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Human evolution: Quest for primitive human backfires

Best news I’ve heard all year, actually. Also the worst.

Bear with me.

A friend writes to tell me that

Jared Diamond, geography prof at UCLA, ornithologist and popular science writer, is in hot water for writing a story in the New Yorker last year that described “vengeance wars” among tribes in Papua New Guinea that apparently has angered the tribes. The convoluted episode has resulted in his being vilified by anthropologists and by Stephen Jay Gould’s widow, who runs Art Science Research Laboratory.

He is being sued for defamation by his New Guinea subjects. Read More ›

Time Mag (of all places) Exposes Media Hype About Ida

 Time’s verdict regarding Ida:  “Most paleontologists will roll their eyes at that sort of overhyped nonsense, especially given that there’s real science lurking underneath. After wading through the false advertising, though, most people might have a hard time finding it.”Full story here. Then there is this gem:  “‘Most of what we understand about primate evolution is pieced together from bits of teeth and jaws,’ says Michael Novacek, curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.” Teeth and jaws.  Seems to me that leaves an awful lot of room for interpretation, which, of course, is influenced by worldview (or “metaphysical prejudices if you like) as much as anything else.  

Ida the Lemur and media manipulation

Ida the Lemur-like creature, has had some high praise from leading Darwinists. David Attenborough announced with confidence that the missing link ‘is no longer missing,’ but the way the evidence has been presented and handled has raised questions about media manipulation, especially from the London Times science correspondent Mark Henderson; he seems quite miffed. 

More on Ida: overblown claims and a worrying precedent

Mark Henderson reports that doubts have arisen now that others have finally been given access to the fossil and suggests that Ida is related to ‘nothing that exists today.’ Although Ida is an important fossil, he writes that ‘she isn’t all that’ and complains that the researchers haven’t provided sufficient evidence to justify their claims. He argues that this is… 

‘…especially serious given the publicity blitz behind Ida…a popular book, a documentary, a website and an exhibition have been launched on the back of this find, before it has received full scientific scrutiny.’  Read More ›

Review: Alva Noe’s “Out of Our Heads”

Here is my review of Alva Noe’s Out of Our Heads Out of Our Heads at MercatorNet: He raises vital issues but, unfortunately, he fails to offer a convincing solution. Arguing that consciousness must be understood as involving the body and the environment as well as the brain, he offers platitudes such as, “Where do you stop and where does the rest of the world begin?” An interesting question, but if consciousness is real — and not well described by materialist theory — we are no closer to an answer even if our brains, bodies, and environment are all one world. He offers only a different description of the problem. Noë seems to want to move away from reductive explanations, Read More ›

Shapiro Hoisted With His Own Petard?

Robert Shapiro, noted Darwinist and professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University, says this of the recent Sutherland RNA world experiments: “‘Although as an exercise in chemistry this represents some very elegant work, this has nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth whatsoever,’ he says.   According to Shapiro, it is hard to imagine RNA forming in a prebiotic world along the lines of Sutherland’s synthesis.   ‘The chances that blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA is highly unlikely,’ argues Shapiro. Instead, he advocates the metabolism-first argument: that early self-sustaining autocatalytic chemosynthetic systems associated with amino acids predated RNA.” My question Read More ›

“Junk DNA”: Seems Vital

I’m just posting this to give people an update on what researchers are finding. More and more, so-called “junk DNA” is proving to be essential for life. Here, transposons, considered, generally, to be the “junkiest” of the “junk”, is found to have a rather central role in the development of a pond critter. Here is the write-up on PhysOrg. com.
Read More ›

Prebiotic Earth Scenarios Founded On Tarry Barbecue Mess

A Nature review that begins with the pronouncement that an experiment “has quashed” major objections to the RNA world of prebiotic origins (Ref 1) is bound to raise a few eye-brows.  It is a bold pronouncement indeed and one that must be accompanied by a water-tight set of evidences.  In his review of the work of John Sutherland and others at the University of Manchester, science writer Richard Van Noorden promised just that by declaring to his readers that these same scientists had achieved the ‘never-before-performed’ feat of making a ribonucleotide- one of the components of RNA- in the lab (Ref 1).  Key to the success of the experiment was the presence of a phosphate group that, in addition to serving as one of the final reactants in the ribonucleotide synthesis process, also functioned as a catalyst earlier on in the reaction (Refs 1-3).  This result was the culmination of twelve long years of laboratory-based research during which simple molecules had been shown to be the “unwitting choreographers” of ribonucleotide synthesis (Ref 1).

Read More ›

Winner: Contest Question 1 winner: Does the multiverse help science make sense – or simply destroy science?

This contest was posted 6 May 2009, and closed today.

The Uncommon Descent Contest Question 1 winner is #27:

To claim the prize, a free copy of Expelled, #27 John A Designer must send me a snail address at dodesignorchance@gmail.com Here is the entry: Read More ›

A Dialog Between God and Evolution

Michael D. Thomas, Ph.D. is a Professor and Director of the Division of Spanish and Portuguese at Baylor and is an ordained pastor.  On his BLOG,  he has a dialog between God and Evolution I found fun.  There are some other ID posts on his site that are worth perusing.

I keep having to remind myself that science is self-correcting …

I have often been wearied by legends in their own lunchroom huffing that science differs from other endeavours because it is “self-correcting.”

To which I reply: Aw come off it, fellas. Any system that does not go extinct is self-correcting – after it collapses on its hind end. This is true of governments, businesses, churches, and not-for-profit organizations. I’ve seen enough of life to know.

Here’s a classic: At The Scientist’s NewsBlog, Bob Grant reveals (May 7, 2009) that

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted. Read More ›

Religion dressed up as science?

A review of a book titled “The Universe: Order without design” appears in New Scientist. The summary of current ideas has a mythic sound to ordinary readers “a tiny piece of inflating “false vacuum” decays into a fireball, and stars and galaxies congeal out of the cooling debris”. Read it and see what you think. I have two questions. First, does description equal causation? Second, is the invoking of billions of theoretical and eternally undetectable other universes simply to give an atheistic explaination of our one tuned universe, more scientific or rational than believing in an Intelligent Fine Tuner?

Human evolution: The spin machine in top gear

For a fascinating misreading of what the recently announced Messel Pit fossil really shows, go here: Scientists have found a 47-million-year-old human ancestor. Discovered in Messel Pit, Germany, the fossil, described as Darwinius masillae, is 20 times older than most fossils that explain human evolution. That fossil doesn’t “explain” human evolution; it complicates the picture. The theory that was gaining ground was that humans were descended from tarsier-like creatures, but this fossil, touted as a primate ancestor, is a lemur-like creature. Often, I hear from people attempting to patch the cracks in the unguided Darwinian evolution theory, as follows: “We have more information than ever!” Yes, but what if it is – as in this case – the evidence is Read More ›

RNA Worlds

I know this is old news by now (I was teaching an ID-intensive last week at Southern Evangelical Seminary, so I’m only now getting caught up), but the following paragraphs in ScienceNews struck me: RNA molecules are formed from three components: a sugar, a base and a phosphate group. In past research, chemists developed each of the components and then tried to put them together to make the complete molecule. “But the components are quite stable, and so they wouldn’t stick together,” Sutherland says. “After 40 years of trying, we decided there had to be a better way of doing this reaction.” The team took a different approach, starting with a common precursor molecule that had a bit of the Read More ›

DARPA’s search for “physical intelligence”

Check out the following at fedbizopps.gov (click here):

Solicitation Number:
DARPA-SN-09-35
Notice Type:
Special Notice
Synopsis:
Added: May 05, 2009 11:23 am

Special Notice DARPA-SN-09-35: Physical intelligence (PI);
Proposers’ Day Workshop, DATES: June 9th and June 11th, 2009;
REGISTRATION DEADLINE: May 29, 2009; TECHNICAL POC: Dr. Todd Hylton, DARPA/DSO, Email: Todd.Hylton@darpa.mil; URL: www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/solicit.htm

In anticipation of a potential program on the topic of Physical intelligence (PI), DARPA is hosting two Proposers’ Day Workshops that will provide critical information on the program vision, the milestones, and opportunities associated with the development of interdisciplinary teams to respond to an anticipated Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). The Physical Intelligence program aspires to understand intelligence as a physical phenomenon and to make the first demonstration of the principle in electronic and chemical systems. A central tenet is that intelligence spontaneously evolves as a consequence of thermodynamics in open systems. The program plan is organized around three interrelated task areas: (1) creating a theory (a mathematical formalism) and validating it in natural and engineered systems; (2) building the first human-engineered systems that display physical intelligence in the form of abiotic, self-organizing electronic and chemical systems; and (3) developing analytical tools to support the design and understanding of physically intelligent systems. If successful, the program would launch a revolution of understanding across many fields of human endeavor, demonstrate the first intelligence engineered from first principles, create new classes of electronic, computational, and chemical systems, and create tools to engineer intelligent systems that match the problem/environment in which they will exist. Concepts relevant to the objectives of the Physical Intelligence program can be found in numerous disciplines and areas of research including statistical physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, dissipative systems, group theory, collective behavior, complexity theory, consciousness theory, non-linear dynamical systems, complex adaptive systems, systems analysis, multi-scale modeling, control systems, information theory, computation theory, topology, electronics, evolutionary computation, cellular automata, artificial life, origin of life, microbiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary chemistry, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, brain modeling, organizational behavior, operations research and others. Read More ›