Darwinism

You have probably heard the saying, “correlation does not imply causation.” In other words, just because two things are associated, it does not mean that one causes the other. Perhaps this time-honored standard of scientific investigation should be amended based on what is often practiced by Darwinists. I propose, “correlation and Darwinian storytelling imply causation.” This kind of thinking does not pass scientific muster, but it is the kind that is often practiced, particularly when the evolutionary roots of behavior are being studied.

As a case in point, consider the recent study, Musical Aptitude Is Associated with AVPR1A-Haplotypes.¹

NewScientist² reports on the study:

MUSICAL ability is linked to gene variants that help control social bonding. The finding adds weight to the notion that music developed to cement human relationships.

…

Järvelä thinks musical aptitude evolved because musical people were better at forming attachments to others: “Think of lullabies, which increase social bonding and possibly the survival of the baby.”

And from the original source: Read More ›

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe Americans are getting sick of all this, Expelled stuff:

Recently, I received a rare student complaint over an e-mail I had sent to all my classes. In the e-mail, which welcomed all of my students back for a new semester, I characterized myself as an “outspoken Christian professor.” I admitted that I had been critical of some aspects of Darwinism and that I saw my students as more than mere “random mutations.” Finally, I said my Christian views would cause me to treat them differently – namely, by holding them all to a high standard that would help them find their purpose in life: a Divine purpose given to them by their Creator.

[ … ]

In his letter to the department chair, the student claimed that it was inappropriate and offensive for a professor to reveal his religious affiliation in class. He said he was also offended by what he perceived as an inappropriate put-down of Darwinism. Finally, he expressed his concern that he would become a victim of religious discrimination because he did not share my religious views.

If he’d bothered to approach me directly, I could have told this student a little of what I know about inappropriate and offensive religious expression in the classroom. In fifth grade I had a teacher named Barbara O’Gara. Mrs. O’Gara was my favorite teacher despite the fact that I was then a Baptist and she was an atheist. Mrs. O’Gara made no secret of this fact. She mentioned it on the first day of class, and she mentioned it throughout the year.

During the course of the year, though, it never occurred to me to report Mrs. O’Gara for simply stating her religious affiliation. If it offended me, I simply dealt with it. Even as a fifth-grader, I sensed that this was how mature people handled things. She had a right to her feelings, and I had a right to mine.

Strange that a fifth grader in those days would have more sense of what North American culture is about than many postdocs do today:

As students in the 1960s, the Baby Boomers fought for the right to be treated as adults. After they became college administrators in the 1990s, they began to fight for students’ right to be treated like children. The war was waged principally with speech codes, which give almost unlimited power to college administrators who wish to control the marketplace of ideas.

Those of us who oppose these speech codes should not be angry when college administrators try to enforce them. We should thank God for the arrogance that these codes foster. They embolden these administrators in ways that seldom play well in front of a jury of their peers.

My own view is that university is a privilege for those who can tolerate ideas they don’t agree with. If that is a big problem, I recommend a good trade school where one will learn only practical information and can make a good living out of it.

While we are here anyway: Read More ›

Walter ReMine once said to me, the supposed 99.5% identity between chimps and humans is like taking two books, creating an alphabetical listing of all the unique words in each book, and then comparing the lists of unique words derived from each book. It would be really easy then to use these lists to argue: “see the books are 99.5% identical!” Another ID proponent, David Pogge, argued that the sequence comparison are like comparing driving directions: two sets of directions can have 99% similarity, but a few differences can lead to radically different destinations. With this in mind, here is Rick Sternberg’s Guy Walks Into a Bar and Thinks He’s a Chimpanzee: The Unbearable Lightness of Chimp-Human Genome Similarity.

Evolutionary explanations to resist — For ease of conversation, I here define a “threat” as a macro-evolutionary explanation that inherently threatens the successful communication of the biotic message. (I do not mean threat in any other sense.) Evolutionary explanations are not all equal. Some are more potent at explaining-away data; some are limited in scope; some are weak; and some are unscientific. In other words, some evolutionary explanations are more threatening than others. There is some tension between the three design-goals claimed in Message Theory, so tradeoffs must be made in order to approach an optimal solution. Message Theory claims life’s design should resist a given evolutionary explanation in proportion to the threat it poses. If a given evolutionary explanation Read More ›

“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”

This is a phrase a software engineer will use to jokingly confess his software has a defect.

When Sharon Moalem wrote the NY Times Bestseller, Survival of the Sickest: Why We Need Disease, he probably did not intend to make a joking confession of flaws in Darwin’s theory, but he succeed in doing so.

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 On 31 March, I gave one of the keynote addresses at the annual meeting of the British Sociological Association’s Religion Study Group in Durham. This meant that I could not watch the first airing of ‘Did Darwin Kill God?’ on BBC2.  I recommend that you watch this show over the next couple of days, while it’s still available on-line at the BBC website. It may be the most sophisticated treatment of this general topic on television, though as you’ll see from my comments below I found it profoundly unsatisfying. The person who scripted and presents the programme is Conor Cunningham, an academic theologian, about whom more below. Even those who disagree with his take on things – as I do – should welcome what he has done here. The challenge is to do better. Read More ›

I periodically get emails from individuals who are sympathetic to ID but then read Francis Collins’ THE LANGUAGE OF GOD and find themselves wondering what to think. Thus I recently received the following email: Dear Dr. Dembski, I … have read, I think, three of your books — the most recent “The Design Revolution”. I have been thoroughly convinced of your position in these books. I was encouraged by a friend of many years, who was Professor of Science at … for 40 years … to consider the book by Francis S. Collins — “The Language of God”, which I have just read. This was in exchange for his reading “The Design Revolution.” I’ve not heard from him after reading Read More ›

Reuben Kendall, freshman at UT-Martin, has written a thoughtful view point regarding Evolution vs Intelligent Design. He raises important points on metaphysical presumptions vs data. He raises the question of Academic Freedom which incorporates the foundational unalienable freedoms of speech and religion. May I encourage readers to write editorials and viewpoints raising such issues and standing up for our inalienable rights.
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Academic freedom for creation explanation
Reuben Kendall, Issue date: 3/17/09 Section: Viewpoints

As a freshman, I haven’t been at UT-Martin for very long. But some problems are so obvious that they don’t take very long to notice.

In my studies I quickly realized that when it comes to the theory of evolution, Darwin is the only one who gets to answer questions-or ask them.

I want to question this theory-to test it; check its credentials. And I want honest, thoughtful answers to my questions, not pre-formulated quips and deflections.
But I have learned that if I’m not an evolutionist, my questions don’t get credited, or even heard.
Read More ›

There are some great new posts at Michael Behe’s Amazon blog for Edge of Evolution, and quite recently the fourth in the series Waiting for Two Mutations, went up:

An interesting paper appeared several months ago in an issue of the journal Genetics, “Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution” (Durrett, R & Schmidt, D. 2008. Genetics 180: 1501-1509). This is the fourth of five posts that discusses it. Cited references will appear in the last post.

Now I’d like to turn to a couple of other points in Durrett and Schmidt’s reply which aren’t mistakes with their model, but which do reflect conceptual errors. As I quote in a previous post, they state in their reply, “This conclusion is simply wrong since it assumes that there is only one individual in the population with the first mutation.” I have shown previously that, despite their assertion, my conclusion is right. But where do they get the idea that “it assumes that there is only one individual in the population with the first mutation”? I wrote no such thing in my letter about “one individual”. Furthermore, I “assumed” nothing. I merely cited empirical results from the literature. The figure of 1 in 10^20 is a citation from the literature on chloroquine resistance of malaria. Unlike their model, it is not a calculation on my part.

Right after this, in their reply Durrett and Schmidt say that the “mistake” I made is a common one, and they go on to illustrate “my” mistake with an example about a lottery winner. Yet their own example shows they are seriously confused about what is going on.

The basic problem, as I noted here, referencing this controversy (oh, wait, there isn’t a controversy, right?):

Well, the real problem is quite simple, actually: Read More ›

On pp. 47-48 of THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, Richard Dawkins gives two runs of his WEASEL program (note that there were typos in both initial seeds — one had 27 characters, the other 29 whereas they should have 28; I’ve corrected that). Here are the two runs using the Courier typeface, which assigns equal width to each character (spaces are represented by asterisks): WDL*MNLT*DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO*P WDLTMNLT*DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO*P MDLDMNLS*ITJISWHRZREZ*MECS*P MELDINLS*IT*ISWPRKE*Z*WECSEL METHINGS*IT*ISWLIKE*B*WECSEL METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*I*WEASEL METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL Y*YVMQKZPFJXWVHGLAWFVCHQXYPY Y*YVMQKSPFTXWSHLIKEFV*HQYSPY YETHINKSPITXISHLIKEFA*WQYSEY METHINKS*IT*ISSLIKE*A*WEFSEY METHINKS*IT*ISBLIKE*A*WEASES METHINKS*IT*ISJLIKE*A*WEASEO METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEP METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL These runs are incomplete. The first, according to Dawkins, required 43 iterations to converge, the second 64 (Dawkins omitted the other iterates to save space). As you can see, by using the Courier font, one can read up from the target sequence METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL, Read More ›

Back in January I posted this comment to ask what is science’s “rightful place.” Now it seems we’re getting a clearer picture of the answer as far as the President is concerned. Fox News is reporting that President Obama to issue an executive order on Monday that would lift the restrictions on embryonic stem cell research put in place under President Bush.

Regardless of one’s opinion or position on this issue, there are a couple points of concern with respect to this story. First is this comment Read More ›

A recent bill introduced into the Iowa State Legislature has prompted the defenders of Darwinian Dogma to issue the following statement:

STATEMENT BY IOWA FACULTY ON HF 183: THE EVOLUTION ACADEMIC FREEDOM ACT

We, the undersigned members of institutions of higher learning in Iowa, urge our legislators to reject passage of “The Evolution Academic Freedom Act” (HF 183) introduced by Rod Roberts (R-Carroll). The language of this bill comes primarily from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which has conducted lobbying efforts and political activism against the teaching of evolution since 1994.

Evolution is as established a scientific theory as any other theory in science. It is misleading to claim that there is any controversy or dissent within the vast majority of the scientific community regarding the scientific validity of evolutionary theory. Since there is no real dissent within the scientific community, then “academic freedom” for alternative theories is simply a mechanism to introduce religious or non-scientific doctrines into our science curriculum.

Similar efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution in schools repeatedly have been found to be unconstitutional, something witnessed most recently in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005) in Pennsylvania.

We, therefore, urge our legislators to recognize HF183 as part of a long history of creationist assaults on science education, and reject passage of this bill.

Read More ›