A Facebook friend of mine is a conspiracy nut. She was tagged in a post by a friend of hers, so up in my ‘news’ feed comes a post offering incontrovertible evidence that persistent contrails are in fact chemical spraying of the populace or the planet for nefarious purposes. I was dimly aware of this notion but was taken aback when encountering such people in the (virtual) flesh. Continue reading
I thought this article in the current New Yorker might generate some interesting discussion here.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/breakthroughs-in-epigenetics
Would naturalism insist 500 fair coins 100% heads on a table could not possibly emerge from a random process (like random coin flipping)? How about a buzzillion fair coins being 100% heads after an explosion from a terrorist event at a bank? If naturalism won’t exclude such improbable events (events statistically indistinguishable from miracles), then naturalism doesn’t exclude miracles.
Continue reading
From the Center for Skeptical Inquiry:
The Foundation for Thought and Ethics, the non-profit which once published the internationally controversial textbook Of Pandas and People, has quietly closed its doors. The financially-struggling organization was completely dissolved some time in early 2016, and its titles have been absorbed by the notorious Intelligent Design group, The Discovery Institute.
More details and commentary on Pandas at the above link.
http://www.nature.com/news/evolution-of-darwin-s-finches-tracked-at-genetic-level-1.19795
“But their still Finches! Checkmate Evolutionists!”
Or some similar comment. But whatever. Still a very cool study.
Koprowski and I, the only biologists present, were confronted by a rather weird discussion between four mathematicians – Eden, Schutzenberger, Weisskopf, and Ulam – on mathematical doubts concerning the Darwinian theory of evolution. At the end of several hours of heated debate, the biological contingent proposed that a symposium be arranged to consider the points of dispute more systematically, and with a more powerful array of biologists who could function adequately in the universe of discourse inhabited by mathematicians.
– Martin Kaplan
Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said…Somewhere out there could be a being whose intelligence is that much greater than our own. “We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,” he said. “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.”
…http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/
Evolution is Nature’s design process. The natural world is full of wonderful examples of its successes, from engineering design feats such as powered flight, to the design of complex optical systems such as the mammalian eye, to the merely stunningly beautiful designs of orchids or birds of paradise. With increasing computational power, we are now able to simulate this process with greater fidelity, combining complex simulations with high-performance evolutionary algorithms to tackle problems that used to be impractical.
I was like great! A book that will finally tell me how Evolution designs such magnificent designs. But there’s that “problem” word again. Is Evolution faced with design problems that it then solves? And I wonder if, over time, Evolution has learned how to make better designs, advances in evolutionary design. Some folks certainly seem to think so.
Most modern readers have difficulty appreciating the resilience of spiritual or metaphysical overtones to 19th Century scientific thought, alternatively referred to as “vitalism” & “teleology”. At this point, a quick historical digression is in order.
What exactly is life?”! Traditional education systems were well-grounded in the classics, and many 19th Century naturalists could relate to an ancient Greek philosopher named Aristotle who was convinced no real boundary existed between “living” and “non-living”. According to Aristotle, non-living matter could give rise to living things because our universe possesses some vital life force or soul, “anima”, which could “animate” non-living matter. In Aristotle’s view: the universe, as a whole, had its own soul. In modern terms the universe could be considered as some giant fractal and we are all but elements therein. Even today, various mystical traditions hold similar ideas.
Historically and conceptually, modern Genetics and modern Evolutionary Theory are closely intertwined. Mendel and Darwin both published their masterpieces in the mid-1800s and both were promptly misunderstood and discounted for half a century. Both theories required several more “kicks at the can” before final acceptance. Put simply: the Theory of Evolution itself evolved in response to an emerging understanding of Genetics.
Some quick questions:
Question: Name the scientist that first suggested “the effects of use and disuse” were passed from one generation to the next?
Answer: Charles Darwin and NOT Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who actually had a somewhat different theory.
Question: Name the scientist who first to employed the term evolve/evolution while also suggesting human beings had “evolved” from apes?
Answer: That would be Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. (Lamarck in fact invented the word “evolution”, a word which never appeared in Darwin’s Book “Origin of the Species”). Continue reading
Charles Darwin in his book the Descent of Man (chap12) insisted that womewn were clearly biologically intellectually inferior to men. He said if you compare the accomplishments of men verses women the women not only lose but show the common average must be very inferior of women relative to men.
He said this was not from society but from biology.
In fact he used this case as a typical case in the evidences he listed in his book to show how mankind etc had acquired the traits we have. Not from god but merely steps along the way while evolving .
No, this isn’t a post about TSZ. It’s about how to get abiogenesis without a designer and how to build a nanocar.
In the “The Disunity of Reason” thread, Mung suggested that “the typical non-theist will insist that organisms are machines, including humans.” And there is a long tradition of mechanistic metaphysics in Western anti-theism (La Mettrie is probably the most well-known example). However, I pointed that I disagree with the claim that organisms are machines. I’m reposting my thoughts from there for our continued conversation.
A machine is a system with components or parts that can be partially isolated from the rest of the system and made to vary independently of the system in which they are embedded, but which has no causal loops that allow it to minimize the entropy produced by the system. It will generate as much or as little heat as it is designed to do, and will accumulate heat until the materials lose the properties necessary for implementing their specific functions. In other words, machines can break.
What makes organisms qualitatively different from machines is that organisms are self-regulating, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems. Whereas machines are nearly always in thermodynamic equilibrium with the surrounding system, organisms are nearly always far from thermodynamic equilibrium — and they stay there. An organism at thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment is, pretty much by definition, dead.
The difference, then, is that machines require some agent to manipulate them in order to push them away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Organisms temporarily sustain themselves at far-from-equilibrium attractors in phase space — though entropy catches up with all of us in the end.
It is true that some parts of an organism can break — a bone, for example. But I worry that to produce a concept general enough that both breaking and dying are subsumed under it, one can lost sight of the specific difference that one is trying to explain.
Indeed, that’s the exact problem with Intelligent Design theory — the ID theorist says, “organisms and machines are exactly the same, except for all the differences”. Which is why the ID theorist then concludes that organisms are just really special machines — the kind of machines that only a supremely intelligent being could have made. As Fuller nicely puts it, according to ID “biology is divine technology”.
The Death of Humanity is a new book by Richard Weikart.
Are humans intrinsically valuable, or are they simply a cosmic accident with no real meaning or purpose? Since the Enlightenment this debate has raged in Western culture, profoundly influencing our understanding of bioethics and informing the debate over abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, genetic engineering, etc. The title of this book, The Death of Humanity, refers not only to the demise of the concept that humans are intrinsically valuable, but also the the resultant killing of actual human lives.
Mung has drawn our attention to a post by Kirk Durston at ENV. This is my initial reaction to his method to establish the likelihood of generating a protein with AA permease (amino acid membrane transport) capability.
Burden tennis is an intellectual parlor game, wherein the players “hit” the “burden of proof” across the net from one side to the other. We see this expressed as “the burden is in your court” or “the burden of proof is yours”, with often both sides making similar statements.
Burden tennis can be a fun game to watch, but it is sometimes wiser to avoid being a participant.
Note: I did not invent the term “burden tennis”. I saw that being used on the net somewhere many years ago. But it seems like a good term.
This post is really a reply to Patrick’s post in the moderation thread. I’ve started a new thread, because the discussion really doesn’t belong there.
I’ll be making a presentation at AM-NAT 2016, and Dan Graur will be the poster boy of impractical naturalism. Below are some things I collected from his websites, some of which I view as highly anti-science. The aim of my presentation isn’t to settle the question of God or no God or ultimate questions of whether godless naturalism is the best description of reality. The goal is to suggest there are some unspoken naturalistic creeds that often take priority over experiments and observations. In a manner of speaking, there are some interpretations of naturalism that actually go against dispassionate examination of how the natural world actually operates.
Continue reading
If anyone wants to join us, we are doing an online preview for a conference on Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism. For the preview session, Dr. Sam Rakover is giving a talk on Methodological Dualism in Psychology. Connection information is at the link below.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/am-nat-conference-preview-session-tomorrow/
Edward Feser has a blog post up that is highly relevant to much of the debate that takes place here at The Skeptical Zone between theists and non-theists.