Intelligent Design

As ‘Marginalized People’ From Alex Berezow at American Council for Science and Health: Today, the official March for Science Twitter account criticized the Trump Administration for bombing ISIS, claiming that the gigantic bomb we dropped on the terrorists is an “example of how science is weaponized against marginalized people.” After being mocked on Twitter, they deleted it. Unfortunately for them, Todd Myers of the Washington Policy Center screen capped it. And just like a latent herpes infection, screen caps live forever. … ISIS terrorists brutally murder anyone, including other Muslims, who do not share their perverted worldview. They behead “infidels” and oppress women. Actually, “oppression” isn’t even close to the right word for it. According to The Independent, ISIS extremists Read More ›

From the editors of Nature: Nature is delighted to offer its own endorsement of the march and, more importantly, of the movement that the marchers will represent. We encourage readers to get involved, to show solidarity and to speak out about the importance of research and evidence — not just next weekend, but more often and more forcefully. Some serious and important criticisms have been made of the science march, its methods and its possible implications. But a sense of the bigger picture is essential here. Yes, there is a risk, as critics claim, that the march and the wider protest it hopes to symbolize could be diluted or even sidetracked by any number of special interests. Yet there is Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: Mick Hume’s analysis converges closely with traditionalist/conservative streams of thought, especially in criticising claims that fake news determined election outcomes such as Brexit and Trump. The underlying assumption of many pundits is that the public cannot be trusted to make reasonable judgments in the face of fake news, and that a government/corporate crackdown is therefore in order. The problem is, from time immemorial, we have been inundated by fake news in the form of hype, rumour mills, tabloids, cost-free predictions, trendspotting claims, and many other artifacts of the human imagination. If democracy works at all, it works despite the constant and inevitable presence of all these factors all the time. Many predate the printing press Read More ›

There’s a Science Magazine article on research into hidden biases in the language that AI systems use. The authors write: Our work has implications for AI and machine learning because of the concern that these technologies may perpetuate cultural stereotypes (18). Our findings suggest that if we build an intelligent system that learns enough about the properties of language to be able to understand and produce it, in the process it will also acquire historical cultural associations, some of which can be objectionable The ID position on almost every, if not every, Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) program written with the hope of simulating evolution, drags into it certain information that is essential in that program arriving at any appearance of high Read More ›

All that follows is from a comment WJM posted that deserves its own post: KF said: “RVB8 is free to believe whatever he wants to believe…” To which RVB8 said: “True.” As a materialist, RVB8 should have said: “No, I believe whatever happenstance chemical interactions cause me to believe.” RVB8 then spends some time trying to purchase some separation between his belief and faith and the belief and faith of the religious, as if they are two different things and come from two entirely different foundations, when – as an atheistic materialist – RVB8 must assume that his views, faith, beliefs and knowledge, and that of a religious person, are exactly the same and come from exactly the same source: Read More ›

From our WJM: When one is asked to support the view that the most highly complex and sophisticated, precise, self-correcting, multi-level & interdependent software-controlled hardware machinery known to exist most likely did not come into existence by happenstance interactions of chemistry, you know that we are in an age of rampant, self-imposed, ignorant idiocy. Happenstance physical interactions are not up to the task of creating such sophisticated, information-driven nanotechnology. There is no rational contrary position. You simply cannot argue such willful idiocy out of its self-imposed state. Thankfully, such exchanges are useful for other onlookers with more reasonable perspectives.

From Evolution News & Views: Some stunning upsets in conventional thinking about evolution have hit the news in rapid succession, threatening Darwin’s famous tree icon. Under the rules of neo-Darwinism, mutations must be random, providing fodder for the blind processes of natural selection. But here’s a case where animals defy their own neo-Darwinism. More. Yes, octopuses edit their genomes: News from the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory implies that cephalopods were wise to choose the RNA editing bargain. “Mutation is usually thought of as the currency of natural selection, and these animals are suppressing that to maintain recoding flexibility at the RNA level,” says biologist Joshua Rosenthal. The lab “identified tens of thousands of evolutionarily conserved RNA recoding sites Read More ›

From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Sabine Hossenfelder is on a tear this week, with two excellent and highly provocative pieces about research practice in theoretical physics, a topic on which she has become the field’s most perceptive critic. The first is in this month’s Nature Physics, entitled Science needs reason to be trusted. I’ll quote fairly extensively so that you get the gist of her argument: But we have a crisis of an entirely different sort: we produce a huge amount of new theories and yet none of them is ever empirically confirmed. Let’s call it the overproduction crisis. We use the approved methods of our field, see they don’t work, but don’t draw consequences. Like a fly Read More ›

Abstract: Why is drug resistance common and vaccine resistance rare? Drugs and vaccines both impose substantial pressure on pathogen populations to evolve resistance and indeed, drug resistance typically emerges soon after the introduction of a drug. But vaccine resistance has only rarely emerged. Using well-established principles of population genetics and evolutionary ecology, we argue that two key differences between vaccines and drugs explain why vaccines have so far proved more robust against evolution than drugs. First, vaccines tend to work prophylactically while drugs tend to work therapeutically. Second, vaccines tend to induce immune responses against multiple targets on a pathogen while drugs tend to target very few. Consequently, pathogen populations generate less variation for vaccine resistance than they do for Read More ›

. . . through a case in point: >>tjguyApril 12, 2017 at 2:28 am rvb8 @2 Thank god (heh:), the obvious has been consigned to the rubbish bin of understanding, and we now prefer evidence, experimentation, and the unobvious, to the vacuous, empty, ‘obvious’. What is the problem with this way of thinking? He just assumes this “obvious” thing too will be relegated to the dustbin of understanding. That is what he believes – which is great, but it is nothing more than opinion/belief/worldview deduction, etc. right now. It is just as possible that the Materialist view of OoL will be relegated to the dustbin of understanding. And get this! He thinks that since we were able to learn how Read More ›

Astrophysicist and neuroscientist Casper Hesp wrote a piece at BioLogos, reviewing physicist Peter Bussey’s Signposts to God. Hesp thinks that fine-tuning of the universe is not a good argument for theism. After all, despite massive evidence and the utter improbability of other approaches, we could find out some day that we are wrong. From Wayne Rossiter, at Shadow of Oz: Last week I posted on what I see as a growing (and concerning) trend among BioLogians: the gravitation towards full-on naturalism (even beyond cosmology). I also speculated that Bussey’s arguments had been badly misrepresented. I decide to ask Dr. Bussey directly about some of the Hesp’s claims. In a really splendid way Bussey has offered a response. I am cut-pasting Read More ›

From Michael Keas at Synthese: Essay Abstract: There are at least twelve major virtues of good theories: evidential accuracy, causal adequacy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, internal coherence, universal coherence, beauty, simplicity, unification, durability, fruitfulness, and applicability. These virtues are best classified into four classes: evidential, coherential, aesthetic, and diachronic. Each virtue class contains at least three virtues that sequentially follow a repeating pattern of progressive disclosure and expansion. Systematizing the theoretical virtues in this manner clarifies each virtue and suggests how they might have a coordinated and cumulative role in theory formation and evaluation across the disciplines—with allowance for discipline specific modification. An informal and flexible logic of theory choice is in the making here. Evidential accuracy (empirical fit), according Read More ›

In response to my last post, Sev gives us an astonishing double down: Yes, a microscopic living cell is immensely complex when you look at it closely but comparing one to a factory based on some similarities in the internal processes is an analogy not necessarily evidence of design. To judge the value of an analogy you should also consider the differences. For example, a human factory is vastly larger than a living cell. It’s also made of refined metals, plastics and glass which you don’t find in the cell. Judged by those attributes of known design, the cell is not designed. OK, lets consider the differences that you point out. 1.  Cells are smaller than factories.  Sev, you didn’t Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The ability to generate oxygen through photosynthesis — that helpful service performed by plants and algae, making life possible for humans and animals on Earth — evolved just once, roughly 2.3 billion years ago, in certain types of cyanobacteria. This planet-changing biological invention has never been duplicated, as far as anyone can tell. Instead, according to endosymbiotic theory, all the “green” oxygen-producing organisms (plants and algae) simply subsumed cyanobacteria as organelles in their cells at some point during their evolution. Endosymbiotic theory (life forms acquire useful units the way corporations acquire businesses) is a favourite in the coffee room around here but it is not up there with gravity. Still, do say on: Fischer and his colleagues found Read More ›

Further to David Deming’s observation that is often misused, Laszlo Bencze offers this thought: reminds us that he reflected a while back on the whole business of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. As to Carl Sagan’s “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence,“ well, my goodness, there’s a flaw here. The person making the demand is always the one to judge the sufficiency of how “extraordinary” is extraordinary enough. The extraordinary evidence demanded may be a mite too extraordinary. By these standards, we might still be stuck with ancient animistic notions of how the world works because no evidence extraordinary enough could ever be found to dislodge them. But what’s wrong with “ordinary” evidence such as we usually get in the world Read More ›