A very interesting blog post by William Dembski:
The old Dembski returns — the one was an old earth creationist before his run-in with Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
I don’t find this surprising. I never really believed his capitulation to the fundamentalists. It always looked like saving his job rather than changing his beliefs.
Still, I found the post quite interesting. And maybe it will give some folk something better to do than flinging poo at Dawkins’ software.
Richard Dawkins has made his programs from The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable available via a web browser interface.
Sadly for our friends at Uncommon Descent, the Weasel is not included.
I hope I will be forgiven for abusing the term “skepticism” here — for what I have in mind is not a perfectly innocuous “claims require evidence” epistemic prudence, but rather Cartesian skepticism.
According to the Cartesian skeptic, one can be perfectly certain about one’s own mental contents and yet also be in total doubt about what really corresponds to those mental contents. Hence she needs an argument that will justify her belief that there is any external reality at all, and that at least some of her mental contents can correspond to it.
There are many responses to Cartesian skepticism, and here I want to pick up on one strand in the pragmatist tradition that, on my view, cuts deepest into what is wrong with Cartesian skepticism.
I think that one cannot talk, in any intelligible sense, about justification in the first place without also committing oneself to a belief in other minds with whom one shares a world. (Not that I like that way of putting it — “a belief in other minds” is a much too intellectualistic interpretation of the myriad ways in which we experience the sentience of nonhuman animals and the sentience-and-sapience of other human animals.)
If the DNA codes primarily for proteins and helps regulate protein quantities, then where is the developmental or structural information? I’ve never gotten a straight answer from most evolutionists I’ve encountered, for that matter anyone on planet Earth. Maybe no one really knows. I think Creationist biologist Arthur Jones is right about Non-DNA inheritance.
Continue reading
This Strawson piece just appeared in the NY Times.
It’s a position that I found attractive long ago. FWIW, I preferred Strawson’s father as a philosopher but I give the son some credit for consistently pushing this position for years. (IIRC, correctly, he also has no sympathy for compatibalism, and is an old-fashioned hard determinist.
What do y’all think?
There has been much discussion, here and elsewhere, on ‘epigenetics’, broadly understood as the control of gene expression. People who cling to ‘classical’ models are portrayed, by revolutionaries and their cheerleaders, as dinosaurs standing in the way of progress.
I could perhaps explain, to any interested bystander, my own rationale for my position, since I’ve requested that of others. Continue reading
Any sufficiently convoluted explanation for biological phenomena is indistinguishable from epigenetics.
Use of the word “epigenetics” over time
A few times I’ve referred to my view about “the God question” as “radical agnosticism.” I thought it might be fun to work through what this means.
For the purposes of this discussion, by “God” I shall mean follow Hart’s definition of God as “the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things” (The Experience of God, p. 30).
Next, I shall stipulate that our assertions about the world fall into two classes: those that take a truth-value in all possible worlds and those that take a truth-value only in the actual world. This is a contemporary version of “Hume’s Fork”: there are “relations of ideas”, “truths of reason”, analytic a priori claims and then there are “matters of fact”, “truths of fact,” synthetic a posteriori claims. (There are some reasons to be skeptical of this neat distinction but I’ll leave that aside for now.)
Whether or not God exists would therefore seem to be either a “truth of fact” or a “truth of reason”. I shall therefore now argue that it cannot be either.
The intelligent-design movement is, by design, a big tent accommodating almost everyone who has something to say against “Darwinism.” How kooky is too kooky for admission? Well, the Raelian movement’s Message from the Designers may be out, but the Unification Church’s message from Moon is definitely in.
Evolution News and Views (ENV), ID’s blog of record, is consequently a wellspring of incoherence. It recently posted a lame argument by geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig that survival is “too random” for natural selection to “work.” Geneticist (of high renown) Joe Felsenstein has just responded at The Panda’s Thumb. He mentions that the Discovery Institute also released a podcast interview of Lönnig. Checking it out, I find this teaser by David Klinghoffer, the editor of ENV: Continue reading
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 .