Christianity Today has weighed in on the bloggingheads’ controversy involving the disappearing and reappearing discussion between John McWhorter and Michael Behe. An online clearinghouse for intellectual debate has discovered the apparent boundary for its controversial conversations: Intelligent Design. Bloggingheads.tv posted a video interview between journalist John McWhorter and Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe in late August focused on the Lehigh University biochemistry professor’s 2007 book The Edge of Evolution. It was taken down the same day after the website received a barrage of online criticism for not asking tougher questions of Behe and for hosting him at all. The video was re-posted later, but as Dr. Behe  explains, the initial removal is indicative of a larger issue: “Reposting the interview Read More ›

Time Magazine addresses the problem that neuroscientists who think the mind is real often discuss (John Cloud, October 13, 2009):

How people react to a medication depends in large part on how they think about it.

Exactly why the placebo and nocebo responses arise is a puzzle, but a fascinating article in Wired magazine noted earlier this year that the positive placebo response to drugs has increased during clinical trials over the past few years. The article speculated that drug advertising – which exploded after 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration began allowing direct-to-consumer ads – has led us to expect more from drugs. Those expectations, in turn, have made us feel better just for popping a pill. (Placebo responses can also occur simply when you book appointments with doctors[*] or psychotherapists[**].)

No surprise, really. If your problem is,

– *Why should I pay $159.95 plus tax for a medication? Dunno. Maybe some consumer research would pay off.

But if the question is Read More ›

Although its official release date is not until November 1, THE END OF CHRISTIANITY is now in stock and being sold at Amazon.com (go here). Even though argument in this book is compatible with both intelligent design and theistic evolution, it helps bring clarity to the controversy over design and evolution. In particular, it resolves the problem of dysteleology and natural evil by introducing a conception of the Fall that is theologically sound and also compatible with modern science (i.e., with standard astrophysical and geological dating that places the earth and universe at billions of years old).

I am sure glad someone is writing about this, though glad it isn’t my own job.

The problem is that judges and jurors will mistakenly assume that technologies that are demonstrably valid medical diagnostic tools yield equally valid conclusions when they are used to map the neural correlates of deception and other forms of cognition.

I think what this person is trying to say is this (though he sure can’t just come right out and say it): Neuroscience can tell you if an elderly person’s brain problems are the likely cause of serious cognitive deficits. That’s very useful; one can make better decisions for that person’s care, decisions that respect his dignity too.

If neuroscience claims to tell us whether Jimmy “the jimslamm” is lying, well, yes of course he is. If his lips are moving and intelligible sounds are coming out of his mouth, he is lying. I’ve dealt with lots of people like him so I can tell you for free and save you trouble.

But what is he lying about this time? I don’t like this new neurolaw craze for a number of reasons. I think Jimmy should just take his chances with a skilled Crown*. A fair fight.

*In Canada, a prosecution attorney

[The abstract] Read More ›

There are a number of articles on the Science and Values blog about climate change. I was at a Cardiff university conference over the summer where the question of what action to take to tackle climate change was discussed along side questions about poverty reduction. The fear was that major action to tackle climate change, with CO2 levels reduced to 80% of today’s level, will lead to a massive increase in global poverty. Even though it was recognised that there is a problem, the effect of actions to reduce CO2 levels may cause greater problems. Both James Lovelock and Mike Hulme have proposed different solutions.

James Lovelock calls for mitigation strategies

James Lovelock commented to an audience at the ‘Ways With Words’ literary festival at Dartington Hall, near Totnes in Devon that; “It’s not going to take much of a sea-surge to knock out London. We should be spending money strengthening defences there rather than vain efforts to improve renewable energy.”

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“Big Environment,” “Big Government,” “Big Business,” “Big Science” — all involve huge sums of money, leave a money trail, and require independent watchdogs to ask the tough questions. We noted the upcoming documentary NOT EVIL JUST WRONG here at UD last week. Here’s the latest (it made the top of Drudge): www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf-fzVH6v_U

Since in my last post a commenter put on the table thermodynamics to support evolution I decided to offer my personal answer in a specific post, although UD already dealt with this issue. As known, 2nd law of thermodynamics (SLOT, also called “entropy law”) states that in a closed system the overall energy entropy ΔS never decreases spontaneously (i.e. without an external intervention). Example: in a room (considered a closed system) a hot cup of coffee on a tabletop, loosing heat, decreases in energy entropy –ΔSc (neghentropy). Around the table the environment, absorbing heat, increases energy entropy ΔSe, in such manner that the overall energy entropy of the room ΔSr doesn’t decrease. In this example SLOT can be expressed with this formula: Read More ›

In “God vs. Science Isn’t the Issue”, William McGurn (Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2009) notes,

In contrast to the majority of scientists whose wondrous discoveries seem to inspire humility, today’s advocates of scientism can be every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear. We saw an example a week ago, when the New York Times reported that many scientists view “outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia.”

The reporter was Gardiner Harris, and the object of his snark was Francis Collins—the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is perhaps best noted for his leadership on the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the genetic makeup of man. But he is also well known for his unapologetic talk about his Christian faith and how he came to it.

Mr. Harris’s aside about dementia, of course, is less a proposition open to debate than the kind of putdown you tell at a private cocktail party where you know everyone in the room shares your orthodoxies. In this room, there are those who hold that God cannot be reconciled with what science has discovered about the human body, the origin of the species, and the beginnings of the universe. The more honest ones do not flinch before the implications of their materialist principles on our understanding of human dignity and human rights and human freedom—as well as on religion.

A couple of thoughts:

– Whoever said God vs. science was an issue? The whole idea was invented and is kept alive by materialist atheists, whose comments about “dementia” tell you something worth knowing.

– I have noticed that working scientists tend to be humble in the face of the facts, which is a good place to begin any type of true knowledge. The practitioners of scientism, by contrast, behave like cult members.* Recently, I was listening to one of them hold forth as an after-dinner speaker, proclaiming that on many science stories there is only one side. Well, that’s all right then; we can all just mindlessly shout in unison. Oh wait. Cue the pop science press on any subject to do with neuroscience. It is genuinely hard to imagine a neuroscience story so stupid they wouldn’t run with it. Read More ›

According to Michael Brooks (New Scientist, 06 October 2009), in Don’t be such a scientist, Randy “Flock of Dodos” Olson advises DID you spot James Cameron’s mistake in Titanic? Leo DiCaprio is about to drown in the north Atlantic ocean, yet the constellations of the southern hemisphere are aglow in the sky above. Who cares? Scientists, apparently. The mistake “ruined” the movie for Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, Randy Olson says. It’s the kind of reaction that gets scientists a bad rap, and Olson – himself a scientist and film-maker – suggests it pays to skip the pedantry and concentrate on the bigger picture. While small factual errors can be irksome, they are not life-threatening, Read More ›

O’Reilly told Dawkins”

you insist you can’t even mention it, that is fascism, sir.

Was he right? Is it constitutional/scientific to insist that only materialistic evolution can be taught?
See: O’Reilly vs. Atheist Author Richard Dawkins

O’REILLY: . . . It’s not fair to leave it out of the science class if the science class is incomplete. And you, by your own admission, say we don’t know how it all began. So if the science class is going to say evolution only, but I really don’t know how it started, that gap has got to be explored. Read More ›

Leading Darwinist Richard Dawkins Dodges Debates, Refuses to Defend Evolution as The Greatest Show On Earth Seattle – Richard Dawkins, the world’s leading public spokesman for Darwinian evolution and an advocate of the “new atheism,” has refused to debate Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, a prominent advocate of intelligent design and the author of the acclaimed Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009) in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. “Richard Dawkins claims that the appearance of design in biology is an illusion and claims to have refuted the case for intelligent design,” says Dr. Meyer who received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge in England. “But Dawkins assiduously avoids addressing the Read More ›

The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays has just been published from the always interesting and highly engaging David Berlinski. You can find it on Amazon here. Also, Dr. Berlinski’s book The Devil’s Delusion has just been released in paperback.

Here I was recently treated to an interesting display of Darwinist logic. A commenter demanded that I provide proof that in a single-payer health system like Canada’s, older people are being abandoned to die. Another suggested I just shut up about it. Sorry. Go here for how bad it can get. It’s a matter of simple logic, really. Sarah Palin’s death panels are alive and well in Canada because we have a single government payer health system. I don’t care what you think of Palin. But this much I know is true: If the government is the only entity permitted to open a new bed in a hospital, this is what happens: You have a 55 year-old high school math teacher Read More ›

 Chromosomes have yet another level of complexity and are even better designed than previously thought.   Erez Lieberman-Aiden et al 

By probing the three-dimensional architecture of whole genomes, the authors constructed spatial proximity maps of the human genome that confirm the presence of chromosome territories and the spatial proximity of small, gene-rich chromosomes. They identified an additional level of genome organization that is characterized by the spatial segregation of open and closed chromatin to form two genome-wide compartments. At the megabase scale, the chromatin conformation is consistent with a fractal globule, a knot-free, polymer conformation that enables maximally dense packing while preserving the ability to easily fold and unfold any genomic locus.

Imagine a fine hair 2 meters long. Imagine balling it up in such a way that it can fit on the head of pin — and be unraveled and knot-free, at a moment’s notice. A similar engineering feat is at work inside each cell in our body. The genome is over two meters long and must be carefully packed into the confines of a space (called the “nucleus”) several times narrower than a human hair.

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