May 2011

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 10:00 am EST tomorrow, May 22. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Professor Stephen Hawking shared with us his thoughts on death:

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Now, Stephen Hawking is a physicist, not a biologist, so I can understand why he would compare the brain to a computer. Nevertheless, I was rather surprised that Professor Jerry Coyne, in a recent post on Hawking’s remarks, let the comparison slide without comment. Coyne should know that there are no less than ten major differences between brains and computers, a fact which vitiates Hawking’s analogy. (I’ll say more about these differences below.)

But Professor Coyne goes further: not only does he equate the human mind with the human brain (as Hawking does), but he also regards the evolution of human intelligence as no more remarkable than the evolution of skunk butts, according to a recent report by Faye Flam in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

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“Beware of Science as Political Veneer” warns Tom Price at Miller-McCune report (May 13, 2011), because “Scientization of politics,” not just politicization of science, weakens scientific integrity.” That includes … “scientization of politics” — portraying all government decisions as science-based when, in fact, most aren’t.[ … ] “Some [government] decisions are based on the best available science,” said Francesca Grifo, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Scientific Integrity Program. “A lot of decisions end up being based on whatever values the politicians were elected to uphold.” That’s OK, she said, as long as the politicians don’t pretend those decisions were science-based. Trouble is, they usually do. Go here for more. Some say that openly discussing a problem like this Read More ›

It looks like Francis Collins’ famed “junk DNA” – that proves Darwinism – is not junk after all. And that an ID theorist predicted we would find that. Of course, because Darwinism must be correct, a fact can only confirm it, never disconfirm it.  So it makes no difference that the Darwinists were wrong and an ID guy was right. Watch the spin, but not so close you get dizzy. Meanwhile, a question arises: If design is real, must all DNA be functional? I don’t see why that should necessarily be so. A designed system may accumulate junk. A well-designed system accumulates much less junk. So if design is real, we should see a system with only a small amount Read More ›

In a general disquisition on death as the final end, he responds to Ian Sample for Britain’s Guardian (15 May 2011), What is the value in knowing “Why are we here?”The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can’t solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value. Who assigns them higher value? Is there a way of determining which societies are most likely to survive, absent details? History has frequently produced societies “most likely to survive” that experience little freedom and low quality of life. Why should “we” (?) assign them higher value? Thoughts? Read More ›

Here

This blast from the past is still a source of ruinous commercial fish losses. Because lampreys do not have bone or any substantial cartilage, they are extremely rare as fossils. This fossil not only reveals a nearly complete soft tissue impression, but it also pushes back their fossil record another 35 million years. File under: Someone contact the guy who says “Evolution must happen.

Do doomsday scenarios bore and frustrate you? Here, in “The draw of doomsday: Why apocalypse aficionados look forward to the end, and how they hope to survive”, Stephanie Pappas (MSNBC News (5/17/20) observes,

Camping [Rev. Doomsday, tomorrow] has made this prediction before, in 1994 — it didn’t pan out — but the thousands of failed doomsday predictions throughout history are no match for what Lorenzo DiTommaso, a professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal, calls the “apocalyptic worldview.””It’s a very persistent and potent way of understanding the world,” DiTommaso told LiveScience.

While religious doomsdays attract more ridicule, the growth area is secular doomsdays: Read More ›

(This contest was judged here.) … tell New Scientist, … what the first person to set foot on Mars should say. If you win, and it doesn’t impress them, you have the wrong friends. Mars rocks. So, come to think of it, we will offer a free copy of The Nature of Nature (which offers Guillermo Gonzalez’s work on the true status of habitability of exoplanets) to the best entry placed here at Uncommon Descent, in the comments box. Gonzalez’s 2001 prediction has held up so far. Contest will be closed for judging May 28, 2011.

Maybe good, maybe bad, depending.

The decline is really happening. This source, Tom Price for “A Primer on Media in the 21st Century”, Miller-McCune (July 9, 2009) reports the fact with no satisfaction:

Beyond cost-cutting measures like reducing staff, pulling back coverage and shrinking the size of their printed products, news organizations are sharing work with longtime rivals, using amateurs as volunteer reporters and moving heavily or totally online. They’re also turning to new and untested methods for raising income.

Amateur reporters: You do the work, then buy the paper. It doesn’t work, editors say – but why should it? Read More ›

The folk at Nature’s blog appear so anxious to get people to believe Darwinism dunit that some have resorted to making statements about the history of Christianity and science that are actually true. Get a load of this, from James Hannam, “Science owes much to both Christianity and the Middle Ages” (May 18, 2011): Read More ›

Justice at last, for the majestic Monarch. A new Illustra film chronicles North America’s remarkable butterfly in defense of the design of life. Preview here. David Klinghoffer notes from preview (ENV, May 18, 2011):
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I have an evolutionary theory which proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Darwin was right. Natural selection created me upright so I could play the piano and sit on a piano bench. One day, while in college, I was playing the piano in a practice room at the university, and my soon-to-be-wife came in to listen to me practicing the piano. We were both music and foreign language double majors, and had much in common, except that she was a Christian and I was an atheist. (This all worked out in the end, by the way.) Eventually we produced two wonderful daughters who will pass on our selfish genes. So, simple logic dictates that Darwinian evolution made me upright so Read More ›

Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall talked to Uncommon Descent recently about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canada in the mid-twentieth century.

Part I is here.

Denyse: You mentioned the silent American eugenics film The Black Stork (1917) (P. 16):

A young man and woman are considering marriage; eugenicist Harry J Haiselden warns that they are ill-matched and will produce defective offspring. He is right; their baby is born defective, dies quickly and floats into heaven.

Courtesy the Moral Uplift League in Baltimore. (Floats into heaven? Well, that gives an oomph to “uplift”, I guess.) Yes, I’d heard of that one, but long forgotten. Looked it up again. And, sure enough, here’s something, from a book called The Black Stork (Oxford, 1999) I’d never heard before – about the famed Helen Keller: Read More ›

Last May, the Tevatron particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois showed a 1 per cent preference for B mesons, 40 times the predicted standard model amount. (Kate McAlpine, “Weird ‘unparticle’ boosted by Tevatron signal” (New Scientist, 19 May 2011) Proposed explanation here. Two separate groups now suggest an explanation for this larger asymmetry lies in the unparticle, a hypothetical entity conjured up in 2007 by theorist Howard Georgi of Harvard University. Georgi suggested that a property known as scale invariance – seen in fractal-like patterns that remain unchanged even when you zoom in and out to different scales, like the branching of redwood trees and the jagged edges of coastlines – could apply to individual particles too. The charge and spin of Read More ›

In “Calculations may have overestimated extinction rates” (New Scientist, 18 May 2011), Debora MacKenzie advises that a mathematical error undetected for decades may affect estimates of extinction rates (the “sixth great extinction,” said to be due to human dominance): Read More ›