I did a podcast on whether or not naturalism has historically been of benefit to science. The *actual* interaction of naturalism with science is both drastically different and more interesting than what is presented in most science classes and books. Podcast information available here.
Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection has done a lot to convince many professional academics of the truth of Darwinian evolution. The theorem states that the rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its variance in fitness at that time. In other words, fitness must go up! Because it is a mathematical equation, many are convinced that selection must be effective. However, it turns out that Fisher’s theorem actually says very little about fitness, or even biology. While this has been pointed out before, a recent paper shows (a) the limitations of the theorem to tell us anything helpful about selection, (b) the limitations of the theorem to tell us anything about evolution, Read More ›
I just started a podcast that explores various ideas, including Intelligent Design, from a conservative viewpoint. Episode 4 is out now, which is a short introduction to Intelligent Design. I hope you take a moment to subscribe! iTunes Podcast Link
It turns out that biological fine-tuning goes to the very extremes of physics. In this lecture, William Bialek shows that eyes can detect individual photons, and a number of other phenomena where biology operates on the very edge of what is possible in physics. View Video Here
Early this year BIO-Complexity published a paper of mine titled “Measuring Active Information in Biological Systems” which showed how some ID concepts such as Active Information can be directly applied to biology. Essentially, it seems that in some situations, organisms direct their own mutations/evolution. This has not always been noticed because we don’t have a good measurement for when this happens. Active Information helps to fill that role. Anyway, this is a video I made describing the paper and the thinking behind it. Also, if you need background of why we should think that organisms direct their own mutations in the first place, see this video:
The promised interview has arrived! Bob Murphy interviews Winston Ewert on various topics around Intelligent Design, including Winston’s latest paper on life’s dependency graph.
In my previous post about Bob Murphy’s support of ID, some people commented that Bob Murphy, being an economist, doesn’t count much in support of ID. However, those comments would be misplaced. Although Bob Murphy did not get into this in this podcast episode, there is actually a direct connection between ID and economics. First of all, as I have pointed out innumerable times, ID is not a theory of biology or of origins, it is a theory of causation. Biology and origins are application areas, not the core idea itself. Naturalism causes us to have blinders on not just in the case of evolution, but in any number of other academic endeavors as well. When we assume that humans Read More ›
Bob Murphy, author of the book Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous Keynesian and host of the Bob Murphy Show, just released Episode 106 of his podcast, where he expresses his support of the ID project and relates it to other marginalized anti-establishment academic projects.
I haven’t had time to read this yet, but it sure looks interesting. A new paper came out across the pond discussing the thermodynamic efficiency of various cellular processes/computations. An interesting snippet from the abstract: Here we show that the computational efficiency of translation, defined as free energy expended per amino acid operation, outperforms the best supercomputers by several orders of magnitude, and is only about an order of magnitude worse than the Landauer bound. Of course, various scientists assure us that selectionism is a failed concept and that no biologist today takes it seriously, right? Oh wait, also from the abstract: This issue is interesting both from the perspective of how close life has come to maximally efficient computation Read More ›
In calculus, the Leibniz notation for the second derivative confuses most students. It turns out, rightfully so. The notation for the second derivative turns out to actually be incorrect. Earlier this year, I got a paper published detailing the problem and the corrected notation. In the video below, I introduce the new notation, why the old notation is problematic, how the new notation can be derived straightforwardly, and why it may matter in the future. For those interested, the problems with the notation for the second derivative are well-known, and a kludge exists for working around it known as Faa di Bruno’s formula (a simplified version being known as “the chain rule for the second derivative”). However, this formula does Read More ›