Here, well-known physicist author Paul Davies acknowledges that we have no idea how life began. However, the TalkOrigins forces of certainty are ever at work, stomping on reasonable doubt. Of course, rubes doubt the TalkOrigins “donut hole” explanations. But that just proves they are rubes. Rubes never realize that the hole is the very best part of the donut, full of nutritional value. They keep wanting the stuff on the outside of the hole, for no good reason.

A woman who has had a normal mammogram shortly afterward develops an aggressive tumour? In “Cancer Can Develop in Catastrophic Burst”, Nicholas Wade ( New York Times, January 10, 2011) reports The finding marks a striking exception to the current theory of how cancer develops. Cells are thought to become cancerous over many years as they collect, one by one, the mutations required to override the many genetic restraints on a cell’s growth. It now seems that a cell can gain all or most of these cancerous mutations in a single event. Darwinists might well contain their hopes, however. It is a single destructive event. Not a single creative event. Usually a cell that suffers this much damage will destroy Read More ›

“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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Interesting article in PLoS Medicine (source): Why Most Published Research Findings Are False By John P. A. Ioannidis Abstract: There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and Read More ›

Steve Martin performed the following on Letterman a few weeks back:

Well, the problem in Washington, DC schools was roughly this drama in three acts:

Standardized test scores improved dramatically. In 2006, only 10% of Noyes’ students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math on the standardized tests required by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Two years later, 58% achieved that level. The school showed similar gains in reading.[ … ]

Twice in three years, she rewarded Noyes’ staff for boosting scores: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher won an $8,000 bonus, and the principal won $10,000.

[ … ]

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

– from Jack Gillum and Marisol Bello, “When standardized test scores soared in D.C., were the gains real?” (USA Today , March 28, 2011)

Like most human beings, I am implicitly a non-materialist, so I would think, the important question is, who made the extra erasures and when? Read More ›

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 ›

Here are the edited conference proceedings (.pdf) of a roundtable discussion among leading astrobiologists, to relate atrobiology goals to planning in planetary sciences: “The Next Phase in Our Search for Life: An Expert Discussion”:

Moderator: Christopher P. McKayParticipants: Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Penelope Jane Boston, Inge L. ten Kate, Alfonso F. Davila, and Everett Shock

Some interesting stuff here:

PJB: I served for about three years on the National Research Council (NRC) Complex Panel and just about everybriefng we received from anyone within the planetary programs always included the life question, because it is something that’s on everyone’s mind, whether they do this kind of science or not.

This question is one that I have struggled with a lot. To scope out the physical and chemical environment is really inextricably bound to the search for life, and it is true that we have focused a great deal on that because, truthfully, it is a lot easier to measure a physical parameter on Mars than it is to, ‘‘search for life,’’ because that latter question is so open-ended. We have a very poor constraint set on what we actually mean by the term ‘‘life,’’ and searching for biochemistry and macromolecules that look just like those on Earth is not an efficient approach. It is much more challenging to imagine how we would actually design a real life detection mission.

So people are tempted to shy away from coming to grips with that very difficult epistemological question, which is: Read More ›

See this beautiful image of a flowering plant from the Cretaceous era. It killed the dinosaurs? … Mmmm … probably not. I spent some time thinking how to arrange these branches in a vase, had they survived, and then decided, no: Outdoor container gardening, overwinter in cool greenhouse. May need support. (= Will need support, but no rush.) We seem to get better fossils all the time. Who says there’s no progress? This would make a great fabric print too.

A friend points to this review of an interesting new book:

In Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy, Sandra D. Mitchell accomplishes an enormous amount in very short compass. Starting from the actual practice of (mainly) biological and (some) social sciences, she presents a workable and effective philosophy of science focused particularly on sciences dealing with complex subject matters. Drawing on nicely handled examples from psychiatry (e.g., major depressive disorder), biology (e.g., recent genetics and genomics, drug discovery, the study of insect societies), and the policy world (e.g., climate change and economic problems), Mitchell develops and illustrates a philosophy of science suited to the complexities scientists face. The result is a compact and elegant presentation of a philosophy she calls “integrative pluralism,” challenging many orthodox positions in the philosophy of science. While keeping her examples in the foreground, Mitchell provides a philosophical basis for rethinking the methods for analyzing complex systems in situations involving considerable uncertainty. She also demonstrates by example the value and reach of her philosophical approach in contrast with more conventional philosophies of science, from Popperian falsification and standard forms of inductive reasoning to sophisticated forms of theory and model testing.

Long overdue, if you ask me.

“Considerable uncertainty”? Um, yes. Most human systems are unthinkably complex.

That does not mean we can’t act or make decisions, but it does mean that we must work with fuzzy boundaries: Causes of Alzheimer? Dangers of radiation? Sin/salvation foods? Alternative medical treatments? Last ditch cancer fight? Simple answers, begone!

For example, Read More ›

First, it’s okay to doubt the received ape-ology nostrums. No, really. It is.

Re that:  Memo to Templeton’s Rod Dreher: It is still okay to doubt received nostrums. And it had better be.

Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery Publishing), wrote to introduce us to the “other side” of Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson (for Gilead, 2005), who recently took the occasion of her four Yale Terry Lectures to attack the evolutionary biologists who talk as if science were atheism writ large.

But let Bethell tell it: 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 ›

Well some profs say, in this recent academic push poll (“Death Anxiety Prompts People to Believe in Intelligent Design, Reject Evolution, Study Suggests,” ScienceDaily, March 30, 2011). They did an experiment that they say demonstrates it:

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Union College (Schenectady, N.Y.) have found that people’s death anxiety can influence them to support theories of intelligent design and reject evolutionary theory.Existential anxiety also prompted people to report increased liking for Michael Behe, intelligent design’s main proponent, and increased disliking for evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

The lead author is UBC Psychology Asst. Prof. Jessica Tracy with co-authors Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology at Union College, and UBC psychology PhD student Jason Martens.

Published in the March 30 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, their paper is the first to examine the implicit psychological motives that underpin one of the most heated debates in North America. Despite scientific consensus that intelligent design theory is inherently unscientific, 25 per cent of high school biology teachers in the U.S. devote at least some class time to the topic of intelligent design.

An extract from Carl Sagan provided the missing teddy bear, absent in Dawkins, to help people accept Dawkins’s materialist atheism. Personally, I think the most remarkable part is that the push pollers even did the study. I can remember when ID was supposed to be dead, then a threat, then a menace, then more of a menace, then … better get out the thesaurus we are in the repetition zone …

Anyway, some comments landed on my desk, including one from one from psychologist Jack Cole on what it means and one from Mike Behe, advising that, in the test passages for this study, something he had not written was attributed to him (surprise, surprise):

Cole, a practising psychologist and Uncommon Descent moderator, notes:

The fear of death is not actually measured in this study, but is in fact inferred. The measure of mood in the study actually showed an increase in positive mood after thinking about one’s own death. It is not explicitly stated, but this is inferred to be more of an unconscious process. From the study authors: 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.

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