At the UNZ Review, an “alternative media selection,” Razib Khan asks, is “ Jonah Lehrer “One of the Most Gifted Nonfiction Writers of His Generation”?”.
He is referring to the perception that, under Jonah Leher’s magic touch, the truth began to lose its facts, and the facts their truth. Maybe Lehrer just shook the pom poms a bit too wildly?
Khan writes,
Many, many, people want to be science writers. That’s why there are now professional programs to train you to do this. But very few make a good living in this area. One issue that immediately comes to mind is that you probably need some financial buffer to really take this risk as far as a career choice. It could be family money, or, it could be that your partner has a more conventional job which can allow for income smoothing over time. I also happen to know that Jonah had some powerful and influential mentors, so it wasn’t hard for him to become a public intellectual, and so bring to the table the requisite synergy that agents are looking for. Every now and then literary agents contact me, and one issue that comes up is that they want me to increase my public profile so that I will be able to push copies of anything I publish using my own resources of my own personal fame. I have not forged that path, rather, I’d like to think I’m a much more eccentric character who has tracked himself into much more exotic territory, career-wise. But back to the numbers, the vast majority of people who aspire to be science writers will not become science writers. Jonah was one of the few who had made it, and spectacularly so. He then flamed out, again, spectacularly so. Now he’s back, seemingly on his way to success. Is he such an exceptional talent that he deserves this? Are there no other Jonah Lehrers in the world who haven’t been given a chance and who happen not to have Jonah’s baggage? It is hard for me to believe that.
Look, I don’t know. If Lehrer’s the Comeback Kid, maybe he is just good with the pom poms.
Today, most science journalism is just naturalism made easy for the masses. It’s not true, but why does that matter? If Lehrer played fast and loose and got away with it, why should the world care?
Aren’t we supposed to have real difficulty grappling with the fact that our brains have not evolved so as to understand that our minds are an illusion?
Then why should we hear claims of injury from anyone who honestly believes that his judges are fleeting, illusory consciousnesses anyway?
See also: Science 2.0 on one of Darwin’s greats dismissing arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins as a “journalist”: (with useful info on the science writer culture)
Follow UD News at Twitter!
Denyse,
Everyone including you. Correct?
Denyse is a science writer. That escaped you somehow?
Troll
OT: per Behe
Structural diversity of bacterial flagellar motors – 2011
Excerpt: Figure 3 – Manual segmentation of conserved (solid colours) and unconserved (dotted lines) motor components based on visual inspection.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f3/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC3160247/
=======
Figure 1 – Flagellar motor structures obtained by ECT and subtomogram averaging.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f1/
Figure 2 – Structure of the common core and its comparison with an earlier cryoEM single-particle reconstruction.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f2/
Figure 3 – Manual segmentation of conserved (solid colours) and unconserved (dotted lines) motor components based on visual inspection.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f3/
Figure 4 – Structure of the export apparatus.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f4/
Figure 5 – Symmetries in the stator region.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f5/
if science is difficult then it could only be that a science writer is a jack of all trades and master of none.
If a master then the money wouldn’t be there to survive.
Anyways if science writers don’t smell evolutions demise and ID/YEC rise then what good are they!
missing the story of the century!!
Without an alternate (even tentative) mechanism, ID is not going anywhere. “ID just detects design” and nothing else is not going to take ID far.
Me_Think as to:
“Without an alternate (even tentative) mechanism”
Actually you, as an atheist, are the one without a mechanism,,, ‘laws’, whether they be hidden laws or in your face laws, have never ’caused’ anything to happen in this universe. The following Professor, who is a former atheist, gets this point across more clearly than anyone else I have heard:
C.S. Lewis humorously stated the point like this:
The following ‘doodle video’ is also excellent for getting this point across:
In other words, law or necessity does not have causal adequacy within itself. i.e. Law is not a ‘mechanism’ that has ever ’caused’ anything to happen in the universe but is merely a description of a law-like regularity within the universe. The early Christian founders of modern science understood this sharp distinction between law and lawgiver quite well,,,
Perhaps the most famous confusion of a mathematical description of a law and the causal agency behind the law is Stephen Hawking’s following statement:
Here is an excerpt of an article, (that is well worth reading in full), in which Dr. Gordon exposes Stephen Hawking’s delusion for thinking that mathematical description and agent causality are the same thing.
Moreover, the same type of confusion arises when atheists’ appeal to ‘random chance’ as a causal agent instead of merely a description.
When people say that something ‘happened by chance’ they are not actually appealing to a known causal mechanism but are instead using chance as a ‘placeholder for ignorance’ as to an actual causal mechanism. Stephen Talbott puts the situation like this,,
In other words, when people say that something “happened randomly by chance”, usually a mishap, they are in fact assuming an impersonal purposeless determiner of unaccountable happenings which is, in fact, is impossible to separate from causal agency. i.e. ‘every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle’
Although the term “chance” can be defined as a mathematical probability, such as the chance involved in flipping a coin, when Darwinists use the term ‘random chance’, generally it’s substituting for a more precise word such as “cause”, especially when the cause, i.e. ‘mechanism’, is not known. Several people have noted this ‘shell game’ that is played with the word ‘chance’..
Thus, when an atheist states that something happened by chance, we have every right to ask, as Talbott pointed out, “Can you be a little more explicit here?”
In conclusion, contrary to how atheists imagine reality to be structured, they, in their appeal to random chance and law as to being causally adequate within themselves, have, in reality, appealed to vacuous explanations for a ‘causal mechanism’ that are far more properly grounded in agent causality. ,,,
,,,”vacuous explanations for a causal mechanism” reminds me of Lawrence Krauss’s argument against God from a few years ago in his book ‘A Universe from Nothing’,,
To put what I consider the main philosophical arguments for God more simply, (at the risk of irritating more than a few philosophers), atheistic materialists do not have a causal mechanism to appeal to to explain how the universe originated, nor do they have a causal mechanism to explain why the universe continues to exists, nor why anything in the universe continues to exist in the universe, nor do they even have a causal mechanism for explaining how anything, any particle in the universe, moves within the universe!
Here are a few notes along that line:
As to the ancient first mover argument of Aquinas in particular, the double slit experiment is excellent for illustrating that the ‘unmoved mover’ argument is empirically valid.
In the following video Anton Zeilinger, whose group is arguably the best group of experimentalists in quantum physics today, ‘tries’ to explain the double slit experiment to Morgan Freeman:
Prof. Zeilinger makes this rather startling statement in the preceding video that meshes perfectly with the ‘first mover argument’::
If that was not enough to get Dr. Zeilinger’s point across, at the 4:12 minute mark in this following video,,,
Professor Zeilinger states,,,
or as Dr. Egnor succintly put the argument,
Supplemental quote:
Verse and Music:
Of related interest:,,, as Stephen Talbott has clearly pointed out, a major problem with Darwinian explanations is how to describe the complexities of life without illegitimately using terminology that invokes agency,,,
This working biologist agrees completely with Talbott:
bornagain77,
Why not declare all those mechanisms officially that you pointed out to ? Why say ID is just design detection and nothing else? As I have repeatedly asked “How is ID any different from CSI if it just stops after detecting design ?”
Me_Think, good grief, do you even read for comprehension? What you use to imagine to be causally adequate mechanisms with law and chance are now shown to you to be nothing of the sort. Agent causality is, by far, and contrary to what you believed, the best causally adequate ‘mechanism’ going. Indeed, Agent causality, with a capital A, is the very ‘mechanism’ by which Newton inferred the law of Gravity in the first place.
Why would anything else matter to you after being shown that you were so foundationally wrong in your presuppositional thinking???
bornagain77 @6&7:
Great stuff. Materialism was effectively disproved long ago.
ID detects design and then fixes all knows improbable processes( pretty much everything – protein folding, 2 point mutations, searching new functions, metabolism ATP synthesis etc) by capital ‘A’ Agency ‘Agent causality’. ? Now it’s so much more clear why ID wouldn’t go beyond detecting design.
bornagain77,
What is more, if you preclude an omnipotent designer, you will need thousands of designers to guide evolutionary process. If you consider that just 30,000 process (against the actual billion process (in millions of organisms) – like protein folding, 2 point mutations, searching new functions, metabolism – pretty much everything which ID claims is improbable with unguided process), needs to be fixed in a given time frame, Binomial calculation shows:
the minimum number of ID agents that can provide a 90% probability of getting service (attention to processes) for just 30,000 process is 3,069.
IOW, Minimize the capacity required for Binomial Distribution with n = 30,000 p=0.1
For a 99.9% ‘service’ probability, minimum 3,162 agents will be required. Imagine how much will be required for a billion process !
Of semi related note to time: As to the Time Dilation of relativity,,,
There was a discrepancy found by Godel in the time dialation of relativity:
That discrepancy, found by Godel with relativity, was dealt with in the following study. the following study, through a fairly ingenious thought experiment, challenged the assumption of length contraction as being valid for ‘photon clocks’. In doing so, they cleared up some loose ends in relativity concerning time’s relation to space. Loose ends that had been ample fodder for much of the speculation of time travel being possible in relativity:
Of supplemental note: The Time Dilation of Relativity is VERY friendly to the Theistic concept of eternity:
MT:
We don’t need any designers to guide evolution. Programmers are not required to guide their programs.
And just because ID is about the detection and study of design, oops the study of means we do not stop after detecting design- that alone proves MT is empty- that does NOT prevent anyoine from asking or trying to answer the questions that come after design is detected. MT is proudly ignorant.
MT:
Design is a mechanism by definition. And it is just as detailed as natural selection and drift- or any differing accumulations of genetic accidents. Intelligent design is OK with mutations. So buy a vowel and stop being so ignorant already
Design can’t be a mechanism unless the mechanism is nature.
A dam can’t produce hydroelectricity with out use of the gravitational force of falling or flowing water, a windmill can’t produce wind mill without wind.
So by accepting design is the mechanism, what you really are accepting is Evolution is a Natural mechanism though it looks designed for you.
a windmill can’t produce
wind millelectricity without wind.MT:
That is incorrect. Design is a mechanism by definition- deal with it or remain willfully ignorant.
What you are saying is that you cannot handle reality and are forced to try to change it.
Without an alternate (even tentative) mechanism, evolution is not going anywhere. “It just happened, that’s all” and nothing else is not going to take evolution far.
I beg to differ wrt the claim that design by itself is a mechanism. My experience with design tells me that a design needs to be implemented, and something/somebud to perform the implementation.
Please show how it is done.
You are not saying that all the car designs out of Detroit were just designed and poof! out of the assembly lines they rolled? I am waiting for the next phase of ID theory explaining how species rolled out of the design studio.
BTW, I agree that “ID is deceptively repackaged Creationism in a cheap tuxedo” is not a nice thing to say. It would look much better wtihout the reference to a cheap tuxedo.
I know all about cheap tuxedo’s, I once owned a BMW 700LS!
Cabal #20
Would it possibly that it is done by a mind (or agent of a mind) choosing one design option to the exclusion of all the possible design options? Then encoding the instructions for that design, in say, chemical molecules, to be implemented by another mind (or agent of a mind) which understands the code used by the first mind? Then that second mind (or agent of that mind) could read the decoded design and implement it. That seems to be how it’s done. Now where might we find examples of that mechanism? where, oh where?
If this is indeed the mechanism used, then there is a whole big field of study that is waiting to be reaped — if scientists weren’t being handicapped by ruling philosophers posing as scientists.
Cabal, feel free to try to change the definitions of “design” and “mechanism”. But until you do design is a mechanism by definition:
design:
: to plan and make (something) for a specific use or purpose
Note the “and make” part
and the noun:
: a plan or protocol for carrying out or accomplishing something (especially a scientific experiment); also : the process of preparing this
mechanism:
: a process or system that is used to produce a particular result
To build something per a plan is to build it by design.
Joe:
Cabal, feel free to try to change the definitions of “design” and “mechanism”. But until you do design is a mechanism by definition:
Not the way ID uses design, design is a pattern of elements. If you want to use design as a mechanism then you need a designer. No designer no design mechanism.
velikovskys:
It’s both.
I am pretty sure Intelligent Design is OK with an intelligent designer.