Denyse O'Leary

Casey Luskin noted a while back at Evolution News that a recent article in Nature noted that many universes theory is not testable:

Since the early 1980s, some cosmologists have argued that multiple universes could have formed during a period of cosmic inflation that preceded the Big Bang. More recently, string theorists have calculated that there could be 10 [to the]500 universes, which is more than the number of atoms in our observable Universe. Under these circumstances, it becomes more reasonable to assume that several would turn out like ours. It’s like getting zillions and zillions of darts to throw at the dart board, Susskind says. “Surely, a large number of them are going to wind up in the target zone.” And of course, we exist in our particular Universe because we couldn’t exist anywhere else. It’s an intriguing idea with just one problem, says Gross: “It’s impossible to disprove.” Because our Universe is, almost by definition, everything we can observe, there are no apparent measurements that would confirm whether we exist within a cosmic landscape of multiple universes, or if ours is the only one. And because we can’t falsify the idea, Gross says, it isn’t science. (Geoff Brumfiel, “Outrageous Fortune,” Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006).)

But, Luskin writes, “National Academy of Sciences member and Nobel Laureate Leonard Susskind was given print-space–in fact he had a highlighted box-quote–saying that we should not reject the multi-verse hypothesis on the grounds that it isn’t testable.”

Nature reports:

Susskind, too, finds it “deeply, deeply troubling” that there’s no way to test the principle. But he is not yet ready to rule it out completely. “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science,” he says. (Geoff Brumfiel, “Outrageous Fortune,” Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006)

I love it! “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science …” Why so foolish? Because, while it doesn’t conform to science, it does conform to materialism? Read More ›

Someone recently brownbagged me this: Apparently, a shrill screed has been accepted for the science journal Gene on “Intelligent design and biological complexity”, announcing that Europe so far blissfully seems to have remained relatively immune to the intellectual virus named “intelligent design”. This virus certainly is a problem in the country in which I have lived over the last thirty years, the United States, where about 40% of the people are said to believe that evolution never took place, that evolution is just a theory, not a fact, and a wrong theory at that. To give themselves an edge, the “creationists” – the dominant stripe of anti-evolutionists in the United States — have decided some years ago (Pennock, 2003) to dress Read More ›

“sophophile”  wonders whether I’ll reconsider my statement that Darwin doesn’t matter if Michael Shermer has to write a book on why he matters – on the basis of sophophile’s research into book titles. [sophophile: Oh, WHY don’t these people have proper names? Isn’t this “Internet handle” thing becoming a bit childish after all these years?]  At any rate, sophophile  writes: Denyse O’Leary insists: First, I find the title of Shermer’s book interesting. If Darwin really mattered, Shermer wouldn’t be writing a book insisting that he does. Let’s test that reasoning on a few other book titles taken from Amazon.com: Why Religion Matters Class Matters Why Gender Matters Science Matters Why Geography Matters Race Matters Why Sinatra Matters Culture Matters Why New Orleans Read More ›

In a recent book, Michael Shermer, who ” once aspired to Christian ministry, now is one of the most hostile critics of Christianity” (according to Touchstone Magazine‘s Russell D. Moore), holds forth as follows: In a feature article in the Christian magazine Touchstone, [William] Dembski was even more direct: ‘Intelligent Design is just the Logos theory of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.’ Make no mistake about it. Creationists and their Intelligent Design brethern do not just want equal time, they want all the time they can get. First, I find the title of Shermer’s book interesting. If Darwin really mattered, Shermer wouldn’t be writing a book insisting that he does. I mean, who writes a book called Read More ›

Recently, I blogged on Google videos on the ID controversy, and to entice readers, offered the video Octopus eats shark, where the eight-legged wonder surprises its keepers (octopi gave this film EIGHT thumbs up): Zoologist Norbert Smith, for whom Octopus eats shark is a favourite, offered a comment on the octopus (cephalopod) as a creature unlikely to be the victim of a stupid shark, as the zoo curators had originally assumed*: Cephalopods are certainly the most intelligent of invertebrates. While attending college, I built a 100 gallon refrigerated salt water aquarium and kept a small octopus, crabs, starfish and other tide pool critters…not an easy task for one living in western Oklahoma. The tank was divided by a vertical glass petition Read More ›

Apparently, Coral Ridge Hour, hosted by Dr. D. James Kennedy, is hosting a special called Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, on the legacy of social Darwinism (= sterilizing or murdering people who are thought to be unfit, sometimes called eugenics). There is a whole history there, ably recounted in a sober way by Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler.

I think it quite worthwhile that Coral Ridge would want to explore the legacy of social Darwinism, on the “never again” principle. However, some cautions are also well advised.

Strictly speaking, the social Darwinists were completely off the wall in their understanding of Darwinism, as agnostic Australian philosopher David Stove points out.

For example, Darwin himself disapproved, apparently, of vaccination because it preserved weak people:

Consider, for example, the following paragraph from The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, (second edition, 1874).

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poorlaws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. (p. 9, quoting Darwin, c. (1874) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd edition) John Murray, London, Vol. I, pp. 205-6.)

Now, in writing as he did in this specific instance, Darwin was being a true Darwinist (though according to Stove’s Darwinian Fairytales, he often wasn’t).

That is, if you believe that natural selection is the main force that creates diversity and adaptation in the world, you should not interfere via eugenics. After all, the prison sociopath’s selfish genes are probably much better adapted to sheer survival and continuance than are those of the musical genius. The prison socio may well produce eight children on his “trailer weekends,” whom he compels other men to support. The musical genius, by contrast, may produce one or two at best, but very often none.

Yet most human beings who have ever lived would prefer to forego the evolutionary benefits of the sociopath’s selfish genes. Whenever they can, they execute him or keep him locked up, and offer awards, prizes, and fan clubs to the musical genius instead. That approach to human survival seems quite sound to me – but it is hardly Darwinism.

Here’s where the social Darwinists went wrong: They took from Darwinism the lack of respect for the human being as anything other than a brainy ape. But they still wanted to smuggle into Darwinian philosophy at least some respect for human culture and decency, because they were not willing to give all that up. So they developed the worst possible solution: Read More ›

Here’s a link to the 10 weirdest cosmology theories (that New Scientist is prepared to take seriously enough to publish), and yes they are weird. Here’s one: 10. In the Matrix Maybe our universe isn’t real. Yale Philosopher Nick Bostrum has claimed that we are probably living inside a computer simulation. Assuming it ever becomes possible to simulate consciousness, then presumably future civilisations would try it, probably many times over. Most perceived universes would be simulated ones – so chances are we are in one of them. In that case, perhaps all those cosmological oddities such as dark matter and dark energy are simply patches, stuck on to cover up early inconsistencies in our simulation. Right, prof. Right. Uhhh … Read More ›

Last night I was out giving a talk on the origin and development of the intelligent design controversy, when an engineer audience member asked me, “How long do you give Darwinism before it collapses?”

I found providing an answer difficult because I am not psychic, so I must rely on near term, high impact information when making predictions.

(For example, I figured that ID would become big news in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century because events recorded around 1991-2001 in the United States could have no other outcome – absent, of course, a nuclear holocaust or some other “all-bets-are-off” scenario, but you can’t let unlikely events distract you when you are making predictions based on the flow of normal events.)

In response to him, I pointed out that the Catholic Church is now spreading the news on prayer cards in many languages around the world that “we are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution Each of us is the result of a thought of God”. That is certain to have impact, but I am uncertain how to evaluate its strength.

So finally, I told him, “Look, I don’t think we are going to get anywhere understanding the origin of life or of species until we understand what information is and how it relates to the other factors in the universe.”

Information in life forms clearly does not arise the way Darwin thought it did. Even species don’t seem to arise the way Darwin thought they did. The recent challenge to demonstrate it on this blog did not turn up much. And that was supposed to be Darwin’s big contribution … sigh …

But aw, it’s been worse. The Washington Post was reduced to flogging up the idea that the introduction of Ontario squirrels to the Washington area by an ill-advised naturalist in the early twentieth century was an instance of natural selection at work. Yeah. Read all about it ….

Not  quite sure how to answer the guy’s question, I was reminded  of someone I had quoted in By Design or by Chance?: Read More ›

University of Bristol (England) bacteriologist Alan H. Linton went looking for direct evidence of speciation and concluded in 2001: “None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of twenty to thirty minutes, and populations achieved after eighteen hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another … Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [i.e., bacterial] to eukaryotic [i.e. plant Read More ›

 Recently, we have been discussing the (probably true) claim that Americans are less likely than others to believe Darwinism. As I noted in earlier discussions, American society gives its citizens greater rights than many other societies do to disagree with the elite and the privileged. And what may be the consequences of that?: “In the final episode of PBS’s television series, the narrator states that for decades after the 1925 Scopes trial “Darwin seemed to be locked out of America’s public schools.” When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, according to the narrator, Darwin was restored to the curriculum and “long-neglected science programs were revived in America’s classrooms.” Yet during the supposedly benighted decades between 1925 Read More ›

Bill’s recent exchange with an American sci jo who has suddenly discovered (how, I wonder?) that Darwinists’ promotion of evangelical atheism is a poor match for their claims of religious neutrality made me decide to cross-post an item from the Post-Darwinist. I keep up with the steady stream of nonsense from evolutionary psychology, because that is the form of Darwinism that most laypeople encounter most regularly. Stories like the one from the Dallas Morning News, linked below, help us understand why so many Americans cannot take Darwinism seriously. It drips with the vast contempt that the Darwinist feels for people who have had experiences he (or she) cannot account for, let alone (apparently) have. (I don’t take too seriously the Read More ›

In an article in Skeptical Inquirer Paul Kurtz announced that religion and science are compatible: … there is an appropriate domain for religion, and in this sense science and religion are not necessarily incompatible. That domain is evocative, expressive, emotive. Religion presents moral poetry, aesthetic inspiration, and dramatic expressions of existential hope and yearnings. In other words, religion represents what yer know ain’t so. I don’t imagine he’ll sell too many of those to people who take their faith seriously. More to the point, the relevant question is not whether “religion” and “science” are compatible. When categories are as broad as that, anything can be compatible with anything else, or not. The relevant question for Western culture is whether Judaeo-Christianity Read More ›

To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.”

– Thomas Kuhn pp. 17-18 ( The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 2^nd Edition, Enlarged, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970)

Darwinism was first forced on my notice by the Darwinists’ unseemly habit of persecuting scientists who question it – I mean, really question it, as if it could actually be wrong. Way back in 1996, I noticed that Darwinism seemed to be the only theory you could not safely criticize.

Later, I began to pay attention to a curious pattern in the pop science media’s coverage. Many, many stories heralded new evidence for Darwinism. Virtually none talked about problems with it. The few that did admit to any problems assured the reader that they would soon be solved – as if we are all heavily invested in when or whether they get solved.

For example, in stories on the Cambrian explosion, the point of much coverage is to force a Darwinian interpretation on the picture. Yet, a very minor investment of time in story research will turn up the fact that even Darwin knew that the Cambrian and its subsequent rollout did not really fit his theory.

Somehow one just did not talk about problems with Darwinism unless one had turned up a scrap of evidence that suggested that they might not be problems after all. Read More ›

According to Jeff Jarvis of the Guardian, After Reuters ran a photo last week of black smoke over Beirut, suspicious bloggers noted that smoke isn’t known to rise in incredibly symmetrical bulbous billows. That was clear evidence of Photoshopping, using a tool to “clone” one part of a picture so you can cut-and-paste it over other parts. Someone took this photo, added smoke and made it darker. You can see the before-and-after most clearly here. The sleuth who proved the hoax was Charles Johnson, the man behind the controversial Little Green Footballs blog and the same man who uncovered the faking of the memos used in Dan Rather’s fateful – for Rather, that is – story about George Bush’s military Read More ›

A clear sign that people are losing an argument (at least as they themselves have framed it) is when they do what Darwinist Pigliucci and others are doing, as per Bill’s recent post.

Here are a few moves that guarantee a loss of public support, and the Darwinists seem to be doing them all:

– attribute enormous power and influence to those who doubt. (Speaking for myself, I was a completely obscure trade mag hack and textbook editor (though a reliable and accurate one) until I began to wonder whether the whole of the history of life can be explained by natural selection acting on random mutations and whether that Brit toff Darwin was really the greatest man in history. Now, all sorts of people have an opinion about me who aren’t even sure of my age, sex, or nationality.

Nice going, eh? Except, in all honesty, I didn’t really do anything except start asking of Darwinism the type of questions I used to ask about automotive airbags or social service programs.

– squawk that it is all a big conspiracy (oh, you know, the Wedge and Wedge II and – my favourite – Wedge the Edge!, after which, I guess, the sky falls, or something – I’d have to go look up which part of the Apocalypse happens after that).

As any journalist knows, most people can’t keep a secret for five minutes if they can gain temporary social importance by communicating it. We j’s depend on that. It’s called gossip, right? Gossip has the same effect on conspiracies as soap has on bacteria.

So any time someone tries to tell me that a broad social change or pattern is the result of a conspiracy, I know I am dealing with either a desperately naive individual or a less than firmly rational one. Or else a person who manipulates these types for his or her own ends.

What is happening to Darwinism today is the same thing that happens to failing enterprises throughout history.  Read More ›