2011

The second award offer in the recent contest, a copy of Don Johnson’s Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability, asks “What do you call a guy who reviews/trashes a book without reading it?”

It goes to homerj1 at 3 for

The review is a noview and the reviewer is a noviewer.

This won because it can be used effortlessly in a sentence, as in:

Prof. Retro Darwin’s noview of biochemist Michael Behe’s latest  …

Rev. Darwin Santa, noviewer of Steve Meyer’s …

Recently, Dimbo Darwin, science writer, noviewed Bill Dembski’s latest …

Ease of use is important. And dropping the pretense of reading makes for more honest communication: Read More ›

Three recent papers in Science:

In Evolution, the Sum Is Less than Its Parts

Sergey Kryazhimskiy1,2,
Jeremy A. Draghi1, and
Joshua B. Plotkin1
Propagating bacteria in a lab for thousands of generations may seem tedious, or even irrelevant, to most evolutionary biologists. Nonetheless, such experiments provide an opportunity to deduce quantitative principles of evolution and directly test them in controlled environments. Combined with modern sequencing technologies, as well as theory, recent microbial experiments have suggested a critical role for genetic interactions among mutations, called epistasis, in determining the pace of evolution. Two papers in this issue, by Khan et al. on page 1193 (1) and Chou et al. (2) on page 1190, present precise experimental measurements of these epistatic interactions.

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In “New Data Still Have Scientists in Dark Over Dark Matter,” (ScienceDaily, June 8, 2011), we learn: The new seasonal variation, recorded by the Coherent Germanium Neutrino Technology (CoGeNT) experiment, is exactly what theoreticians had predicted if dark matter turned out to be what physicists call Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).”We cannot call this a WIMP signal. It’s just what you might expect from it,” said Juan Collar, associate professor in physics at the University of Chicago. Collar and John Orrell of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who lead the CoGeNT collaboration, are submitting their results in two papers to Physical Review Letters. The researchers have not ruled out random fluctuation. Dark matter accounts for nearly 90 percent of all matter Read More ›

In Nature News (8 June 2011), Emma Marris recounts how evolutionary biologist D. S. Wilson is trying to apply  his theories to once-prosperous Binghamton, New York (pop 47,000). In “Evolution: Darwin’s city,” she explains that he has focused much of his research on “the long-standing puzzle of altruism,” (“why organisms sometimes do things for others at a cost to themselves”).

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The challenge Wilson has undertaken is to turn bad neighbours into good ones, and unwilling students into willing ones, using evolutionary psychology (though puzzled colleagues doubt that he is really doing EP). The problem is that he simply doesn’t have the needed grasp of human nature. Evolutionary psychology makes that impossible, as we shall see.

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Some wonder why that’s even a puzzle, where humans are concerned. Darwinian social theory dictates that the default switch must be set to selfishness, because then the awesome power of natural selection can be shown. From an ID perspective,  the human default switch is not in fact set to selfishness exclusively and natural selection plays a limited role in human history. So Wilson’s “puzzle” disappears in favour of innumerable conflicting motivations, many of which do not happen to be especially selfish.   Read More ›

Lest there be any lingering doubt about how far Darwinians might go in the enforcement of the dogma, it now appears that even beauty pageant contestants are not immune to consequences for failing to toe the Darwinian line. Contestants in this year’s Miss USA pageant are being asked questions about whether evolution should be taught in public schools. Fox News reports:

In on-camera interviews set to be posted on the official Miss USA website, 2011 pageant hopefuls are being asked if they believe evolution should be taught in schools, and if they would ever pose for nude photographs.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 5:00 pm EST today, June 10. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

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Before it’s deleted: A riff on the publicly funded, court-enforced Darwin lobby. Stars long-ago scientist Richard Dawkins and Darwin’s broomstick Eugenie Scott*: Lines like “He’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!”  and “You don’t know me, you don’t know Dick!” Stuff that People Who Count complain about tends to disappear so, if interested, watch now … * Mistakenly identified earlier as pseudo-ID expert Barbara Forrest.

Yes, Darwinists are bringing back one of the most famous fakes in biology: Darwin disciple Ernst Haeckel’s hundred year old fake embryo drawings are scheduled by some publishers for Texas schoolbooks:

In addition, many of these curricula contain glaring scientific errors based on outdated science.For example, three of the proposed curricula (from Adaptive Curriculum, Holt McDougal, and Rice University) use Haeckel’s inaccurate embryo drawings—called fraudulent by multiple evolutionary scientists—to claim that vertebrate embryos are similar in their earliest stages. Clearly inaccurate as well as outdated, Haeckel-derived embryo drawings were previously removed by the TBSOE from textbooks designed for use in Texas during the 2003 biology textbook adoption process; these bogus drawings should not be allowed to re-enter the curriculum. Read More ›

Harris’s view is interesting, in the light of the recent Christianity Today cover story on the Christian Darwinists of the BioLogos institute, which Collins founded: Read More ›

 In response to my last post RabbitDawg writes: Barry, I was reading a column in Slate, and I tripped across the following: “The behavior of this bacterium, once elucidated, proved to be truly chilling. Unlike previously known E. coli, O157 borrowed a gene from a completely different bacterium (Shigella flexneri) that produces the shiga toxin, which causes dysentery. This Yankee swap of genetic bits across species is what gives scientists nightmares. E. coli demonstrated evolution in action, right under our noses and at Warp 7 speed. Creationists take notice: This is the real deal.” You’ll find the full article at http://www.slate.com/id/2296326/ Page 2, Paragraph 5. know you’re not a “Creationist”, and this is not an example of new species creation, Read More ›

A reason captured in photos: Here, Barry Arrington notes, “Natural Selection Defies the Odds,” As in

Recently the management of a casino hired Professor Hannum to investigate a roulette player whom they suspected might be cheating. The house has a huge mathematical advantage in roulette, which is why the casino suspected something other than random chance was involved when the player parlayed a few thousand dollars into over $1.4 million.

Professor Hannum crunched the numbers, however, and told the casino that while the player’s run was very unlikely (about an 80:1 shot), it was not so unlikely as to suggest cheating. And sure enough, over the next few gaming sessions the player blew his entire $1.4 million stack.

Yes, that’s just the trouble. We are forever being told, as he goes on to note, how the magic of natural selection bests the odds, when in fact no natural force can do so.

A friend writes to tell us a remarkable story from Kenya about a moment when natural selection fails: Three cheetahs spare tiny antelope’s life, … and play with him instead” (Daily Mail, 5th February 2010) Read More ›

The founder of “Evolutionary Christianity” writes, There is a world of difference between a pre-evolutionary and an evolutionary understanding of “biblical inerrancy.” With a God-glorifying understanding of deep times, one need not make an idol of human words as a carrier of God’s Word. Rather, from an emergent perspective, we can see that the Bible accurately reveals how the authors and editors of the books of scripture understood themselves, their world, and the nature of Ultimate Reality two or three thousand years ago. Those understandings include many powerful insights we can use today, woven in amongst much that is primarily historical or symbolic value, and even some components that modern sensibilities rightly find morally offensive. It is up to us Read More ›

Recently, we noted Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman’s new “neurolaw” book, Incognito. The basic idea, driven by evolutionary psychology, is that criminal law would improve if we dropped the illusion that people are responsible for their behaviour. Perhaps social justice minded supporters hope it will bring about prison reform, an end to capital punishment, or such.

They hope in vain. Here’s my MercatorNet article in which a defense lawyer who specializes in capital punishment explains why that probably won’t happen:

This is not a controversy between the String ‘Em Up Gang and the Prison Reform Society. All parties want a just and humane system; they differ fundamentally as to whether they think that personal responsibility is an illusion. Read More ›

Alan Prendergast has this story in Westword about Robert Hannum, a professor of “applied probability” at the University of Denver. Recently the management of a casino hired Professor Hannum to investigate a roulette player whom they suspected might be cheating. The house has a huge mathematical advantage in roulette, which is why the casino suspected something other than random chance was involved when the player parlayed a few thousand dollars into over $1.4 million.

Professor Hannum crunched the numbers, however, and told the casino that while the player’s run was very unlikely (about an 80:1 shot), it was not so unlikely as to suggest cheating. And sure enough, over the next few gaming sessions the player blew his entire $1.4 million stack.

What was the key assumption underlying the casino management’s request of Professor Hannum? They assumed that some events are just too improbable reasonably to attribute them to the interaction of random chance and the physical laws of nature working on the roulette wheel (i.e., “physical necessity”), and and if an event is not caused by the interaction of chance and necessity, the most likely cause of the event is design by an intelligent agent. In the particular case of gaming “design by an intelligent agent” goes by the name of “cheating.” Finally, the very fact they hired Professor Hannum suggests they understood that design leaves behind indicia that can be sussed out objectively.

Consider an example from poker. Suppose a poker dealer deals himself 13 royal flushes in hearts in a row in a five card game. The odds of this happening are easy to calculate. They are about 2.74^-71. To put that number into perspective, the dealer could deal the same 13 hands to every atom in the universe, and it is less than even money that any atom would receive that same series of hands. Conclusion: It is not, as a matter of strict logic, impossible for random chance to result in 13 royal flushes in a row, but the odds of that happing are so low that the inference to design is overwhelming.

Now the odds of the information content of even the simplest strand of DNA forming though pure random chance are even less than the odds of dealing 13 royal flushes in a row. Yet Neo-Darwinian evolution (NDE) theorists routinely discount the design inference. How can this be? Read More ›

Paying too much attention to details and not understanding the general situation is the classic definition of NSFT.

It is my view that Darwinists have become ensnared by NSFT. As the evidence of modern science — from many domains, especially the information and computational sciences, in addition to simple mathematical probabilistic calculations — has progressively and logically eviscerated the creative powers of the Darwinian mechanism, Darwinists continue to hang on to the hopelessly improbable.

How can this be? How can the Darwinist not see the forest (design) for the trees (the endlessly unsubstantiated and usually silly or even embarrassing speculations of Darwinian storytelling, as countered by the mounting evidence of design from every sector of scientific investigation, all evaluated with simple rational thought)?

In my essay here (which has generated at this writing 182 comments) UD contributor allanius presented what I believe encapsulates and elucidates the essentials concerning this enigma.

In his comment he offers the thesis that cultural epochs are self-limiting. Proponents obtain power and dominance for a season, but are eventually brought down by their inflexibility.
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At Cannuckian Yankee’s comment 14 on UD Contest post “Why do people refuse to read books they are attacking?” (now being judged), we learn,

There’s a guy on Amazon who’s extremely anti-ID. He comments on or reviews just about every ID book, but it’s quite obvious that he never reads the books. He goes by “sillysilly” sometimes, and other names, but you can tell it’s him.Sillysilly’s “reviews” and comments are pretty much the same – “ID is religion and not science, and you’re a lying jerk if you believe otherwise.”

But then we learn, at 22, Read More ›