Denyse O'Leary

Recently, in the “stuff we know that just ain’t so” files, I referenced Niko Tinbergen’s Nobel Prize for supposed discoveries about herring gull chicks – a discovery that turned to ashes. A friend writes to say: Read More ›

From Nature:

Classic behavioural studies flawed

Nobel prizewinner took short cuts to show that the way gulls feed is instinctive.

John Whitfield

One of the most famous experiments in biology isn’t the solid piece of work it’s usually portrayed as, say Dutch researchers who have replicated the study. Instead, it’s more like an anecdote that became slightly more legendary each time its author retold the story.

The work in question was done in 1947 by the Dutch researcher Niko Tinbergen on the begging behaviour of herring-gull chicks. At the time, the dominant idea in animal behaviour was that learning was all-important. Tinbergen argued that animals come into the world with instincts already adapted to their environments.

Adult gulls have a red spot on their lower bill. Tinbergen, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973, presented wild chicks with model birds bearing spots and measured how much they pecked at the model.

The story that made it into the textbooks is that chicks have a powerful innate tendency to peck at red dots, which has evolved as a way of getting their parents to feed them. The original paper, however, shows that Tinbergen found that chicks actually pecked more at a black dot than a red one.

In a follow-up paper written in 1949, Tinbergen concluded that this strange finding resulted from a mistake in his methods. He had tested red, black, blue, white and yellow spots, but he presented the ‘natural’ red spot much more often than any other. The chicks, he decided, became habituated to the red spot and stopped pecking at it.

Of course, Tinbergen has his defenders: Read More ›

A recent article in Cracked, discussing plagiarism, used the careers of Richard Owen and H.G. Wells – both important evolutionists – as 40% of “Five Great Men who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism.” Read it and see what you think.

What make you all of this, in City Journal?: How Science Fiction Found Religion Benjamin A. Plotinsky Once overtly political, the genre increasingly employs Christian allegory. Winter 2009 There is a young man, different from other young men. Ancient prophecies foretell his coming, and he performs miraculous feats. Eventually, confronted by his enemies, he must sacrifice his own life—an act that saves mankind from calamity—but in a mystery as great as that of his origin, he is reborn, to preside in glory over a world redeemed. Tell this story to one of the world’s 2 billion Christians, and he’ll recognize it instantly. Tell it to a science-fiction and fantasy fan, and he’ll ask why you’re making minor alterations to the Read More ›

Dogs, not chimps can help us understand human behaviour?

Well, this moved recently at msnbc.com:

Dogs (not chimps) most like humans

Man’s best friend serves as model for understanding human social behavior

By Jennifer Viegas

Discovery Channel
updated 11:58 a.m. ET, Thurs., March. 26, 2009

Chimpanzees share many of our genes, but dogs have lived with us for so long and undergone so much domestication that they are now serving as a model for understanding human social behavior, according to a new paper.

Cooperation, attachment to people, understanding human verbal and non-verbal communications, and the ability to imitate are just a handful of the social behaviors we share with dogs. They might even think like us at times too, according to the paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Advances in the Study of Behavior.

While there is no evidence to support that dogs and humans co-evolved their laundry list of shared behaviors over the past 10,000 to 20,000 years, the researchers believe adapting to the same living conditions during this period may have resulted in the similarities.

Well, I am glad someone noticed that dogs are way better at understanding and living with humans than chimpanzees are. It sure beats this (horrific chimp rampage). Read More ›

I see where Nature News published (2009 03 25) an item about Canadian science minister Gary Goodyear vs. the puff dino suits in downtown Toronto (young researchers with nothing better to do (?), claiming that he doesn’t believe in evolution – like it was some kind of religious experience he never had, but was supposed to have had). You’d have to pay to read the story, and I certainly won’t. It was never a story in the first place but, as I point out here, activists and academics, hard up for work, have been trying to commercialize the ID controversy in Canada. It’s not easy because the way the Canadian public divides on the issues makes commercialization difficult. They should Read More ›

I must move on to other stories about false knowledge infesting the sciences and social sciences, but realized that I should notice this comment to this post: Bottom line is that even if the Gage story is wrong it does not show what is currently known about TBI. Whether Gage is true or not does not invalidate or falsify this, although O’Leary seems to imply this and I guess hopes it will stick. I replied: Taylor, I am glad I came back one last time. You speak as a true Darwinist!! It is clearly of NO consequence to you that the Phineas Gage story is probably false – as long as it fronts your agenda. You are not ashamed of the Read More ›

I was at dinner the other week with a voluble atheist religion professor who, in defense of a materialist view of the human mind, raised the subject of Phineas Gage (1823-1860). Ah yes, the man whose personality changed completely after a horrific accident, a staple of Introductory Psychology.

Anyone who has taken Psychology 101 or read popular neuroscience books has probably heard Gage’s story, which upholds the “frontal lobe” theory of personality. (= You are your frontal lobes.)

The story is that in 1848, a tamping rod went through Gage’s head and totally changed his personality. He was “no longer Gage.” Which demonstrates that the mind and the self are an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in the brain. A textbook case.

I pointed out over dinner that there are good reasons to doubt this story. The prof was, of course, withering. Hundreds and hundreds of psych texts have told Gage’s story, he informed me, so how could it be false or questionable?

Well, I have written for newspapers most of my adult life, and one thing I know is this: Printing more copies of any type of information does not make it true. It makes it more widely disseminated.

A distant relative of the Textbook Case sent me an article by University of London historian Zbigniew Kotowicz, “The strange case of Phineas Gage,” History of the Human Sciences (Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 115-131), which offers the story you and six hundred others in Psych 101 may not have heard.

Read More ›

Here’s a useful link to the response to efforts to pretend that scientists whose research convinces them that the universe shows evidence of design do not face persecution. (I’ve covered the persecution for years. To say it is not happening is, to me, like saying 9-11 didn’t happen. It is always possible for an ideologue to construct an alternate reality – a legend in his own mind, in which the event is not happening. He likes his alternate reality, of course.) [Evil Disco warning] Most of the falsehoods in circulation about the film can be traced to a website called “Expelled Exposed” set up by the pro-Darwin National Center for Science Education (NCSE) as part of its PR effort to Read More ›

So why are these University of Colorado at Boulder people – and New Scientist – determined to prove that God must have created life?

Look, I don’t care, but consider this:

Just when claims for Akilia, as evidence of life at 3.82 billion years ago have not held up, some researchers are even more ambitious than that.

As reported in New Scientist, Oleg Abramov and Steve Mojzsis of the University of Colorado in Boulder suggest that life could have existed on earth as early as 4.4 billion years ago:

They were using a computer model and they assumed that these primeval life forms were extremophiles (simple, extremely hardy life forms).

… heat from the impacts would not have penetrated very deeply into the underlying solid crust. The layer heated to the sterilisation point, about 110 ̊C, would be only about 300 metres thick. High-temperature ‘extremophile’ microbes, like those in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, would have survived at greater depths, down to their limit of about 4 km.

Mojzsis argues that the Late Heavy Bombardment of Earth by asteroids “pruned, rather than frustrated, life.”

That conclusion is reasonable, says Kevin Zahnle of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.

It certainly is, if you are looking for an argument that God created the first life on Earth. I wonder if either he or New Scientist have thought this one out ….

Abramov and Mojzsis will present their research to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas on March 23. Here’s the .pdf.

In fairness, I must warn you that I consider New Scientist the National Enquirer of popular science magazines, and I am also wary of computer models in these situations. So I would just wait and see.

See also: Podcast: Chemist Charles Garner on chemical evolution; Why the Huygens probe – sadly – probably won’t tell us much; Mars red but not dead?; NASA says, could be life on Mars, could be rocks; Origin of life: What can the Saturnian moon Titan tell us?; Origin of life: Alien origin taken seriously? Ghost of Francis Crick smiles wanly; Origin of life: A meatier theory? Or just another theory?; Origin of life: There must be life out there vs. there can’t be life out there; Origin of life: Oldest Earth rocks may show signs of life, in which case … ; Origin of life: Positive evidence of intelligent design?; Origin of life: But is being greedy enough?; Origin of life: Ah, that “just so happens” intermediate series of chemical steps; Why should the search for Darwin’s “warm little puddle” be publicly funded?

Also just up at Colliding Universes: Read More ›

If you have decided that a multiverse makes more sense than a designed universe, chances are, you will rethink after you see this:

“Time Travelling the Universe,” produced by Rob Bryanton of What You Ought to Know.

See also: Read More ›