Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Darwinism: Pathetically Low Standards of Evidence, Unacceptable Anywhere Else

In my work in aerospace R&D I produce computer simulations using what is arguably the most sophisticated Finite Element Analysis program ever developed: LS-DYNA. It was originally conceived and developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the mid-1970s for research into variable-yield nuclear weapons. For more than 35 years it has been under constant refinement and development by the best and the brightest in the field. This computational tool is phenomenally valuable and powerful, because it can tell you what is likely to work and what is not. However, it is not a perfect representation of reality — simplifying assumptions must be made or the computational overhead will become insurmountable. The trick is knowing and identifying what simplifying assumptions can Read More ›

Repeatability in studies falls over time: Can you give this phenomenon a name?

In “The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” (New Yorker, December 13, 2010), Jonah Lehrer reported, Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.[ … ] … now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a Read More ›

Running On Immunity Against Disproof

Three months ago Princeton evolutionary biologist Andrea Graham became the talk of the ecoimmunology town through her summarization of the apparent connection between immunity and fertility (1). From trials carried out on 1476 individuals of wild Soay sheep from the St Kilda island archipelago in northern Scotland, Graham et al painted a complex picture of competing trade-offs the strengths of which were intimately dependent on the prevalence of environmental extremes. They found that higher immunity amongst animals, while promoting better survival, negatively affected reproductive prowess (1,2). More specifically sheep with increased immune readiness against ‘parasite infested winters’ were less likely to sire offspring, which Graham et al attributed to the concomitantly higher levels of auto-reactive antibodies (1,2).

Low immune-response animals fared better in low ‘parasite prevalence’ environments perhaps because energy for reproduction was not frivoled away on energy-costly antibody manufacture (1,2). The conclusion drawn was that the selective advantage of low immune-and high-immune response animals in low parasite prevalence and high parasite prevalence environments respectively explains why evolution has in effect “failed to eliminate alleles that confer susceptibility to infection or promote autoimmunity”(2).

So can we pack our bags and head home content with yet another open-and-shut case in which natural selection has been incontrovertibly authenticated? Not quite. Read More ›

Philosopher offers six signs of “scientism”

Non-materialist neuroscientists must often deal with the claim that their work is “unscientific,” despite the fact that, for example, the placebo effect, for example, is one of the best attested effects in medicine and the fact that there Is mounting evidence for researchable psi effects. The problem arises because, as Susan Hack puts it, “scientism” enables assessors to avoid evaluating evidence in favor of evaluating whether the evidence “counts as science”. Here are her six signs: 1. Using the words “science,” “scientific,” “scientifically,” “scientist,” etc., honorifically, as generic terms of epistemic praise.

And, inevitably, the honorific use of “science” encourages uncritical credulity about whatever new scientific idea comes down the pike. But the fact is that all the explanatory hypotheses that scientists come up with are, at first, highly speculative, and most are eventually found to be untenable, and abandoned. To be sure, by now there is a vast body of well-warranted scientific theory, some of it so well-warranted that it would be astonishing if new evidence were to show it to be mistaken – though even this possibility should never absolutely be ruled out.

Always remember that Ptolemy’s model of the solar system was used successfully by astronomers for 1200 years, even though it had Earth in the wrong place. Read More ›

Now that we have got to “pre-selection”, even Darwinians must be wondering …

In “Evolution by Mistake: Major Driving Force Comes from How Organisms Cope With Errors at Cellular Level” ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2011), Joanna Masel and Etienne Rajon posit “pre-selection” by error in order to explain how natural selection works its Darwinian wonders:

In nature, it turns out, many new traits that, for example, enable their bearers to conquer new habitats, start out as blunders: mistakes made by cells that result in altered proteins with changed properties or functions that are new altogether, even when there is nothing wrong with the gene itself. Sometime later, one of these mistakes can get into the gene and become more permanent.

“If the mechanisms interpreting genetic information were completely flawless, organisms would stay the same all the time and be unable to adapt to new situations or changes in their environment,” said Masel, who is also a member of the UA’s BIO5 Institute.

Living beings face two options of handling the dangers posed by errors, Masel and Rajon wrote. One is to avoid making errors in the first place, for example by having a proofreading mechanism to spot and fix errors as they arise. The authors call this a global solution, since it is not specific to any particular mistake, but instead watches over the entire process.

The alternative is to allow errors to happen, but evolve robustness to the effects of each of them. Masel and Rajon call this strategy a local solution, because in the absence of a global proofreading mechanism, it requires an organism to be resilient to each and every mistake that pops up.

Offhand, this sounds a lot like design. Would anyone like to calculate the probability of such a process forming by Darwinian means (natural selection acting on random mutation)? Read More ›

Anthony Hopkins Schools Charlie Rose on the Warfare Thesis

As if we needed more evidence that the myth of the warfare thesis is alive and well, Charlie Rose supplied it in abundance in his interview with legendary actor Anthony Hopkins last week. Fortunately Hopkins was able to disabuse the audience of Rose’s misconceptions, though it is not clear Rose was the better for it. Here is the relevant discussion, beginning at the 11:25 mark of the interview:  Read more

Knockout gene study in mice prompts speculations on human behaviour #3348

Lab mice by Aaron Logan, Lightsource

In “Ma’s gene does different things to pa’s copy” Jessica Hamzelou (26 January 2011) reports for New Scientist on a knockout study of mice where researchers knocked out a gene called Grb10 in females and mated them with normal males.

(From the report: “Most of our genes are expressed in pairs – one copy inherited from each parent. But pairs of so-called imprinted genes have just one copy “switched on”.)

What happened? The gene was expressed “only in the brain and spinal cord.”* How did this influence behaviour?

Mice lacking the paternal gene groomed their mates so much that the latter lost their whiskers and fur.

So far so good. The gene helps regulate mouse behaviour. Now wait for the klunk:

Humans have the same gene, so there is a possibility that it might be influencing our own social behaviours, he adds.

“Possibility”,  “might” Their caution is well advised, but the question is, why bother? Humans differ from mice precisely in that we adjust our behaviour to real or perceived circumstances, and that difference greatly reduces the importance of any similarities.

If a human mother brushed her kid’s hair until it fell out, she would soon be in a supervised parenting program (at least where I live).

A study author comments, Read More ›

New Book on Alfred Russel Wallace and the ID Connection

    In my new book, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, I take the reader on a journey from 19-century England, to the wilds of the Amazon River Basin, to the Malay Archipelago, and back to the highly charged scientific climate of Victorian London. Wallace’s story is one of discovery, from shocking Charles Darwin with his own theory of natural selection to his realization that the very principle he used to explain the diversity of biological life itself had limits, limits with profound implications about humankind and nature itself. After years of research across the globe, Wallace came to believe that some intelligence was required to explain the natural world. This intelligent evolution would be explained by Wallace as directed, detectably designed, Read More ›

The Accidental Design Apologist

Back in 2004, a well-known philosopher appeared in an interview and appeared to make a startling concession – that there was evidence that evolution itself was in some sense designed, and perhaps even directed towards a goal. This let to a lot of buzz on the internet, eventually resulting in back and forth between the philosopher and interviewer – the philosopher backed away from his previous statements and insisted he made no such concession, while the interviewer (himself a self-declared agnostic, even materialist) held to his guns and (armed with the actual interview) argued the philosopher had made this concession and was now changing his story and backing off.

So, who was this philosopher who stood accused of conceding evidence for design and purpose in nature?

Some Theistic Evolutionist, perhaps? A reasonable guess, but no. Besides, many TEs are too good at the fine art of saying nothing noteworthy to find themselves making such a concession.

Maybe Anthony Flew? Again, a good guess, but still no. Besides, when Flew went deist he no longer regarded ‘design’ as a dirty word.

No, the philosopher in question was none other than (once upon a time) fourth horseman of the Atheist Apocalypse Dan Dennett, being interviewed by Robert Wright.

And there’s a lesson to be learned from the whole affair.

Read More ›

So what will you do when your turn comes?

Nathan Black reports for Christian Post “Intelligent Design Proponent Fired from NASA Lab” (Jan. 26 2011).

David Coppedge is an information technology specialist and system administrator on JPL’s international Cassini mission to Saturn, the most ambitious interplanetary exploration ever launched. A division of California Institute of Technology, JPL operates under a contract with the federal space agency. Coppedge held the title of “Team Lead” System Administrator on the mission until his supervisors demoted and humiliated him for advancing ideas that superiors labeled “unwelcome” and “disruptive.”

He favoured intelligent design and talked about it, and one superior didn’t like that.

There was no workplace policy that forbid discussing private opinions at work, and claims that Coppedge harassed fellow employees proved unsubstantiated.

Here’s columnist David Klinghoffer on the case:

What did Coppedge do to get himself in trouble? He occasionally chatted with interested colleagues about the scientific case for intelligent design, he passed around a couple of pro-ID DVDs, which made good sense since JPL’s officially defined mission includes the exploration of questions relating to the origin and development of life on earth and elsewhere. His supervisor severely chastised him for this, humiliated and demoted him.

Now he’s been fired. JPL claims it was a cost-cutting measure. … The truth will emerge when Coppedge’s lawsuit comes to trial, but the appearance here certainly suggests a final strike at Mr. Coppedge for his offense of introducing fresh ideas to co-workers.

In the light of this case and the recent, similar Martin Gaskell case, one hardly knows what to make of doubt that Ben Stein was right. There is an Expelled factor. Today, you can doubt anything except Darwin, and you must contrive not to know about or speak of the growing mass of evidence that contradicts the stuff government forces students to learn in tax-funded schools.

But there is no freedom for adults either, it turns out. Darwinism today has nothing to do with the science and everything to do with protecting the cultural status of an icon that has given government everything from compulsory sterilization to scientific racism to … the right of tax-funded institutions like JPL to run inquisitions powered by devotion to that icon.

Sadly, Klinghoffer writes,

It’s bad enough when private universities clamp down on the free exchange of ideas. But public institutions have often seemed to be the worst offenders of all in this respect, and that is something taxpayers have every right to protest.

Klinghoffer suggests that Americans phone: 202-358-1010 or e-mail Charles Bolden, charles.bolden@nasa.gov Yet will they?

I’ve covered ID stories for about a decade now, and on the way, I learned something interesting: What is keeping Darwinism alive right now is not evidence; the evidence is leaning sharply against Darwin’s “information for free” mechanism.

What keeps Darwinism alive is the awful passivity of the taxpayers who doubt it, yet continue to fund its long, persecutory march through the institutions.

Christians are the worst, incidentally.
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Coffee!! Flying reptile egg soon to be major movie

Adult pteranodon fossils from Royal Ontario Museum. Courtesy  Kenn Chaplin from Toronto Jonathan Amos reports at BBC News (20 January 2011) on a “Fossil female pterosaur found with preserved egg“. Wonderful news, and note this: The egg indicates this ancient flying reptile was a female, and that realisation has allowed researchers to sex these creatures for the first time. Writing in Science magazine, the palaeontologists make some broad statements about differences in pterosaurs, including the observation that only males sported a head-crest. “Broad” statements indeed, about the head-crest. They couldn’t really be sure unless they could sex a flock, and there’s a risk of being led off course. The state of the egg’s shell suggests it was well developed and Read More ›

The 4% solution: The ultimate Copernican revolution is “We’re different”?

In “The challenge of the great cosmic unknowns” ( New Scientist 24 January 2011), Dan Falk reviews Richard Panek’s The 4% Universe: Dark matter, dark energy, and the race to discover the rest of reality: As he nears the present day, Panek weaves together two separate yet closely related storylines. In the first, he takes us to sophisticated laboratories around the world where researchers are trying to isolate particles of dark matter. Their best guess is that dark matter is made of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which were created at the time of the big bang and are now fiendishly difficult to detect. In the second storyline, we join the hunt for dark energy, which began in the late Read More ›

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ID Foundations, 3: Irreducible Complexity as concept, as fact, as [macro-]evolution obstacle, and as a sign of design

[ID Found’ns Series, cf. also Bartlett here]

Irreducible complexity is probably the most violently objected to foundation stone of Intelligent Design theory. So, let us first of all define it by slightly modifying Dr Michael Behe’s original statement in his 1996 Darwin’s Black Box [DBB]:

What type of biological system could not be formed by “numerous successive, slight modifications?” Well, for starters, a system that is irreducibly complex. By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the [core] parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. [DBB, p. 39, emphases and parenthesis added. Cf. expository remarks in comment 15 below.]

Behe proposed this definition in response to the following challenge by Darwin in Origin of Species:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case . . . . We should be extremely cautious in concluding that an organ could not have been formed by transitional gradations of some kind. [Origin, 6th edn, 1872, Ch VI: “Difficulties of the Theory.”]

In fact, there is a bit of question-begging by deck-stacking in Darwin’s statement: we are dealing with empirical matters, and one does not have a right to impose in effect outright logical/physical impossibility — “could not possibly have been formed” — as a criterion of test.

If, one is making a positive scientific assertion that complex organs exist and were credibly formed by gradualistic, undirected change through chance mutations and differential reproductive success through natural selection and similar mechanisms, one has a duty to provide decisive positive evidence of that capacity. Behe’s onward claim is then quite relevant: for dozens of key cases, no credible macro-evolutionary pathway (especially no detailed biochemical and genetic pathway) has been empirically demonstrated and published in the relevant professional literature. That was true in 1996, and despite several attempts to dismiss key cases such as the bacterial flagellum [which is illustrated at the top of this blog page] or the relevant part of the blood clotting cascade [hint: picking the part of the cascade — that before the “fork” that Behe did not address as the IC core is a strawman fallacy], it arguably still remains to today.

Now, we can immediately lay the issue of the fact of irreducible complexity as a real-world phenomenon to rest.

For, a situation where core, well-matched, and co-ordinated parts of a system are each necessary for and jointly sufficient to effect the relevant function is a commonplace fact of life. One that is familiar from all manner of engineered systems; such as, the classic double-acting steam engine:

Fig. A: A double-acting steam engine (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Such a steam engine is made up of rather commonly available components: cylinders, tubes, rods, pipes, crankshafts, disks, fasteners, pins, wheels, drive-belts, valves etc. But, because a core set of well-matched parts has to be carefully organised according to a complex “wiring diagram,” the specific function of the double-acting  steam engine is not explained by the mere existence of the parts.

Nor, can simply choosing and re-arranging similar parts from say a bicycle or an old-fashioned car or the like create a viable steam engine.  Specific mutually matching parts [matched to thousandths of an inch usually], in a very specific pattern of organisation, made of specific materials, have to be in place, and they have to be integrated into the right context [e.g. a boiler or other source providing steam at the right temperature and pressure], for it to work.

If one core part breaks down or is removed — e.g. piston, cylinder, valve, crank shaft, etc., core function obviously ceases.

Irreducible complexity is not only a concept but a fact.

But, why is it said that irreducible complexity is a barrier to Darwinian-style [macro-]evolution and a credible sign of design in biological systems?

Read More ›

Finally starting to drag the carcass of Darwinism off the scene?

I’ve long suspected that the carcass of Darwinism is finally getting dragged off the scene, and with any luck, the career atheists and the Christian Darwinists will be fighting over it full time, with few onlookers, and Templeton funding the whack. Have a look at this roundup of abstracts a friend sent me:

Forthcoming articles about Darwinism in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences:

1. The Mastodon in the room: how Darwinian is neo-Darwinism?

Daniel R. Brooks

Abstract Failing to acknowledge substantial differences between Darwinism and neo-Darwinism impedes evolutionary biology. Darwin described evolution as the outcome of interactions between the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions, each relatively autonomous but both historically and spatially intertwined. Furthermore, he postulated that the nature of the organism was more important than the nature of the conditions, leading to natural selection as an inevitable emergent product of biological systems. The neo-Darwinian tradition assumed a creative rather than selective view of natural selection, with the nature of the organism determined by the nature of the conditions, rendering the nature of the organism and temporal contingency unnecessary. Contemporary advances in biology, specifically the phylogenetics revolution and evo-devo, underscore the significance of history and the nature of the organism in biology. Darwinism explains more bio logy better, and better resolves apparent anomalies between living systems and more general natural laws, than does neo-Darwinism. The “extended” or “expanded” synthesis currently called for by neo-Darwinians is Darwinism.

Hmmm. No idea what he is talking about except that the “neo-Darwinians” (now the bad guys) made the mistake of assuming “a creative rather than selective view of natural selection”. In other words, they thought natural selection could create information and it can’t.

So, when the debts are called … Darwinism couldn’t create a small part of the hind end of a flea?

2. What was really synthesized during the evolutionary synthesis? a historiographic proposal

Richard G. Delisle

Abstract The 1920-1960 period saw the creation of the conditions for a unification of disciplines in the area of evolutionary biology under a limited number of theoretical prescriptions: the evolutionary synthesis. Whereas the sociological dimension of this synthesis was fairly successful, it was surprisingly loose when it came to the interpretation of the evolutionary mechanisms per se, and completely lacking at the level of the foundational epistemological and metaphysical commitments. Key figures such as Huxley, Simpson, Dobzhansky, and Rensch only paid lip service to the conceptual dimension of the evolutionary synthesis, as they eventually realized that a number of evolutionary phenomena could not be explained by its narrow theoretical corpus. Apparently, the evolutionary synthesis constituted a premature event in the development of evolutionary biology. Not only are the real achievements of the evolutionary synthesis in need of reevaluation, but this reassessment also has important implications for the historiography of Darwinism and the current debates about the darwinian movement.

So there isn’t really a grand synthesis that was supposed to shut up all critics already. Figures. The only synthesis I ever heard of was, “We all agree to keep our jobs fronting this nonsense. After all, the pop science press are all on our side, and everyone else is scared shiftless.”
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Information and Energy

Today’s PhysOrg.com site contains this article. To my view, their investigation has important implications for ID. Many critics of ID ask us: “Well, how does your Designer design?” This is their way of saying to us that a Designer who lies outside the physical realm cannot possibly act within it. Of course, this amounts to a theological claim, and not a scientific one; nevertheless, it’s made. What’s new here, though, is that, whereas formerly it was thought that energy was needed to “erase” information (which leaves its own physical residue–that is, it’s measurable), now this is no longer the case. However, if it is true that energy is not needed to “erase” information, contrariwise, wouldn’t it also be true that Read More ›