2011

Cornelius Hunter just posted a wonderful blog about the “debate” between Newton and Laplace about the origin of the solar system. Newton remained a committed Deist theist to his dying day, believing that God created the planets in their orbits, but had to fix them occasionally to keep them in line. Laplace, on the other hand, “had no need for that hypothesis” and in the original “god-of-the-gaps” argument, reduced God’s job requirements by one. No, make that two, because Laplace (1796) also formulated a “Nebular Hypothesis” explanation of the creation of the solar system, so God didn’t actually have to create the planets either. Immanuel Kant really liked that nebular hypothesis, and wrote quite a long treatise on it early Read More ›

I discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, The End of Faith (pp. 158-164), and my thinking on the subject has not changed. The “war on drugs” has been well lost, and should never have been waged. While it isn’t explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, I can think of no political right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. Read More ›

Warmup act: The sky is falling.

In “From The Kentucky ‘Ark Park’ To Back-Door Creationist Legislation, Religious Right Forces Are Demanding State Support Of Fundamentalist Dogma, Rob Boston (Americans United for the Separation of Church and State Newsletter, July/August 2011) dispenses with nuances,

Attacking evolution means big money for the Religious Right. In Kentucky, a creationist ministry called Answers in Genesis opened the Creation Museum in 2007 at a cost of $25 million. Three years later, it had logged its one millionth visitor.

So is it any wonder that Kentucky, smelling more jobs and tax revenues, is eager to do business with the forthcoming Ark Park? Would Kentucky be better or more fairly governed if – absent of crime, sedition, or ethics issues – the government made the principals’ religious beliefs an issue? Read More ›

Here is a Nature News Feature that speaks volumes about the state of evolutionary theory. It explains how the Human Genome project and high throughput technologies have revealed levels of complexity evolutionists hadn’t even dreamed of. It is yet another monumental failure of evolutionary theory, even though we all know evolution is a fact.  Read more

Thomas Cudworth in his post here referenced “…being competent in the field of evolutionary biology.” My question is, What does it mean to be “competent” in the field of evolutionary biology? It seems to me that it would mean providing hard empirical evidence that the mechanism of random variation/mutation and natural selection which is known to exist (e.g., bacterial antibiotic resistance) can be extrapolated to explain the highly functionally integrated information-processing machinery of the cell — at a very minimum! This empirical demonstration should be a prerequisite, before we even begin to entertain speculation about how this mechanism produced body plans and the human brain. Yet, the theoretically most “highly competent” evolutionary biologists never even attempt to address this requirement. Read More ›

If “them” are the new atheists, here’s the kind of thing you’d get in response: Read More ›

Jeffrey Shallit has responded to my new column over at his blog, Recursivity.

Shallit’s reply is interesting.  He starts out on the wrong foot right away, in his subtitle:

“Thomas Cudworth asks why prominent evolutionary scientists did not attend the Evolution 2011 conference in Norman, Oklahoma this summer.”

Actually, I didn’t.  In fact, I pointed out at the beginning of my article several prominent “evolutionary scientists” who were at the conference.  What I asked was why almost no prominent culture-war biologists read or contributed to papers at the Evolution 2011 conference.  Apparently it escaped Shallit’s notice that the whole point of my article was to question the connection between being a loud culture-war crusader for neo-Darwinism and actually being competent in the field of evolutionary biology.

The bulk of Shallit’s response is an explanation, allegedly for my benefit, about how academia works and why academics can’t attend every conference going.  Well, I agree with him that academics can’t attend every conference going (as I clearly conceded in my original article, which he appears to have read hurriedly).

One of the obvious constraints, I acknowledged, is budgetary.  But such restraints clearly do not apply to all the people on the list.  Read More ›

From “Environs Prompt Advantageous Gene Mutations as Plants Grow; Changes Passed to Progeny” (ScienceDaily, July 5, 2011) we learn:

If a person were to climb a towering redwood and take a sample from the top and a sample from the bottom of the tree, a comparison would show that the two DNA samples are different.Christopher A. Cullis, chair of biology at Case Western Reserve University, explains that this is the basis of his controversial research findings. Read More ›

In a popular lecture delivered in Vienna I 1900, the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the fathers of statistical mechanics and the kinetic theory of gases, declared that the nineteenth century would be remembered as the Century of Darwin, then stated: In my view all salvation for philosophy may be expected to come from Darwin’s theory. … What then will be the position of the so-called laws of thought in logic? Well, in the light of Darwin’s theory they will be nothing else but inherited habits of thought. … One can call these laws of thought a priori because through many thousands of years of our species’ experience they have become innate to the individual, but it seems to be Read More ›

At Eurekalert ( 7-Jul-2011), we learn:

Jewel beetles, obtained from local people, turn out to be 4 species unknown to science

A team of researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences discovered four new species of jewel beetles (Buprestidae) from South-eastern Asia. This family of beetles is named for their particularly beautiful body and fascinating, shiny colours.

“All new species belong to the genus Philanthaxia. Before the publication of this study, 61 species had been known from this genus. Currently, it comprises of 65 species, with a primarily Southeast-Asian distribution, except for two species extending to the Australasian region”, said Oto Nakládal, a co-author of the study.

Beetles do speciate very readily. From famous mid-twentieth century Darwinist J.B.S. Haldane:

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. Beetles are actually more numerous than the species of any other insect order. That kind of thing is characteristic of nature.

So maybe not such a surprise. On the other hand,
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I commend Thomas Cudworth’s post today to all, for raising a very good question: Do Darwin’s best known hacks and flacks do much science research. Given their other activies, like interfering with academic employment decisions and journal publications, writing hit pieces on scholars, and demanding wacky decisions from school authorities, one wonders where they would find the time.

One curious fact is that these activists are, generally speaking, Americans talking to Americans – and their fellow Americans have displayed a low level of confidence in Darwinism for decades.

So one of three possibilities, surely: Read More ›

Reviewer Charlie Jane Anders tells us “Zookeeper is a horror movie about evolutionary biology” (IO9, July 8, 2011), but she means “evolutionary psychology.” Briefly, the zookeeper wants this girl, and the animals (who can talk, of course) advise him to use their mating strategies:

Griffin is encouraged to become an Alpha Male, to pee in public to mark his territory. (There is a lot of urination.) The Adam Sandler-voiced monkey tells him to fling poop. At various times, his mating seminar starts to seem like an episode of the Pick-Up Artist, as a lion tells him to throw some negs. He’s encouraged to pick fights with competing males, to separate his desired mate from the pack, and to make his nerdy-but-gorgeous best friend pretend to be his girlfriend to make Stephanie jealous. There is much slapstick involving Griffin attempting to do a frog confrontation stance and making his pants split open.Eventually, though, it starts to work — Griffin, implausibly, becomes an Alpha Male and everybody admires him. He becomes a kind of super-yuppie and God among ordinary shlubs.

The usual keenness of evolutionary psychology’s insight into human nature is on display here; the screenwriter captures the quintessential truth that humans have evolved to consider this kind of behaviour sexy – just as animals evolved to have equivalent-to-human minds. From Anders:

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I have often wondered whether the loudness and aggressiveness of many culture-war defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution bears any relationship at all to the actual scientific contributions of those defenders to the field of evolutionary biology.  As it happens, we have at hand some evidence, albeit of a rough and ready kind, relevant to that question.

Read More ›

New research is providing a fascinating new perspective on fine-tuning and a three hundred year old debate. First for the context. When Isaac Newton figured out how the solar system worked he also detected a stability problem. Could the smooth-running machine go unstable, with planets smashing into each other? This is what the math indicated. But on the other hand, we’re still here. How could that be?  Read more