2011

The source who reported on U.S. Darwin lobbyist Eugenie Scott’s recent talk in Scottsdale, Arizona, on why you can’t teach evidence against evolution, asked her for clarification.

Now, when she says “evolution,” we are pretty sure she means Darwinism. Why? Let investigative journalist Suzan Mazur explain. Her story is consistent with  another episode in the life of the Darwin lobby. His note to her:

Genie,

You stated in your April 17 talk in Scottsdale, AZ:

There is no evidence against evolution. There is no evidence against the idea that livings things shared common ancestry. All of the evidence that we have from biogeography, from comparative anatomy, from genetics, from the fossil record, from any number of different sources, that all is very compatible and pointing very clearly to the inference that living things had common ancestors. Nothing out there is running a big neon light saying, ‘Whoa! Evolution fails here! We have to toss it out!’

If “there is no evidence against evolution”, or indeed could exist, how then can evolution be testable?

The answer he got back was Read More ›

Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, offers his reason for reading Jacques “Chance alone is at the source ofevery innovation” Monod:

Some of the most useful books are written by people we don’t agree with. Francis Crick is another. After the double helix and his Nobel Prize in 1962, his position was impregnable and he could say whatever he liked without fear of losing grants. Read More ›

Here. According to a source, round the 45 minute mark, she says U.S. courts have ruled that teachers cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. Then she says:

46:29 Okay, what else can you not do? I have a little asterisk here. You cannot teach evidence against evolution. There have been some court decisions that have talked about this including Kitzmiller, but there has not been a really clean test of this idea of teaching evidence against evolution. …

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From “Chromosomes’ Big Picture: Similarities Found in Genomes Across Multiple Species; Platypus Still out of Place” (ScienceDaily, July 11, 2011), we learn: “Basically what this all means is that if the chromosome number of a species can be given, the relative sizes of all the chromosomes can instantly be known,” Yu said. “Also, if you tell me the genome size in the chromosome base pair, I can tell you the base pair length of each chromosome.”According to Yu, the most surprising finding is the extremely consistent distribution pattern of the chromosomes, a result from comparing the full sets of chromosomes — called genomes — of the 68 random eukaryotes. The team found that nearly every genome perfectly formed an S-curve Read More ›

At one time, life was simple, and defining it was easy. NASA defined life as: “a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.” [1] In that case, what are they to make of recent findings that life’s simplest cells evolve mainly by swapping genes, and not through Darwinian competition? [2] Can they forbid teaching that in publicly funded schools – Texas Darwin lobby-style? But then …

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Here’s Doonesbury’s daily dose of political correctness, this time on Darwin in the classroom, and here’s an on the ground response. Favourite panel line: Teacher: “Sorry, the government has mandated that I continue to fill your heads with this crap.” Here’s a great one on the difference between science as understood by the legacy media columnist (panel 1) and science on the ground (panel 2).

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne is currently engaged in a very gentlemanly debate with ex-Anglican priest Eric McDonald on the meaning and existence of free will. Eric McDonald has opened with a very thoughtful article entitled, Free Will: A First, Very Tentative Step. Today, I’d like to focus on the first part of Professor Coyne’s extended reply to Eric McDonald. This post is an especially interesting one, as it not only reveals scientists’ real reasons for accepting determinism, but their reasons for accepting naturalism as well. I shall attempt to show that in both cases, scientists who accept these “isms” are not thinking rationally: they are guilty of making an illict extrapolation which is not warranted by the available evidence. Additionally, I will argue the case for scientific naturalism is built on the romantic myth that for the past 2,500 years, science has been continually enlarging the range of phenomena known to be naturally explicable, leaving fewer and fewer phenomena unexplained. I shall then put forward an alternative metric of progress in science, in place of the one proposed by Professor Coyne. Finally, I will conclude my essay by drawing a contrast between Coyne’s illicit extrapolation to scientific naturalism and another famous extrapolation in the history of science which everyone accepts as legitimate: Newton’s theory of universal gravitation.

Let’s return to Professor Coyne’s debate with Eric McDonald on free will. In his opening article, Eric McDonald highlights a critical flaw in Coyne’s scientific case against free will: scientists haven’t put forward any arguments in defence of determinism. McDonald anticipates a response that Professor Coyne might make, and then explains why he regards this response as unsatisfactory:
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In “Common Grace and Amazing Grace: A Review of David Brooks’s ‘The Social Animal,’” Andy Crouch finds that “Brooks’s portrait of human flourishing lacks the essential elements of rescue and redemption” (Christianity Today, 7/11/2011): Then there is Erica’s brief fling with adultery, her only real moral failure. Erica’s indiscretion could have been a catalyst of self-discovery and transformation, but in Brooks’s story of upper-middle-class well-adjustment, it’s a mere speed bump on the road to a warm, if not passionate, “companionate marriage.” Certainly infidelity, like premarital sex, is not always a Category 5 emotional hurricane, especially for those with abundant social capital. Yet one senses no real indignation. What else would you expect from social animals, after all? Radical commitment just Read More ›

In “Mutations in Single Gene May Have Shaped Human Cerebral Cortex” (ScienceDaily, Apr. 28, 2011), we encounter a surprising claim:

The size and shape of the human cerebral cortex, an evolutionary marvel responsible for everything from Shakespeare’s poetry to the atomic bomb, are largely influenced by mutations in a single gene, according to a team of researchers led by the Yale School of Medicine and three other universities. Read More ›

I’m on vacation so I haven’t had time to watch this, but I thought it looked interesting enough to share. Apparently, this year there was a debate on whether or not a theory of everything is possible. See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYeN66CSQhg

At Ricochet, Claire Berlinski introduces her father, mathematician David Berlinski, asking Why Haven’t Our Great Expectations of the Sciences Been Met? Claire Berlinski, Ed. (Jun. 14, 2011): My father reflects upon the expectations he once held for scientific inquiry and what he imagined we would know in the year 2011. We find ourselves, he says, without the unifying, powerful theories he expected to see by now.  Instead, he suggests, we’re in “slack-jawed perplexity.” John Horgan has voiced similar ideas, especially in The End of Science, and earned his share of grief for it.

Newsweek here.

Also: Rick Mcginnis reviews the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times (Landmark Report Jul 09, 2011), recounting,

Subtitled “A Year Inside The New York Times,” Andrew Rossi’s film begins at the paper’s printing plant, the camera following huge rolls of newsprint on their way to becoming the next morning’s edition of the Times. This is the physical incarnation of institutions like the New York Times, with their insistence on remaining once daily, pulp-and-ink, top heavy, capital intensive operations in a digital age without deadlines or time zones, where a billion-dollar enterprise with lovely new offices in midtown Manhattan can be scooped by a blog published from a laptop in a coffee shop.

Like here, for example. And countless other places.  Read More ›

Here: This work is difficult and time consuming, but the question at its core—the genetic origin of new and complex traits—is probably still one of the most pertinent and fundamental unanswered questions in evolution today. At stake is the possibility of testing whether novel complex traits arise from a gradual building of novel developmental networks, gene by gene, or whether pre-existent modules of interacting genes are recruited together to play novel roles in novel parts of the organism. – Monteiro A, Podlaha O (2009) Wings, Horns, and Butterfly Eyespots: How Do Complex Traits Evolve? PLoS Biol 7(2): e1000037. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000037 February 24, 2009 But surely the answer c has come in by now, right? Alternatively: Those guys must be creationists if Read More ›

The standard argument against free will is that it is incoherent.  It claims that a free agent must either be determined or non-determined.  If the free agent is determined, then it cannot be responsible for its choices.  On the other hand, if it is non-determined, then its choices are random and uncontrolled.  Neither case preserves the notion of responsibility that proponents of free will wish to maintain.  Thus, since there is no sensible way to define free will, it is incoherent. [1]

Note that this is not really an argument against free will, but merely an argument that we cannot talk about free will.  So, if someone were to produce another way of talking about free will the argument is satisfied.

Does ID help us in this case?  It appears so.  If we relabel “determinism” and “non-determinism” as “necessity” and “chance”, ID shows us that there is a third way we might talk about free will. Read More ›

They didn’t make it into the film. Caroline Crocker, author of Free to Think and currently executive director of AITSE (dedicated to rescuing science from the mudslide of “science”), reflected in her book on discovering that she was not alone, that the Expelled were quite numerous:

There is companionship in troubles, and the more public my case became the mor others experiencing the same type of persecution contacted me and shared their own stories. Over 800 intellectually honest colleagues admit to seeing flaws in the theory of evolution and as a result many have suffered attacks on their careers and reputations. I was told of Nancy Bryson, a chemistry professor at Mississippi State University, who nearly lost her job for teaching the evidence for and against neo-Darwinian evolution to honors students, despite the fact that universities are supposed to be places for open inquiry and academic freedom. The university decided against demoting her only after her story was made public. In comparison, the case of the immunologist who lost his job after 30 years of stellar research has not been made public, simply because he still hopes to secure another position.  Read More ›