Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Another take on why scientists don't debate creationists from the Buffalo News. It is interesting to read this article in light of the Gallup Poll data.
Gallup has a poll on evolution and creation here. The opening paragraph sets the tone of the article:
PRINCETON, NJ -- The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.
The poll is heavily oriented toward the idea that humans did or did not evolve--presumably to spark a more visceral response from those questioned. This is, in fact, admitted later in the article. After all, evolution is okay as long as it happens over there. The other paragraph that struck me was this one, in which the stellar record of science education in this country is put on spectacular display:
It might seem contradictory to believe that humans were created in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years and at the same time believe that humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. But, based on an analysis of the two side-by-side questions asked this month about evolution and creationism, it appears that a substantial number of Americans hold these conflicting views.
ya boy!
PRINCETON, NJ -- The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.
The poll is heavily oriented toward the idea that humans did or did not evolve--presumably to spark a more visceral response from those questioned. This is, in fact, admitted later in the article. After all, evolution is okay as long as it happens over there. The other paragraph that struck me was this one, in which the stellar record of science education in this country is put on spectacular display:
It might seem contradictory to believe that humans were created in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years and at the same time believe that humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. But, based on an analysis of the two side-by-side questions asked this month about evolution and creationism, it appears that a substantial number of Americans hold these conflicting views.
ya boy!
Monday, June 11, 2007
George Gilder's Take on Evolution
Realising somewhat after the fact that the George Gilder article is a year old and still not quite sure why my "up to the minute" search strategy retrieved it, it did provide an interesting, if somewhat disappointing read.
He makes a number of peculiar errors that, had he actually been familiar with either the literature of evolution or the workings of the biological world, he likely would not have made. For example, he states that evolution (what he calls "Darwinism," which ought to be a red flag right there) is "...tautological. What survives is fit; what is fit survives." This is too simplistic a criticism to be useful. It is like saying "he burns easily because he has red hair; he has red hair, so he burns easily." It is only tautological on the surface. It doesn't change the fact that people with red hair burn easily. He continues:
As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said that whatever survives is, in some way, normative, Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.
One wonders why he did not include Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood under the umbrella of eugenics, which it certainly was/is. Indeed, "Darwinism" could, and perhaps did inspire these movements. That does not make it bad science.
His arguments against the science of evolution take the form of those of William Dembski, the mathematician that is attached to the Discovery Institute:
I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer's materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations.
He then notes about DNA:
But even here, the deoxyribonucleic acid that bears the word is not itself the word. Like a sheet of paper or a computer memory chip, DNA bears messages but is chemistry is irrelevant to its content.
This is patently silly. He is arguing that the computer can be used to convey content of any conceivable kind and it is irrespective of the content itself. The problem is that the computer hardware is more than one level removed from the content. I have used the hardware to open a web page so I can type this post. There is no biological analogue to this. The closest thing might be the world/universe in which organisms (programs) reside. At the content level, however (the web page) every single word that I have written on this page results in a message. Indeed, if you reorder the words or sentences or even letters, the message is very different. At times, if I have mistakenly ordered a word ('osme' instead of 'some'), the resulting meaning is gibberish (can you say 'mutation?'). This is a mathematical, not biological understanding of reality. The world as a whole, does not care a whit whether a particular organism does or does not survive. It simply exerts the influence on that organism that either helps or hinders its survival. At the informational level, this is an elementary biological concept: the difference between genotype and phenotype. Genotype is the genetic underpinning of the organism, phenotype is how it is expressed in the organism (what it looks like). The organism, if it survives, then reproduces, imparting its genotype to its offspring, which will partly code for how the offspring will look, warts and all.
Over an over, he retreats to mathematical models to state that 64 codons cannot result from 20 amino acids, despite clear evidence that that is exactly what happens in the biological world. He states:
DNA can inform the creation of a brain, but a brain as an aggregation of proteins cannot generate the information in DNA. Wherever there is information, there is a preceding intelligence.
This is something along the lines of Romans 9:
"20But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' "
The catch is that Gilder is using an either-or argument when there is no a priori reason for doing so. DNA is perfectly capable of coding for the formation of a brain. It does so with ease. Whether or not there is a guiding intelligence behind this coding is a theological question, not a biological one. In this sense, like the arguments of William Dembski, the use of mathematics is just a smokescreen to sidestep proximate causation versus ultimate causation and is poor model for the biological world.
He makes a number of peculiar errors that, had he actually been familiar with either the literature of evolution or the workings of the biological world, he likely would not have made. For example, he states that evolution (what he calls "Darwinism," which ought to be a red flag right there) is "...tautological. What survives is fit; what is fit survives." This is too simplistic a criticism to be useful. It is like saying "he burns easily because he has red hair; he has red hair, so he burns easily." It is only tautological on the surface. It doesn't change the fact that people with red hair burn easily. He continues:
As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said that whatever survives is, in some way, normative, Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.
One wonders why he did not include Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood under the umbrella of eugenics, which it certainly was/is. Indeed, "Darwinism" could, and perhaps did inspire these movements. That does not make it bad science.
His arguments against the science of evolution take the form of those of William Dembski, the mathematician that is attached to the Discovery Institute:
I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer's materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations.
He then notes about DNA:
But even here, the deoxyribonucleic acid that bears the word is not itself the word. Like a sheet of paper or a computer memory chip, DNA bears messages but is chemistry is irrelevant to its content.
This is patently silly. He is arguing that the computer can be used to convey content of any conceivable kind and it is irrespective of the content itself. The problem is that the computer hardware is more than one level removed from the content. I have used the hardware to open a web page so I can type this post. There is no biological analogue to this. The closest thing might be the world/universe in which organisms (programs) reside. At the content level, however (the web page) every single word that I have written on this page results in a message. Indeed, if you reorder the words or sentences or even letters, the message is very different. At times, if I have mistakenly ordered a word ('osme' instead of 'some'), the resulting meaning is gibberish (can you say 'mutation?'). This is a mathematical, not biological understanding of reality. The world as a whole, does not care a whit whether a particular organism does or does not survive. It simply exerts the influence on that organism that either helps or hinders its survival. At the informational level, this is an elementary biological concept: the difference between genotype and phenotype. Genotype is the genetic underpinning of the organism, phenotype is how it is expressed in the organism (what it looks like). The organism, if it survives, then reproduces, imparting its genotype to its offspring, which will partly code for how the offspring will look, warts and all.
Over an over, he retreats to mathematical models to state that 64 codons cannot result from 20 amino acids, despite clear evidence that that is exactly what happens in the biological world. He states:
DNA can inform the creation of a brain, but a brain as an aggregation of proteins cannot generate the information in DNA. Wherever there is information, there is a preceding intelligence.
This is something along the lines of Romans 9:
"20But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?' "
The catch is that Gilder is using an either-or argument when there is no a priori reason for doing so. DNA is perfectly capable of coding for the formation of a brain. It does so with ease. Whether or not there is a guiding intelligence behind this coding is a theological question, not a biological one. In this sense, like the arguments of William Dembski, the use of mathematics is just a smokescreen to sidestep proximate causation versus ultimate causation and is poor model for the biological world.
Friday, June 08, 2007
USA Today has a poll on evolution in today's online and print versions. Here are the actual results. Interestingly, the poll questions were phrased in an 'either-or' way--either old-earth evolutionism or recent earth creationism. There was not a question asking whether people believed in God and found evolution a good theory. That would have been interesting. The STRIKING result is that when asked if presidential candidates' views on evolution or creationism mattered in how they would, the vast majority of those polled said 'no.' Further, most of those polled answered that whether or not a candidate believed in creationism likely had no bearing on how good a president they would be. I would encourage you to look at all of the poll results.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
John Derbyshire and Evolution
The new issue of National Review has an article entitled "Evolution and Me," by George Gilder. I haven't picked up a copy of it yet. John Derbyshire comments on it here in what can only be termed an excellent, smack-on-the-money essay. He is not complementary of Gilder's reasoning. He also very succintly points out one of the principle problems in the debate:
It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can’t be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn’t actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It’s boring.
He also notes the elephant in the living room:
George’s own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science? In all those years, not a single paper of scientific standing has come out of (nor even, to the best of my knowledge, been submitted by) the DI or the CSC. I am certainly willing to be corrected here. If the DI or CSC have any papers of scientific standing — published or not — I shall post links to them to NRO for qualified readers to scrutinize.
Please, please, please read the whole thing.
It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can’t be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn’t actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It’s boring.
He also notes the elephant in the living room:
George’s own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science? In all those years, not a single paper of scientific standing has come out of (nor even, to the best of my knowledge, been submitted by) the DI or the CSC. I am certainly willing to be corrected here. If the DI or CSC have any papers of scientific standing — published or not — I shall post links to them to NRO for qualified readers to scrutinize.
Please, please, please read the whole thing.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Michael Behe has written a new book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Michael Ruse thinks it is the same old stuff. His review can be found in the most recent issue of Science. Since it is behind a subscription wall, I can only quote a small amount. He says:
I am afraid, though, that The Edge of Evolution is a bit of a sad sack. Nothing very much new, old arguments repeated, opposition ignored or dismissed without argument. What does surprise me is how emphatic Behe now is in putting a distance between himself and the older Creationists. For a start, he stresses his commitment to evolution. He thinks the world of life is as old as is claimed by any more conventional biologist. He also wants to give natural processes of change a role in life's history. For instance, the genetic mechanisms that led to the production of anti-freeze in fish that live in Arctic conditions are explicitly acknowledged to be those of random mutation sifted through the processes of natural selection, the survival of the fittest.
Not sure if I will pick it up or not.Sunday, June 03, 2007
Peter Hitchens Speaks Out
Kind of off-topic but interesting nonetheless, Peter Hitchens has an editorial in the Daily Mail that is a reflection of the contrast of his brother Christopher's atheistic beliefs and his own, that of Christianity. A short quote:
Did the Supper at Emmaus really take place? How I hope that it did, but I do not know that it did, in the way that I know a British soldier has recently been flown home dead from Basra or Helmand, or even in the way that I know that another such soldier will soon make the same sad journey.
Many decades have passed since I fancied the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth, if I ever did. Rather more recently I have realised the great warning against human arrogance that is contained in it, the serpent’s silky promise that if we reject the supposedly foolish, trivial restrictions imposed on us by an interfering, jealous nuisance of a God, then we shall be liberated.
As the serpent promises: "Ye shall be as gods." These may be the most important words in the whole Bible.
Take the enticing satanic advice, and you arrive, quite quickly, at revolutionary terror, at the invention of the atom bomb, at the torture chamber and the building of concentration camps for those unteachable morons who do not share your vision of a just world.
Friday, June 01, 2007
Thursday, May 31, 2007
GOP presidential candidate Sam Brownback weighs into the evolution/creation fray and (mostly) gets it right. It seems clear that he has read YEC literature and doesn't understand the differences and connections between microevolution and macroevolution, but his heart is in the right place. I realize that it is an NYT article and, as much as I despise the newspaper, this was a bit too good to pass up.
The University of Cincinnati goes on the offensive with classes on evolution for local area schools.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Cognitive Dissonance or Intellectual Dishonesty?
The Virginia Pilot has an intriguing story of a man named Marcus Ross who wrote a PhD dissertation at the University of Rhode Island in the subject of geosciences and doesn't believe a word of what he wrote.
Science tells Ross that the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago in a spectacular supernova explosion. Ross believes God created the Earth in seven days in 4004 B.C., a date many creationists reached by tracing biblical events backward .
The flood, according to Ross, occurred around 2300 B.C. and likely destroyed dinosaurs. He says the impregnation of broken fossils into rocks suggests the bones were slammed by a cataclysmic force of water.
Widely accepted methods of dating fossils may be flawed, according to Ross and other creationists. They say scientists derive dates from carbon-14 and potassium-argon testing based on an unproven assumption that the rate of decay remains constant over time.
The question being asked is whether someone who believes this and writes something entirely different in their dissertation is guilty of intellectual dishonesty or has internalized an almost insurmountable level of cognitive dissonance. How many geologists out there could stand up in front of a classroom and tell the class that the earth was created in 4004 B.C. with a straight face?
"We believe Dr. Ross is doing a tremendous disservice to his students and the public," Nick Matzke, a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education, a non profit group located in Oakland, Calif., that promotes the teaching of evolution, said in a telephone interview.
Michael Dini, a professor of biology education at Texas Tech University, said Ross should not have been awarded a doctorate. "Anyone who uses religious scripture or theological doctrine as a litmus test to gauge the validity of a scientific theory is no scientist," he wrote in an e-mail. "Is this discrimination? Yes! It's discrimination against bad science."
Dini, in 2003, made news by refusing to write letters of recommendation to graduate schools for students who would not offer a "scientific answer" for how the human race began. Writing recommendations "is a favor I grant only to those I respect," he said.
Read the whole thing.
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