Intelligent Design

Here.

The BioLogos crowd seems to have a hard time critiquing intelligent design without casting aspersions on the character and motives of those with whom they disagree.

Darrel Falk, after briefly granting in the video that intelligent design proponents are motivated by “wonderful reasons,” turns right around and sticks in the stiletto. What’s the real reason intelligent design proponents won’t admit they are wrong, wrong, WRONG? Well, according to Falk, ID proponents won’t admit they have been refuted because “everybody is embarrassed because they have invested so much money, they have invested so much personal ideology, reputation, even ego… It’s pretty hard to say, ‘I guess I was wrong.'”  Sean Carroll offers a similar assessment for why ID scholars won’t shut up despite being scientifically bankrupt in his view: “So for, you know, PR reasons, or political reasons, or whatever it might be, they keep talking.” Read More ›

Because Brad Monton was here first.

Here, in A Summary of Scientific Method SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, 2011, Peter Kosso tackles “Is intelligent design science” – a topic that used to be confined union hall megaphones and humanist picket signs (except always expressed as a negative assertion):

Is the theory of intelligent design scientific or not? Well, we can’t even begin to answer this question, at least not in a reasonable and profitable way, without a clear understanding of what it is to be scientific. There must be something shared by all the sciences that makes them scientific, and it would be this something that is missing from the unscientific or the pseudoscientific. That something is not what they study. Geology, biology, and physics study pretty different things, whereas biology and intelligent design study pretty much the same thing. What is common to the sciences is the basic structure of how they study, and the standards they use to judge acceptable results. This is the scientific method. Read More ›

One of the most common objections to design thought is the idea that it is about the improper injection of the alien  supernatural into the world of science. (That is itself based on a strawman misrepresentation of design thought, as was addressed here a few days ago.)

However, there is an underlying root, a common distortion of the origins of modern science, which Nancy Pearcey rebutted in a  2005 sleeper article as headlined, that deserves a UD post of its own.

Let’s clip the article:

Read More ›

Heck, it’s “science”, which is way better than being true, reasonable, or useful.

He tells us,

Recently, evolutionary psychologists have turned their sights on love and divorce. It didn’t take them long to notice that when people fall in love, there’s a period of up to three years during which the zeal and infatuation ride at a peak.

(Many parents of young adults, attempting to dissuade children from a predictably bad match, have noticed this.)

[ … ]

From this perspective, we are preprogrammed to lose interest in a sexual partner after the time required to raise a child has passed – which is, on average, about four years. Read More ›

In “When the multiverse and many-worlds collide” (New Scientist, 01 June 2011), Justin Mullins explains,

Two of the strangest ideas in modern physics – that the cosmos constantly splits into parallel universes in which every conceivable outcome of every event happens, and the notion that our universe is part of a larger multiverse – have been unified into a single theory. This solves a bizarre but fundamental problem in cosmology and has set physics circles buzzing with excitement, as well as some bewilderment. Read More ›

In “The Social Psychological Narrative — or — What Is Social Psychology, Anyway?
A Conversation With Timothy D. Wilson” (Edge (June 16, 2011), Wilson, a researcher into consciousness, comments on evolutionary psychology, taking on one of its most widely quoted exponents, Steve Pinker:

To be clear, evolutionary theory is obviously true and has added to our knowledge about social behavior, by suggesting novel hypotheses that could then be tested with the experimental method. But I believe the examples of this are far fewer than Steve suggests. He mentions a 2003 paper by David Buss that “listed fifty novel predictions about social behavior derived from evolutionary theory.” I went back and checked that list to see how novel those predictions were. Read More ›

  A good place to begin understanding why consciousness is not strictly reducible to the material is in looking at consciousness of material objects — that is, straightforward perception. Perception as it is experienced by human beings is the explicit sense of being aware of something material other than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible Read More ›

Well, they would, but … Once you’re thick in Science, you can question the paradigm. But if you want to get grants, if you want to be elected to high positions, if you want to get awards as a promoter of public education of Science, you can’t question the paradigm. ~  45.09 I interviewed dozens and dozens of scientists and, when they’re amongst each other or talking to a journalist who they trust, they’ll speak about ‘It’s incredibly complex’ or ‘Molecular Biology is in a crisis’, but, publicly, they can’t say that. ~  45.52 – from Expelled Witham is a veteran Washington area journalist and author.

Here’s David Berlinski and Paul Nelson on Ricochet, interviewed by Berlinski’s daughter Claire Berlinski: I asked my father and Paul Nelson to reply to as many of your questions about the Great Expectations conference as they could–beginning with the obvious: “Is it true that Paul Nelson believes that the world is only 6,000 years old?” (I paraphrase, but that idea came up in the comments.) They’ve given their answers to a few more questions, including: “Do you guys believe in intelligent design?” and “Do you actually know anything about science?”

Here, Dave Coppedge handily summarizes and comments on the news from DarwinWorld, everything from “how the skunk got its stripes” to why superstitions “actually make evolutionary sense.” Of course, superstitions make evolutionary sense – in Darwinworld, the distinction between fact and “useful” fantasy disappears. Interestngly, Coppedge notes, One encouraging sign is that more readers seem to be mocking the evolutionary just-so stories in the comments. They usually get shouted down by Darwin bigots (some with terrible spelling and no sense of history or philosophy) … Coppedge offers an anti-bigot kit at the foot of the post.

In “Why the universe wasn’t fine-tuned for life” (New Scientist, 08 June 2011), Marcus Chown tells us that Victor Stenger’s new The Fallacy of Fine-tuning “dismantles arguments that the laws of physics in our universe were ‘fine-tuned’ to foster life.”:

If the force of gravity were a few per cent weaker, it would not squeeze and heat the centre of the sun enough to ignite the nuclear reactions that generate the sunlight necessary for life on Earth. But if it were a few per cent stronger, the temperature of the solar core would have been boosted so much the sun would have burned out in less than a billion years – not enough time for the evolution of complex life like us.(You have to pay to read the article.)

Some, including some atheists, consider fine-tuning evidence for God (though not necessarily sufficient evidence). But not Stenger apparently. Determining whether you think he “dismantles” fine tuning, you might like to consider mathematician George Ellis’s “Toy Universe”comments on the question: Read More ›

Yesterday, in the P Z Myers quote-mining and distortion thread, I happened to cite Lewontin’s infamous 1997 remark in his NYRB article, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” on a priori imposition of materialist censorship on origins science, which reads in the crucial part:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

To my astonishment, I was promptly accused of quote-mining and even academic malpractice, because I omitted the following two sentences, which — strange as it may seem —  some evidently view as justifying the above censoring imposition:

The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

To my mind, instead, these last two sentences are such a sad reflection of bias and ignorance, that their omission is an act of charity to a distinguished professor. Read More ›

Before the Evolutionary Agony Aunt, Darwinian Brand Marketing, and thousands of dim frosh learning the “real” reasons people pray or why we don’t throw granny under the bus?

Think back. Think waaay back (if you can) to Wilhelm Reich, once the science darling of the Establishment, with a single, simple idea that governed everything:

The spiritual hysteria that Reich inspired in the America of the 1940s and early ’50s is as hard to explain now as the madness that 1920s crowds felt hearing Bix Beiderbecke play the cornet, especially when you consider that most Reichians were supposed to be educated skeptics and cultural critics. Even—or especially—intellectuals are not immune to America’s chronic and recurring religious revivals in their various forms.Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, J.D. Salinger, Paul Goodman, William Burroughs and other bohemian culture heroes were among his followers: examples of what Lionel Trilling unsettlingly called “the moral urgency, the sense of crisis and the concern with personal salvation that mark the existence of American intellectuals.” Reich won a particular following among intellectuals, artists and cultural spokesmen who were looking for a new revo
ution after becoming disillusioned with communism.

– Henry Allen, “Thinking Inside the Box: Why some of America’s most prominent minds fell for the wildly eccentric ideas of Wilhelm Reich,”The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2011

Reich was the prophet of the “apocalyptic orgasm.” No, really. And did any big brain get suspicious on account of his Read More ›

In 2000, a man gathered two lbs of rock from a meteorite that crashed into the ice on Tagish Lake, in northern British Columbia, Canada. He kept them frozen until, in 2008, a Canadian research consortium bought them. In “Meteorite hints at life’s origins: As debate continues to swirl around arsenic-loving bacteria, a space rock yields new astrobiological clues,” Tia Ghose (The Scientist , June 9, 2011) tells us, Organic compounds from a meteorite may hold clues to the origin of life on Earth, according to a study published today (June 9) in Science. Water on the asteroid reacted with the rock to form organic compounds—including many scientists believe are the crucial ingredients that sparked life in Earth’s primordial oceans Read More ›

In “Clever Tool Use in Parrots and Crows”, (ScienceDaily, June 13, 2011) , we learn:

Parrots and Corvids frequently astonish researchers investigating animal intelligence, in particular when it comes to solving technical problems. The New Caledonian crow (Corvus monduloides), for example, manufactures and uses elongated objects such as sticks or pieces of Pandanus leaves as tools to probe for grubs in tree bark and dead wood. The kea (Nestor notabilis), a mountain parrot which is unknown to employ tools in the wild, can accomplish the use of compact objects tools to knock a food reward out of place. Read More ›