(Who were the old Humanists, by the way? Anyone know?)

In “Natural history of the soul”, Caspar Melville profiles “the man who thinks that spirituality is essential to consciousness, and science can tell us why.”

That would be Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist and author of Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness who

claims to have solved two fairly large intellectual conundrums. One is something of a technical matter, about which you may have thought little or not at all, unless you happen to be a philosopher. This is the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. The problem is how an entity which is apparently immaterial like the human consciousness – it exists, but you can’t locate it, much less measure it – can have arisen from something purely physical, like the arrangement of cells that make up the human body. The second problem Humphrey claims he has solved is a rather more everyday one, about which you may well have puzzled yourself. This is the problem of the soul. Does it exist? What sort of a thing might it be? Does everyone have one, even atheists? (Volume 126 Issue 2 March/April 2011)

I’ve often wondered why just anyone who claims to have solved two hard problems in one book is accorded a lot of acceptance and respect. But credulity could have something to do with it.

Anyway, we buzzes of neurons learn, Read More ›

In “Science and religion are wise to talk”, a letter to Nature, UK Christian Darwinists Denis Alexander and Bob White explain,

As far as the mingling of scientific and religious language is concerned, we agree that this is a justifiable concern. In the United Kingdom, the Faraday Institute (our institution) is well known for its criticism of both creationism and intelligent design. Attempts to introduce theological language into the practice of science is as damaging for theology as it is for science. Each academic discipline has its own specialized language and its own criteria for justifying its claims; mixing them only creates confusion.However, we disagree with the scientists you cite who oppose any kind of interdisciplinary engagement between science and religion, or who maintain that they are in conflict. (Nature, 471, 166 (10 March 2011) | doi:10.1038/471166b)

Thought, on hearing the good word above:  A widely used phrase like “conflict (or no conflict) between science and religion” is meaningless absent details about what science and whose religion.

For example, if someone, using advanced neuroscience, can exquisitely target and destroy brain areas so that people cannot form concepts that might include dissent from the government – and the Catholic Church opposes it? Is that a “conflict between science and religion”?

What if representatives of another religion come along and say, “Yes, this is wonderful, now there will be no more infidels and no more disobedience to the great prophet. It fits our theology because we don’t believe in free will anyway.” So that is “no conflict between science and religion”?

Must be. That’s pretty much how the debate on using stem cells from abandoned embryos has been understood.

Anyway, physicist David Tyler offers an interesting comment here: Read More ›

David Tyler asks, Are evolutionary biologists really ready for the Extended Synthesis? Here, he discusses the sad story of efforts to reform the discipline three decades ago: The background to the 1982 paper was the burgeoning disquiet with Neo-Darwinism. Gould and Eldredge led the way with their assault on gradualism in the fossil record. Brooks recounts his own involvement with a small band of pioneering rebels: “By 1982, the centenary of Darwin’s death, Niles Eldredge and Steven J. Gould had catalyzed a loosely connected group of evolutionary biologists unhappy with the New Synthesis to unleash a cascade of criticisms and proposals. Emboldened by this display of the scientific community at its meritocratic best, Ed Wiley and I entered the fray. Read More ›

Our different senses rely on a complex process known as cellular signal transduction which converts an external stimulus, such as sound or light, to a nerve signal. But the nerve signal doesn’t go straight to the brain. In the case of mammalian vision the massive data stream emanating from the millions of photoreceptor cells undergoes substantial signal processing before the information is sent to the brain. New research is now providing more information about the cellular architecture involved in this intermediate processing stage.  Read more

Here, University of Toronto’s Larry Moran, blogger at Sandwalk (named after Darwin’s garden path) and famed (okay, okay, reputable) textbook author, commented at UncommonDescent on this story about Jonathan Wells’ new book on the junk DNA myth, complaining, Denyse, you’ve promised in the past to stop using the term “Darwinism” to refer to all of evolution. What happened to that promise?In evolutionary biology, “Darwinism” refers to those who focus on adaptation as the almost exclusive mechanism of change. They are also called adapationists. Moran calls himself a pluralist. For the record, he said, I’m a pluralist who promotes the importance of random genetic drift and accidental evolution. That’s perfectly consistent with junk DNA. I am not a Darwinist. Yes, as Read More ›

(This is a sequel to my previous post in response to Professor Anthony Grayling, entitled Is the notion of God logically contradictory?)

In a recent short essay, entitled God and Disaster, Professor Anthony Grayling, a leading atheist philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, lamented the loss of life from the recent earthquake in Japan and the tsunami that followed it. He then went on to voice his perplexity at television reports of people going to church after the massive earthquake which hit Christchurch, New Zealand, on February 22, killing over 200 people. Grayling concluded by wondering how such people could believe in such an “incoherent fiction” as the idea of a Deity. “This,” he wrote, “is a perennial puzzle.”

Before I address the substance of Professor Grayling’s essay, I’d like readers to keep one simple question uppermost in their minds: exactly what does Grayling want God to do, in order to prevent human suffering?

Let me begin with a short word about myself. Like Professor Grayling, I possess a Ph.D. in philosophy. Unlike him, I live and work in Japan, and I was working in Yokohama, Japan, when the earthquake struck on Friday, March 11th at 2:46 p.m. local time. After the quake hit, I spent the night with several hundred people in a shopping mall near Yokohama station, as the trains had stopped running. On the Sunday after the quake, I also attended my local church, where the congregation is almost entirely Japanese. Despite the tragic loss of life – the death toll is expected to exceed 20,000 – the earthquake did not weaken my belief in God. It did, however, reinforce my conviction that attempts to rationalize suffering – such as Leibniz’s optimistic assertion that we live in the best of all possible worlds, which Voltaire savagely satirized in his novel Candide – are fundamentally wrong-headed. Whole towns were swept away by the tsunami following the quake. The suffering that people experience in disasters is absurd and pointless; on this point, the atheists are surely right.

The views I present in this essay are mine, and I take sole responsibility for them. My aim is to show that two mistaken theological assumptions – the notion that God can do anything imaginable and the notion that God always does things for the best – lie at the heart of the contemporary “New Atheist” insistence that senseless suffering renders belief in God irrational. In passing, I also point out examples of invalid arguments for Darwinian evolution which rely on the assumption that that God can do anything imaginable. Read More ›

Recently Bill Dembski posted on the Origin of Life debate that took place at ASU not too long ago. At issue was the exchange that took place between Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter over the Tree of Life. Venter expressed a contrarian view, saying that he saw a “bush” instead of a “tree”. The article below from New Scientist I believe let’s us know just what Venter was thinking. So, for those involved in that original post here’s the article.

In The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies–How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, Michael Shermer explains it all for you. And Publishers Weekly’s reviewer offers As the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, author of Why People Believe Weird Things, and a columnist for Scientific American, Shermer is perhaps the country’s best-known skeptic. His position is as clear as it is simple: “When I call myself a skeptic I simply mean that I take a scientific approach to the evaluation of claims.” But now Shermer is interested not only in why people have irrational beliefs, but “why people believe at all.” Our brains, he says, have evolved to find meaningful patterns around us. But Read More ›

(Or, why human evolution should not be taught in school) Jessica Hamzelou tells us, “Fire did not spark human colonisation of cold Europe” (New Scientist, 14 March 2011): To try to pin down the earliest evidence of controlled fire use, Paola Villa at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands re-examined the data from over 100 European sites. They were looking for evidence of fires that were unlikely to have occurred naturally – those in caves, for example – and for clues that fire had been used in a controlled way. These include activities such as making pitch: some early hominins made this sticky substance by burning birch bark and using it Read More ›

In “All alone and no one knows why” former nanotechnology watchdog Mike Treder tells us (Ethical Technology, Mar. 2, 2010)

In 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi famously wondered, “Where is everybody?” He was referring to the strange silence in the universe, the apparent lack of any advanced civilizations beyond Earth.

Fermi reasoned that the size and age of the universe would indicate that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations ought to exist. However, this hypothesis is inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it.

He offers a solution he says his critics have been unable to refute.

First, he rejects the idea that humans may simply be the first intelligent beings to explore outer space, arguing that humans “along with every other form of life” evolved by natural selection and are not special”: “Why, then, would it even be conceivable that earthlings are destined to be the very first species to make a noticeable mark on the universe?”

(The logic here escapes me. Earthlings could just happen to be first to explore because 1 is the first natural number. Indeed, absent prejudice, his first option is far more reasonable than what follows.)

He then finds himself stuck between:

2. There have been others before us, but all of them, without exception, have chosen—or somehow been forced—to expand in such a way that they are presently undetectable by our most sophisticated instruments. ?

3. There have been others, but all of them, without exception, have run into a cosmic roadblock that either destroys them or prevents their expansion beyond a small radius.

Well, he rejects 2 because it is unreasonable to suppose that millions of advanced civilizations before us chose or were forced to avoid detection by ourselves.

Again, I don’t follow because we cannot establish the definite existence of even one of these millions of secretive civilizations, which makes it premature to dispute their motives. However, unless one is paranoid (“Secret groups are hiding critical information from me”), one must agree with him.

That leaves proposition 3: Read More ›

Here, we noted one recent effort to rid biology of language that implies design. A friend writes to say that Noam Chomsky, no friend to design in nature, wrote, with co-authors, in a 2002 article in Science, “The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?” “… All living things are designed on the basis of highly conserved developmental systems that read an (almost) universal language encoded in DNA base pairs.” (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, Science, 298, 2002) I wonder if that would get past the referee today? Today, it might be a game misconduct, not just five minutes in the penalty box. It’s interesting to reflect that evolutionary biology today exists mostly to Read More ›

Anthony Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He has a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts. Professor Grayling has written and edited over twenty books on philosophy and other subjects. In addition, he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society. One would therefore hope that if a man with such a distinguished background were to pen an attack on belief in God, it would be an intelligent critique. But one would be wrong.

In a recent email exchange with Professor Jerry Coyne (an atheist who, to his credit, is at least prepared to entertain the possibility of theism) over at Why Evolution Is True, Anthony Grayling contends that the notion of God is a logical absurdity:

[O]n the standard definition of an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent etc being – on inspection such a concept collapses into contradiction and absurdity…

and again:

But ‘god’ is not like ‘yeti’ (which might – so to say: yet? – be found romping about the Himalayas), it is like ‘square circle’.

Now, if Grayling is right, then the implications for Intelligent Design are obvious: the notion of an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent Designer can be automatically ruled out.

But has Grayling established his case? Not by a long shot. Read More ›

There was an interesting debate among friends regarding the recent BioEssays editorial lamenting purpose-based language in science (teleology): “…It is that innocent little word ‘to’ that transforms the meaning, giving enzyme Y the essence of ‘will’ – ‘to’ being short for ‘in order to’, or ‘with the purpose of’. Purpose can only be exercised by a supernatural entity in this situation.”

A sampling of comments: Read More ›

In the Florida Times-Union, Abel Harding tells us, “Florida Legislature poised to battle over teaching evolution in schools”: Critics say that Wise’s legislation could open the door for teachers and students to challenge evolution, which they say is settled science.”You can have critical analysis of everything, but the idea that you should single out evolution for critical analysis is problematic,” said Joshua Rosenau, programs and policy director at California-based National Center for Science Education [the Darwin lobby]. “It’s recognized by the scientific community as the foundation of modern biology.” Hold it right there, Rosenau. Which parts, exactly, are settled science? Junk DNA? And does anyone really believe that Rosenau would be satisfied if critical thinking was also permitted on other Read More ›

Jonathan Wells’ book, The Myth of Junk DNA (Discovery, 2011), is now being advertised at Amazon:

According to the modern version of Darwin’s theory, DNA contains a program for embryo development that is passed down from generation to generation; the program is implemented by proteins encoded by the DNA, and accidental DNA mutations introduce changes in those proteins that natural selection then shapes into new species, organs and body plans. When scientists discovered forty years ago that about 98% of our DNA does not encode proteins, the non-protein-coding portion was labeled “junk” and attributed to molecular accidents that have accumulated in the course of evolution.

Recent books by Richard Dawkins, Francis Collins and others have used this “junk DNA” as evidence for Darwinian evolution and evidence against intelligent design (since an intelligent designer would presumably not have filled our genome with so much garbage). But recent genome evidence shows that much of our non-protein-coding DNA performs essential biological functions.

The Myth of Junk DNA is written for a general audience by biologist Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution. Citing some of the abundant evidence from recent genome projects, the book shows that “junk DNA” is not science, but myth.

Junk DNA was one of those ideas that just had to be true. Genome mapper and NIH head Francis Collins saw it as a slam dunk for his beloved Darwinism in his first book, The Language of God, (“Darwin’s theory predicts … That is exactly what is observed”) but seems to have changed his tune in his second, The Language of Life.

I’ll be interviewing Wells on the book next week, but in the meantime, two questions occur to me: To what extent did Darwinism cause the myth to be retained longer than it otherwise would be? Given that Darwinists must now be in search of another guiding myth, any idea out there which one it will be?

Now, one prediction: Read More ›