The Atlanta Journal Constitution Weigh In

In what can only be described as a heavy-handed editorial, Maureen Downey had written a column on the recent Cobb County decision:

To see evidence of evolution, look no further than the Cobb County Board of Education. From a tax-frittering, pseudo-science muddle, the board seems to be evolving into a deliberate and engaged panel capable of putting the reputation and credibility of the district ahead of politics or personal creeds.

While it is probably true that the decision was correct, the evolution sticker side acted in good faith and with good motives. Ms. Downey makes no attempt to hide her contempt for them. Not professional.

Man the Hunter

A new report in Foxnews indicates that humans may have wiped out the megafauna in Australia some 10k years ago. This is what is also been suggested to have happened in the New World around the same time period.

We like to romaticize the Native Americans and Native Australians and think that they were "close to the land." The fact of the matter is that, as humans, we haven't changed much over time.

YouTube

Getting onto the bandwagon a bit slowly. I discovered that if you type in "Intelligent Design" into the search engine at YouTube, you get a bunch of videos, including some lectures. Nifty.

Daphne Michelle Kidder

Another reason that I have posted lightly is that our fourth child, Daphne Michelle Kidder, was born on Wednesday, December 20, at 2:23. Everybody is doing very well.

Sorry for the light posting

I have torn some muscles in my back and have not been able to sit for any period of time for about two weeks. Sorry for the light posting.

One thing did cross my path in the last week. In a press release by the organization Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (an organization I can throw a little bit further than I can the ACLU, but not much), the Cobb County Georgia sticker brouhaha seems to have been settled. Part of the release states,

In an agreement announced today, Cobb County school officials state that they will not order the placement of “any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other warnings or disclaimers bearing language substantially similar to that used on the sticker that is the subject of this action.” School officials also agreed not to take other actions that would undermine the teaching of evolution in biology classes.

Sounds like unilateral surrender to me.

ID on a Grand Scale

For years, ID folks like Hugh Ross have been championing the "Anthropic Principle," which states, in somewhat simplified terms, that the universe is tweaked in such a way to make life possible and that if certain parameters (such as the age of the universe, the electromagnetic and gravitational forces) were a hair off, life would not exist. The Constant is the force that drives the universal expansion. As the story notes:

Quantum physics predicts the cosmological constant should be far larger than what is actually seen: roughly 10 to the 120th power larger, a number represented by 1 with 120 zeroes behind it. By comparison, [Steven] Weinberg's original estimate was off just by roughly a hundredfold, and refined versions of this argument claim greater accuracy, suggesting anthropic reasoning could provide answers quantum physics currently cannot.

Others are not convinced.

However, theoretical physicist Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and cosmologist Roberto Trotta at Oxford University in England take issue with how anthropic reasoning predicts the cosmological constant.

"The specifications used to allow life are rather arbitrary and can lead to very different expected values for fundamental constants," Starkman told SPACE.com.

Seems to me that you still have the other 28 dimensionless variables to deal with, though.

A Very Old Meteorite

This will get all the "origins of life" people hopping. A meteorite that fell in the Yukon and northern BC appears to have organic material in it. According to the National Geographic story by Brian Handwerk:


The meteorite likely formed in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt, but the organic material it contains probably had a far more distant origin.

The globules could have originated in the Kuiper Belt group of icy planetary remnants orbiting beyond Neptune. Or they could have been created even farther afield.

Whether this lends credence to the hypotheses that life on earth is extraterrestrial in origin remains unclear. Stay Tuned!

Kansas Outlaws Evolution!!

That paragon of intrepid reporting, the Onion, has revealed that Kansas lawmakers have outlawed evolution. As the report notes:

"Barn swallows that develop lighter, more streamlined builds to enable faster migration, for example, could live out the rest of their brief lives in prison," said Indiana University chemist and pro-intelligent-design author Robert Hellenbaum, who helped compose the language of the law. "And butterflies who mimic the wing patterns and colors of other butterflies for an adaptive advantage, well, their days of flaunting God's will are over."

This is truly a major step in legislation.

Hat tip to Jon Reid.

William Dembski at the Panda's Thumb

The Panda's Thumb relates an exchange with William Dembski in which he is asked to operationalize ID in terms of probability calculations. His answer is nothing short of astounding:

As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.

If it is not a mechanistic theory, what kind of theory is it? How does it rise above the charge of "just so story" that he claims for Darwinian evolution? Once again, how is ID operationalized? How would these discontinuities manifest themselves? ID seems repeatedly unable to address, and hopes no one will notice, this elephant in the living room.

Origins of Life

Although it is not a subject that evolutionary theory can address, origin of life questions are fascinating. In a short article appearing in Physicsweb, it is suggested that organic solids may have rained down on the early earth for millions of years, eventually leading to life as we know it. Interesting.

A View From the Jerusalem Post

Natan Slifkin wonders where all the Jews are that oppose ID? In a November 16 article for the Jerusalem Post (subscription required), he laments:

The prophets said that "the Heavens declare the glory of God." Some of the ancients interpreted this to mean that since (in their time) there was no explanation as to why the planets move in the way that they do they attest to a Designer. But now that physics and astronomy have explained planetary motion does this mean that the Heavens no longer declare the glory of God? Of course they do; and the unavoidable position for the religious person is that God's grandeur is seen in the laws of nature.

Good point. And, in a stab at "irreducible complexity," he writes:

So where does that leave the rest of the universe? What about all those structures that do not even by the admission of the ID camp present irreducible complexity? The unstated implication of their position is that these things do not attest to a Creator. Don't have a grasp of cellular biology? Sorry you won't be able to perceive that the universe was created by God.

Either God is everywhere or He is nowhere. But He is certainly not limiting His appearance in the universe to the bacterial flagellum and the blood-clotting system.

Ah, kids will be kids.

This amusing story showed up in the WaPo today.

Neandertal DNA part II

The issue of Science has arrived with the stories involving the study of the Neandertal DNA. The new test, called "metagenomics," has so far identified 65 250 base pairs of what is believed to be Neandertal DNA. The article is behind a subscription wall, so I cannot quote liberally. Here are the high points:

- Neandertals and modern humans share a common ancestor back c. 706 000 years ago
- The Neandertal/modern human split was c. 370 000 years ago, although it varies for different populations tested.
- This predates the appearance of modern humans in Africa which occurred c. 195 000 years ago.
- There is a lack of evidence supporting admixture of Neandertals and modern humans.

Not everyone thinks the results are fool-proof, however. Genomicist Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University State College is quoted in a companion article by Elizabeth Pennisi as saying:

“The divergence [between living people and Neandertals] is so small compared to the DNA damage and the sequencing error” that it’s hard to be confident of any results. If we’ve learned anything, it is that we generally haven’t perceived the full extent of the problems and complexities of ancient DNA research. We’re still very much in the learning curve."

We haven't heard the last of this one. Stay tuned.

Neandertal DNA

According to a report in the WaPo, a new genetic test may unravel the mystery behind the Neandertal DNA code. The story begins:

Unleashing a new kind of DNA analyzer on a 38,000-year-old fragment of fossilized Neanderthal bone, scientists have reconstructed a portion of that creature's genetic code -- a technological tour de force that has researchers convinced they will soon know the entire DNA sequence of the closest cousin humans ever had.

Heady stuff, indeed. These are things the fossil record simply cannot tell us. The study will appear in this week's Science and is sure to touch off a firestorm between the continuity folks and the replacement folks.

"Clearly, we are at the dawn of Neanderthal genomics," said Edward M. Rubin of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Read the whole thing.

Set Your VCR's (Or TiVo's or whatever)

Nova is doing a story on bipedalism, focusing on a family in Turkey that walks quadrupedally. The show will air tomorrow night, Nov. 14 at 8:00.

Cultural History Washing Away

Foxnews reports that many archaeological sites are falling prey to "global warming." The reports suggests that climate changes caused by global warming. I am not sure how much is due to human action and how much is "programmed" into the life of the planet, but it is a problem when your cultural history starts washing away.

Dolphins and Legs

And in case you missed this, Japanese fishermen caught a dolphin with a vestigial pair of limbs. As the article points out:

Fossil remains show dolphins and whales were four-footed land animals about 50 million years ago and share common ancestors with hippopotamuses and deer. Scientists believe they later transitioned to an aquatic lifestyle.

Much like the Tiktaalik fossil that was found in the arctic a few months back, this shows evidence of an evolutionary lineage. Cool!!

Australopithecine Diet

Foxnews reports that robust australopithecines may have had a more varied diet than was originally thought. According to the article, if the diet was more varied than thought, then the hypothesis that the robusts went extinct because of an ecological shift might need to be rethought. Interesting.

Sorry for the light posts

I have started a new job at ORNL and am settling in. I will get back into the swing of things shortly.

Compatabilism and Libertarianism

David Siemens thinks J.P. Moreland is wrong. Moreland argues the human mind is part of nature and is endowed with libertarian capacities, such that it is capable of true choice. Siemans believes that this is a capacity that only God has. He notes:

Moreland has produced a straw man, but one with a curious consequence. If, as he claims, physics is not self-contained, that is, if there are nonphysical causes of physical phenomena, where does he draw the line? Psychokinesis? Energy vortexes, like those claimed to exist near Sedona, AZ? Crystals? Pyramidology? Alien intelligences exerting forces we cannot detect or measure? Astral influences?


He argues that Moreland has conflated terms for different disciplines:

"Mass" is obviously an important scientific term, from Newton's [f = ma] to Einstein's [E = mc^2]. This does not mean that I can insist that it be applied by psychologists to determine the mass of anger when someone loses his temper. Conversely, I cannot ask how angry a uranium nucleus is when it spalls.

Read the whole thing.