Intelligent Design

Greetings from beautiful Tucuman, Argentina! The main point of my withdrawn paper was the tautology: If an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is isolated, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering (or leaving) which makes it NOT extremely improbable. When is a tautology controversial? When it contradicts the consensus view of science, which is that anything can happen in an open system as long as something (anything) is happening outside which, if reversed, would be even more improbable! (See my video, starting at about minute 4, if you don’t believe that is what the consensus view is all about.) I looked at the very equations on which this “compensation” Read More ›

At New Scientist, Michael Marshall reports, “It is human nature to cooperate with strangers” (13 June 2011):

It seems humans really are the cooperative ape. A nomadic society in east Africa that lacks a centralised government can still regularly muster armies of several hundred warriors, most of whom are strangers to each other.

These would be Turkana men, raising a crowd to risk their lives rustling cattle. Marshall observes,

We are the only species prepared to cooperate in large numbers with unrelated individuals. The feeling was that such behaviour was a recent development, requiring a centralised political authority. Now it seems possible that such cooperation could have predated these organisational structures and may have featured in numerous large prehistoric societies hundreds of thousands of years ago.

In that case, we are allowed to believe that such co-operation exists.

Interesting that researchers Mathew and Boyd – instead of theorizing from baboons and vervet monkeys and then making an announcement that lies in the face of everyday observation – observed humans in real life (the Turkana here standing in for Cave Man).

I have noted the same quality in a starkly non-violent situation: A Toronto subway shutdown at rush hour. If humans have an “innate tendency” to interpersonal violence or lack of co-operativeness, the shutdown should demonstrate it – thousands of people from all over the globe suddenly stranded together at a major urban intersection. What happened? Why? Read More ›

😆 Wrapping up the recent contest on why some educated people trash books unread and what to call those who do, thanks to commenter TomG at 9 who links us to a study at Thinking Christian of “noviewers” of Steve Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: So then, who read the book? Of those who rated the book favorably (5 stars), 94 percent likely read the book, and 2 percent communicated they had not read it, and 4 percent were in the middle grouping. Of those who gave the book a 1-star rating, only 26 percent likely read the book. About 43 percent of very negative ratings came from people who read the book only in part (or whose reading of Read More ›

From “We Are All Mutants: First Direct Whole-Genome Measure of Human Mutation Predicts 60 New Mutations in Each of Us,” (ScienceDaily, June 12, 2011), a study involving four adults and one child, we learn: Each one of us receives approximately 60 new mutations in our genome from our parents. This striking value is reported in the first-ever direct measure of new mutations coming from mother and father in whole human genomes.[ … ] Mutations that occur in sperm or egg cells will be ‘new’ mutations not seen in our parents. Although most of our variety comes from reshuffling of genes from our parents, new mutations are the ultimate source from which new variation is drawn. Finding new mutations is extremely Read More ›

Over at Creation-Evolution Headlines, Dave Coppedge reports that two recent journal article’s have confirmed Cornell’s John Sanford’s “genetic entropy”: An accumulation of mutations always decreases fitness (contrary to neo-Darwinists’ hopes): For mutations under epistasis to produce innovation, there must be a way for them to work together (synergistic epistasis). This is often assumed but has not been observed. Most experiments have shown beneficial mutations working against each other (antagonistic epistasis; see 12/14/2006), or causing even less fitness than if they acted alone (decompensatory epistasis; see 10/19/2004). In a new paper in Science,3 Khan et al, working with Richard Lenski [Michigan State], leader of the longest-running experiment on evolution of E. coli, found a law of diminishing returns with beneficial mutations Read More ›

PZ has a lot to say. I present some gems below for your education. I’m sure that I have some irrational beliefs of my own. I have no idea what they are. It’s not holding irrational beliefs that makes you an idiot. It’s holding the irrational beliefs and demanding that those be imposed on everyone else. Nobody has convinced me that God exists. That’s not going to happen. Science is the answer. I’m sorry; you may be a very devout religious person, but praying is not going to solve the world’s problems. It never has.  We’re living in an enlightenment, which is fuelled by rational thinking and science. Science is the answer. I’m buddies with a lot of the big Read More ›

Except that he doesn’t. In “Slaves to evolution,” (ABC Science 06/09/2011) Bernie Hobbs explains it all for you:

Two billion-odd years ago, one of the most important meals in history took place. One bacterium swallowed another one. But instead of being digested, the swallowee survived. And it kept doing what it had always done: using oxygen to rip apart food molecules, and then using the energy released to make ATP. So the bacteria that did the swallowing suddenly had this little lump inside it that leaked ATP, which the swallower could use to power its own cellular reactions. It was a match made in thermodynamic heaven.

And this crazy hybrid was the great (x10n) grandmother cell that all eukaryotic cells evolved from. The mitochondria in your cells, mine and every plant, animal and fungi on the planet are descendents of that meal. It’s like slavery, but with benefits. Read More ›

In The Guardian (25 May 2011), Mark Vernon reports on Princeton’s Peter Singer’s gradual coming round to the view that, if there is no objective truth, morality – and specifically the immorality of ignoring climate change – cannot be grounded in anything. Speaking to a group of Christian ethicists at Oxford, Singer said that his current focus is climate change, but he sees that the “preference utilitarianism” he was previously comfortable with,

… runs into problems because climate change requires that we consider the preferences not only of existing human beings, but of those yet to come. And we can have no confidence about that, when it comes to generations far into the future. Perhaps they won’t much care about Earth because the consumptive delights of life on other planets will be even greater. Perhaps they won’t much care because a virtual life, with its brilliant fantasies, will seem far more preferable than a real one. What this adds up to is that preference utilitarianism can provide good arguments not to worry about climate change, as well as arguments to do so.

Worse, some would add,

(See also: “Ed Feser on Peter Singer’s shift, and “Objective morality and Peter Singer.”)

Read More ›

In my work as a software engineer in aerospace R&D I use what is arguably the most sophisticated, universally applicable, finite-element analysis program ever devised by the most brilliant people in field, refined and tested for 35 years since its inception in the mid-1970s for the development of variable-yield nuclear weapons at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is called LS-DYNA (LS for Livermore Software, and DYNA for the evaluation of dynamic, nonlinear, transient systems). A finite element is an attempt to descretize on a macro level what occurs at a molecular level in a physical system, so that a result is amenable to a practical computational solution. The learning curve for the use of this sophisticated technology is extremely steep, Read More ›

In Life’s solution, Simon Conway Morris devotes an entire five-page, double-column index to convergence: Two or more species evolving the same complex, multi-part trait without being related.

Seemingly, it works that way in politics too, if we heed journalist Rich Galen’s advice:

There is a reason that just about every airliner looks like every other airliner. Some are larger, some smaller; some have two engines, some four, but they generally look alike.There is a reason for that. There is a design solution that fits commercial airliners. They take off, they go where the pilot aims them, they land, and they can carry enough passengers to make money.

Same with political campaigns. Every cycle candidates say, “We’re going to run a different type of campaign.” They all look pretty much alike because there is an engineering design solution for political campaigns.

Things change. On-line fundraising instead of using the USPS was new. So were digital avionics instead of analog instruments. But those things are updates, not fundamental changes. – “Design solution,” (Townhall, 06/10/2011)

Sounds like evolution (as it really happens) . ..  Well, it seems one American politician ignored this pattern, and Read More ›

Just when it was noted that Amazon has been going all negative on “I haven’t read the book but … ” “noviews”,  Wikipedia carries a notice on the Haeckel’s embryos page (June 11, 2011): This article’s use of external links may not follow Wikipedia’s policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive and inappropriate external links.(August 2010) The links may well have been cleaned up since then; at one time, much material on the Internet defended the fakes and attacked those who exposed them. Thoughts? Follow UD News for breaking news on the design controversy.

As in here. Also: What make you of this, from Wikipedia?

Sources note: Choosing only those embryos of species that fit the Darwin/Haeckel frame for teaching purposes – as opposed to a range of accurate depictions – isn’t the biggest problem, nor is exaggerating the similarities midway through development. Haeckel’s most serious misrepresentation is that he left out the earliest stages in embryo development – when various classes differ markedly.

Why would he do that? In order to demonstrate common ancestry through embryos, what you need is for them to all start out very similar and gradually diverge as they develop. And that does not happen. Of course, common ancestry can be true even if embryos do not demonstrate it. But if we believe there is sufficient evidence for common ancestry, why choose  fake evidence to demonstrate it?

See Jonathan Wells, “Haeckel’s embryos: Setting the record straight,” The American Biology Teacher (May 1, 1999): Read More ›

Does ” Oxbridge-on-Thames” provide a test of the social power of new atheism?

Here, we noted that AC Graying was beginning to take heat, alongside Richard Dawkins, for refusing to debate American Christian apologist William Lane Craig, as other new atheists have done. He’s in the news again, as the organizer of a private, very expensive private New College of the Humanities (18,000 quid a year), where Richard Dawkins will have a key role: Read More ›

PZ has done an interview. I have compiled some statements that interest us here at UD. Here is the first installment.

ON ID

Host Stephen Smith: “You spend a lot of digital ink, if you will, attacking intelligent design and the people who are behind that movement. They argue that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process, such as natural selection.” Why do you have such scorn for these beliefs?”

Myers: “Well, for one thing, they’re dishonest. They’re grossly dishonest about this stuff. That’s not really where they’re coming from. When they say this stuff, they say, “Oh, we’re taking an objective view. We’re taking a secular view of the universe in saying that there’s a designer behind it.” They’re misleading you. That’s not where they come from. Where they come from is typically a very religious background. What intelligent design is, is taking their religious beliefs, sanitizing them of any mention of God, and presenting them in this cleaned up format. The sole premise, the sole impetus for doing this stuff is their belief in God.

Read More ›

In “Black, White and Stinky: Explaining Bold Coloration in Skunks” (ScienceDaily June 8, 2011), we learn about warning colors in mammals (who can’t usually do fashion runway colours): Read More ›