1. Dawkins claims in public, ignoring his OWN writings, that “little junk DNA” is just what Darwin’s followers would have expected.
2. Christian Darwinists, including Francis Collins, misrepresent C.S. Lewis. Never really supported Darwin.
3. Claim in Nature: Human moral compasses are easily confused. Study really shows that most people don’t read carefully if they don’t care much
4. TED talks creator Wurman says they’ve lost their jazz. Now plans new type of event most of us can’t afford.
5. Oldest galaxy ever detected?
6. Wikipedia in (inevitable) corruption scandal
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1. Dawkins claims, in defiance of evidence from his OWN writings, that “not much junk DNA” is just what Darwin’s followers would have expected
In “In Debate, Britain’s Chief Rabbi Tweaks Richard Dawkins with the Myth of ‘Junk DNA’”
(Evolution News & Views September 20, 2012), David Klinghoffer reports,
On the junk DNA point, though, Dawkins manages to squirm out and seems to turn it to his own advantage (at about 13:00). In his telling now, the discovery that junk DNA is not junk at all isn’t a blow to Darwinist predictions but — yes, you guessed right — exactly what a Darwinist would expect.
I have noticed that there are some creationists who are jumping on [the ENCODE results] because they think that’s awkward for Darwinism. Quite the contrary it’s exactly what a Darwinist would hope for, to find usefulness in the living world….
But, as Klinghoffer notes,
If I had been whispering at Rabbi Sacks’s elbow, I would have suggested he point out that Dawkins has changed his tune. Back in 2009, in The Greatest Show on Earth (pp. 332-333), he was presenting the supposed junkiness of the vast majority of the genome as an assured scientific reality and one that is, in the specific case of “pseudogenes,” “useful for. . . embarrassing creationists.”
A reader writes to explain why Darwinists always have an answer even when a specific claim (“junk DNA proves Darwin was right”) is confuted, as it was by the ENCODE project. Riffing off a film, maybe Full Metal Jacket, he quotes:
“How do you know if they’re Viet Cong?”
“They run when they see the chopper.”
“Those guys were standing still.”
“They’re highly disciplined Viet Cong.”*
Make no mistake: people do this sort of thing when they have the cultural power to get away with it and destroy those who call them to account. That’s it; not logic, reason, evidence, facts or history.
Another reader writes,
Perhaps the funniest moment was watching Dawkin’s face when the Rabbi said, “There are Jewish atheists and there are Christian atheists. You, Richard,
are a Christian atheist.”
* We’ve heard it as “”If they run, they’re Viet Cong. If they don’t run, they’re highly disciplined Viet Cong.”—Full Metal Jacket.” Same basic idea. Top people cannot be wrong.
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2. Christian Darwinists, including Francis Collins, misrepresent C.S. Lewis
In “Up From Evolution” (American Spectator, 9.21.12), Tom Bethell reviews The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society (Discovery Institute Press, 2012), a collection of essays edited by John West:
In the past, some evolutionists claimed Lewis as an ally. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, a Christian who admired Lewis and was influenced by him, believed that Lewis accepted that “Christians should accept the animal ancestry of humans.” But he neglected to study Lewis’s published comments. Others have openly misrepresented what he believed on the subject.
Lewis was “a thoroughgoing skeptic of the creative power of unguided natural selection,” John West points out, and as the years passed he became increasingly critical.
[ … ]
Of particular interest are Lewis’s comments in his posthumously published book, The Discarded Image. He notes the shift in recent centuries “from a devolutionary to an evolutionary scheme”; from a cosmology in which it was once considered axiomatic that “all perfect things precede all imperfect things.” That is a quotation from the sixth century philosopher Boethius, who wrote the Consolation of Philosophy, a work widely read in the Middle Ages. Today, in biology at least, “the starting point is always lower than what is developed,” Lewis commented.
The modern intelligent design movement has raised a related question:
More.
See also newly discovered notes shed light on Lewis’s doubts.
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3. Claim in Nature: Human moral compasses are easily confused
In “How to confuse a moral compass: Survey ‘magic trick’ causes attitude reversal”
(Nature, 19 September 2012), Zoë Corbyn reports on a survey that is supposed to be about how people’s moral compass can just change but is actually about how many people, in this case Swedes, do not read or think carefully:
Two statements in every hidden set had been reworded to mean the opposite of the original statements. For example, if the top statement read, “Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism,” the word ‘forbidden’ was replaced with ‘permitted’ in the hidden statement.
Sure enough, 53% of the 160 volunteers started arguing for the opposite position from what they hold.
While the study quite properly raises an issue about the value of unsupported self-reports, it probably isn’t valid about topics people know and care about:
Tania Lombrozo, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that the experiment is “creative and careful”, but adds that it would be good to see the findings replicated with a more diverse group of participants and a broader range of claims, including those more likely to play a role in people’s everyday judgement and behaviour. “For example, would people fail to notice a change in their judgement concerning the ethics of meat consumption and subsequently provide a justification for a view that isn’t their own?” she asks.
One might add, hot button issues like capital punishment, abortion, gun control, or “My job going overseas.”
The study is just another push poll for “People don’t really know what they think” (and therefore their moral and intellectual superiors should tell them). The trick here is to choose an issue where respondents don’t know enough about the issues to have an opinion from personal knowledge and experience.
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4. TED talks creator Wurman says they’ve lost their jazz
Now plans new type of event most of us can’t afford.
In “Life after TED” (Financial Times September 29, 2012), April Dembosky
Ideas conferences have lost their spontaneity, says Richard Saul Wurman. His solution? A $16,000-a-ticket event featuring David Blaine [pianist], Herbie Hancock [stuntman] and 72 hours of ‘intellectual jazz’
TED talks here.
For Wurman every detail is an important part of the experience he is trying to create: a series of conversations, threaded together by themes and meals and musical breaks that, taken together as a whole, feels like a piece of theatre.
It is something he feels he achieved for several years with TED, which he first hosted in 1984 in Monterey, California. The event grew and grew, and since Wurman sold it in 2001 for $14m, has developed cult status, attracting thousands of followers jockeying for its $7,500 entry tickets for four days filled with highly produced 18-minute “talks of a lifetime”. TED Talks, a series of lecture videos posted online, have received more than 800m views to date. University professors assign them as required course material. Some airlines, such as Delta, even have a TED channel on their in-flight entertainment systems.
But, in Wurman’s opinion, TED today has become over-orchestrated, too “slick”. He intends WWW to be the opposite, to be an exercise in improvisation through conversation or, as the conference tagline runs, “intellectual jazz”. The event’s title, WWW, does not have a single meaning, says Wurman, suggesting instead a long list of words beginning with “w”, including “wanderlust”, “warming” and “wizardry”.
More. Was the current chattering class scene bound to come to this?
The 20 most-watched TED talks tell us something. If one of the talks featured an ID proponent explaining what is wrong with Darwinism, it most likely could not be broadcast, due to riling Darwin’s trolls. Which tells us of another part of the problem.
All TED talks here.
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5. Oldest galaxy ever detected?
From “Ultra-Distant Galaxy Discovered Amidst Cosmic ‘Dark Ages’: May Be Oldest Galaxy Ever” (Science Daily, September 19, 2012), we learn of the galaxy, found viagraviational lensing, that dates from 500 million years after the 13.7 mya Big Bang,
Based on the Spitzer and Hubble observations, astronomers think the distant galaxy was spied at a time when it was less than 200 million years old. It also is small and compact, containing only about 1 percent of the Milky Way’s mass. According to leading cosmological theories, the first galaxies should indeed have started out tiny. They then progressively merged, eventually accumulating into the sizable galaxies of the more modern universe.
“This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” – astronomer Wei Zheng of The Johns Hopkins University
These first galaxies likely played the dominant role in the epoch of reionization, the event that signaled the demise of the universe’s Dark Ages. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, neutral hydrogen gas formed from cooling particles. The first luminous stars and their host galaxies, however, did not emerge until a few hundred million years later. The energy released by these earliest galaxies is thought to have caused the neutral hydrogen strewn throughout the universe to ionize, or lose an electron, the state in which the gas has remained since that time.
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6. Wikipedia in (inevitable) corruption scandal
Recently, some commenters were squawking about jabs we and others have taken at Wikipedia, world sinkhole of flattened opinion, and the worst way to find out anything about the ID controversy. Well, now this, and who is surprised? In “Corruption in Wikiland? Paid PR scandal erupts at Wikipedia” (C/Net, September 18, 2012), Violet Blue reports,
A Wikipedia trustee and a Wikipedian In Residence have been editing the online encyclopedia on behalf of PR clients. Add the discovery of an SEO business run on the side, and this tempest is out of its teapot.
Both Klein and Bamkin are “Wikipedians In Residence,” a role held by Wikipedia editors in high esteem who liaison with galleries, libraries, archives and museums to facilitate information between the organizations and Wikipedia community editors.
Defenders will rush to assert, of course, that these are isolated instances. How do they know? Who knows how many of the trolls, crackpots, and bigots who camp at Wikipedia and erase fact-based edits are in fact paid by someone, if not Wikipedia, to do just that?
Of course not all Wikipedia sites are troll holes, but when some you know about are, you should take Bertrand Russell’s approach to finding rotten apples in a barrel: Assume they are all rotten and move on.
The teapot is smashed, actually, but it would be contrary to the spirit of flattened knowledge to notice that.
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