John Taylor Gatto, a veteran teacher who is “against school ” discusses an old book about education and its hair-curling ideas: It was from James Bryant Conant – president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century – that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High Read More ›

In this article in The Scientist, “Imprinting Diversity”, Cristina Luiggi interviews Joachim Messing about ways in which genomic imprinting may be a strong driver of diversity: Sexual reproduction yields offspring with two copies of the same gene, one from each parent; but in an epigenetic phenomenon known as genomic imprinting, only one copy of certain genes is turned on or off, depending on which parent contributed it. Imprinted genes are stamped by patterns of DNA methylation or histone modification during gamete formation, and their activation or inactivation is then passed on to offspring. Previously, approximately 100 genes were thought to be imprinted in mammals. But Rutgers University molecular biologist and F1000 Member Joachim Messing, discusses a recent paper that found Read More ›

This is a FYI post. As I’m given to say: another day, another bad day for Darwinism. Years ago, it became apparent that with whole gene analysis (WGA), either the case for, or against Darwinism, and vice-versa, would happen. Population genetics looks at very small part of the genome, a limitation that is obviated through WGA. And, so, ‘new discoveries’ are happening. In this particular case, it has to do with angiosperms (flowering plants). What they’ve found is that new features appear early on in its phylogeny, and then, only later, is there great speciation, or diversification. This is pretty much OPPOSITE of Darwinian expectations. Darwin would presumably argue that through diversification of species, little-bit by little-bit, some new feature Read More ›

Here’s the story: Horizontal gene transfer between bacteria and animals Julie C. Dunning HotoppTrends in Genetics, Volume 27, Issue 4, 157-163, 18 February 2011 Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved. 10.1016/j.tig.2011.01.005 Julie C. Dunning Hotopp Summary Horizontal gene transfer is increasingly described between bacteria and animals. Such transfers that are vertically inherited have the potential to influence the evolution of animals. One classic example is the transfer of DNA from mitochondria and chloroplasts to the nucleus after the acquisition of these organelles by eukaryotes. Even today, many of the described instances of bacteria-to-animal transfer occur as part of intimate relationships such as those of endosymbionts and their invertebrate hosts, particularly insects and nematodes, while numerous transfers are also Read More ›

Here.

Week July 18th to 22nd inclusive.

Presenters will include:

Prof Steve Fuller, Warwick University
Prof Guillermo Gonzales, Grove City College, Pennsylvania, USA
Dr David Galloway, Vice President Royal College of Surgeons, Glasgow
John Langlois, Barrister
Dr Alastair Noble, Director, Centre for Intelligent Design, Glasgow.
Prof Chris Shaw, Queens University, Belfast.
Dr Jonathan Wells, Discovery Institute, Seattle, USA
David Williams, Lawyer

Other Tutors to be advised.

Bursaries / Scholarships are available as appropriate.

In the first instance visit our web site for more details:-

http://www.c4id.org.uk/

Some thoughts:

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It would be very nice if there was a magic scanner that automatically gave you a readout of the total amount of complex specified information (CSI) in a system when you pointed it at that system, wouldn’t it? Of course, you’d want one that could calculate the CSI of any complex system – be it a bacterial flagellum, an ATP synthase enzyme, a Bach fugue, or the faces on Mt. Rushmore – by following some general algorithm. It would make CSI so much more scientifically rigorous, wouldn’t it? Or would it?

This essay is intended as a follow-up to the recent thread, On the calculation of CSI by Mathgrrl. It is meant to address some concerns about whether CSI is sufficiently objective to qualify as a bona fide scientific concept.

But first, some definitions. In The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems (The Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Dallas, 2008), Intelligent Design advocates William Dembski and Jonathan Wells define complex specified information (or CSI) as follows (p. 311):

Information that is both complex and specified. Synonymous with SPECIFIED COMPLEXITY.

Dembski and Wells then define specified complexity on page 320 as follows:

An event or object exhibits specified complexity provided that (1) the pattern to which it conforms is a highly improbable event (i.e. has high PROBABILISTIC COMPLEXITY) and (2) the pattern itself is easily described (i.e. has low DESCRIPTIVE COMPLEXITY).

In this post, I’m going to examine seven demands which Intelligent Design critics have made with regard to complex specified information (CSI):
Read More ›

Moshe Averick,the ID community Reb and author of Nonsense of the Highest Order, writes to say,

In a post on his blog Why Evolution is True, Dr. Jerry Coyne took some potshots at Rabbi Adam Jacobs and myself about an article by Jacobs on the Huffington Post “A reasonable argument for God’s existence”When all was said and done, Dr. Coyne summed up his “slam dunk” case for a naturalistic origin of life: Read More ›

No biologist has been responsible for more – and for more drastic – modifications of the average person’s worldview than Charles Darwin” (“These words were spoken by Harvard professor Ernst Mayr (1904–2005), veteran evolutionary biologist, when on September 23, 1999, he received the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Dr, Mayr made the point that although most groundbreaking scientists, such as Albert Einstein, had a marked influence within their own fields of science, they made little impact on the way the average person apprehends the world, whereas Darwin changed the very fabric of our worldview.

And so this book. …

Which shows why Darwinism didn’t and shouldn’t have changed the Hindu worldview.

Unless Hindus want to buy into the Evolutionary Agony Aunt, and Darwinian brand marketing, and the Big Bazooms theory of evolution. Why not let it be a late Western neurosis?

by Leif A Jensen, Rethinking Darwin: A Vedic Study of Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Bhaktivedanta Book Trust: Germany, 2010), p. 1

Hey, just readin’ is all. And repeat after me,   Read More ›

“Philosophers are finding fresh meanings in truth, beauty and goodness”, John Cottingham tells us (The Times, June 17, 2006):

ARE VALUES (for example moral values) grounded in something real and objective or are they just a way of talking about whatever we may personally happen to approve of? There has been a remarkable shift in philosophical views about this since I was an undergraduate. Back in the Sixties, when we were all still under the shadow of logical positivism, moral beliefs (“value judgments”, as we often pejoratively called them) were dismissed as subjective — mere expressions of emotion, mere grunts of approval or disapproval. Notions such as goodness were no more than pseudo-properties, masking our personal desires and preferences. Later on, with the rise of postmodernism, even truth became suspect, and was downgraded to no more than an honorific label that a given culture bestows on its favoured assertions.

But it is very striking how the popularity of these subjectivist creeds has faded in more recent times. Relativistic views of truth turned out to be self- defeating; while in ethics, subjectivism ran into a host of logical difficulties and is now on the wane, eclipsed by a growing number of neo-objectivist theories. To everyone’s surprise, the increasing consensus among philosophers today is that some kind of objectivism of truth and of value is correct.

I won’t belabour the way in which this will help design; rather I offer a reflection, based on a true incident, on the – as Cottingham thinks, fading – notion that right and wrong are mere preferences, and that truth is merely propaganda: Read More ›

… invest the money in something really safe, and then get out. Lines from the real world of lots of skill and lots of chance: The vast sums of money shuttled among the accounts of these young professionals — and the shocking aggressiveness and recklessness with which they played — deepened the divide between the young online players and the older guard who earned their millions when poker was still a game played by men sitting around a table. Since the rise of online poker in the early 2000s, every principle of the game, every lesson learned over hundreds of thousands of hours of play, every simple credo uttered in some old Western gambling movie — all those tersely stated, Read More ›

Predation in the Early Cambrian is demonstrated by the occurrence of borings or drill holes in shelly fauna. Confirmatory evidence has been adduced from gut content analyses, although these evidences could also be attributed to scavenging. However, predation involving shell breakage or crushing has been documented previously only from the late Ordovician. This situation has changed with the published research on Lower Cambrian lingulate brachiopods. “Here we present the first report of repaired damage to linguliform brachiopod shells caused by durophagous shell-crushing, which is exquisitely recorded from exceptionally preserved specimens in the early Cambrian Wulongqing Formation (Guanshan fauna), Kunming, China. The healed fractures on specimens with preserved thin pedicles unambiguously suggest failed predation attempts. Although they cannot be linked to Read More ›

On a recent thread, ID critic Larry Moran seemed to take great joy in mischaracterizing the science of design detection as ID/Creationism. That’s no surprise, of course, but I was amused by his rather strange proclivity to swagger in with a sneer and stumble out with a gaffe. If you are going to write this: “I have no respect for hypocrites, liars, and people who don’t take the time to learn about the subject they are attacking.” You don’t want to follow with this: “Intelligent Design Creationism grew out of Scientific Creationism when its leaders decided they needed a new word to try and disguise the religious basis of their agenda.” It just isn’t good form to complain about ignorant Read More ›

Recently on this blog, I have been exploring and examining some of the genomic arguments for common descent. As I have been documenting in recent weeks, while the case for common ancestry — on the face of it — looks mightily strong, closer inspection reveals that the arguments don’t, in fact, stand up under more rigorous scrutiny. In the vast majority of instances, the corroborative data is very carefully cherry picked from the pertinent data set, and the non-congruent evidence is discarded or ignored. In some cases, non-congruent data is rationalised — sometimes plausibly. But then one ought not to think that an ad hoc rationalisation constitutes  evidence for said position. As Casey Luskin notes,

…at the end of the day, we must call them what they are: ad hoc rationalizations designed to save a theory that has already been falsified. Because it is taken as an assumption, evolutionists effectively treat common ancestry in an unfalsifiable and unscientific fashion, where any data that contradicts the expectations of common descent is simply explained away via one of the above ad hoc rationalizations. But if we treat common descent as it ought to be treated — as a testable hypothesis — then it contradicts much data.

One popular argument for common descent is the case from the discipline of biogeography — that is, the study of the geographical and historical distribution of species in relation to one another. The argument is based largely around the observation that species are related in accordance with their geographical proximity with respect to one another. One well-known example of this is the concentration of marsupial mammals in Australia and South America. As the Internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia, explains,

The history of marsupials also provides an example of how the theories of evolution and continental drift can be combined to make predictions about what will be found in the fossil record. The earliest marsupial fossils are about 80 million years old and found in North America; by 40 million years ago fossils show that they could be found throughout South America, but there is no evidence of them in Australia, where they now predominate, until about 30 million years ago. The theory of evolution predicts that the Australian marsupials must be descended from the older ones found in the Americas. The theory of continental drift says that between 30 and 40 million years ago South America and Australia were still part of the Southern hemisphere super continent of Gondwana and that they were connected by land that is now part of Antarctica. Therefore combining the two theories scientists predicted that marsupials migrated from what is now South America across what is now Antarctica to what is now Australia between 40 and 30 million years ago. This hypothesis led paleontologists to Antarctica to look for marsupial fossils of the appropriate age. After years of searching they found, starting in 1982, fossils on Seymour Island off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula of more than a dozen marsupial species that lived 35-40 million years ago.

I must confess that I have my doubts with regards the efficacy of this argument in establishing universal common descent, or even common descent of all marsupial mammals. After all, as noted in the textbook Explore Evolution, marsupials are not even restricted to the southern continents of Australia and South America. Some marsupials live in the northern hemisphere, and there is even some paleontological evidence for the oldest marsupials inhabiting China!

But be that as it may. As with the majority of arguments favouring common descent, the argument from biogeography is loaded with carefully cherry-picked data.

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So here is our ID community reb Moshe Averick’s take on a bunch of complaints about his recent book: Rabbi, this is just the old “Argument from Ignorance” or a “god-of-the gaps” argumentRabbi, you ignored the implications of Darwinian Evolution Rabbi, you ignored current Origin of Life research, particularly the RNA-World research Rabbi, you are “quote mining” (i.e. presenting statements by scientists out of context and misleading the readers) Rabbi, this is just the “Argument from Incredulity” Rabbi, you are “primitive, backward, superstitious and anti-science” Rabbi, we must have unwavering faith in Science and Scientists Hey, I’m with the Reb. Okay, okay, yes, I am a Catholic, but if I had to choose, and the Church had never been invented, … Read More ›

In this review of Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo, Christian historian Pearcey revisits the broader question of how science broke loose from reason. (I am thinking of all the “our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth” rubbish from people who honestly believe that they are on the right side of science, and that that idea somehow helps science.)

Many thinkers were so impressed by the scientific revolution that they began to regard science as the sole source of truth. Whatever could not be known by the scientific method was not real. Science was no longer merely one means for investigation the world. It was elevated into an exclusivist worldview — scientism or positivism. (91)

– Evolution News & Views (March 22, 2011)

Yes. I couldn’t know that I liked sushi until a brain scan told me. My behaviour at the buffet wouldn’t be accepted as evidence. More significant was how it affected the world of the artsie:

Pearcey describes naturalism as an outgrowth of realism, only “…grittier, harsher, more pessimistic. It portrays humans as nothing but biological organisms, products of evolutionary forces.” (145) The Darwinian influence was most noticeable in literature. This literature was rugged, harsh, and at times blurred the lines between man and animal. Jack London was profoundly influenced by the writings of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and we see in his writings a harsh, unforgiving world where survival of the fittest reigns supreme. (144, 150)

To see what this means, consider, artsies did not used to be considered flakes. Was Leonardo a flake? Michelangelo? Jane Austen? No, the flake who thinks that chimps trampling paint on a canvas is art was a product of these new ideas, not the old ones. There ceased to be any way of making a distinction. If it is in a frame, as Catbert said, it will look like art to you.

But one thing she said really set me thinking. Read More ›