New documentary, Privileged Species, features biochemist Michael Denton’s research

_{Denyse O'Leary

November 18, 2014

Evolution, Intelligent Design}

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Michael Denton is the author of Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (for which he is said to be working on a sequel). 3:00 EST:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #761 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #9 in Movies & TV > DVD > Documentary

As his bio page at Discovery Institute explains,

He has long adhered to a structuralist view of organic form, seeing much of the underlying order of life to be immanent in nature, the result of higher organizational principles or ‘laws of form’ which constrain the behaviour of complex higher order assemblages of biomatter. As he argues, because these organizational principles or laws are emergent, and only manifest by their influence on ‘higher order assemblages,’ they cannot be inferred from analysis of the individual molecular components or parts of living systems analyzed in isolation and consequently pose a severe challenge to the reductionist agenda. Darwinism is also challenged because they represent emergent causal agencies which are immanent in nature and have nothing to do with natural selection. Moreover as Denton stresses: “Emergent features of any composite or whole (like the properties of water) are only manifest when the components of the composite (hydrogen and oxygen) are ‘combined together.’ Because of this, they cannot be the result of cumulative Darwinian selection which is by definition a gradualistic process which can only build order bit by bit. Selection may choose and conserve the emergent properties of a whole but it cannot create them in the first place.”

The half-hour documentary is available at Amazon on DVD (Blu-ray to follow shortly).

Here’s Evolution News & Views’s intro:

The new documentary Privileged Species opens very dramatically with Bill “Science Guy” Nye addressing an American Humanist Association conference. To laughter and applause, Mr. Nye riffs on how being human means being no more than a mere “speck” in the universe.

I’m insignificant. … I am just another speck of sand. And the Earth really in the cosmic scheme of things is another speck. And the sun is an unremarkable star. Nothing special about the sun. The sun is another speck. And the galaxy is a speck. I’m a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.

…

On one hand there is Denton, who talks in Privileged Species about how “The human form is something significant in the cosmic order,” adding that that is a “scientific finding,” not a subjective judgment but an objective one, as objective as the unique properties of carbon, oxygen, and water. And then there is Nye, who says, in effect, “Human life sucks.” Unfortunately that is not Bill Nye’s lone, idiosyncratic view but one widely shared in and broadcast by the scientific and media communities.

Watch and decide.

Here’s the film’s site and here’s the trailer:

Comments

OT: Is Quantum Entanglement Real? - David Kaiser - Nov. 14, 2014 Excerpt: Even with these great successes, work remains to be done. Every experimental test of entanglement has been subject to one or more loopholes, which hold out the possibility, however slim, that some alternative theory, distinct from quantum theory and more in line with Einstein’s intuitions, may still be salvageable. For example, one potential loophole — addressed by Dr. Aspect’s experiment — was that the measurement device itself was somehow transmitting information about one particle to the other particle, which would explain the coordination between them. The most stubborn remaining loophole is known as “setting independence.” Dr. Zeilinger and I, working with several colleagues — including the physicists Alan H. Guth, Andrew S. Friedman and Jason Gallicchio — aim to close this loophole, a project that several of us described in an article in Physical Review Letters. HERE’S the problem. In any test of entanglement, the researcher must select the settings on each of the detectors of the experimental apparatus (choosing to measure, for example, a particle’s spin along one direction or another). The setting-independence loophole suggests that, though the researcher appears to be free to select any setting for the detectors, it is possible that he is not completely free: Some unnoticed causal mechanism in the past may have fixed the detectors’ settings in advance, or nudged the likelihood that one setting would be chosen over another. Bizarre as it may sound, even a minuscule amount of such coordination of the detectors’ settings would enable certain alternative theories to mimic the famous predictions from quantum theory. In such a case, entanglement would be merely a chimera. How to close this loophole? Well, obviously, we aren’t going to try to prove that humans have free will. But we can try something else. In our proposed experiment, the detector setting that is selected (say, measuring a particle’s spin along this direction rather than that one) would be determined not by us — but by an observed property of some of the oldest light in the universe (say, whether light from distant quasars arrives at Earth at an even- or odd-numbered microsecond). These sources of light are so far away from us and from one another that they would not have been able to receive a single light signal from one another, or from the position of the Earth, before the moment, billions of years ago, when they emitted the light that we detect here on Earth today. That is, we would guarantee that any strange “nudging” or conspiracy among the detector settings — if it does exist — would have to have occurred all the way back at the Hot Big Bang itself, nearly 14 billion years ago. If, as we expect, the usual predictions from quantum theory are borne out in this experiment, we will have constrained various alternative theories as much as physically possible in our universe. If not, that would point toward a profoundly new physics. Either way, the experiment promises to be exciting — a fitting way, we hope, to mark Bell’s paper’s 50th anniversary. - David Kaiser is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches physics and the history of science. His latest book is “How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/opinion/sunday/is-quantum-entanglement-real.html?_r=1 My only question right now is not if they will close the free will loop hole but, "By how many standard deviations will they close it?",,, These guys don't mess around, they closed the last loophole by 70 standard deviations, and verified Leggett's inequality to 120 standard deviations!bornagain77_{November 19, 2014
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supplemental notes as to the overturning of the Copernican principle,,,
Is there a violation of the Copernican principle in radio sky? – Ashok K. Singal – May 17, 2013 Abstract: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) observations from the WMAP satellite have shown some unexpected anisotropies (directionally dependent observations), which surprisingly seem to be aligned with the ecliptic\cite {20,16,15}. The latest data from the Planck satellite have confirmed the presence of these anisotropies\cite {17}. Here we report even larger anisotropies in the sky distributions of powerful extended quasars and some other sub-classes of radio galaxies in the 3CRR catalogue, one of the oldest and most intensively studies sample of strong radio sources\cite{21,22,3}. The anisotropies lie about a plane passing through the two equinoxes and the north celestial pole (NCP). We can rule out at a 99.995% confidence level the hypothesis that these asymmetries are merely due to statistical fluctuations. Further, even the distribution of observed radio sizes of quasars and radio galaxies show large systematic differences between these two sky regions. The redshift distribution appear to be very similar in both regions of sky for all sources, which rules out any local effects to be the cause of these anomalies. Two pertinent questions then arise. First, why should there be such large anisotropies present in the sky distribution of some of the most distant discrete sources implying inhomogeneities in the universe at very large scales (covering a fraction of the universe)? What is intriguing even further is why such anisotropies should lie about a great circle decided purely by the orientation of earth’s rotation axis and/or the axis of its revolution around the sun? It looks as if these axes have a preferential placement in the larger scheme of things, implying an apparent breakdown of the Copernican principle or its more generalization, cosmological principle, upon which all modern cosmological theories are based upon. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.4134.pdf Why is the solar system cosmically aligned? BY Dragan Huterer – 2007 The solar system seems to line up with the largest cosmic features. Is this mere coincidence or a signpost to deeper insights? Caption under figure on page 43: ODD ALIGNMENTS hide within the multipoles of the cosmic microwave background. In this combination of the quadrupole and octopole, a plane bisects the sphere between the largest warm and cool lobes. The ecliptic — the plane of Earth’s orbit projected onto the celestial sphere — is aligned parallel to the plane between the lobes. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~huterer/PRESS/CMB_Huterer.pdf Of note: The preceding article was written before the Planck data (with WMPA & COBE data), but the multipoles were actually verified by Planck data in 2013. A Large Scale Pattern from Optical Quasar Polarization Vectors – 2013 Testing the Dipole Modulation Model in CMBR – 2013
A few more notes that support the overturning of the Copernican principle:
Privileged Species – How the cosmos is designed for human life – website http://privilegedspecies.com/ The Place of Life and Man in Nature: Defending the Anthropocentric Thesis – Michael J. Denton – February 25, 2013 Summary (page 11) Many of the properties of the key members of Henderson’s vital ensemble —water, oxygen, CO2, HCO3 —are in several instances fit specifically for warm-blooded, air-breathing organisms such as ourselves. These include the thermal properties of water, its low viscosity, the gaseous nature of oxygen and CO2 at ambient temperatures, the inertness of oxygen at ambient temperatures, and the bicarbonate buffer, with its anomalous pKa value and the elegant means of acid-base regulation it provides for air-breathing organisms. Some of their properties are irrelevant to other classes of organisms or even maladaptive. It is very hard to believe there could be a similar suite of fitness for advanced carbon-based life forms. If carbon-based life is all there is, as seems likely, then the design of any active complex terrestrial being would have to closely resemble our own. Indeed the suite of properties of water, oxygen, and CO2 together impose such severe constraints on the design and functioning of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems that their design, even down to the details of capillary and alveolar structure can be inferred from first principles. For complex beings of high metabolic rate, the designs actualized in complex Terran forms are all that can be. There are no alternative physiological designs in the domain of carbon-based life that can achieve the high metabolic activity manifest in man and other higher organisms. http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2013.1/BIO-C.2013.1 The Privileged Planet – video playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnWyPIzTOTw&list=PL61BE8DBE544FE20C “The very conditions that make Earth hospitable to intelligent life also make it well suited to viewing and analyzing the universe as a whole.” - Jay Richards - Privileged Planet “The same narrow circumstances that allow us to exist also provide us with the best over all conditions for making scientific discoveries.” - Guillermo Gonzalez – Astronomer - Privileged Planet The Fine-Tuning for Discoverability – Robin Collins – March 22, 2014 Excerpt: The most dramatic confirmation of the discoverability/livability optimality thesis (DLO) is the dependence of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) on the baryon to photon ratio.,,, …the intensity of CMB depends on the photon to baryon ratio, (??b), which is the ratio of the average number of photons per unit volume of space to the average number of baryons (protons plus neutrons) per unit volume. At present this ratio is approximately a billion to one (10^9) , but it could beanywhere from one to infinity; it traces back to the degree of asymmetry in matter and anti – matter right after the beginning of the universe – for approximately every billion particles of antimatter, there was a billion and one particles of matter.,,, The only livability effect this ratio has is on whether or not galaxies can form that have near – optimally livability zones. As long as this condition is met, the value of this ratio has no further effects on livability. Hence, the DLO predicts that within this range, the value of this ratio will be such as to maximize the intensity of the CMB as observed by typical observers. According to my calculations – which have been verified by three other physicists — to within the margin of error of the experimentally determined parameters (~20%), the value of the photon to baryon ratio is such that it maximizes the CMB. This is shown in Figure 1 below. (pg. 13) It is easy to see that this prediction could have been disconfirmed. In fact, when I first made the calculations in the fall of 2011, I made a mistake and thought I had refuted this thesis since those calculations showed the intensity of the CMB maximizes at a value different than the photon – baryon ratio in our universe. So, not only does the DLO lead us to expect this ratio, but it provides an ultimate explanation for why it has this value,,, This is a case of a teleological thesis serving both a predictive and an ultimate explanatory role.,,, http://home.messiah.edu/~rcollins/Fine-tuning/Greer-Heard%20Forum%20paper%20draft%20for%20posting.pdf
As well,,
We Live At The Right Time In Cosmic History (To see the Cosmic Background Radiation) – Hugh Ross – video http://vimeo.com/31940671 Hugh Ross – The Anthropic Principle and The Anthropic Inequality – video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/8494065/
At the 38:10 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Huterer speaks of the ‘why right now? coincidence problem’ for dark matter and visible matter:
Dragan Huterer – ‘coincidence problem’ – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qTJc1Y7duM#t=2290
All in all, as far as the science itself is concerned, I consider the Copernican principle to be dead and buried,,,
Isaiah 45:18-19 For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens, who is God, who formed the earth and made it, who established it, who did not create it in vain, who formed it to be inhabited: “I am the Lord, and there is no other. I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth; I did not say to the seed of Jacob, ‘seek me in vain’; I, the Lord speak righteousness, I declare things that are right.”
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The overturning of the Copernican principle, i.e. the principle of mediocrity.,,, Recently (2014) Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano claimed,,
“First, what is our relationship to the rest of the universe? Copernicus answered that one. We’re not at the center. We’re a speck in a large place.”
Actually, contrary to what Michael Graziano believes, and as General Relativity has now shown, the earth, and each one of us, is spatially at the center of a 4-Dimensional expanding hypersphere:
“There is no centre of the universe! According to the standard theories of cosmology, the universe started with a “Big Bang” about 14 thousand million years ago and has been expanding ever since. Yet there is no centre to the expansion; it is the same everywhere. The Big Bang should not be visualized as an ordinary explosion. The universe is not expanding out from a centre into space; rather, the whole universe is expanding and it is doing so equally at all places, as far as we can tell.” Philip Gibbs - Where is the centre of the universe? - 1997 Centrality of The Earth Within The 4-Dimensional Space-Time of General Relativity – video https://vimeo.com/98189061
Thus from a 3-dimensional (3D) perspective, any particular 3D spot in the universe is to be considered just as ‘center of the universe’ as any other particular spot in the universe is to be considered ‘center of the universe’. This centrality found for any 3D place in the universe is because the universe is a 4D expanding hypersphere, analogous in 3D to the surface of an expanding balloon. All points on the surface are moving away from each other, and every point is central, no matter where you live in the universe. Moreover, the ‘circle’ of the CMBR that is found by modern science to encompass the Earth, from the remnant of the creation event that brought the entire universe instantaneously into being, was actually predicted in the Bible many centuries earlier:
Proverbs 8:27 (King James Version) “When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he drew a circle upon the face of the depth:” Proverbs 8:27 (New International Version) “I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,” Job 26:10 He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.
Moreover, as if that did not overturn the Copernican principle all by itself, quantum mechanics goes even further and states that each conscious observer is central in the universe,,,
Quantum Enigma:Physics Encounters Consciousness – Richard Conn Henry – Professor of Physics – John Hopkins University Excerpt: It is more than 80 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics gave us the most fundamental insight ever into our nature: the overturning of the Copernican Revolution, and the restoration of us human beings to centrality in the Universe. And yet, have you ever before read a sentence having meaning similar to that of my preceding sentence? Likely you have not, and the reason you have not is, in my opinion, that physicists are in a state of denial… https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-quantum-enigma-of-consciousness-and-the-identity-of-the-designer/
Dr. Henry was even more blunt in his assessment when Leggett's inequality was confirmed:
Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger by Richard Conn Henry – Physics Professor – John Hopkins University Excerpt: Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the “illusion” of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist). (Dr. Henry’s referenced experiment and paper – “An experimental test of non-local realism” by S. Gröblacher et. al., Nature 446, 871, April 2007 – “To be or not to be local” by Alain Aspect, Nature 446, 866, April 2007 (Leggett’s Inequality: Verified, as of 2011, to 120 standard deviations) http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/aspect.html
I find it extremely interesting, and strange, that quantum mechanics tells us that instantaneous quantum wave collapse to its ‘uncertain’ 3D state is centered on each individual conscious observer in the universe, whereas, 4D space-time cosmology (General Relativity) tells us each 3D point in the universe is central to the expansion of the universe. These findings of modern science are pretty much exactly what we would expect to see if this universe were indeed created, and sustained, from a higher dimension by a omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal Being who knows everything that is happening everywhere in the universe at the same time. These findings certainly seem to go to the very heart of the age old question asked of many parents by their children, “How can God hear everybody’s prayers at the same time?”,,, i.e. Why should the expansion of the universe, or the quantum wave collapse of the entire universe, even care that you or I, or anyone else, should exist? Only Theism, Christian Theism in particular, offers a rational explanation as to why you or I, or anyone else, should have such undeserved significance in such a vast universe.
Psalm 33:13-15 The LORD looks from heaven; He sees all the sons of men. From the place of His dwelling He looks on all the inhabitants of the earth; He fashions their hearts individually; He considers all their works. The Galileo Affair and “Life/Consciousness” as the true “Center of the Universe” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BHAcvrc913SgnPcDohwkPnN4kMJ9EDX-JJSkjc4AXmA/edit
Moreover, from a slightly different angle, ‘Life’, with a capital L, is also found to be central to the universe in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides a very credible, empirically backed, reconciliation to the most profound enigma in modern science. Namely Christ’s resurrection solves the unification of General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics/Special Relativity (Quantum Electrodynamics) into a ‘Theory of Everything’:
The Center Of The Universe Is Life (Jesus Christ) – General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Entropy and The Shroud Of Turin – video http://vimeo.com/34084462
Music:
Jesus at the center of it all (4 yr old Hayley Jones) - music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWNX0xpCsWU
Of Related Note:
Two very different ‘eternities’ revealed by physics: Special Relativity, General Relativity, Heaven and Hell https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_4cQ7MXq8bLkoFLYW0kq3Xq-Hkc3c7r-gTk0DYJQFSg/edit
The following site is also very interesting to the topic of ‘centrality in the universe’;
The Scale of The Universe – Part 2 – interactive graph (recently updated in 2012 with cool features) http://htwins.net/scale2/
The preceding interactive graph points out that the smallest scale visible to the human eye (as well as a human egg) is at 10^-4 meters, which ‘just so happens’ to be directly in the exponential center of all possible sizes of our physical reality (not just ‘nearly’ in the exponential center!). i.e. 10^-4 is, exponentially, right in the middle of 10^-35 meters, which is the smallest possible unit of length, which is Planck length, and 10^27 meters, which is the largest possible unit of ‘observable’ length since space-time was created in the Big Bang, which is the diameter of the universe. This is very interesting for, as far as I can tell, the limits to human vision (as well as the size of the human egg) could have, theoretically, been at very different positions than directly in the exponential middle.bornagain77_{November 19, 2014
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OT: Biological Information - Entropy, Evolution and Open Systems 11-15-2014 by Paul Giem - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_G9HtsfXfs Protein Folding https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/s640x640/10420373_766634103404929_8014133858343576294_n.png?oh=66c66d9e06ea77a0ba6f753f079f9e08&oe=54DD121A&__gda__=1423048615_ccf19afb368ccc486d06c48bc126479cbornagain77_{November 19, 2014
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bb. Well done and said. Saying we are just specks is a aggressive rejection of Christianity and Christian civilization which nye is a inheritor and product of.Robert Byers_{November 18, 2014
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I’m a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.
Oddly and ironically enough, I guess Nye agrees with King David. Psalm 8 (ESV):
3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, 4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet David grasps God's great love for mankind and the position bestowed, despite our obvious insignificance.
5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. 6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, 7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
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I guess he’s no longer Bill Nye the ‘Science Guy’ – he’s now Bill Nye the ‘Sucking Speck’...Heartlander_{November 18, 2014
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That is such an encouraging message for all the young minds that he has shared science with over the years. Gag.OldArmy94_{November 18, 2014
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