Monthly Archives: August 2016

Vincent Torley’s Disappearing Book Review

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I guess many folks here are familiar with Dr (of philosophy) Vincent Torley as a contributor of many posts at Uncommon Descent now operated by one Barry Arrington.

Vincent strikes me as a genuinely nice guy whose views are very different from mine on many issues. Possibly one of his most remarked-upon idiosyncracies is his tendency to publish exceedingly long posts at Uncommon Descent but (leaving Joseph of Cupertino in the air for a moment) lately Vincent has become a little more reflective on the merits of “Intelligent Design” as some sort of alternative or rival to mainstream biology. Continue reading →

Some evidence ALUs and SINES aren’t junk and garbologists are wrong

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Larry Moran, Dan Graur and other garbologists (promoters of the junkDNA perspective), have argued SINES and ALU elements are non-functional junk. That claim may have been a quasi-defensible position a decade ago, but real science marches forward. Dan Graur can only whine and complain about the hundreds of millions of dollars spent at the NIH and elsewhere that now strengthens his unwitting claim in 2013, “If ENCODE is right, Evolution is wrong.”

Larry said in Junk in Your Genome: SINES
Continue reading →

Evidence of greater interest in the Flying Spaghetti Monster than in ID

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When the Click Whore of Babylon appeals to her own authority, the chances are high that her rhetoric is designed to conceal an intolerable truth:

My sense, based on some years of coverage at Uncommon Descent, is that Pastafarianism has changed its focus. […] They could not stay in the game with ID indefinitely because they would need to be something other than just a big practical joke that went on way too long.

My response to her pulling stuff out of her ass is of course not to pull stuff out of my ass, but instead to look for evidence. What came immediately to mind was to plug the terms “Flying Spaghetti Monster” and “intelligent design” into Google Trends.

Interest in FSM and ID Since 2004

According to Google Trends, interest in "Flying Spaghetti Monster" has been

According to Google Trends, interest in “intelligent design” (red) has declined steadily since the Dover trial. Interest in “Flying Spaghetti Monster” (blue) has plateaued.

Interest in FSM and ID over the Past Five Years

According to Google Trends, there has been more interest in the Flying Spaghetti Monster than in "intelligent design" crypto-creationism over the past five years.

According to Google Trends, there has been more interest in “Flying Spaghetti Monster” (blue) than in “intelligent design” (red) over the past five years. The average levels of interest in the FSM and ID are, respectively, 20 and 12.

The parody of religion evidently has greater staying power than the parody of science.

Evolution’s Search Problem

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Tom English: (If Mung does not know that authors at Evolution News and Views often disagree with one another, but never point out their disagreements, then I’ve given him way too much credit. For instance, Dembski told us that “evolutionary search” really does search for targets. But Meyer and Axe have both gone out of their ways to explain that “evolutionary search” actually does not search.)

Did Tom ever reveal his sources?

Continue reading →

How Much For The Baptists?

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Matt Wilbourn, one of the founders of the Muskogee Atheist Community donated $100 to the Murrow Indian Children’s Home. His donation was returned because the MICH gets most of its funding from the American Baptist Churches Association and “accepting a donation from atheists would go against everything they believe in.”

Matt upped the ante to $250. Still refused. He and his wife then started a GoFundMe page to see if they could raise $1000 for the charity. At the time of this post the total amount pledged is $12,670 and climbing.

I encourage everyone to donate until we find out how much money it takes to convince a Baptist to do the right thing.

Cartesian skepticism and the Sentinel Islander thought experiment

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Cartesian skepticism has been a hot topic lately at TSZ. I’ve been defending a version of it that I’ve summarized as follows:

Any knowledge claim based on the veridicality of our senses is illegitimate, because we can’t know that our senses are veridical.

This means that even things that seem obvious — that there is a computer monitor in front of me as I write this, for instance — aren’t certain. Besides not being certain, we can’t even claim to know them, and that remains true even when we use a standard of knowledge that allows for some uncertainty. (There’s more — a lot more — on this in earlier threads.)

In explaining to Kantian Naturalist why I am a Cartesian skeptic, I introduced the analogy of the Sentinel Islander:

Continue reading →

Another take on the Conspira-Sea Cruise

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Remember the Conspire-Sea Cruise, attended and reported on by TSZ commenter ‘Colin’, aka ‘Learned Hand’?

Popular Mechanics sent a reporter, Bronwen Dickey, on the same cruise, and here is her dispatch:

Conspira-Sea

I Went on a Weeklong Cruise For Conspiracy Theorists. It Ended Poorly.

What do you get when you stick some of the conspiracy world’s biggest celebrities and their die-hard fans on a cruise ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for a week? Some fascinating insight into our strange times. And one near fistfight.

Genetic load and junk.

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Mung, to petrushka, elsewhere:

Everyone does not understand “genetic load” and those that do claim to understand are probably wrong. Why don’t you start an OP on genetic load and the genetic load argument? That would be interesting. Betting you won’t.

This is such an OP. I believe the genetic load argument*** was initially proposed by Susumu Ohno in 1972, whose paper also introduced the then-scare-quoted term “junk”. It’s brief, accessible, and worth a read for anyone who wishes to offer an opinion/understand (not necessarily in that order).

The short version: sequence-related function must be subject to deleterious mutations. Long genomes (such as those of most eukaryotes) contain too many bases for the entire genome to be considered functional in that way, given known mutation rates. The bulk of such genomes must either have functions that are not related to sequence, or no function at all.

Interestingly, the paper is hosted on the site of an anti-junk-er, Andras Pellionisz, a self-promoting double-PhD’d … er … maverick. Also of interest is that, contrary to some ID narratives, the idea was initially resisted by ‘Darwinists’, if that term is understood not as people who simply accept evolution, but as people who place most emphasis on Natural Selection. Perfectionism is not the sole preserve of Creationists.

More recent work has characterised the nonfunctional fraction, and this lends considerable empirical support to Ohno’s contentions.

[eta: link to comment]
***[eta: in relation to genome size, not the first time anyone, ever, discussed genetic load!]

Mung, a theistic evolutionist who disagrees with some of his kind

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Mung: What I Believe

I am neither YEC nor OEC, so don’t really know of a label I can give you.

I accept that the universe is old, that the earth is old. No problem with dating as provided by the latest science.

I am a theist and a Christian. I am not a deist. I am not a naturalist. I reject the idea of “nature acting alone.”

I believe the universe is created and sustained by God I believe the same of all living beings. I accept common descent or descent with modification as the best explanation for the history of life on earth, but reject the idea that this happens without God (by a random undirected process).

I’ve not identified myself as a theistic evolutionist because I find myself in disagreement with theistic evolutionist authors.

So the best description I can offer is “intelligent design” proponent.
Continue reading →

The Great Filter

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Hoping this will be more fun / less confrontational, but certainly ID and non-ID perspectives will differ. In a nutshell ‘The Great Filter’ is an event that stops life inevitably filling the universe. Others have written much better accounts, so here is your background reading:

The Drake Equation

The Fermi Paradox

The Great Filter

One-stop synopsis if you don’t want the top 3

What do the folks here think? Is there a great filter(s) are we past it / them? My vote is there is at least one ahead of us and we probably won’t make it. Candidates include:

Environmental catastrophe, war using highly potent (N/B/C) weapons, religious zealotry taking us backwards..

I also think other possibilities are flawed assumptions in the Fermi Paradox (maybe marginal / diminishing utility in expansion beyond a certain point, or perhaps transcendence out of this physical realm for sufficiently advanced species. Certainly a million SciFi tropes (Let’s see if we can make a list? Childhood’s End, Mass Effect…) have come from this. What do you folks think?

Consilience and the Cartesian Skeptic

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It is not all that infrequent here at TSZ that some opponent of theism or ID makes a statement that makes me scratch my head and wonder how it is possible that they could make such a statement. This OP explores a recent example.

Cartesian scepticism, more impressed with Descartes’ argument for scepticism than his own reply, holds that we do not have any knowledge of any empirical proposition about anything beyond the contents of our own minds. The reason, roughly put, is that there is a legitimate doubt about all such propositions because there is no way to justifiably deny that our senses are being stimulated by some cause (an evil spirit, for example) which is radically different from the objects which we normally think affect our senses.

– A Companion to Epistemology, p. 457

Imagine my surprise when I found keiths (a self-identified “Cartesian Skeptic”) appealing to the senses.

Continue reading →

Did Patrick Matthew prove natural selection is just a line of reasoning in its conclusions.

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I recently found Patrick Matthew , some 20 years before, had some important conclusions about how natural selection can lead to new species. Darwin agreed he had come to like conclusions, on main points, as he did. This is not known well and indeed they emphasis wAllace as a co discoverer of evolution but say nothing about Matthew.

This brings up a good YEC creationist point.

Matthew did do just what darwin did. he observed the seeming hand of selection controling survival/reproduction of individuals and so new environments bring new controls and so new species.

this is fine for creationism. its minor changes in types/kinds of biology. Yet matthew, a little, and darwin, a great deal,  then went on to extrapolate from this the entire creation of biology. Its entire complexity and diversity as from selection on traits. Yet Matthew did no more investigation then his idea of selection. So it follows the both men ‘s conclusions on evolutions story in biology are just lines of reasoning from simple raw data points.

Both desperately embrace the fossil record, geology concepts for deposition, to make thier lines of reasoning.

I say Matthew’s existence in these matters proves Darwins idea was mostly lines of reasoning from a minor trivial observation of selections ability to determine success in creatures survival.

So evolutionism really is based on a real selection truth and then is wild extrapolation.

Micro does not equal Macro after all. Macro needs to cross boundaries beyond selection on traits. It needs these mutations desperately  and thats the great error in the lines of reasoning.

 

Good News For Atheists!

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By myself I have sworn, my mouth has uttered in all integrity a word that will not be revoked: Before me every knee will bow; by me every tongue will swear. They will say of me, ‘In the LORD alone are deliverance and strength.’ All who have raged against him will come to him and be put to shame. – Isaiah 45:23-24

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. – John 1:9

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’ – John 1:29

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. – John 3:17

Continue reading →

Patrickatheism

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If God exists, atheism is false. Thus atheism is dependent upon the truth of whether or not God exists.

Imagine a world in which it is true that God exists and it is also the case that atheism is true.

This is the world of Patrickatheism.