Intelligent Design

Jeffrey Shallit has responded to my new column over at his blog, Recursivity.

Shallit’s reply is interesting.  He starts out on the wrong foot right away, in his subtitle:

“Thomas Cudworth asks why prominent evolutionary scientists did not attend the Evolution 2011 conference in Norman, Oklahoma this summer.”

Actually, I didn’t.  In fact, I pointed out at the beginning of my article several prominent “evolutionary scientists” who were at the conference.  What I asked was why almost no prominent culture-war biologists read or contributed to papers at the Evolution 2011 conference.  Apparently it escaped Shallit’s notice that the whole point of my article was to question the connection between being a loud culture-war crusader for neo-Darwinism and actually being competent in the field of evolutionary biology.

The bulk of Shallit’s response is an explanation, allegedly for my benefit, about how academia works and why academics can’t attend every conference going.  Well, I agree with him that academics can’t attend every conference going (as I clearly conceded in my original article, which he appears to have read hurriedly).

One of the obvious constraints, I acknowledged, is budgetary.  But such restraints clearly do not apply to all the people on the list.  Read More ›

At Eurekalert ( 7-Jul-2011), we learn:

Jewel beetles, obtained from local people, turn out to be 4 species unknown to science

A team of researchers from the Czech University of Life Sciences discovered four new species of jewel beetles (Buprestidae) from South-eastern Asia. This family of beetles is named for their particularly beautiful body and fascinating, shiny colours.

“All new species belong to the genus Philanthaxia. Before the publication of this study, 61 species had been known from this genus. Currently, it comprises of 65 species, with a primarily Southeast-Asian distribution, except for two species extending to the Australasian region”, said Oto Nakládal, a co-author of the study.

Beetles do speciate very readily. From famous mid-twentieth century Darwinist J.B.S. Haldane:

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. Beetles are actually more numerous than the species of any other insect order. That kind of thing is characteristic of nature.

So maybe not such a surprise. On the other hand,
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I commend Thomas Cudworth’s post today to all, for raising a very good question: Do Darwin’s best known hacks and flacks do much science research. Given their other activies, like interfering with academic employment decisions and journal publications, writing hit pieces on scholars, and demanding wacky decisions from school authorities, one wonders where they would find the time.

One curious fact is that these activists are, generally speaking, Americans talking to Americans – and their fellow Americans have displayed a low level of confidence in Darwinism for decades.

So one of three possibilities, surely: Read More ›

Reviewer Charlie Jane Anders tells us “Zookeeper is a horror movie about evolutionary biology” (IO9, July 8, 2011), but she means “evolutionary psychology.” Briefly, the zookeeper wants this girl, and the animals (who can talk, of course) advise him to use their mating strategies:

Griffin is encouraged to become an Alpha Male, to pee in public to mark his territory. (There is a lot of urination.) The Adam Sandler-voiced monkey tells him to fling poop. At various times, his mating seminar starts to seem like an episode of the Pick-Up Artist, as a lion tells him to throw some negs. He’s encouraged to pick fights with competing males, to separate his desired mate from the pack, and to make his nerdy-but-gorgeous best friend pretend to be his girlfriend to make Stephanie jealous. There is much slapstick involving Griffin attempting to do a frog confrontation stance and making his pants split open.Eventually, though, it starts to work — Griffin, implausibly, becomes an Alpha Male and everybody admires him. He becomes a kind of super-yuppie and God among ordinary shlubs.

The usual keenness of evolutionary psychology’s insight into human nature is on display here; the screenwriter captures the quintessential truth that humans have evolved to consider this kind of behaviour sexy – just as animals evolved to have equivalent-to-human minds. From Anders:

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I have often wondered whether the loudness and aggressiveness of many culture-war defenders of neo-Darwinian evolution bears any relationship at all to the actual scientific contributions of those defenders to the field of evolutionary biology.  As it happens, we have at hand some evidence, albeit of a rough and ready kind, relevant to that question.

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New research is providing a fascinating new perspective on fine-tuning and a three hundred year old debate. First for the context. When Isaac Newton figured out how the solar system worked he also detected a stability problem. Could the smooth-running machine go unstable, with planets smashing into each other? This is what the math indicated. But on the other hand, we’re still here. How could that be?  Read more

The regulation of cellular processes occurs at many levels. Gene expression, where the DNA is transcribed into an RNA molecule, is exquisitely controlled but so are the many downstream actions as well. For instance, the new RNA molecule can be inactivated by an incredible process referred to as RNA interference. This sophisticated process targets specific genes, and as usual nature’s own tools provide researchers with excellent means to investigate and harness biology. For instance, researchers have used RNA interference to turn off one gene at a time in the human cell to determine its function.  Read more

Those of you who’ve followed my posts and comments will have picked up that my view of Intelligent Design is pretty complicated. On the one hand, I defend design inferences, even strong design inferences. I’m entirely comfortable with questioning Darwinism (if that view still has enough content to identify it as a clear position, anyway), and have a downright dismissive view of both naturalism (if that view… etc) and atheism. I regularly see the ID position butchered, mangled and misrepresented by its detractors, most of whom should and probably do know better.

On the flipside, I don’t think ID (or for that matter, no-ID) is science, even if I reason that if no-ID is science then so is ID. My personal leaning has always been towards theistic evolution, and I see evolution as yet another instance of design rather than something which runs in opposition to it – a view which I know some ID proponents share, but certainly not all. I think non-scientific arguments for and inferences to design have considerable power, and see little reason to elevate particular arguments simply because some insist they’re “scientific”.

Here’s another part of that flipside, and the subject of today’s post. One of the more prominent ID arguments hinges on the trichotomy of Chance, Necessity, and Design. The problem for me is that I question the very existence of Chance, and I see Necessity as subsumable under Design.

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When I was seven years old I figured it all out. It was a simple, logically inescapable conclusion. I believed that I was the product of a purely materialistic, random process that did not have me in mind. When I die and my chemistry shuts down I will cease to exist, enter eternal oblivion, and nothing I ever achieve or do will have any ultimate purpose or meaning. Furthermore, there is no ultimate justice. Hitler and the millions he tortured and murdered will have the same ultimate fate: pointless, meaningless oblivion. I lived my life in a complete state of depression, anger and despair for 43 years as a result of this notion, although I accomplished much during that time Read More ›

From Carl Zimmer at Discover Magazine’s “The Loom” blog, we learn, “Last year arsenic-based life, now chlorine-based life” (12011/07/06)

I checked in with Steven Benner, a chemist who has raised a lot of concerns about the arsenic-life research last year. What did he think of the new research?“It looks true,” he said. Read More ›

Imagine if a police detective was told his theory had to be strictly natural. The evidence at the crime scene was obvious, but the boss wants no criminals indicted. The cause of the crime must be limited to the wind, rain, earthquakes, polar shifts, whatever. Absurd you say? Welcome to evolution.  Read more

The day had to come. The day that the political correctness mob, feminist division, turned on Dawkins and his atheists. Apparently, in a response to a complaint about sexual harassment, Dawkins had said,

The man in the elevator didn’t physically touch her, didn’t attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn’t even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that….Rebecca’s feeling that the man’s proposition was ‘creepy’ was her own interpretation of his behavior, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

Bet Dawkins doesn’t know what hit him. He failed to buy into the “I feel like a victim, therefore my accusations are just” line that governs modern, materialist culture. And that’s just unforgivable.  😳

In “Atheists, your moral and intellectual superiors” (July 7, 2011), Canada’s Five Feet of Fury opines Read More ›

At ABC Science, professional skeptic Michael Shermer lays it out for us in “God or ET? You decide” (June 29, 2011), an excerpt from his recent The Believing Brain :

Computer scientists calculate that there have been thirty-two doublings since World War II and that as early as 2030 we may encounter the singularity — the point at which total computational power will rise to levels that are so far beyond anything we can imagine that they will appear nearly infinite and thus, relatively speaking, be indistinguishable from omniscience. When this happens the world will change more in a decade than it did in the previous thousand decades.Deduction 2: Extrapolate these trend lines out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years — mere eye blinks on an evolutionary time scale — and we arrive at a realistic estimate of how far advanced an ETI will be. Read More ›