Barry Arrington

Yesterday a friend and I rode our bikes up to the top of Vail Pass, and when we got back down we stopped in Breckenridge for lunch.  After lunch we decided to walk around Breckenridge for a while, and we soon found ourselves in a wonderful little art gallery on Main Street.  One large bronze in particular caught my attention.  It was a comic piece of a bear standing beside a tree looking at a squirrel on a branch even with the bear’s face.  The squirrel was holding out an acorn as if he were offering it to the bear in exchange for not eating him.   I loved it.  As I looked at the piece the word “whimsy” came to mind.  I inquired about the price and Read More ›

Readers of this blog will know that my favorite game is “spot the irony” (based upon Monty Python’s “spot the looney” game).  Here a colleague from another listserve brings Richard Dawkins’ statement from “The Enemies of Reason” We’ve got to go back to the evidence and see what is true. We must favour verifiable evidence over private feeling otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth. We should be open minded, but not so open minded that our brains fall out. The scientific method tests with objective observation and statistical analysis. Individual scientists may or may not be honest, but science with its’ safeguards of peer review and repeated experiment has scrupulous honesty built into it Read More ›

The Washington Times reports there was a global warming scare in the 1920’s and 1930’s. http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070814/NATION02/108140063 Only problem is, shortly after the scare global temps trended downward for decades. As Dave says, the global warming house of cards is about to come down.

In his post below Dave refers to Karl Popper’s famous white swan/black swan illustration.  Dave is, of course, quite correct to show how ID can be formulated within Popper’s paradigm, which was most cogently set forth in The Logic of Scientific Discovery in which the swan illustration appears.  Popper may be unique among philosophers in that his ideas have been given the force of law in the United States courts.  One need go no further than Judge Jones’ opinion in Dover (although there are other examples) to see this phenomenon at work.  For this reason all who seek acceptance of their work in the scientific community bow before Popper.  While I find Popper’s ideas compelling and often cite them myself, Read More ›

From the AP story regarding new discoveries debunking the Homo habilis evolved into Homo erectus theory (see Sal’s post below): “Susan Anton, a New York University anthropologist and co-author of the Leakey work, said she expects anti-evolution proponents to seize on the new research, but said it would be a mistake to try to use the new work to show flaws in evolution theory.  ‘This is not questioning the idea at all of evolution; it is refining some of the specific points,’ Anton said.  ‘This is a great example of what science does and religion doesn’t do.  It’s a continuous self-testing process.’” Interesting statement.  One suspects that what Anton really means is that, for her, science is a continuous self-testing Read More ›

Medical animator David Bolinsky has worked with Harvard University to produce an incredible animation of the nano-machines in the cell.  You can see part of it here:  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/147 Note in particular one statement Bolinsky makes:  “No life is possible without these machines.”  One wonders if Bolinsky has stopped to think about the origin of life (abiogensesis) implications of his statement.  If no life is posibble without these nano-machines, where did the nano-machines come from?  Note that when Bolinsky calls these objections “machines” he is not making an analogy to a machine.  These objects are in fact small bio-machines.  Question of the day for the Darwinists who visit our site:  If life on earth is not possible without the existence of these Read More ›

Long time followers of this site will remember that my grandfather used to collect small stones he called “arrowheads.”  He had the misguided notion that these small pieces of flint had complex and specific chip patterns that he attributed to intelligent agency, i.e., Indians making tips for their arrows.  Later in life I learned that my grandfather was deluded.  Scientists assure us that unguided natural processes are perfectly competent to produce even the most extraordinarily complex phenomena, and the “design” some people insist on inferring from complexity is merely an illusion.  And my grandfather’s misguided resort to agency to explain these chip patterns is an example of the dreaded “Indian-of-the-Gaps” mode of thinking in action.  See my post here The other day I Read More ›

Sometimes one is tempted to despair that journalists will ever understand even the most basic principles of the philosophy of science.  Then one reads a sentence like this one in a story on the Fox News web site:  “Global warming can no more be “proven” than the theory of continental drift, the theory of evolution or the concept that germs carry diseases.” That little (very little) light you see in the distance is a glimmer of hope.  Full story here:  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,289647,00.html

I have posted below an article by Sam Zaramba, the Director General for Health Services for the nation of Uganda entitled “Give us DDT.”   Dr. Zaramba argues that the ban on DDT was misguided and has resulted in countless unnecessary deaths in Africa.

I  have limited personal experience with this issue.  A couple of years ago my daughter and I traveled to Kenya (just east of Uganda).  We met with many nationals, many of whom had the tell tale yellowish tinge to the whites of the eyes of malaria sufferers.  I will never forget one father in particular, who literally begged us for money for malaria treatment for his daughter.  He could not afford the $10.00 cost of treatment.  Our hearts were broken, and of course we helped as much as we could, but we realized our efforts were a drop in a vast ocean of pain caused by the disease.

When I got home I did some research and was horrified to learn that the malaria epidemic in Africa is perhaps the most preventable health care tragedy in the history of the world.  We could eradicate African malaria if only we would allow them to use DDT to combat the mosquitos that spread the disease.  I also learned that everything I thought I knew about DDT was flat wrong.  Not only is DDT safe, scientists have known this for decades.

It turns out the DDT ban was based on a combination of junk science and moral preening by the environmental movement.  It as if greenies said, “What are a few million African lives so long as we affluent Westerners can feel good about having ‘done something’ even if that something means nothing?” 

As it turns out, the western environmental movement’s push for polices that will kill millions of Africans is far from over.  The drive to force LDC’s (lesser developed countries) to reduce their CO2 emissions will delay the electrification of the continent by decades, and millions will die as a result of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases caused by smoke inhalation from indoor wood fires –- a very real cost for environmental gains that are, to say the least, speculative. 

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Stephen Webb has an excellent review of David Sloan Wilson’s Evolution for Everyone here.  It opens as follows:  The dirty Darwinian secret is now out of the closet: If evolution is true, then it must be true about everything. Most Darwinians used to be very restrained about the relevance of their theory for cultural and moral issues, for obvious reasons. If evolution is true about everything, then randomness and competition are the foundations for the highest human ideals as well as the lowest organic life forms. Scientists have trouble enough restricting Darwinism to biology. What if that restriction is unscientific? What parents would want their children being taught that Darwinism explains not only speciation but also altruism? Some Darwinians take Read More ›

This morning the New Scientist web site posted an article entitled “Is Dark Energy an Illusion?”  See here:

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn11498-is-dark-energy-an-illusion.html

Here is the lead sentence:  “The quickening pace of our universe’s expansion may not be driven by a mysterious force called dark energy after all, but paradoxically, by the collapse of matter in small regions of space.”

This article brought to mind a wonderful debate we had in September about what it means to “know” a scientific theory is true.  I used the standard model of cosmology and especially its reliance on “dark matter” and “dark energy” as a jumping off point for the discussion.  See

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/illusion-of-knowledge-iii/

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-illusion-of-knowldge/

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-illusion-of-knowledge-ii/

In my first post I noted that Professor Mike Disney is skeptical of the standard model, and he says:  “The greatest obstacle to progress in science is the illusion of knowledge, the illusion that we know what’s going on when we really don’t.”

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The recent dustup surrounding the SMU design conference highlighted a rhetorical tactic that has become fashionable in the anti-ID herd.  This tactic is to smear IDists with the “denier” tag, as if mere denial is self-evidently bad.  Herewith, a reflection on famous deniers in history from another forum in which I participate (used with permission): I think that there may be some fodder in the current “witch hunt” attitude towards “deniers” for us to use. Consider the following example:   There were a couple of doctors who were “stress deniers” in that they denied that stress caused peptic ulcers. They had the audacity to suggest that ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection. As a result, they were marginalized and Read More ›

Saint Thomas Aquinas was not content to rest upon received wisdom.  He questioned everything, and at the end of his questioning he came back around to Christian orthodoxy.  In his questioning Aquinas took great pains to examine his opponents’ arguments on their own terms.  He did not, as most of us are inclined to do, attack a straw man caricature of his opponent’s position.  In his magisterial Summa Theologiae Aquinas employed a dialectical approach.  He set out the arguments for his opponents’ position; then he set out the arguments for the orthodox position.  Only then did he draw a conclusion.  Importantly, it has been said that not only did he take his opponent’s arguments on their own terms, but perhaps Read More ›

In a post earlier today Denyse responded to a student’s charge that ID is a “God of the gaps” scientific show stopper.  Apparently, the student assumes if a researcher performs a scientific investigation of a phenomenon and concludes that design by an intelligent agent is the best explanation for the phenomenon, the matter is then settled and all further scientific inquiry is foreclosed.  But that is not the way science works.  All scientific conclusions are tentative and contingent.  Popper put the proposition this way: “Science does not rest on solid bedrock.  The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp.  It is like a building erected on piles.  The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, Read More ›

My grandfather hunted arrowheads, and he found them, hundreds of them.  I was awed by his collection, and one of my most prized possessions is a frame containing 48 of his best specimens that I inherited from him.  Nearly two decades after his death that frame is still hanging on the wall in the room where I am typing this post. Sometimes when I was a kid I went arrowhead hunting with him, but I was not much good at it.  Many times I brought a promising specimen to papa for inspection, only to have him cast it aside and say, “Just a rock boy; shah, shah, shah.”  To this day I don’t know exactly what “shah” means, but from Read More ›