Science

http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060110_bee_fight.html

Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being rather than evolution is responsible for life’s complexities, have long criticized science for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly.
……….
Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can’t explain everything in nature.

“People in the ID community have said that we don’t even know how bees fly,” Altshuler said. “We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.”

Read More ›

Randomness Is Unpredictability
Antony Eagle
Exeter College and Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3DP, UK
antony.eagle@philosophy.oxford.ac.uk

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(4):749-790; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi138

The concept of randomness has been unjustly neglected in recent philosophical literature, and when philosophers have thought about it, they have usually acquiesced in views about the concept that are fundamentally flawed. After indicating the ways in which these accounts are flawed, I propose that randomness is to be understood as a special case of the epistemic concept of the unpredictability of a process. This proposal arguably captures the intuitive desiderata for the concept of randomness; at least it should suggest that the commonly accepted accounts cannot be the whole story and more philosophical attention needs to be paid. Read More ›

I’ve decided to write a series of articles touching upon ID-relevant portions of the seminal book describing the nanotechnology revolution “Engines of Creation” by K. Eric Drexler. The book was originally published in hardcover in 1986 and purchased/read by me that year. This year marks its 20th anniversary and is a good point to take a look at where its predictions on the path and nature of the nanotechnology revolution stand two decades later. It is now in the public domain in hypertext format here: Engines of Creation For this introductory article I want to skip up to the second to last chapter. EOC Chapter 14: The Network of Knowledge Chapter 14 discusses the (at the time: 1986) revolutionary new Read More ›

http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/show_article.asp?9385

I reported earlier on this blog that I was to be the only gentile speaker at an Orthodox Jewish (Lubavitcher) conference on Torah and science (go here, here, and here). That conference took place in Miami last week, and I gave a talk there on ID (December 14th). The talk was very well attended with several high school senior classes from the local Jewish schools attending along with a fair amount of press. I felt very much at home with the Lubavitchers, and I was extremely gratified by their receptivity to ID. These are well-educated thoughtful people with a great stake in not letting a materialistic view of science steamroller their religious faith. They will be significant allies in coming Read More ›

Note the following concession at the end of this New Scientist interview: “If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent – maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation – I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature’s fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.”

By the way, I cite Susskind in my book No Free Lunch (p. 338): “When Alan Guth first began proposing his inflationary cosmology, Lenny Susskind remarked [to Guth]: ‘You know, the most amazing thing is that they pay us for this.'” Don’t expect this sort of light-hearted incredulity from Susskind anymore. The stakes are now much higher. It’s no longer a matter of theoretical physicists with their heads in the clouds collecting fat paychecks from schools like Stanford and spinning out theories with only the most tenuous connection to empirical data. Now it’s a matter of destroying ID. Read More ›

With questions so basic as these, why is evolutionary theory taught with such confidence in our textbooks? THE QUESTIONS The Top 25 Essays by our news staff on 25 big questions facing science over the next quarter-century. http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/125th > What Is the Universe Made Of? > What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness? > Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes? > To What Extent Are Genetic Variation and Personal Health Linked? > Can the Laws of Physics Be Unified? > How Much Can Human Life Span Be Extended? > What Controls Organ Regeneration? > How Can a Skin Cell Become a Nerve Cell? > How Does a Single Somatic Cell Become a Whole Plant? > How Does Earth’s Interior Read More ›

In elementary logic, from premises P1: If A, then B and P2: A, one may conclude B. This rule is called modus ponens. Evolutionary logic now has a particular application of this rule which it is attempting to foist on science as a whole. It runs as follows: P1: If a claim or idea seems to support ID, then it needs to be rejected even if previously you thought there were good arguments to support it. P2: The claim or idea seems to support ID. C: Therefore it needs to be rejected regardless of the sound reasons you previously thought supported it. Here’s an example. According to Jack Cohen, Peter Ward has now gone back on his Rare Earth thesis Read More ›

Simon Conway Morris is scheduled to do the 2006-07 Gifford Lectures on the topic “What organic evolution tells us about our place in the universe, not least in terms of religious perspectives and natural theology “: http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/Admin/Gifford/

When reading the following, remember that string theory is taught and discussed in physics courses. Also ask yourself whether Gross’s criticisms apply to evolutionary theory — is it “missing something absolutely fundamental”?

Nobel laureate admits string theory is in trouble
10 December 2005
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18825293.700.html

“WE DON’T know what we are talking about.” That was Nobel laureate David Gross at the 23rd Solvay Conference in Physics in Brussels, Belgium, during his concluding remarks on Saturday. He was referring to string theory – the attempt to unify the otherwise incompatible theories of relativity and quantum mechanics to provide a theory of everything. Read More ›

[From an engineering colleague:] “This paper gives a nice historical perspective on the development of the theory of noise, from its origins with Brownian motion. It also has some amusing quotes from prominent scientists of the last century denying the existence of atoms with a certainty that can only be matched by today’s Darwinists denying any challenges to evolution.” The history of noise Leon Cohen City Univ. of New York (USA) SPIE Digital Library ABSTRACT: “Noise” had a glorious birth. While there were rumblings before 1905, it was Einstein’s explanation of Brownian motion that started the field. His motivation was not the mere explanation of the erratic movement of pollen, but much bigger: that noise could establish the existence of Read More ›

[From a philosopher colleague:]

I am visiting Harvard, and I was reading the conservative student
paper here, and came across an interesting quote from from Richard
Wrangham, a biologist, on the gaps in science that Intelligent Design
theorists point to: “Given that everything we know about science
gives us confidence that these details either have already or will
shortly be provided, this is both an unhelpful and an improbable claim.”

Nevermind the Intelligent Design context specifically. What I am
interested in is whether there can be a good reason for a naturalist
(and this guy may not be one, though his being a biologist, alas, makes
it more likely than not given the stats) to believe of an unsolved
scientific problem that a solution will eventually be found
(“shortly” or not). The argument seems to be an induction: We have
solved so many prior scientific problems that we have a reasonable
confidence that we will solve this one. Read More ›

Go here for audio-on-demand and here for podcast. For the wave file of the debate, go here: http://www.audiomartini.com/Shermer_Dembski.wma

Concerning Nicholas Kristof’s NYTimes Op-Ed that appeared yesterday:

[From a colleague:] It is ironic that Mr. Kristoff chose to convey his disdain for the humanities by employing language rather than statistics or flow charts.

He writes that the officers of the Third Reich were steeped in Kant and Goethe,” but they were also whizzes in mathematics, the medical science, natural gas, and the technology of efficient transportation, for without
those four the Holocaust would have had far fewer victims. It is not the latter four that impart to Mr. Kistof his belief that the Third Reich was wrong. In fact, his notion that the humanities are less important than the
sciences is not a scientific judgment, but a philosophical claim about the order of things. Mr. Kristof must rely on that which he despises. If he had studied the humanities well, he would have not made such a freshman
philosophy student mistake. But then again, he writes for the New York Times.

Mr. Kristof writes that “the U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn’t realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be.” That’s exactly how the Goethe-Kant reading Nazis would have put it if confronted with criticisms of their use of human subjects to find cures for the powerful. Anti-science in the German 1940s meant you were against fewer lampshades made out of people with names like Goldberg and Einstein. This is what happens when we take the “human” out of humanities and let the cultural barbarians dictate to us what is right and wrong. Read More ›

http://www.lubavitch.com/Article.asp?Section=10&Article=728 . . . Professor Dembski, considered by many to be the most articulate advocate of Intelligent Design, will address the place of intelligent design in the natural sciences, followed by an interactive question and answer period with the audience. . . .