On August 21 Karl Giberson, physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College and one of several engaged in the ever-interesting juggling act of defending “faith and science” by means of a Darwinian apologetic, now has added to his litany of misconceptions a boorish attack on Al Mohler in The Huffington Post, “How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth.” Since David Klinghoffer has provided an excellent summary of the issues involved in an earlier post to this site, Karl Giberson v Al Mohler on Darwin: The Grudge Match, they need not be restated here. The point here is to address Giberson’s principal objection, namely, Mohler’s assertion that “Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged . . . .” Giberson wants to dismiss Mohler’s comments as merely an effort “to undermine evolution by suggesting that it was ‘invented’ to prop up Darwin’s worldview.”

My thoughts on this debate have been posted to Evolution News & Views.

John West of the Discovery Institute Reports:

But when a gunman inspired by Darwinism takes hostages at the offices of the Discovery Channel, reporters seem curiously uninterested in fully disclosing the criminal’s own self-described motivations. Most of yesterday’s media reports about hostage-taker James Lee dutifully reported Lee’s eco-extremism and his pathological hatred for humanity. But they also suppressed any mention of Lee’s explicit appeals to Darwin and Malthus as the intellectual foundations for his views. At least, I could find no references to Lee’s Darwinian motivations in the accounts I read by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC.

Major Media Spike Discovery

This is an important event. I would encourage all UD readers to try to make it to it. I’ll be speaking on ID. For conference information, click here.

Caroline Crocker, of American Institute for Science and Technology Education (AITSE), writes me to comment,

Scientific Integrity and Dr. Hauser

Can being disorganized lead to scientific fame?

Harvard University scientist Marc Hauser became famous for his work in cognitive evolution. As a psychologist who investigates the neurological basis for morality and works with primates and people, you would think he would know better than to, at the least, keep inadequate records or, much worse, fabricate data. But, Dr. Hauser is on “academic leave” after a Harvard University faculty committee found him “solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct”.

The history of the problems is long, starting in 1995, but the Harvard investigation was only initiated in 2007. Perhaps enough students had complained or maybe the comments from peers were becoming too embarrassing. Now Michael Ruse’s concern is that the field of evolutionary biology itself will suffer from bad publicity.

But surely this should not be the main concern! Dr. Ruse makes the point that Dr. Hauser may have been under pressure to attract grant money, graduate students, and postdoctoral students–and this is mostly accomplished through publication. The pressure may have been exacerbated by the fact that Dr. Hauser holds a prestigious position at a leading university. In other words, Dr. Hauser may have succumbed to political, financial or even ideological temptation to forgo scientific integrity–thereby publishing at least three unsubstantiated scientific papers, possibly misleading numerous other scientists, and wasting countless tax dollars.

What is the answer? Raising the profile of scientific integrity in our nation. We need, as Kate Shaw said, to “encourage responsible science, experimental replication, and an even more thorough review process.”

Many will know Crocker as the scientist who got the boot from George Mason University for questioning the Prophet Darwin. I understand she will be posting here after she finalizes her book.

That said, here’s The Edge on Marc Hauser:

Along with Irv Devore, he teaches the Evolution of Human Behavior class, a Core Course at Harvard with 500 undergraduate students. The interdisciplinary course, “Science B29″ (nickname: “The Sex Course”), has been running for 30 years, was started by Devore and Robert Trivers, and is the second most popular course on campus, behind “Econ 10″. Section teachers over the years comprise a who’s who of leading thinkers and include people such as John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and Sarah B. Hrdy. In 1997-98, he sponsored a trial run of “Edge University” in which the students in Science B29 received Edge mailing as part of required reading in the course. Read more »

Alarmed at a science paper that questions Darwin, Steve Newton advises us at the Huffington Post that Darwin was not wrong when he argued that competition was the driving force of evolution. The article suggested that large-scale changes in ecology played a bigger role. Of course, they did. … When an ice sheet covered much of Canada for thousands of years, it would not have mattered whether the preglacial creatures (mammoth, mastodon, ground sloth, saber-tooth cat, horse, camel, etc.) competed or not. When the ice melted, they were just gone. Bison, beavers, wolves, maples, and such were the big noise. How? Why? We don’t know yet. One thing that sure isn’t helping is Darwinism.

For a lot more No! It couldn’t be! angst, go here. Darwinism is a social mood, not a science.

Check this out: LINK

“That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.”

~G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday

I am endlessly intrigued by Evolutionary Psychology. I found this evolutionary psychology journal, and it’s just too good not to share. Here are a few articles, and a quote from their respective abstract:

1. Parent-Offspring Conflict over Mating: The Case of Mating Age

Parents and offspring have asymmetrical preferences with respect to mate choice. So far, several areas of disagreement have been identified, including beauty, family background, and sexual strategies. This article proposes that mating age constitutes another area of conflict, as parents desire their children to initiate mating at a different age than the offspring desire it for themselves. More specifically, the hypothesis is tested that individuals prefer for their offspring to start having sexual relationships at a later age than they prefer for themselves to do so.

Read more »

Nevada is mostly empty; I mean really empty.  Ninety percent of the state’s residents live in the vicinity of Las Vegas or Reno, and the rest of the state is all but uninhabited.  I realized just how empty the state is when I was riding my motorcycle across the desert last month, and I passed a sign that said “Next Gas 167 Miles.”  They weren’t kidding.  My bike’s range is only a little over 200 miles, and if I hadn’t stopped to top off my tank, I would have run out of gas in the middle of the desert. 

This is the kind of riding I love the best.  Riding hour after hour through a vast emptiness, alone with my thoughts, the wind in my face, and the deep-throated throb of my engine in my ears, fills me with a peace and joy that is difficult to describe.  One day my two friends and I decided to just keep on riding after the sun went down, and at about 11:00 we stopped in the middle of the desert and turned off our motorcycles.  There was no moon that night and the wind had died down.  No other vehicles were on the highway, so we were alone in the quiet darkness, the only sound the pinging noises made by our engines as they cooled in the night air.

Hundreds of miles from the lights of the nearest city, the night sky was stunning.  The Milky Way was clearly visible from one horizon to the other.  Antares glowed like a tiny ruby in the heart of Scorpio.  My friends and I just stood there, gaping in awed silence at the numberless points of twinkling light in the celestial sphere.  Then John said, “I wonder why God made the universe so big.” 

John’s comment got me to thinking.  Why is the universe so big, with billons of galaxies and with each galaxy containing billions of stars, there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in all the beaches of the world.  Read more »

A friend advises that Darwinist Douglas Futuyma’s recent book, A New Biology for the 21st Century informs us,

Now more than ever, biology has the potential to contribute practical solutions to many of the major challenges confronting the United States and the world. A New Biology for the 21st Century recommends that a “New Biology” approach–one that depends on greater integration within biology, and closer collaboration with physical, computational, and earth scientists, mathematicians and engineers—be used to find solutions to four key societal needs: sustainable food production, ecosystem restoration, optimized biofuel production, and improvement in human health. The approach calls for a coordinated effort to leverage resources across the federal, private, and academic sectors to help meet challenges and improve the return on life science research in general.

Another friend points out that this is all geared to current “easy story” media campaigns.

I have a vested interest in this problem. I live in one of the world’s breadbaskets, where you will rarely hear of anyone starving to death, unless an alleged criminal activity is involved. Still, I am part of the disastrous population overload, according to some. In my view, the biggest reasons for failed food production are bad government and inadequate culture.

Anyway, how are we disastrous, exactly? Who around here is supposed to look after things?

Raccoons? Porcupines? Rats? Millipedes?

Well, good luck getting them to do anything.

Well, see here:

The professor has not admitted wrongdoing, but he did issue a statement apologizing for making “significant mistakes.” And beyond his own immediate career difficulties, Mr. Hauser’s difficulties spell trouble for one of the trendiest fields in academia—evolutionary psychology.

Mr. Hauser has been at the forefront of a movement to show that our morals are survival instincts evolved over the millennia. When Mr. Hauser’s 2006 book “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong” was published, evolutionary psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker proclaimed that his Harvard colleague was engaged in “one of the hottest new topics in intellectual life: The psychology and biology of morals.”

[ ... ]

Not so long ago, the initial bloom already was off evolutionary psychology. The field earned a bad name by appearing to justify all sorts of nasty, rapacious behaviors, including rape, as successful strategies for Darwinian competition. But the second wave of the discipline solved that PR problem by discovering that evolution favored those with a more progressive outlook. Mr. Hauser has been among those positing that our ancestors survived not by being ruthlessly selfish, but by cooperating, a legacy ingrained in our moral intuitions.

This progressive sort of evolutionary psychology is often in the news. NPR offered an example this week with a story titled “Teary-Eyed Evolution: Crying Serves a Purpose. ” According to NPR, “Scientists who study evolution say crying probably conferred some benefit and did something to advance our species.” Read more »

Here’s an article on the supposed evolution of live birth:

… even the live-bearers have not got rid of the shell entirely. Baby skinks that are born live come out encased in a membrane – all that is left of the eggshell. With a bit of help from their mothers, most of them break out of the membrane within 36 hours.

How did live birth evolve? One group of the egg-laying skinks retain their eggs inside their bodies for longer than the others, and it seems that the live-bearers evolved from these “intermediate” skinks.

Reptiles are more likely to develop live birth if they live in cold climates, where it is a good idea to protect their offspring in their bodies, rather than exposing them to the rigours of the environment too soon. Sarah Smith of Stony Brook University, New York, points out that this explains why it is the skinks who live in the chilly highlands that give birth to live young.

Journal reference: Journal of Morphology, DOI: 10.1002/jmor.10877

I don’t get how this shows that live birth is evolving.

Animals that produce their young in eggs have way different systems from those that produce them via placentas, as do mammals.

With eggs, live birth is just a technicality.

Some snakes lay eggs, and others give live birth.

In other words, the eggs hatch indoors instead of outdoors.

Maybe some snakes or skinks are in between, but so?

To me, a more significant interest is the reptiles that protect their eggs or young, like crocodiles, alligators and cobras. that suggests that the theory of the unfeeling reptilian brain is not true.

The Darwinian model of evolution holds that one of the key mechanisms of evolutionary innovation is the duplication of genes and the subsequent divergence of one of the duplicate copies to undertake a new functional role. Because a probability of a single gene stumbling upon a significantly different (yet functionally advantageous) sequence is so small, the idea is that, following a duplication of a gene, one copy is able to retain the original function, while the other is free to explore the vast sea of combinatorial possibilities in search of some novel function. It is widely believed that a duplicate gene has no phenotypic cost or advantage associated with it – that is, it is selectively neutral. In such a state, it is thought that the gene is free to mutate, independent of selection constraints or pressure. When a previously protein-coding gene incurs deleterious mutations such that it no longer codes for a useful polypeptide, the gene is rendered a “pseudogene”. One recent paper, which recently appeared in the open-access journal, PLoS Genetics, by Kuo and Ochman, entitled “The Extinction Dynamics of Bacterial Pseudogenes”, offers a potent challenge to this view. According to the paper’s abstract: Read more >>

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol.14, No.5, 2010, pp. 475-486.

LINK

A friend wrote recently to advise re this article, that goes to the 365 000 members of the largest engineering society in the world, about an effort to create a female android that smiles.

Look, even Dilbert would not take her out for the evening, and that is saying a lot. He would otherwise spend yet another evening with Dogbert and Catbert.

I suspect the designers will not get past the barrier created by the fact that the real human brain is more like an ocean than a machine, and many human decisions are not made by step-by-step pathways. (Which does not mean that they are badly made, either.)

I stay away from gatherings like the author of the article will soon be asked to address because I would probably be unable to stop myself from getting somewhere near an open mike and saying, softly to be sure:

Actually, you could replicate a human brain in about ten months if you and your wife were willing to risk what God told Adam and Eve to go and do. And, in your lifetime, that is the only way you will ever do it. …

[O’Leary’s mike suddenly goes dead at that point ...]

From some correspondence with a friend:

Darwin was a racist, pure and simple. Why can’t people just accept that fact, and get PAST it?

I have become increasingly suspicious of efforts to excuse Darwin’s racism by saying that the old boy was also anti-slavery.

Lots of racists are anti-slavery. That was true thousands of years ago, by the way.

Slavery is a bad social institution because it disrupts the ties that hold a normal society together.

For example, a man can have two sons, one by his wife and one by a slave girl he rapes. He can lavish the best on the first son and sell the second down river to some horrible fate – without thinking he is doing anything wrong, and irrespective of their merit*

That unfits men for normal relations with women and children – which are (under natural human circumstances) always negotiated relationships.

[= Girl thinks: You want me? Why me? Why not my older sister? My cousin? Have you spoken to my father? What are you offering? And, have you ever been married before? What happened?]

Over time, slavery leads to stupid immorality, brutality, and the downfall of the societies that sponsor it. It is not hard to see why.

(*By the way, that fact alone pretty much disproves Dawkins’s “selfish gene” thesis. But I assume that no intelligent person believes Dawkins’s thesis anyway.)