Barry Arrington

By Eric Law Anderson See here for this award winning animated film.   HT:  Englishmanininstanbul

The atheist declares there is no transcendent objective standard by which to measure ethical choices.  Thus, ethics ultimately boils down to subjective preference.  For the atheist, our subjective preference for the ethical rule against theft, for example, is impelled by evolution.  Theft is, on balance, maladaptive.  Therefore, our genes cause us not to prefer it. To the extent this is true, out ethical choices are akin to our aesthetic judgments.  The evolutionary materialist says that our aesthetic judgments are also impelled by evolution.  We judge certain things to be beautiful or sublime not because they are beautiful or sublime in any objective sense, but because our aesthetic preferences have been formed by evolutionary adaptations in exactly the same way our Read More ›

So says study: It is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus. Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

Reports the Federalist here: Kisses from mommy are not an effective way of remedying children’s boo-boos, according to a new study which was published online by the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. The study, which was allegedly conducted on 943 pairs of toddlers and their mothers, examined whether a kiss from a child’s mother after a minor injury significantly reduced the child’s distress. “Maternal kissing of boo-boos is a common practice that appears to have no ability to reduce the distress of toddlers and may have significant untoward effects,” the anonymous authors of the study concluded. “On the basis of this study, we recommend a moratorium on the practice.”

In today’s Wall Street Journal (behind paywall) Stephen Budiansky reviews John Allen’s Home, in which Allen purports to give an evolutionary account of why humans, who like other primates are “not natural builders,” started building shelters.  As one might expect, everything Allen writes is highly speculative and totally untestable and therefore unfalsifiable.   In other words, Allen trots out the usual litany of “just so stories” that are the stock in trade of evolutionary psychologists.   One thing it is clearly not:  science. Budiansky’s review is particularly insightful regarding the utter futility of any attempt to apply evolutionary storytelling to any real world problem: A chapter that tries to explain the recent home-mortgage crisis as the product of the “powerful Read More ›

RDFish seems to think so.  I summarize his argument as follows: The ID explanatory filter works as follows: (a)  The explanatory filter first asks whether the phenomenon is contingent.  If it is not, then it is probably best explained as the result of a natural regularity. (b)  If the phenomenon is contingent, the filter asks whether it is complex and specified.  If it is neither complex nor specified, then chance is the most viable explanation.  While there may be false negatives, there can be no reliable design inference. (c)  But if the phenomenon is contingent, complex and specified, then an abductive inference to design is warranted. Therefore, under the explanatory filter design is inferred only after law and chance have Read More ›

In Did Michael Behe say that astrology was scientific in Kitzmiller v. Dover?  Moran actually excerpts the testimony and then concludes: I mostly agree with Behe. Astrology was an attempt to explain human behaviors by relating them to the position of the Earth on the day you were born. There is no connection. So today we think of astrology as bad science. It’s not true that the stars determine your behavior and whenever we make this claim to an astologist we make sure to point out that the evidence is against it. (footnote excluded) We compliment Dr. Moran on his analysis as well as on his often-expressed willingness to buck the conventional wisdom of his “side” of the debate.   Read More ›

In a prior post RDFish starts off with a promisingly cogent observation: We’re not arguing about “evolutionary adaptation”, but rather about the highly intricate, multi-component mechanisms we observe in organisms. Of course large populations and crossovers can help a bit with local optima, but saying these things will “tend to avoid” them is wishful thinking – there is just so much that can be assembled that way, which is why GAs come up with optimizations and not novel mechanisms. The important point, though, is not to argue about this in the abstract, because there is no way to demonstrate (yet) whether or not the combinatorial resources were sufficient or not. Leading Mapou to respond: Wow. RDFish is moving dangerously close Read More ›

Over the Thanksgiving holiday LK and I visited my sister in New York.  While we were there we did all of the touristy things one might expect, including an obligatory ferry ride over to check out the Statue of Liberty, and I can assure you it is just as beautiful and majestic as ever. Meanwhile, over at The Skeptical Zone Tom English has posted an article entitled The Law of Conservation of Information is defunct.  Apparently they are mighty proud of English’s article, because they have had it glued to the top of their homepage for nearly a month. Anyone who has been following the ID debate for any length of time knows that reports of ID’s demise are issued by Read More ›

It occurred to me today that the United States Supreme Court is attempting to establish Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist atheism as the official religion of the United States. Sartre defined his basic project in Existentialism is Humanism: Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position . . . Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.  Such is the first principle of existentialism . . . Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. In Being and Nothingness he added: Thus the best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human Read More ›

EL invites me to post comments at The Skeptical Zone:  “I will take this opportunity of inviting him over here, where he can post freely.” Yeah, but no.  I tried to post at The Skeptical Zone once.  KN promptly trashed everything I wrote.  Fool me once . . .  

Over at The Skeptical Zone Elizabeth Liddle quotes me regarding the circular reasoning that would be necessary to suppose that cladistics establishes common descent: It does not take a genius to know that cladistic techniques do not establish common descent; rather they assume it.  But I bet if one asked, 9 out of 10 materialist evolutionists, even the trained scientists among them, would tell you that cladistics is powerful evidence for common descent.  As Johnson argues, a lawyer’s training may help him understand when faulty arguments are being made, sometimes even better than those with a far superior grasp of the technical aspects of the field.  This is not to say that common descent is necessarily false; only cladistics does Read More ›

Perhaps.  Its founder is preaching materialist heresy. In a post over at The Skeptical Zone Elizabeth Liddle joins the ranks of our opponents who are finally admiting that biological design inferences are not invalid in principle.  She writes: Has Barry finally realised that those of us who oppose the ideas of Intelligent Design proponents do not dispute that it is possible, in principle, to make a reasonable inference of design?  That rather our opposition is based on the evidence and argument advanced, not on some principled (or unprincipled!) objection to the entire project? EL, welcome to the ranks of biological design theorists, by which I mean that group of people willing to follow the evidence for (or against) design in Read More ›

Astoundingly, some of our Darwinist friends continue to insist that Darwin had no problem with the fossil record, that he thought it was in complete agreement with this theory.  This is nuts.  He spent major portions of his book explaining why we should accept his theory even though the fossil record does not support it.  Here is a summary of what Darwin said: 1. My theory predicts that natural selection is working everywhere all the time to effect tiny morphological changes that accumulate over time and result in new species appearing. 2. The result is an extremely gradual process in which new species arise from prior species over eons of time though slow practically imperceptible changes. 3. If that is Read More ›

Readers may recall that in a recent post I quoted molecular biologist wd400 undermining Theodosius Dobzhansky’s silly maxim that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution” when he asserted that a lot of molecular biologists, including world-famous leader of the human genome project Francis Collins, “don’t understand much about evolution.” I noted that it follows as a matter of simple logic that Dobzhansky was wrong if one of the world’s leading biologists can do his job perfectly well without even understanding evolution, far less depending on it to make sense of everything. Today wd400 doubled down when he asserted that not only does Collins not understand evolution, but in fact he is dead wrong about key aspects Read More ›