Denyse O'Leary

Here are the edited conference proceedings (.pdf) of a roundtable discussion among leading astrobiologists, to relate atrobiology goals to planning in planetary sciences: “The Next Phase in Our Search for Life: An Expert Discussion”:

Moderator: Christopher P. McKayParticipants: Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Penelope Jane Boston, Inge L. ten Kate, Alfonso F. Davila, and Everett Shock

Some interesting stuff here:

PJB: I served for about three years on the National Research Council (NRC) Complex Panel and just about everybriefng we received from anyone within the planetary programs always included the life question, because it is something that’s on everyone’s mind, whether they do this kind of science or not.

This question is one that I have struggled with a lot. To scope out the physical and chemical environment is really inextricably bound to the search for life, and it is true that we have focused a great deal on that because, truthfully, it is a lot easier to measure a physical parameter on Mars than it is to, ‘‘search for life,’’ because that latter question is so open-ended. We have a very poor constraint set on what we actually mean by the term ‘‘life,’’ and searching for biochemistry and macromolecules that look just like those on Earth is not an efficient approach. It is much more challenging to imagine how we would actually design a real life detection mission.

So people are tempted to shy away from coming to grips with that very difficult epistemological question, which is: Read More ›

See this beautiful image of a flowering plant from the Cretaceous era. It killed the dinosaurs? … Mmmm … probably not. I spent some time thinking how to arrange these branches in a vase, had they survived, and then decided, no: Outdoor container gardening, overwinter in cool greenhouse. May need support. (= Will need support, but no rush.) We seem to get better fossils all the time. Who says there’s no progress? This would make a great fabric print too.

A friend points to this review of an interesting new book:

In Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy, Sandra D. Mitchell accomplishes an enormous amount in very short compass. Starting from the actual practice of (mainly) biological and (some) social sciences, she presents a workable and effective philosophy of science focused particularly on sciences dealing with complex subject matters. Drawing on nicely handled examples from psychiatry (e.g., major depressive disorder), biology (e.g., recent genetics and genomics, drug discovery, the study of insect societies), and the policy world (e.g., climate change and economic problems), Mitchell develops and illustrates a philosophy of science suited to the complexities scientists face. The result is a compact and elegant presentation of a philosophy she calls “integrative pluralism,” challenging many orthodox positions in the philosophy of science. While keeping her examples in the foreground, Mitchell provides a philosophical basis for rethinking the methods for analyzing complex systems in situations involving considerable uncertainty. She also demonstrates by example the value and reach of her philosophical approach in contrast with more conventional philosophies of science, from Popperian falsification and standard forms of inductive reasoning to sophisticated forms of theory and model testing.

Long overdue, if you ask me.

“Considerable uncertainty”? Um, yes. Most human systems are unthinkably complex.

That does not mean we can’t act or make decisions, but it does mean that we must work with fuzzy boundaries: Causes of Alzheimer? Dangers of radiation? Sin/salvation foods? Alternative medical treatments? Last ditch cancer fight? Simple answers, begone!

For example, Read More ›

First, it’s okay to doubt the received ape-ology nostrums. No, really. It is.

Re that:  Memo to Templeton’s Rod Dreher: It is still okay to doubt received nostrums. And it had better be.

Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery Publishing), wrote to introduce us to the “other side” of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson (for Gilead, 2005), who recently took the occasion of her four Yale Terry Lectures to attack the evolutionary biologists who talk as if science were atheism writ large.

But let Bethell tell it: Read More ›

At ScienceDaily (March 30, 2011), we learn that “Like Products, Plants Wait for Optimal Configuration Before Market Success”: Just as a company creates new, better versions of a product to increase market share and pad its bottom line, an international team of researchers led by Brown University has found that plants tinker with their design and performance before flooding the environment with new, improved versions of themselves.  The issue: When does a grouping of plants with the same ancestor, called a clade, begin to spin off new species? Biologists have long assumed that rapid speciation occurred when a clade first developed a new physical trait or mechanism and had begun its own genetic branch. But the team, led by Brown Read More ›

Well some profs say, in this recent academic push poll (“Death Anxiety Prompts People to Believe in Intelligent Design, Reject Evolution, Study Suggests,” ScienceDaily, March 30, 2011). They did an experiment that they say demonstrates it:

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Union College (Schenectady, N.Y.) have found that people’s death anxiety can influence them to support theories of intelligent design and reject evolutionary theory.Existential anxiety also prompted people to report increased liking for Michael Behe, intelligent design’s main proponent, and increased disliking for evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

The lead author is UBC Psychology Asst. Prof. Jessica Tracy with co-authors Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology at Union College, and UBC psychology PhD student Jason Martens.

Published in the March 30 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, their paper is the first to examine the implicit psychological motives that underpin one of the most heated debates in North America. Despite scientific consensus that intelligent design theory is inherently unscientific, 25 per cent of high school biology teachers in the U.S. devote at least some class time to the topic of intelligent design.

An extract from Carl Sagan provided the missing teddy bear, absent in Dawkins, to help people accept Dawkins’s materialist atheism. Personally, I think the most remarkable part is that the push pollers even did the study. I can remember when ID was supposed to be dead, then a threat, then a menace, then more of a menace, then … better get out the thesaurus we are in the repetition zone …

Anyway, some comments landed on my desk, including one from one from psychologist Jack Cole on what it means and one from Mike Behe, advising that, in the test passages for this study, something he had not written was attributed to him (surprise, surprise):

Cole, a practising psychologist and Uncommon Descent moderator, notes:

The fear of death is not actually measured in this study, but is in fact inferred. The measure of mood in the study actually showed an increase in positive mood after thinking about one’s own death. It is not explicitly stated, but this is inferred to be more of an unconscious process. From the study authors: Read More ›

“Searching for alien life? Check out failed stars”, we learn via Clara Moskowitz (MSNBC, 4/1/2011): “Potential exists on free-floating planets and sub-brown dwarfs, researcher says”:

Researcher Viorel Badescu of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in Romania recently investigated the possibilities for life on free-floating planets (FFPs) and sub-brown dwarfs (SBDs) that might contain lakes of the chemical ethane. He found that such life is not impossible, though it would be significantly different from life on Earth. His findings were detailed in the August 2010 issue of the journal Planetary and Space Science.

Solvents? Well, “Synthesis of observational data makes it possible to conceive Read More ›

Yes, the Bunny is dead, but his lawyers aren’t, see?

You may have heard this one, from Dennis Overbye (New York Times, February 21, 2011):

Using mail-order snippets of DNA, Dr. Venter and his colleagues stitched together the million-letter genetic code of a bacterium of a goat parasite last year and inserted it into another bacterium’s cell, where it took over, churning out blue-stained copies of itself. Dr. Venter advertised his genome as the wave of future migration to the stars. Send a kit of chemicals and a digitized genome across space.”We’ll create panspermia if it didn’t already exist,” he said.

The new genome included what Dr. Venter called a watermark. Along with the names of the researchers were three quotations, from the author James Joyce; Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the building of the atomic bomb; and the Caltech physicist Richard Feynman: “What I cannot build, I do not understand.”

– “A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life”

Then Irish novelist James Joyce’s estate threatened to sue, because Venter had allegedly violated Joyce’s copyright.

And Caltech called to complain that Read More ›

Why doesn’t this The Scientist feature, with Richard P. Grant interviewing Yale Passamaneck (March 31, 2011) fill me with confidence about the long slow march of Darwinian evolution?: What can a clam-like creature tell us about eye evolution? Quite a bit, as it turns out. We ran a news article at the beginning of the month, on the finding that brachiopod, or lamp shell, embryos have eyes that are more closely related to those of vertebrates, than of their spineless cousins. Here’s the original article, where Amy Maxmen explains “Eye evolution questioned: Invertebrates with vertebrate-like vision challenge the idea that the two groups of organisms have distinctly different visual receptors” (1st March 2011): In 2004, biologists hypothesized that an ancestor Read More ›

Casey Luskin addresses this question in “Ignore That Research!” (Spring 2011, p. 54). He notes that “Critics falsely claim there is no ID research.”

He cites the work of Douglas Axe who published articles in 2000 and 2004 in the Journal of Molecular Biology, Michael Behe and David Snoke who published in 2004 in Protein Science, and Axe again in 2010 in BIO-Complexity, a peer reviewed journal for testing ID claims. From my reading, all these papers cast doubt on natural selection acting on random mutations as a source of new information.

Luskin’s is obviously not intended to be a complete list. Here’s a much fuller one. But, given the difficulties of even raising these issues in Darwinworld, it is a wonder that any papers were published anywhere. Does anyone remember what happened to editor Rick Sternberg of the Journal of the Biological Society of Washington (Smithsonian) over Steve Meyer’s peer reviewed paper suggesting that design might be a reasonable explanation?

That said, a legitimate question raised by thoughtful people is, why don’t ID-friendly researchers do positive research? Why do they just go on proving that Darwinism doesn’t work?

I have thought about that one for a while, and now usually reply:

Because, just as bad money drives out good, bad ideas drive out good. Let us say your country’s carefully regulated money supply is assaulted by counterfeiters. Does it make more sense to start by exposing them or to just virtuously ignore them and continue to print good money – while they continue to print bad money? Read More ›

Here:

Big Bang?

One sometimes hears the claim that the Big Bang was the beginning of both time and space; that to ask about spacetime “before the Big Bang” is like asking about land “north of the North Pole.” This may turn out to be true, but it is not an established understanding. The singularity at the Big Bang doesn’t indicate a beginning to the universe, only an end to our theoretical comprehension. It may be that this moment does indeed correspond to a beginning, and a complete theory of quantum gravity will eventually explain how the universe started at approximately this time. But it is equally plausible that what we think of as the Big Bang is merely a phase in the history of the universe, which stretches long before that time – perhaps infinitely far in the past. The present state of the art is simply insufficient to decide between these alternatives; to do so, we will need to formulate and test a working theory of quantum gravity.

Fine tuning? Read More ›

A most interesting discussion has got started here at “But ‘Lucy’ herself is mostly an artifact”. Commenter KL got it going, I suspect, by observing that

I certainly don’t consider you hicks. However, my spouse and associates are primate researchers, physical anthropologists, geologists and archeologists. It’s strange to come here and see their work dismissed as a just so story. Some of them have been in the field extensively and have published many, many papers. Are you guys saying that somehow all these people are simply mistaken?

Yes, it  is quite possible.

My question is, is there anything fronted by “evolution researchers” that KL wouldn’t believe? How about the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution? Or Marc “Well, the monkeys talk to me!” Hauser? How about any single item on this list? Is there nothing that KL would even wonder about? Does he know that E. O. Wilson has retracted his own kin selection theory?

Two things: Read More ›

Courtesy Britain’s Royal Society. A friend notes that three Nobel Prize winners were among the speakers: Read More ›

Here is a great source of cellular movies, for example ” The Inner Life of the Cell”, courtesy Harvard University.

And tells us a bit Explaining the history and diversity of life is simply not an issue of great concern to most people except as a marker of belief system. On that score, many “evolution believers” have knowledge that is just as shallow as creationists. They simply nod and smile in response to different cues. Professing a belief in evolution or creation is a not-so-secret handshake that signals membership in a loose clan. That’s why the press is so insistent that presidential candidates take some position on the issue; it marks them like a scarlet letter. before freaking out: But many [creationists] are well practiced in the art of debate and will not easily play into your hands. They will Read More ›