Our noses have specialized cells that give us a sense of the vapors around us by detecting the presence of chemicals and sending signals to the brain. New research is now explaining how our lungs also have such chemosensors. These sensors send signals not to the brain but to the nearby tissues causing a fast response, such as coughing and wheezing, when we inhale irritating or toxic vapors. Our lungs need this protection since they essentially are open to the external environment. As one evolutionist explained, “it makes sense that we evolved mechanisms to protect ourselves.” But such reasoning violates Occam’s Razor and reveals again how Aristotelianism lives on inside of evolution.  Read more

In automatic control theory “homeostasis” is defined as the property of a system in which variables are regulated so that internal conditions remain stable and relatively constant. Homeostasis is a fundamental concept in biology because is what allows the life of organisms. In fact, it maintains the stability of the organisms in response to changes in external conditions. The concept of homeostasis is tied to the strictly correlation and interdependence of all systems in a body, i.e. its functional unity. Organisms can live and survive only because are giant cybernetic hierarchical hologramatic macro-systems. Donald Johnson defines cybernetics as: … the interdisciplinary study of control systems with feedback. (Programming of Life, Big Mac Publishers 2010) While Norbert Wiener, about homeostasis, writes: Read More ›

Truth may be, as Paul Dirac suggested, beautiful, but beauty is not always true. From the celestial spheres of the Greeks to Kepler’s heavenly harmonic tones, our dreams of beauty are often just that—dreams and not reality. But we dream on and today the most beautiful dream is evolution.  Read more

Over at TSZ Lizzie disagrees with me regarding my conclusions from the zombie thought experiment (see this post).  Very briefly, in the zombie post I summarized David Gelernter’s argument from the zombie thought experiment: If a conscious person and a zombie behave exactly alike, consciousness does not confer a survival advantage on the conscious person. It follows that consciousness is invisible to natural selection, which selects for only those traits that provide a survival advantage. And from this it follows that consciousness cannot be accounted for as the product of natural selection. Lizzie disagrees.  In her post she writes: What is being startled if not being “conscious” of an alarming signal? What is trying to gain further information, if not Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne cares deeply about people and sentient animals. But when he attempts to explain why we should care about others, his whole theory of ethics comes apart at the seams. Curiously, Professor Coyne does not seem to notice. In today’s post (which will be short), I’d like to explain what’s wrong with Coyne’s ethical theory. In a nutshell, it fails to address the following three very simple questions: 1. What matters, ethically speaking? 2. What ultimately matters: the individual or society? 3. How can we know whether an animal has feelings or not? What matters, ethically speaking? The first question is fatal to Professor Coyne’s ethical theory because he doesn’t believe in a self, but at the same Read More ›