Darwinism

This is one of those stories about which one says, I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.

These three Ohio bucks somehow locked antlers while battling near a small creek. When one deer slid into a shallow pool, it sealed the fate for all three, who drowned together, antlers still locked. Steve Hill talked to the men who found and recovered the deer and their combined 400-inches of antler to bring you the story of this sad, almost poetic scene.

Some said, heartlessly, that they’d make a nice chandelier. Others asked sensible questions:

Wildlife biologists are taught that anthropomorphism—endowing the animals they study with human qualities—is not good science. Yet, says Mike Tonkovich, deer project leader for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, “I can’t help wondering what was that third buck thinking? Whatever possessed him to get engaged when the two were already entangled?”

Mmmm … Stupidity? He wasn’t thinking anything? Question: How many times has this happened when no human was around to see it?

But others outgassed on Darwinism: Read More ›

I would not have known, if I hadn’t read Suzan Mazur’s The Altenberg 16 (on the growing collapse of Darwinism): While speaking at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture Society meeting one Saturday night (March 12, 2008) on his book, The God Delusion, as she tells it, Richard Dawkins

admitted to being “guilty” of viewing Darwinism as a kind of religion and vowed to “reform”

Having a natural interest in reform, I would be most interested to learn of any evidence for this one. But now this, from Mazur:

(no one was allowed to tape Dawkins’ confession, however, with organizers of the event threatening to march offenders around the corner to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). (p 97)

Can’t help wondering whether the warning was principally aimed at Mazur. Certainly, in her book, she manages to put a number of Darwin devotees and their enablers, whom the New York Times considers important authorities for no particularly good reason, in a much less flattering light than they are used to.

It seems that Mazur had met up with Dawkins the night before at a book signing. On self-organization theory (to which Mazur is partial), he noted, Read More ›

Here. He was briefly a born-again Christian as a youth, but

… my sister’s husband (an aspiring psychologist whose preference for graduate school over employment my father wasn’t wild about) suggested I read Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner. As intellectuals go, Skinner was pretty dismissive of intellectuals — at least the ones who blathered unproductively about “freedom” and “dignity,” the ones he considered insufficiently hard-nosed and scientific.Look, he said, people are animals. Kind of like laboratory rats, except taller. Their behavioral proclivities are a product of the positive and negative reinforcements they’ve gotten in the past. Want to build a better society? Discern the links between past reinforcement and future proclivity, and then adjust society’s disbursement of reinforcements accordingly. No need to speculate about unobservable states of mind or ponder the role of “free will” or any other imponderables. Epistemology, phenomenology, metaphysics, and 25 cents will get you a ride on the New York subway.

This was my kind of intellectual — an anti-intellectual intellectual! I became an ardent Skinnerian.

However, that wore off, so then this: Read More ›

From the Templeton Foundation we learn that the big crackdown paper, morphed into a Templeton-funded book taking dead aim at aimed at science teachers who have enough sense to doubt Darwinism. Think anti-evolution teaching is confined to schools in certain regions? Think again. Plutzer says he and Berkman find that “active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts.” While it is true that those who reject evolution tend to find jobs in more socially conservative school districts, where they receive parental backing, it’s also the case that teachers who experience the most pressure teach in districts with large and clashing constituencies of conservative Protestants and pro-evolution opponents. Says Plutzer, “In Read More ›

Michael Flannery, author of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution and Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life , sent this note re the latter book: John Landon has just posted a review of my Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life chiding me for not following the Roy Davies Darwin Conspiracy thesis that Charles “stole” Al’s theory of natural selection.I have explained my skepticism over this persistent plagiarism charge thoroughly in the book, not the least of which is that to make the accusation stick you really have to see both theories as one in the same, and I believe (as do most scholars) that closer examination reveals they are not. In fact, Wallace’s version appears on the face of Read More ›

I am currently reading New Zealand journalist Suzan Mazur’s excellent Altenberg 16, which, among other things, gives you a good look at the underbelly of the Darwin racket. For example, at the Rockefeller University Evolution Symposium (May 2009), Mazur, who has interviewed a number of prominent scientists who think that self-organization is one form of evolution, asked Eugenie Scott of NCSE (the Darwin lobby) why self-organization was not represented in the books that NCSE was promoting. She responded that people confuse self-organization with intelligent design and that is why NCSE has not been supportive. (P. 101) But later, NCSE responded “NCSE does not recommend specific textbook publishers to ensure that their treatment evolution is extensive, pervasive, and up-to-date, and we oppose Read More ›

“Foresight is an imperfect thing — all prevision in economics is imperfect. And, even more serious, the economist in high office is under a strong personal and political compulsion to predict wrongly. That is partly because of the temptation to predict what is wanted, and it is better, not worse, economic performance that is always wanted.” –John Kenneth Galbraith, MONEY (1975), pp. 269-70. This quote is relevant to the ID debate. People in high scientific office, whether in the straight-up secular world or in evangelical educational circles, would look bad if they were seen as endorsing a grand scientific theory, for which they are on record as saying that this theory contributes to science’s caché, that ends up being thoroughly Read More ›

From Tina Hesman Saey, “Helpful Mutations Didn’t Sweep Through Early Humans”, Wired Science (February 18, 2011) we learn Humans probably didn’t get swept up in evolution.Scientists have favored a model of evolution in which beneficial gene mutations quickly and dramatically sweep through a population due to the evolutionary advantages they confer. Such mutations would become nearly universal in a population. But this selective sweep model may not be accurate for humans, a new study indicates. Human evolution likely followed a more subtle and complicated path, say population geneticists Molly Przeworski of the University of Chicago and Guy Sella of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and colleagues. [ … ] Good evidence does exist for some mutations that did undergo selective sweeps Read More ›

Online here: This point is crucial: If there is not a smooth, gradually rising, easily found evolutionary pathway leading to a biological system within a reasonable time, Darwinian processes won’t work. In this book we’ll examine just how demanding a requirement that is. (pg. 7) No wonder that guy Behe had to be sidelined and disinvited.

… about genetics, here, in honour of Darwin Day. Meet A False Fact: What Would Darwin Do (WWDD)?Now, in the spirit of challenging false facts and views, as Darwin encourages us to do, we have a particular “false fact” in mind, used to support a false view. Both are widely promoted by Richard Dawkins, who should know better. (More about that, below.) We’ll call this false fact Dawkins’ Whopper. You can listen to the Whopper here, as Dawkins answers this question: Out of all the evidence used to support the theory of evolution, what would you say is the stongest [sic], most irrefutable single piece of evidence in support of the theory? Or you can read a transcript of what Read More ›

No, this isn’t about what you think. For once, we are talking about frogs and newts.

A friend notes that an evolutionary biologist puzzles as follows:

“One of the most puzzling paradoxes in the evolution of toxins is why organisms evolve to be deadly – contrary to venoms, for which deadly effects have a clear benefit. Extreme toxicity occurs repeatedly, from saturniid caterpillars to dart poison frogs. Selection favors the most-fit individuals, and those should be the ones that avoid predation. Killing an individual predator does not give an advantage over simply deterring one, especially if the prey has to be handled or eaten by a predator to deliver the poison. How, then, can we explain the evolution of deadly toxicity?” (Brodie, E. D., III. 2009. Toxins and venoms. Current Biology 19: R931-R935.)

Brodie, I’m told, is a leading researcher on evolutionary arms races at the University of Virginia. He goes on to suggest a solution: “arms races between predators and prey … drive the exaggerated evolution of toxicity in general, without resulting in deadly consequences to the primary selective agent.” (R933) He suggests as an example is the predator-prey relationship between garter snakes and a newt that produces tetrodotoxin powerful enough to kill 10-20 humans or thousands of mice. But the interesting thing is that the snakes, which seem to be the “primary selective agent” for newts, in the sense of selecting them for dinner, are resistant to the toxin. Brodie attributes the newts’ heightened toxicity to coevolution with the garter snakes.

My friend asks, “But how does that solve the paradox? Newts with a higher level of toxicity would only accrue selective advantage if those higher levels of toxicity protected them against the predators.”

Well, I suspect the answer lies in another question: Read More ›

Here’s a good one: NCSE’s Eugenie Scott Serves as Chief of Darwinian Thought Police for University of Kentucky Faculty Casey Luskin February 11, 2011 9:29 AM As reported on ID the Future interview, Martin Gaskell’s attorney Frank Manion stated that during the course of Gaskell’s lawsuit, it became clear that Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), consulted University of Kentucky (UK) faculty about whether UK should hire Gaskell. She gave Gaskell a clean bill of health–not because she endorsed hiring Darwin-skeptics, but because at the time she believed Gaskell was a died-in-the-wool evolutionist–“accepting of evolution.” According to her e-mail, Eugenie Scott wrote: Gaskell hasn’t popped onto our radar as an antievolution activist. Checking his Read More ›

Dr. Cornelius Hunter recently posted on some findingsfrom the NCSE (the National Center for the Selling of Evolutioner, I mean, Science Education, on how many biology teachers are reluctant to teach evolution. Now, TV personality Bill Nye “The Science Guy” has given us his two cents worth on this controversy. In the interview he’s asked what he thinks about the reluctance of teachers regarding evolution. He says:

It’s horrible. Science is the key to our future, and if you don’t believe in science, then you’re holding everybody back. And it’s fine if you as an adult want to run around pretending or claiming that you don’t believe in evolution, but if we educate a generation of people who don’t believe in science, that’s a recipe for disaster. We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.

Read More ›

Nabokov was right and the Darwinists who ignored and dismissed him were wrong. Here: Enter the Harvard biology professor, Naomi Pierce, who has had the honour of telling the world this last fortnight, that Nabokov’s fanciful hypothesis is true, down to the most provocative assertions. Using the most advanced current molecular technology, she has tracked the whole history through DNA, confirming Nabokov dead right through fine details on five out of five.This does not surprise me. It would have surprised many drudges in the field, however, who ignored Nabokov’s remarkable paper of 1945, I think for two reasons. The first is that it was written with real literary style. Nabokov invites his reader to step into a Wellsian time machine, Read More ›

In “Evolution by Mistake: Major Driving Force Comes from How Organisms Cope With Errors at Cellular Level” ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2011), Joanna Masel and Etienne Rajon posit “pre-selection” by error in order to explain how natural selection works its Darwinian wonders:

In nature, it turns out, many new traits that, for example, enable their bearers to conquer new habitats, start out as blunders: mistakes made by cells that result in altered proteins with changed properties or functions that are new altogether, even when there is nothing wrong with the gene itself. Sometime later, one of these mistakes can get into the gene and become more permanent.

“If the mechanisms interpreting genetic information were completely flawless, organisms would stay the same all the time and be unable to adapt to new situations or changes in their environment,” said Masel, who is also a member of the UA’s BIO5 Institute.

Living beings face two options of handling the dangers posed by errors, Masel and Rajon wrote. One is to avoid making errors in the first place, for example by having a proofreading mechanism to spot and fix errors as they arise. The authors call this a global solution, since it is not specific to any particular mistake, but instead watches over the entire process.

The alternative is to allow errors to happen, but evolve robustness to the effects of each of them. Masel and Rajon call this strategy a local solution, because in the absence of a global proofreading mechanism, it requires an organism to be resilient to each and every mistake that pops up.

Offhand, this sounds a lot like design. Would anyone like to calculate the probability of such a process forming by Darwinian means (natural selection acting on random mutation)? Read More ›