a locked and established part of our culture.   

Arthur undoubtedly received much of his insight from long conversations that he had with biophysicist Stuart Kaufman as the two of them thrashed out the concepts of biology and economic policy in an attempt to reconcile both under the umbrella of their unifying theory of complexity (1).  It was clear that a great number of parallels could be drawn between these two otherwise distinct areas of research. 

From an origin of life standpoint, Kauffman has long been unconvinced by the usual crop of prebiotic synthesis experiments.  There is after all no basis upon which to suppose that amino acids and nucleotides could randomly form long polymer chains with specific functions such as we see in the cell (2).  Following such a realization Kauffman became enthralled by the idea that maybe there was a self-organizing process through which compounds could come together in an autocatalytic cycle- a closed cycle of catalysts that converted one molecule to another in a self sustaining fashion (3).  What was interesting about Kauffman’s idea was the manner through which he reached it- a multidisciplinary environment, such as the Santa Fe Institute with economists, political analysts and archaeologists coming together to look for a common thread uniting the emergence of complexity in lost civilizations, economically autonomous states and ultimately life’s biochemistry. Read More ›