Science

At the Beyond Expelled worldview conference, Nancy Pearcey explored the impact of evolution vs ID. She describes skeptic Michael Shermer’s conversion to evolution & Scarlett Johansson’s acting on belief in evolution.
—————-
The intelligent design of life

Nancy Pearcey tells crowd that Darwinism has evolved into more than just a theory (with VIDEO)
Rachel Kyler, Thursday May 8th, 2008

NICEVILLE — Not religion pitted against science, but philosophy against philosophy.

In a truly liberal education system, that’s how academic Nancy Pearcey says educators would approach intelligent design and the theory of evolution.
Read More ›

Robert Meyer provides thought provoking insight into the major issues surrounding Expelled.
————————————-
Ben Stein’s Dangerous Idea
Robert Meyer, May 6, 2008, New Media Alliance – Robert E. Meyer

Ben Stein has a dangerous idea. His idea is that professors and teachers who express skepticism about Darwinism are likely to find themselves not granted tenure, castigated and ridiculed, and disqualified from the opportunity to have research papers published.
. . .
Having reviewed the movie myself, it appeared that Stein was trying to make the case for academic freedom, not attempted to convert anyone to a particular ideological position.

Read More ›

The same day I first watched “Expelled” in theaters, I also watched the movie “21”. The movie “21” is based on the true story of MIT students who made a fortune in Las Vegas casinos through the use of mathematics.

The real story behind the movie began with an associate of Claude Shannon by the name of Dr. Edward O. Thorp of MIT. In the Early 60’s, Thorp published a landmark mathematical treatise on how to beat casinos. His research was so successful that Las Vegas casinos shut down many of their card tables for an entire year until they could devise counter measures to impede Thorp’s mathematics.

Thorp is arguably the greatest gambler of all time. He extended his gambling science to the stock market and made a fortune. His net worth is in the fractional to low billions. He is credited with some independent discoveries which were the foundation to the Black-Scholes-Merton equation relating heat transfer thermodynamics to stock option pricing. The equation won the Nobel prize and was the subject of the documentary: The Trillion Dollar Bet.

Thorp would probably be even richer today if Rudy Gulliani had not falsely implicated him in the racketeering scandal involving Michael Milken. Thorp, by the way, keeps a dartboard with Gulliani’s picture on it… 🙂

The relevance of Thorp’s math to Darwinism is that Thorp was a pioneer of risk management (which he used to create the world’s first hedge fund). In managing a hedge fund or managing the wagers in casinos, one is confronted with the mathematically defined problem of Gambler’s Ruin. The science of risk management allows a risk manager or a skilled gambler to defend against the perils gamblers ruin. Unfortunately for Darwinism, natural selection has little defense against the perils of gambler’s ruin.
Read More ›

Derbyshire continues to embarrass himself — it’s as though on the topic of ID and God his emotions take over and he can’t think straight. I’ll spare you his review and simply quote Berlinski’s response, which skillfully shuts him down with very few words: [From] David Berlinski: 1 If I remark that no sane man would hesitate to choose between A and B, it hardly follows that either A or B is insane. This is a point of logic. It is obvious. 2 To suggest that Mbombo or Unkulunkulu have an enduring claim on our attention is to ignore the striking insight achieved by the ancient Hebrews: That various scattered deities are nothing more than local manifestations of a single Read More ›

“One of the reasons research is being stifled in the U.S. is the pressure from the left for conformity to their agenda. How many scientists have been threatened with the loss of their grants because their work questioned the left’s Global Warming mantra? The decline in science is directly related to its politicalization.” –James Barends

Per recommendations, here is a separate thread on:

Michael Le Page weighing in at New Scientist with:

Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions

18:00 16 April 2008
He provides the mother pie statement that:

Darwin presented compelling evidence for evolution in On the Origin and, since his time, the case has become overwhelming. . . . Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth.

This might be tolerable if “evolution” is limited to microevolution defined as mutations and heritable variations in populations. e.g., to “fast-changing viruses such as HIV and H5N1 bird flu” — except that he gives equal weight to the controversial “pollution-matching pepper moth”. Read More ›

Clarke’s Three Laws Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think I’ve read almost everything written by Arthur C. Clarke. For the last 35 years usually shortly after he wrote it. I often quote the third law but I’d forgotten about the other two. All three laws color my perspective on ID and a lot of Read More ›

[[This blast from the past was originally published here at UD 25oct06. With EXPELLED coming out so soon and given Dawkins’s prominent role in it, I thought it worth moving to the top of the stack (blogs have the data structure of a push-down stack). –WmAD]] Last night Richard Dawkins did a reading from his new book, The God Delusion, at a bookstore in DC. After the reading he fielded questions. A friend of mine was in the front and got to be the first to go. He asked Dawkins if he thought he was being inconsistent by being a determinist while taking credit for writing his book. The answer so shocked my questioner friend that he typed out a Read More ›

Last evening I had the joy of meeting David Berlinski at Biola University during his tour of the U.S. to promote his new book, The Devil’s Delusion — Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.

I was hanging out on the front steps of the lecture hall when David appeared, and we chatted in both French and English. (As bizarre as it might seem, although I earn my living as a software engineer in aerospace R&D, my three college degrees are in French language and literature, and classical piano.) I was wearing my Harley Davidson windbreaker, and David asked if I was a Harley rider, to which I replied yes. He asked about what model Harley I rode, and expressed his passion for motorcycles.

David is one of the most eloquent, insightful, clever, iconoclastic, and irreverently humorous speakers I have ever had the pleasure to encounter. During his lecture he talked about the great successes of the scientific enterprise — especially in the 20th century with the discoveries of modern mathematics and physics — but how the dreams of this enterprise to explain everything have dissolved into fantastic and unsupported speculation (e.g., multiverses), in the name of the rational and objective science on which it is supposed to be based.

If the dreams of 20th century mathematics and physics have dissolved into fantastic and unsupported speculation concerning the big questions, then surely naive 19th century Darwinian speculation about the origins and diversification of living systems must be in even deeper trouble. But Darwinian “theory” seems to enjoy an extraordinary resistance to being falsified or even challenged. All evidence, however contradictory, supports it.
Read More ›

Father Michal Heller, 72, a Polish priest-cosmologist and a onetime associate of Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, the future pope, was named March 12 as the winner of the Templeton Prize.

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0801398.htm

In this recent interview came a critique of the intelligent design position as bad theology, akin to the Manichean heresy. Fr. Heller puts forth this rather strange argument as follows:

“They implicitly revive the old manicheistic error postulating the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design.”

Read More ›

I read somewhere about a guy in Florida some years ago who was winning races in an offshore speed boat powered by hydrogen/oxygen by water electrolyzed on demand. He used a conventional piston engine modified slightly to run on hydrogen/oxygen (which is one of the most efficient fuels you can get). Normally there’s no way to store hydrogen and oxygen that’s lighter than a tank filled with gasoline. High pressure or cryogenic tanks are HEAVY and DANGEROUS. This guy had developed an extremely efficient method of rapidly electrolyzing water at a throttled rate where the combined weight of the batteries and electronics were much lighter than a tank of gasoline. He won races by having a superior power-to-weight ratio in Read More ›

Can science ever stop being skeptical of the dominant theory?

Ferenc Miskolczi may have discovered an upper bound to Greenhouse Effect. He found a “simplifying” assumption of an optically infinite atmospheric thickness in the original climate models. Modeling an optically finite atmospheric thickness clamped the “runaway greenhouse” projections.

Could similar “simplifying” assumptions be discovered in neo-Darwinian evolution’s random mutation with natural selection” that invalidate conventional wisdom?
—————————————-
New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals “runaway warming” impossible

Miklós Zágoni isn’t just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was. That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Langley Research Center. Read More ›

Further to Granville Sewell‘s work on the 2nd Law in an open system, here is Duncan & Semura profound insight into how loss of information is the foundation for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This appears foundational to the understanding and development and testing of origin theories and consequent change in physical and biotic systems. ———————

The key insight here is that when one attempts to derive the second law without any reference to information, a step which can be described as information loss always makes its way into the derivation by some sleight of hand. An information-losing approximation is necessary, and adds essentially new physics into the model which is outside the realm of energy dynamics.

Read More ›

From The Boston Globe: Can expectations influence how we judge the evidence?

SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices.

The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.

[…]

What they saw was the power of expectations. People expect expensive wines to taste better, and then their brains literally make it so. Wine lovers shouldn’t feel singled out: Antonio Rangel, the Caltech neuroeconomist who led the study, insists that he could have used a variety of items to get similar results, from bottled water to modern art.

[…]

After the researchers finished their brain imaging, they asked the subjects to taste the five different wines again, only this time the scientists didn’t provide any price information. Although the subjects had just listed the $90 wine as the most pleasant, they now completely reversed their preferences. When the tasting was truly blind, when the subjects were no longer biased by their expectations, the cheapest wine got the highest ratings. It wasn’t fancy, but it tasted the best.

Read More ›

David Berlinski is my favorite secular Jew and quintessential iconoclast. How could one not adore a guy who is a mathematician, no advocate of any religion, a Darwin skeptic, and phenomenally eloquent in both English and French, with a great penchant for ironic humor?

His latest opus is The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, due out in April.
Read More ›