Intelligent Design

In “Left brain, right brain: researchers link neurology to political orientation” Andrew Duffy, Ottawa Citizen Postmedia News April 7, 2011) tells us,

The study, published in the online edition of Current Biology, found that people who identified themselves as liberal tended to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes (ACC), a region of the brain that monitors uncertainty and conflict.Meanwhile, those who identified themselves as conservative had larger amygdalas. Among other things, the almond-shaped amygdala processes emotions related to fear.

Researchers believe the physical differences reflect the nature of voters: that liberals tend to be more comfortable with uncertainty while conservatives are more sensitive to fear.

Observers have noted that Canada, mid-election, is currently a target for this sort of thing.

Those who read all the way down to the bottom will encounter the lines: Read More ›

The debate: Does Good Come From God II by Sam Harris vs William Lane Harris 7 April 2011 at Notre Dame is now on YouTube.

Part 1 of 9 – Harris vs Craig – Does Good Come From God Read More ›

This is a post about complex specified information (CSI). But first, I’d like to begin with a true story, going back to the mid-1960s. A Cambridge astronomer named Anthony Hewish had designed a large radio telescope, covering more than four acres, in order to pick out a special group of objects in the sky: compact, scintillating radio sources called quasars, which are now known to be the very active and energetic cores of distant galaxies. Professor Hewish and his students were finally able to start operating their telescope by July 1967, although it was not completely finished until later on. At the time, Hewish had a Ph.D. student named Jocelyn Bell. Bell had sole responsibility for operating the telescope and analyzing the data, under Hewish’s supervision.

Six or eight weeks after starting the survey, Jocelyn Bell noticed that a bit of “scruff” was occasionally appearing in the data records. However, it wasn’t one of the scintillating sources that Professor Hewish was searching for. Further observations revealed that it was a series of pulses, spaced 1.3373 seconds apart. The pulses could not be man-made, as they kept to sidereal time (the time-keeping system used by astronomers to track stars in the night sky). Subsequent measurements of the dispersion of the pulse signal established that the source was well outside the solar system but inside the galaxy. Yet at that time, a pulse rate of 1.3373 seconds seemed far too fast for a star, and on top of that, the signal was uncannily regular. Bell and her Ph.D supervisor were forced to consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life. As Bell put it in her recollections of the event (after-dinner speech, published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 302, pp. 685-689, 1977):

We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission.

The observation was half-humorously designated Little green men 1 until a famous astronomer, Thomas Gold, identified these signals as rapidly rotating neutron stars with strong magnetic fields, in 1968. The existence of these stars had been postulated as far back as 1934, by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky, but no-one had yet confirmed their existence when Bell made her observations in 1967, and only a few astronomers knew much about them.

Here’s a question for readers: was Bell wrong to consider the possibility that the signals might be from aliens? Here’s another one: if you were searching for an extra-terrestrial intelligence, what criteria would you use to decide whether a signal came from aliens? As we’ll see, SETI’s criterion for identifying alien signals makes use of one form of complex specified information. The criterion – narrow band-width – looks very simple, but it involves picking out a sequence of events which is highly surprising, and therefore very complex.

My previous post, entitled Why there’s no such thing as a CSI Scanner, or: Reasonable and Unreasonable Demands Relating to Complex Specified Information, dealt with complex specified information (CSI), as defined in Professor William Dembski’s paper, Specification: The Pattern that Signifies Intelligence. It was intended to answer some common criticisms of complex specified information, and also to explain why CSI, although defined in a mathematically rigorous manner, is not a physically computable quantity. Briefly, the reason is that Professor Dembski’s formula for CSI contains not only the physically computable term P(T|H), but also the semiotic term Phi_s(T). Specifically, Dembski defines the specified complexity Chi of a pattern T given chance hypothesis H, minus the tilde and context sensitivity, as:

Chi=-log2[10^120.Phi_s(T).P(T|H)],

where Chi is the specified complexity (or CSI) of a system,
Phi_s(T) is the number of patterns whose semiotic description by speaker S is at least as simple as S’s semiotic description of T,
P(T|H) is the probability of a pattern T with respect to the most plausible chance hypothesis H, and
10^120 is the maximal number of bit operations that the known, observable universe could have performed throughout its entire multi-billion year history, as calculated by theoretical computer scientist Seth Lloyd (“Computational Capacity of the Universe,” Physical Review Letters 88(23) (2002): 7901–4).

Some of the more thoughtful skeptics who regularly post comments on Uncommon Descent were not happy with this formula, so I’ve come up with a simpler one – call it CSI-lite, if you will – which I hope will be more to their liking. This post is therefore intended for people who are still puzzled about, or skeptical of, the concept of complex specified information. Read More ›

In “Chimp, Bonobo Study Sheds Light on the Social Brain”, ScienceDaily reports (Apr. 5, 2011) It’s been a puzzle why our two closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, have widely different social traits, despite belonging to the same genus. Now, a comparative analysis of their brains shows neuroanatomical differences that may be responsible for these behaviors, from the aggression more typical of chimpanzees to the social tolerance of bonobos.”What’s remarkable is that the data appears to match what we know about the human brain and behavior,” says Emory anthropologist James Rilling, who led the analysis. “The neural circuitry that mediates anxiety, empathy and the inhibition of aggression in humans is better developed in bonobos than in chimpanzees.” [ … Read More ›

A guy was involved with a push poll in a publically funded medium in Canada (currently heading to the polls), by which just about everyone comes out a “Liberal”: Here’s the first experiment. It only takes a minute. Go through the survey and answer every question with “no opinion” as your answer. Of course, skip the part where it asks you to choose parties or leaders (that would be taking an opinion). Surprise! The CBC push-poll says you’re a Liberal. Even though you gave absolutely no legitimate reason to be pegged as a Liberal. Like I say; Loewen and friends rigged the system. Now try a completely different approach. Go through the survey again and simply alternate clicking “strongly agree” Read More ›

UD commenter markf offers the following: Is there a bright side if you are an atheist?” Oh yes. For example, – no pressure to sit through hour long rambles or harangues once a week in a building with minimal heating and hard seats – easier to enjoy satires on religion – no need to repeat “I was once an atheist but now I know better” every week. In our church there is no pressure to do anything; it’s all voluntary. The seats are soft and the heating is comfortable. The sermons are not rambles or harangues, but insightful messages (often convicting, but necessarily and constructively so) given by a pastor with a Ph.D. in ethics who has been a professor Read More ›

Proponent of the multiverse and the universe as simulation wins this year’s Templeton Prize
The Prize has been awarded to Martin Rees. As Daniel Cressey tells it in Nature (6 April 2011),

Controversial ‘spirituality’ award goes to a scientist for fourth year in a row.

Martin Rees, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and former head of the Royal Society in London, today received the 2011 prize, worth £1 million (US$1.62 million), which rewards “a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension”.

The prize and the foundation have both attracted attacks from high-profile atheist scientists, who accuse them of attempting to insert religion needlessly into science. Rees says that he has no problem with accepting the prize, and he refuses to be drawn on the controversy, saying, “I have no comment on the views other people have.”

He also says he has no religious beliefs but sometimes attends Church of England services.

In 2004 Rees speculated controversially that we are living in a giant computer simulation: Read More ›

A fine tuning and multiverse advocate, Martin J. Rees, today won the 2011 Templeton Prize. The astrophysicist with no religion won the Prize originally “for Progress in Religion.”
The 2011 Templeton Prize was announced today.

LONDON, APRIL 6 – Martin J. Rees, a theoretical astrophysicist whose profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize.
Rees, Master of Trinity College, one of Cambridge University’s top academic posts, and former president of the Royal Society, the highest leadership position within British science, has spent decades investigating the implications of the big bang, the nature of black holes, events during the so-called ‘dark age’ of the early universe, and the mysterious explosions from galaxy centers known as gamma ray bursters. Read More ›

Paul Feyerabend’s latest book has finally been published in English. The Tyranny of Science, Polity Press (2011) although it was written in 1993. The Tyranny of Science “In this wide–ranging and accessible book Feyerabend challenges some modern myths about science, including the myth that ‘science is successful’. He argues that some very basic assumptions about science are simply false and that substantial parts of scientific ideology were created on the basis of superficial generalizations that led to absurd misconceptions about the nature of human life. Far from solving the pressing problems of our age, such as war and poverty, scientific theorizing glorifies ephemeral generalities, at the cost of confronting the real particulars that make life meaningful. Objectivity and generality are Read More ›

I saw this on XKCD this morning, and thought it was hilarious.

“So if someone is mentally ill, is it the mind (spiritual, demonic, etc.) or the translating organ of the brain (age, MS, injury, other disease, etc.) that is the cause, (or perhaps both)?  How does one distinguish the causes?” Read More ›

Here’s a question about ID I’ve had for a long time, and I hope some ID proponents are able to help me sort it out. I’ll get right to the point before starting in with the commentary.

When an intelligent agent demonstrates the ability to directly and purposefully modify the genes of a given creature, is that evidence for intelligent design?

When intelligent agents use selection and variation to produce particular desired results, is that evidence for intelligent design?

When intelligent agents use selection and variation to produce a ‘better’ antenna is that evidence for intelligent design?

More on this and some commentary below.

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Here’s Dennis Prager: A radio talk show host for 29 years, I long ago began asking callers who made foolish comments what graduate school they attended. It takes higher education to learn to believe that America and Israel are villains, that men and women have essentially the same natures, that human nature is good, that ever-larger governments create wealth, etc. Okay that woke you up, didn’t it? His basic point, I think, is that we must be educated into some follies; most of us are just not smart enough to arrive at them by ourselves. My basic theory: The world has always been a mess, but it is a more stable mess when the follies are the usual features of Read More ›

At ScienceDaily (March 30, 2011), we learn that “Like Products, Plants Wait for Optimal Configuration Before Market Success”: Just as a company creates new, better versions of a product to increase market share and pad its bottom line, an international team of researchers led by Brown University has found that plants tinker with their design and performance before flooding the environment with new, improved versions of themselves.  The issue: When does a grouping of plants with the same ancestor, called a clade, begin to spin off new species? Biologists have long assumed that rapid speciation occurred when a clade first developed a new physical trait or mechanism and had begun its own genetic branch. But the team, led by Brown Read More ›

The Map of Life is a new website, funded in part by the Templeton Organization, devoted to highlighting and discussing the role of convergence in evolution. Simon Conway Morris, whose thoughts on evolution I’m actually very interested in, has a role in the site – and it promises to be a place of interest for those people (ID proponents and TEs both) who see convergence as evidence that evolution may not be as “blind” as many people typically assume.

But I’m actually not interested in the the convergence question at the moment. Instead I’m interested in the site’s stated “aims”. The second aim is to promote discussion about convergence in evolution, and whether or not evolution may be more predictable than previously thought. The first aim is to A) promote the truth of evolution, and B) criticize ID in one of the most mangled, confused ways I’ve seen recently.

More on that below.

Read More ›