Intelligent Design

Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers (who is a cladist) has written an entertaining but misguided post titled, Yes, you are a fish. In today’s post, I’ll argue that the key to classifying organisms correctly isn’t phylogeny, anatomy or genetics; it’s embryology. Only embryology can tell us something specific about an organism’s past and present characteristics, as well as resolving disputes about taxonomic categories. The importance of taxonomy to biology cannot be overstated. To put it bluntly: you cannot hope to understand organisms properly unless you know how to classify them. During the past few decades, there has been a move away from the traditional approach (favored by Linnaeus and later by Richard Owen) of classifying living creatures on the basis Read More ›

Here is the next video from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference. In this video, Jonathan Bartlett describes how, at least in principle, one can model non-naturalistic causes mathematically.
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Recently, one of our star commenters, Sandwalk’s Larry Moran, mooted that the Royal Society meeting on assessing where we are with evolution maybe should be cancelled. Then he said he doesn’t want it to be cancelled but “they may cancel the meeting because the IDiots and the kooks are gloating about destroying evolution.” We hadn’t heard much from people who are gloating about destroying evolution but we’ve heard plenty from people who can do without the Darwin lobby running the field into the ground. Some of the episodes we’ve noted are pretty crazy. The University of Kentucky had to settle with astronomer Martin Gaskell for $125,000 because one of his colleagues was obsessing with a Darwin-in-the-schools lobbyist about his possible support Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It turns out that forests in the Andean and western Amazonian regions of South America break long-understood rules about how ecosystems are put together, according to new research. … They discovered that the leaf economics of forests are not as straightforward as scientists once believed. “We found that Andean and Amazonian forests have evolved into diverse communities that break simple ecological ‘rules’ previously developed through field-based studies. These forests are actually much more interesting and functionally diverse than previously thought, and have sorted themselves out across a variety of environmental templates like geology, elevation and temperature,” Asner added. It turns out the forests aren’t so simply split between high-rollers and prudent investors either. Rather the authors found a Read More ›

Long time UD contributor Gil Dodgen has died. From here: A small episode from Gil Dodgen’s life might help you understand the sort of person he was: Picture a homeless kitten, lost and confused in Southern California traffic. A man sees her, stops his car in the middle of the street and rescues her, starting a lifelong companionship. Gil’s life was characterized by excellence in everything he did, combined with a deep sympathy for those around him. Gil was born Dec. 29, 1950, in Moscow, was raised in Pullman and received bachelor’s degrees in music and French and a master’s in French from Washington State University. He met and married his college sweetheart, Janie Gay of Prosser, Wash., who was Read More ›

Readers may remember Lehrer from a 2012 uproar around his making up Dylan quotes, The truth losing its facts From a review of Jonah Lehrer’s new Book about Love by Jennifer Senior at New York Times: In retrospect — and I am hardly the first person to point this out — the vote to excommunicate Mr. Lehrer was as much about the product he was peddling as the professional transgressions he was committing. It was a referendum on a certain genre of canned, cocktail-party social science, one that traffics in bespoke platitudes for the middlebrow and rehearses the same studies without saying something new. Apparently, he’s learned nothing. This book is a series of duckpin arguments, just waiting to be Read More ›

Here: More. He advises hi audience to depart if they are looking for simple solutions to the orgin of life problem. Here at YouTube: See also: Professor James Tour points the way forward for intelligent design (Vincent Torley) and What we know and don’t know about the origin of life Follow UD News at Twitter!

I thought readers might be interested in this recent conversation I had with Scottish apologist David Robertson (of the SOLAS Centre for Public Christianity) in Dundee, Scotland, on God and science. Enjoy!

From reader Gutman Levitan: I am a computer scientists and communications engineer with “unlikely” interests in nature of information and information in the nature. The interest stems basically from my research in applied AI. That was decades ago in the Soviet Union but only recently I was able to concentrate on the issues. More. From his online publication, Information: Connecting Two Sides of Reality, Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics [1] famously noted that information is information, not matter or energy. Really, the three are fundamentally different in their relationship to space. A material object cannot exist simultaneously at two or more distant places; it occupies a certain place in space and no two objects can occupy the same place Read More ›

From Jeffrey Guhin at Slate: First, experts usually don’t know nearly as much as they think they do. Experts often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that, through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true, mislead us and misinterpret information. Rationality is subjective. All humans experience such biases; the real problem is when we forget that scientists and experts are human too—that they approach evidence and reasoned deliberation with the same prior commitments and unspoken assumptions as anyone else. Scientists: They’re just like us.More. Well, rule by science doesn’t really mean anything, any more than rule by ecology or religion would. What are the specifics? Does Read More ›

PZ Myers is incensed at the publication of a Bible tract by Ray Comfort, who argues that it’s just as absurd to believe that the human body evolved by chance as it is to believe that chance processes could generate a can of Coke, such as the one pictured above (public domain image, courtesy of Wikipedia). Over at Pharyngula, Myers wastes no time in demolishing this argument: The thing is, we know how coke cans (and bible tracts) are made: these are objects that are constructed by human beings. They do not have an independent capability to replicate. We also know that that is not how biological organisms are made. If we see something like, say, a rabbit, we know Read More ›

In this presentation from the AM-Nat conference, Mario Lopez points out the possibility that design itself may be able to serve as a neutral descriptor of what counts as science, where here “design” serves as a general description, not necessarily Intelligent Design.

No, really. Berra’s blunder is now official Darwinian science From ScienceDaily: A UCLA-led team of researchers has taken a unique approach to explain the way in which technologies evolve in modern society. Borrowing a technique that biologists might use to study the evolution of plants or animals, the scientists plotted the “births” and “deaths” of every American-made car and truck model from 1896 to 2014. … Based on the study, the researchers can project how the electric car marketplace will evolve over the next several years. Alfaro said the field now is in an early phase of rapid diversification, and although it’s likely that many more electric and hybrid models will be introduced over the next 15 to 20 years, Read More ›

In another thread, Seversky complains: And it’s irrational nonsense to deny that much of who and what you are was determined by past events of which you were unaware and over which you had no control. What you inherited from your parent’s genes and the formative influences of childhood and adolescence means you, like everyone else, are a product of history. You can’t change that so the question becomes, to what extent can you be said to have free will. Seversky makes an argument based on false assumptions and misrepresentations that don’t characterize either side of the argument properly. He is simply attempting to word-smith a collection of phrases (like so many other physicalists here) that build nothing more than Read More ›

From Olivia Goldhill at Quartz: Not much is definitively proven about consciousness, the awareness of one’s existence and surroundings, other than that its somehow linked to the brain. But theories as to how, exactly, grey matter generates consciousness are challenged when a fully-conscious man is found to be missing most of his brain. Several years ago, a 44-year-old Frenchman went to the hospital complaining of mild weakness in his left leg. It was discovered then that his skull was filled largely by fluid, leaving just a thin parameter of actual brain tissue. And yet the man was a married father of two and a civil servant with an IQ of 75, below-average in his intelligence but not mentally disabled. More. Zap! Read More ›