Here’s today’s Wall Street Journal on ClimateGate: Global Warming With the Lid Off The emails that reveal an effort to hide the truth about climate science. ‘The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.” So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to “Mike.” Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director Read More ›

Science can be wrong about some things and still make great discoveries and inventions. One can believe the earth is flat or that electrons are nothing more than tiny billiard balls and still make progress. The history of science is a fascinating story of erroneous theories and beliefs intertwined with remarkable progress. And even today’s life science research journals are full of asinine statements, arising from a belief in evolution, mingled with perfectly good scientific research. Most scientists can distinguish between the hard data gathered in the laboratory and the obligatory evolutionary framework into which the data are forced and presented. You focus on the former in order to make progress and tolerate the latter in order to get funded. Read More ›

At the Mail Online, Allan Hall reports (November 23, 2009) on the case of a man who was conscious for 23 years, but no one knew because he was paralyzed.

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them – but could make no sound.

‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.

Read more here.

I think doctors should be much more careful with the “persistent vegetative state” (PVS) diagnoses than they sometimes are – if consequences follow. Some people – like Rom Houben, above – can be conscious without being mobile. We aren’t even sure what consciousness is , after all, so why be definitive about who has it?

Here are some more articles about persistent vegetative state: Read More ›

We all know that our planet is awash with wonderful and beautiful life forms, none more so than we find in our oceans. This photo essay from the Fox News Website provides a glimpse into the strange world of creatures that inhabit the deepest parts of the seas. Truly remarkable. Here is but one example — the blind lobster:

The title of this post is also the title of a recent book by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. According to the website for The Edge Foundation,

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, known to Edge readers as a philosopher who has interesting things to say about Gödel and Spinoza, among others, enters into this conversation, taking on these and wider themes, and pushing the envelope by crossing over into the realm of fiction.

Goldstein isn’t the first novelist to appear on Edge, nor the first to discuss religion. In October 1989, the novelist Ken Kesey came to New York spoke to The Reality Club. “As I’ve often told Ginsberg,” he began, “you can’t blame the President for the state of the country, it’s always the poets’ fault. You can’t expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don’t have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.”

It’s in this spirit that Edge presents a brief excerpt from the first chapter, and the nonfiction appendix from 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

Read More ›

Cells have remarkable adaptation capabilities. They can precisely adjust which segments of the genome are copied for use in the cell. They can edit and regulate those DNA copies according to their needs. And they can even modify the DNA itself, such as with adaptive mutations, to accommodate environmental pressures. And in addition to these examples, cells can create completely new, de novo, genes in an evolutionary instant. It is yet another biological capability that reveals the scientific weakness of evolutionary theory.  Read more

There is a strange belief abroad that critics of Darwinism are found chiefly among right-wing, ultra-conservative reactionaries and their cadre of uneducated backwoods religious fundamentalists for whom, according to Philip Kitcher, Darwin “serves evangelical Christians as the bogeyman.”¹ Keith M. Parsons, writing for Eugenie Scott’s National Center for Science Education (largely an organization devoted to fear-mongering against ID), praised James H. Fetzer in his Review: Render Unto Darwin for effectively tying “creationism to larger political and ideological forces that provide the impetus for creationism as a social movement and prompt wealthy sympathizers to bankroll its organizations.” Parsons further sensationalizes these “elements of the religious right” as “fascist.”

Of course it is easy enough (persistent conflations of creationism and ID aside) to discount such stereotyping as itself the product of ignorance and ideological prejudice. A recent Zogby poll, for example, showed that self-identified liberals supported the teaching of evidence both for and against Darwinian evolution by a significant percentage over self-identified conservatives. Quick and easy typecasting does not, it would appear on closer scrutiny, hold up. In fact, critics of Darwinian evolution can be found across the ideologicial spectrum, from the conservative right to the radical left, a fact worthy of further investigation.

Though seldom discussed or analyzed, the left has indeed directed some telling criticisms at Darwinism and none so interesting or instructive as that of Max Horkheimer (1895-1973).  Although Horkheimer is hardly a household name, his assumption of the directorship of the Instutute for Social Research placed him within the center of leftist intellectual circles, and he would exert important influences over Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Jürgen Habermas.

Horkheimer is most notably associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of neo-Marxist philosophers and social critics who championed “critical theory,” a leftist analytic with varying admixtures of Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud. Thus, on one level Horkheimer’s philosophy was an idiosyncratic blend that lent itself well to an overarching pessimism that ultimately wound up as an ineffectual nihilism. For all of Horkheimer’s flaws as a philosopher–and they were many–he refused to rubber-stamp the Communist regimes of the 20th century, accusing the “murderers in the Kremlin” of adopting the fascist tactics they had so recently defeated. Even as Horkheimer retreated from the strident and at times ebullient Marxism of his youth, his leftist transcendentalism offered a spiritualism without spirit, a scathing critique of the Englightenment and modernity with no clear enlightened replacement save for a vague demand for “otherness.”

None of this should suggest a sweeping dismissal of Horkheimer’s views, however. “To acknowledge the latent nihilism in Horkheimer’s thought as a whole . . .,” observes Brian J. Shaw, “is not to deny those real flashes of critical insight which illuminate even the most obscure and wrong-headed regions of his philosophy. That Horkheimer mistakenly poses the alternative to contemporary society in an uncompromising manner does not automatically disqualify the validity of each of his insights into its problematic nature. One does not have to possess the cure to an illness to recognize illness when one sees it.”² One of the illnesses endemic to contemporary society Horkheimer identified as Darwinism.

Read More ›

Woes of God particle researchers worse than woes of Job, in the Bible, apparently:

Here’s a fun piece on the large Hadron Collider’s woes, when a passing bird dropped a piece of bread on it (yes!) , via Commentary Magazine – “Big Bang Machine Felled by Frenchman from the Future” by Anthony Sacramone (11/16/09):

So efforts by scientists to re-create the big bang — that moment, if one can speak of a moment, as in time, before there was time, or at least a decent wristwatch, when energy, or some hot gooey primordial stuff, spewed out a burgeoning universe, eventuating in the birth of galaxies, the advent of life, and the eventual cancellation of Charles in Charge — have failed once again.

It seems that the quixotic quest to find Higgs Boson, once thought to be the front man for an Air Supply tribute band, but which turns out to be the “God” particle,” has come to a crumbling halt.

First, about a year ago, the Large Hadron Collider (not to be confused with the Medium Hadron Collider and Omnidirectional Shower Head) went phffffff when, shortly upon whiz-banging, hydrogen began to leak from its cooling thingee, ruining a good pair of chinos and an autographed picture of Carol Channing.

Go here for more. The funny part is the explanation offered:

As the narrator of this CNN piece relates:

According to two physicists, the culprit could be the Higgs-Boson Particle traveling back in time to destroy itself.

Hey, I do that all the time, but generally only to defuse embarrassing social situations and get rid of problem documents. I do not  drop bread on anyone, unless they really, really bug me and only in situations where I can retreat indoors from the balcony before they figure out who dun it. Succeed or fail, I have an advantage over the Higgs Boson particle. I definitely exist.

Golly, I can remember the days when science was not ridiculous. Here’s another interesting comment.

Note added: Re the bread from heaven files: The secret of a successful aerial bread bomb – and I do not expect the bird to know this – is to make sure that the thickly buttered side lands in the victim’s hair.  I cannot give advice on the Large Hadron Collider. I only know how to ensure that snotty persons must go home and shampoo and shower before going to whatever upscale event they were bound for.

Other stories at Colliding Universes: Read More ›

Here’s more on “Climategate.” My favorite line: “And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW [anthropogentic global warming] can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.” Where have I heard that sort of thing before? Here’s also a line I enjoyed from another piece in this vein: “It is not hard to think up ways to scare people into handing over more of their cash via taxes, insurance, inflation, etc. You just have to think of the right nightmare, publicize it, politicize Read More ›

Specifications have long been an intense interest of mine (e.g., go here). Below is an 833-word specification by our U.S. Senate that could have been said in one word — LOUISIANA. Indeed, the only state to which this specifcation applies is LOUISIANA. Congrats to Lousiana’s Mary Landrieu for snagging $100M in pork that’s associated with this specification! ‘‘(aa)(1) Notwithstanding subsection (b), beginning January 1, 2011, the Federal medical assistance percentage for a fiscal year for a disaster-recovery FMAP adjustment State shall be equal to the following: ‘(A) In the case of the first fiscal year (or part of a fiscal year) for which this subsection applies to the State, the Federal medical assistance percentage determined for the fiscal year without Read More ›

I once debated an evolutionist who listed a dozen or so major areas of evidence he said proved evolution. The problem was each of the areas of evidence was problematic for evolution. True, one could find within those areas, as he did, supportive evidences. But the story was not so simple. In fact the areas of scientific evidence, when carefully examined from a theory-neutral perspective, reveal all kinds of problems for evolution. Is evolution false? Is it true? The answer is there are no easy answers. There certainly are substantial scientific problems with Darwin’s idea—that much we do know. If evolution is true then there is much we have to learn about science. But the scientific evidence can tell us Read More ›

There’s breaking news today about the Hadley CRU in England which had its emails and data banks hacked into. CRU is the acronym for ‘Climate Research Unit’. Seems that some of the emails show some possible collusion when it came to producing and supporting data that didn’t fit into GW science. Some interesting quotes. How about this one: “This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit Read More ›

For Uncommon Descent Question 12: Can Darwinism beat the odds?, we have declared a winner, and it is Philip W at 11.

Philip W must provide me with a valid postal address* via oleary@sympatico.ca, in order to receive the prize, a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD.

Philip W tells me that he is a pilot, and I liked his analysis of issues around flight:

Darwinian evolution can not possibly explain the life which we find on this planet. Let’s explore one of these methods by asking the question “How, and why, did flight originate?” Before any creature took to the air there was nothing there to eat and so why would any creature, even an intelligent creature, want to fly. There could have been no powerful survival benefit in flight beyond perhaps escaping a predator to recommend it. Also, there are many other and far simpler ways to escape a predator. Flight is perhaps the most complicated and sophisticated activity that any creature possesses which means that it would have taken an extraordinary number of attempts by random evolutionary methods to make it a reality. There is another and even more fundamental question which underlies biological flight. Did nature, completely unguided by intelligence, just somehow know that flight was even possible or achievable? Humans, with their intelligence, were able to make gliders and toy airplanes long ago but they had an objective and they also had the model of the birds to follow. Even at that it took a long time to achieve human flight despite the huge cost in time, effort, and treasure which they were willing to expend. No amount of tinkering, especially without a conscious objective, could possibly account for biological flight. There are simply too many things which would have had to happen all at once for that to be possible. Remember that nature had no way of knowing that flight was possible and it certainly had no previous conception of flight. Without having an objective how can random tinkering achieve anything?

Even now, with considerable human intelligence, we have limits. Science does not try to achieve anything, on a serious level, which cannot be demonstrated to be achievable. Once we find clues that give us a ray of hope the situation changes drastically; and at that point we feel certain enough of eventual success to justify pouring money and effort into a project. Read More ›

On the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s seminal work, The Origin of Species, the American Freedom Alliance is pleased to present a series of events in Los Angeles devoted to an examination of issues surrounding the debate on the origins of life.

The Origins of Life Debate

A Public Debate featuring:
Stephen Meyer, Rick Sternberg, Michael Shermer and Don Prothero

Two Advocates of Intelligent Design vs Two Advocates of Evolutionary Theory

Monday, November 30, 2009 7:30 PM
Saban Theater
8440 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills