Scott Adams offers some insights on P. Z. Myers, prefacing them as follows: . . . Some people are quite certain that I am misusing my minor celebrity status to confuse the masses and turn them into creationists or pyramid worshipers. Is it intentional, they wonder? Do I really believe the things I write? Or am I simply stupid, as it appears. . . . MORE
Here’s a piece about ID in the UK that came out a few days ago. Note especially the comments after the article. The Ego and the ID Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 30/01/2007 Why I hate this intelligent design story. It’s simply IDiotic, writes Richard Fortey Scientists have found themselves trapped into appearing to be unreasonable in their pursuit of rationality. A snare has been cleverly set by the proponents of Intelligent Design in their quest to prove that Charles Darwin got it wrong. The vast majority of scientists feel nothing but distress that the teaching of Intelligent Design has been promoted in a number of our schools, particularly the faith schools apparently beloved by Tony Blair. Fundamentalists of both Islamic Read More ›
The blurb for a book review from Physics Web, copied in the Weekend Edition of Arts and Letters Daily (February 3-4, 2007 ) reads, “String theory and intelligent design belong in the same category as speculative and unproveable. They cannot be falsified.” One would think, at first, that this was just another yawner denouncing ID. The sort of thing that trips unbidden to the lips of any third rate lecturer who has never considered the possibility that the grade school tales he was told about the the Viceroy butterflies proving Darwinism by mimicking the Monarchs might not actually be true. About the falsifiability of intelligent design: A specific hypothesis must be proposed for falsification. I remember replying, more or less as follows, a while Read More ›
Edmonton Global News television report on dichloroacetate cancer cure and interview with discoverer Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, Department of Medicine, University of Alberta. Click here to watch.
In case anyone was wondering, the international patent application for DCA as a cancer cure is available for anyone to read. DCA is an inexpensive, uncontrolled chemical hailed as a potential cure for cancer that anyone can buy. This is not an endorsement or encouragement for anyone to self-medicate. It is intended solely to get the attention of established clinicians with experience in orphan drug testing.
Get this from Orac (a.k.a. DH Gorski) at Respectful Insolence. Here’s a cutter/researcher who makes a living from cancer. A respectable number of research papers in chemotherapy and radiation bear his name and he’s a surgeon. He is, in other words, a fully vested member in the multi-billion dollar cancer treatment industry. If there’s a big breakthrough cure for cancer that consists of a $2 teaspoonful of a common chemical in a glass of water the good Doctor Gorski becomes like unto a horse drawn carriage maker when Ford started mass producing automobiles. He’ll be reduced to lancing boils for a living.
I recently posted on Irreducible Complexity in Mathematics, Physics and Biology. That thread generated interest in a well-written article by ID proponents in Italy. The article touches on the work of Turing, Chaitin, von Neumann and relates it to ID-sympathetic literature by Dembski, Behe, Voie, Trevors and Abel. The article was so well written and informative, that I felt it deserved its own thread. Our readers can learn much about ID through this article!
Mathematics and the origin-of-life problem
Here are some excerpts:
The works of Gödel, Turing, Chaitin and Von Neumann even from different points of view, show basic limits of the reasoning power. Someone said that these results got the fall of the platonistic conceptions about mathematics. This conclusion is fully wrong. The truth is exactly the inverse of that. Plato never said the total truth could be derived from few axioms. Instead what was fallen on 1931 is the positivistic utopia that reason may get more from less! In nuce reason cannot get Infinity from finite. In short that is the moral we can learn from the theorems about information irreducibility. These are particular cases only of a more general ascertainment: total truth cannot be axiomatizable. We cannot close the Unlimited into a limited system. The Total Possibility, i.e. the Infinite, is not reducible to a system. In all fields one can find the effects of this universal truth. Gödel found them in metamathematics, Turing found them in informatics, Chaitin found them in AIT. In the following we will show as also the fundamental problem of biology – the origin of life – is unsolvable without an intelligent source indeed due to the same reasons.
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Dr. Terry Tommyrot questions the existence of Richard Dawkins in this brilliant spoof — whoever did Dawkins has him down. Here’s the audio as a wma file: The Dawkins Delusion. [[Click HERE for the transcript.]] [[The inspiration for this came from http://david.dw-perspective.org.uk/does-richard-dawkins-exist.html.]]
The sharp spike in hits and files (green and dark blue) are mostly due to the new layout. The key statistic is daily average number of visits. Total visits are shown in yellow but that varies by number of days in the month so the daily average is the better metric. The daily average number of visits was 5828 for January 2007 compared to the previous record of 5311 for December 2006 representing a gain of 10% month over month. For those who haven’t been following UD very long the decline between August and October was was the result of being delisted from Google in the middle of September.
… what about Dolly the sheep? New vaccines? The chess computer? New antibiotics? Alternative energy sources? Yes, all these discoveries are exciting, but, as Horgan notes, they depend on existing science. They do not forge new frontiers in our understanding of our world. Science journalist John Horgan created a minor stir a decade ago with his book, The End of Science, arguing that the major science discoveries are all behind us. Now that was hardly a popular thesis. The rest of my column on John Horgan and the “End of Science” is here.
Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers
New Scientist has received an unprecedented amount of interest in this story from readers. If you would like up-to-date information on any plans for clinical trials of DCA in patients with cancer, or would like to donate towards a fund for such trials, please visit the site set up by the University of Alberta and the Alberta Cancer Board. We will also follow events closely and will report any progress as it happens.
It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.
There is a new paper on Irreducible Complexity by renowned mathematician Gregory Chaitin: The Halting Probability Omega: Irreducible Complexity in Pure Mathematics Milan Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 75, 2007.
Ω is an extreme case of total lawlessness; in effect, it shows that God plays dice in pure mathematics.
On the surface Chaitin’s notion of Irreducible Complexity (IC) in math may seem totally irrelevant to Irreducible Complexity (IC) in ID literature. But let me argue that notion of IC in math relates to IC in physics which may point to some IC in biology…
First, of consider this article archived at Access Research Network (ARN) by George Johnson in the NY Times on IC in physics:
Challenging Particle Physics as Path to Truth
Many complex systems — the very ones the solid-staters study — appear to be irreducible.
The concept of “irreducible complexity” has been used by Alan Turing, Michael Behe, and perhaps now by physicists. Behe’s sense of irreducible is not too far from the sense of irreducible in the context of this physics. If biological systems take advantage of irreducible phenomena in physics (for example, what if we discover the brain uses irreducible physical phenomena ) we will have a strong proof by contradiction that there are no Darwinian pathways for biolgoical systems to incorporate that phenomena.
The possibility of IC in physics may be tied to IC in math and this may have relevance to IC in biology.
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Click here first, then click on the javascript link: Click here to view your video, “‘Blasphemy Challenge’” Check it out. Gil
In 1981 Dennett and Hofstadter edited a compilation of essays entitled The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul . The book is a compilation of essays by Dawkins, Morowitz, Searle, Alan Turing, and several other big names on the nature of mind and intelligence. Since ID implies a mind of some sort, it is appropriate to ponder what a mind really is, and this is a surprisingly good book on the topic.
Dennett’s co-author, Hofstadter, makes an interesting remark about the ultimate mind:
one way to think of the universal wave function [of quantum physics] is as the mind– or brain, if you prefer–of the great novelist in the sky, God.