Dembski-Hitchens debate

Posted on November 21, 2010 by Michael

I have yet to watch this, but I thought I’d throw out a link to the Dembski-Hitchens debate anyway.

via Why Evolution Is True

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Creationism | Tagged: , , , | 3 Comments »

The limits of science

Posted on November 21, 2010 by Michael

Jerry Coyne has a post about the NCSE enabling woo, but there’s one part near his introduction that really stood out to me.

This accommodationism is most annoying when the NCSE assumes its science-has-its-limits stance, a stance designed to show that beyond those borders lies the proper and goodly realm of religion. Yes, of course science has some limits—it can’t (yet) explain why I love the paintings of Kandinsky and others find them abstract and boring. But how on earth do these “limits” somehow justify belief in the palpable nonsense of faith?

Going by his use of the word “yet”, it sounds like he doesn’t see science as being limited in theory. His post doesn’t focus on this point, so it isn’t entirely clear if that’s his position. However, it is my position.

Science is not limited in and of itself. It can tell us absolutely everything about the Universe. That includes telling us why we think something is beautiful or moral or why we love someone. Science is not theoretically limited in any way from being able to tell us all these things. The problem, however, that arises here is the whole “yet” thing. It causes confusion. Let me explain.

Science is limited in telling us a vast majority of things we might want to know. Right now it cannot tell us why we make all the choices we do or why some of us might find the ocean beautiful. But that is not a matter of science being limited in and of itself. In actuality, the limit comes from human ability, a lack of technology, a lack of necessity, the short span of time in which one person will live, the short time the entirety of the human race has and will exist, etc. We limit science; science does not limit us.

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Repost: Only in the light of evolution

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Michael

There are two reasons I want to make a repost of a post from about a year and a half ago. First, it’s always interesting to go back and read old posts for me. From time to time I have no recollection of making a certain post, so when I see it, it’s almost like it’s brand new to me. I do happen to remember this one very clearly, but it is at least understandable why I was skimming posts from May 2009. Second, I average significantly more views now than I did a year and a half ago. I feel this post is a pretty important one, and now that more people can see it, I would like to throw it back up.

~~~

I am following a specific chapter in Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True.

The fossil record: We should see fossils in a certain order if evolution is correct. They should go from simple to more complex overall, and the fossils we see in the most recent strata should resemble extant life much more than the fossils we see in old strata.

We should also see changes within lineages. We should be able to observe instances of gradual change in species that eventually leads up to either current species or at least to the time of extinction for these species.

Here’s a simple timeline of life’s history. Click it.

What the evidence shows is gradual change. First we find simple bacteria which survived off energy from the Sun, then we see more complicated cells known as eukaryotes arise. (You are a eukaryote.) Next we see a slew of multi-cellular animals arise. They’re still simple, but much more complex than the original bacteria. A few million years later more complicated life arrives. Early (and simple) plants begin to take hold. Soon the fossil record begins to show more plant complexity with low-lying shrub such as ferns, then conifers, then deciduous trees, and finally flowering plants. Gradual changes occur in the oceans and fresh waters which lead to fish and then tetrapods (Tiktaalik comes to mind).

One of my favorite fossils is trilobites. They’re extremely common due to their hard bodies. In fact, even their eyes are well-preserved because of their hard mineral make-up. I personally recall entering touristy-stores seeing countless fossils of these guys in the mid-west to the west (which, unsurprisingly, was once a shallow sea). This image shows the different lineages of this organism. Studies show that the ‘rib’ count has changed over time in each individual species, often without regard to how the other species changed. Going back further, there is less and less divergence in each species. Eventually, as evolution predicts, they all meet at a common ancestor.

So naturally the next step is to find fossils which show more significant changes. Let’s take birds and reptiles. They hold similarities between each other, both morphologically (certain shapes and structures) and phylogenetically (genetic sequence). A good hypothesis is that they came from one common ancestor. If this is true, the links between birds and its ancestors and reptiles and its ancestors should lead to the same point. They do. Dinosaurs are the ancestors of both. The links between birds and dinosaurs are so incredibly well established that I’d prefer to not go over them in detail. But for starters, some dinosaurs sported feathers and claws and had the same proteins for the feather-making process as extant birds. The links between reptiles and dinosaurs is easier just on intuition, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Other transitional fossils include the already mentioned Tiktaalik. A view of the history of life can be see here. This shows the change in head and neck structure. Recent research on long-ago discovered Tiktaalik fossils has shown the importance in the gradual bone changes in the neck. These changes – a hallmark of evolution – were important to the ability to turn its head. This is a hallmark because natural selection only modifies what already exists. This is precisely what happened.

Going further with this example, evolution makes predictions as to how early fish evolved to survive on land. If there were lobe-finned fish 390 million years ago and obviously terrestrial organisms 360 million years ago (which is what the fossil record shows), then if scientists are to find transitional fossils, they should date in between that time frame. There should be an animal that shows both features of lobe-finned fish and terrestrial animals. Tiktaalik is that animal. It has fins, scales, and gills, but it also has a flat, salamander-like head with nostrils on top of its nose. This is a good indication that it could breathe air. Its eyes were also placed there, indicating that it swam in shallow waters. Furthermore, it was lobe-finned, but shows bones (which eventually evolved into the arm bones you used to get out of bed today) that were able to support its weight to prop itself up. And of course, it dates to 375 million years ago.

Next, evolution says the fossil record should show recent fossils being more closely related to extant species than are early fossils. This is precisely what happens. Sixty million years ago there were no whales. Fossils resembling modern whales only show up 30 million years ago. So, again, evolution makes a predication: if transitional fossils are to be found, they will be within this gap. And so it is.

We begin with Indohyus. It was an artiodactyl. This is important because extant whales have vestigial bones which indicate that they came from this order: scientists expected to find this because, again, evolution predicted it. It should be of no surprise that this fossil dates to about 48 million years ago, right in the predicted gap. From here there is a gradual evolution shown in the fossil record which leads up to modern whales.

Filed under: Evidence, Evolution | Tagged: , | 21 Comments »

Young voters, education, and tuning out the GOP

Posted on November 10, 2010 by Michael

There is an article up at the pro-conservative FrumForum which talks about how the GOP did extremely well during last week’s elections among general voters, but when it comes to well-educated young people, they failed horribly.

The blue line is the trend for Tompkins county (see link for chart; Cornell University is in Tompkins County). Again, a negative score implies that Republicans do better than they do nationally, a positive score that the Democrats to better. In 1960 – admittedly an odd year – Nixon beat Kennedy by 33 points in what was nationally a tied election. In 2008 Obama beat McCain by 42 points, 35 points more than the national average. The trend is not quite linear – apart from the 1960 election, there is a relatively flat trend between 1964 and 1980 – on average, Republicans do a little bit better than Democrats relatively. Then there is a new level between 1984 and 2000, where Democrats are up by 20 points compared to the national average. Finally, there is a jump in the last two elections, with Democrats up around 35 points. This implies a swing of 40 points from the 1970s – and a whopping 68 points from 1960.

And even this second chart (see link) understates the Republican problem with top students.

It isn’t any surprise that the GOP does poorly with young students. There’s a social and economic disconnect. Students tend to be more socially tolerant of others than the GOP in general. The GOP’s base is made in large part of an older generation that didn’t need higher education at the rate required today, so there is an education gap there that negatively impacts things such as women’s rights and civil rights for gays. This older generation then further negatively impacts the things that matter to young voters by voting in favor of social programs which are in need of fiscal retooling; a lack of retooling is fine for now, but will become an issue later – when these older voters are mostly dead. (The U.S. really needs a version of the Australian law which says everyone must vote or face a fine.)

But it isn’t just that the GOP absolutely does not serve the financial interests of young people (or most people who aren’t wildly wealthy, but I digress). It’s also that well-educated young people care about, well, education. In this area, the GOP unarguably fails. A second FrumForum article gets to the heart of the matter.

Let me advance another hypothesis. Today’s top students are motivated less by enthusiasm for Democrats and much more by revulsion from Republicans. It’s not the students who have changed so much. It’s the Republicans.

…

Under Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, Republicans championed science and knowledge. But over the past 30 years, national Republicans have formed an intensifying alliance with religious conservatives more skeptical of science and knowledge. I don’t know whether discarding evolution goes against common sense; but I’m pretty sure it goes against most Ivy League-educated senses.

To advance this alliance, national Republicans have derided elite universities as dangerous and hostile places.

This anti-intelligence movement among Republicans is long-standing. I think part of it stems from the emphasis the party placed on social values in recent years, especially throughout the 90’s. A lot of the concern there was fair, even if wrong-headed. But there was a hidden correlation among those with more socially liberal (i.e., fair and equal) values; some of what brings one to certain social values also brings one to more liberal economic policies. Given the unfortunate nature of politics, we often find ourselves arguing the polemic even though we may have plenty of common ground. This can lead to an us-vs-them mentality which in turn polarizes the political atmosphere. Now we have Republicans, resting on the shoulders of those who came to power over socially conservative values, who are also forced into other positions, including economic hostility towards science and education. And of course, there is the real hostility that exists among religious conservative who rightly recognize the threat science and education pose to their pre-conceived notions; it isn’t just politics now – much of the power of the GOP is locked up in the hands of those who really are anti-science and anti-education. (To be fair, I’ll grant that they are only generally anti-education in practice; idealistically I think most everyone is pro-education.)

And even though they didn’t win in every instance, now we have those annoying Teabaggers promoting anti-intelligence views.

via Why Evolution Is True

Filed under: Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Ignoring evolution

Posted on October 24, 2010 by Michael

There were two major factors which contributed to the ruining of Soviet agriculture from the 1930’s into the 1950’s. First, Stalin accused wealthy farmers of withholding production from the state. This led him to institute a policy of force collectivization where small-scale farms were forced to be managed as single large-scale productions. The government would take the amount of grain it thought it should have while also placing peasants in work camps to complete the ideal of big time farming for the community. Unfortunately, it was from these peasants, not the few wealthy farmers, where grain had been taken. This discouraged workers from producing more; those in camps tended to die. The ideal of people working for the good of the group had been undermined by what was effectively slavery; workers were forced into collectivization and had no power to determine working conditions (thank goodness for unions in the U.S.).

Second, and far, far, far more importantly, Trogim Lysenko emerged to become a major political figure (though he called himself a scientist). The government recognized that its policies of the late 20’s and early 30’s had failed to produce more output, and now they needed to find a way to not only fix their political liabilities (angry and disenchanted peasants), but they also needed to make their land produce more.

The big deal with Lysenko was that he rejected Mendelian genetics, instead favoring Lamarckism. This seemed intuitively sound on an extremely immature and scientifically ignorant level; it was that intuitive appeal that helped convince Stalin:

But that is not the point just now. The point is that our practice, our reality, is providing new arguments against this theory, but our theoreticians, strangely enough, either will not, or cannot, make use of this new weapon against the enemies of the working class. I have in mind our practice in abolishing private ownership of land, our practice in nationalising the land, our practice which liberates the small peasant from his slavish attachment to his little plot of land and thereby helps the change from small-scale peasant farming to large-scale collective farming.

Stalin was using “theory” in reference to political theories, but we can see clearly that he was willing to favor his own ideology (“practice”) over anything remotely abstract. That is why Lysenko became so political successful. His own theories jived with the Soviet ideal of forced collectivization; perform a little biological magic on some crops and voila! everyone has enough food and an angry peasantry isn’t all that important.

During the years Lysenko’s ideas reigned, Soviet agriculture suffered tremendously. He was ignoring how evolution works; populations are not permanently improved through environmental changes. Change may happen through epigenetics, but as Jerry Coyne explains, this does nothing to alter the basis of biology. In order to improve agriculture, practice (not in the ideological sense) has its role, but ultimately we must be sure our ideas fall within the theoretical (in the scientific sense) framework we have established – especially since we know it is true.

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The greater enemy

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Michael

From The God Delusion:

“[The nature of the conflict] is not just about evolution versus creationism. To scientists like Dawkins and Wilson, the real war is between rationalism and superstition. Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition. Creationism is just a symptom of what they see as the greater enemy: religion. While religion can exist without creationism, creationism cannot exist without religion.” ~Jerry Coyne

Filed under: Religions | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Giberson gets it before Maloney

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Michael

Karl Giberson is one of those insufferable BioLogos accommodationists who loves to make up stuff about New Atheists. He has recently offered up a sort of apology for his crappy rhetoric. This comes after Dan Dennett pointed out that his attacks make him a fibber for faith.

As I reflect on the various exchanges [via email with Dan Dennett], I see no evidence that religious believers are standing on any higher moral ground. The vilification of the New Atheists is accompanied by caricature, hyperbole, misprepresentation (sic) and a distinct lack of charity.

On the Answers in Genesis site, to take one example, Ken Ham published a report about the atheist that Christians love to hate entitled “Dawkins Ranting in Oklahoma.” The audience was described as “mind-numbed robots,” and Dawkins’ ideas were sarcastically dismissed as communications from “an extraterrestrial.” Anti-evolutionary religion sites across the Internet make similar claims. But not all the charged-up rhetoric is on the lowbrow backwaters of the Internet. A passage from the 2007 book “Oracles of Science: Celebrity Scientists versus God and Religion,” compares Richard Dawkins to a “museum piece that becomes ever more interesting because, while everything else moves forward and changes, it remains the same.”

Alas, I have to confess to having authored the museum metaphor. It was a cheap shot and, while hardly the cheapest of all possible shots, it was probably about as cheap as could reasonably sail past the staid editors at the venerable Oxford University Press. Certainly my co-author, the late Father Mariano Artigas, would have objected to anything less charitable.

…

Confession, they say, is good for the soul. So Dan, I was a faith fibber. Sorry about that.

My only hope is that this doesn’t get confused as a call for unneeded civility. I always like to see substantial, cutting arguments that address issues; Giberson didn’t always do that, instead making up whatever about an entire group of diverse individuals who aren’t even held together via a common philosophy. But I think he could have let his language soar, a la Hitchens or Dawkins or Myers, and not been charged as a Faith Fibber by Dennett.

I have to confess that the temptation to ridicule one’s debating opponents is all but unbearable, especially when playing street hockey on the Internet, where one must shout to be heard. In the past few months I have tried hard to come up with clever rhetorical attacks on Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, PZ Myers and countless others whose ideas I was supposedly challenging. PZ once wrote the following about me, which I thought was pretty clever: “I will have no truck with the perpetuation of fallacious illusions, whether honeyed or bitter, and consider the Gibersons of this world to be corruptors of a better truth.” Of course, I responded to his evangelistic assault on me by calling him “Rev. Myers” in an essay on Salon.com. And so it goes. (I recommend against verbal swordfights with PZ Myers — you can’t win.)

If only his rhetoric could soar to such levels.

But notice his use of “Rev. Myers”. My, oh my. Who else has done that?

Dear “Reverend” PZ Myers,

How fitting that, three hundred years later, the witch trials continue. If you recall, it was the herbalists that were burned then as well. Your flock has spoken to me, Reverend Myers, with the shrieking common to all fundamentalist cults. I believe if you check you will find that fundamentalism involves a closed mind while doing science requires an open mind. It also involves a thing they call research.

Yes, yes. Christopher Maloney.

Now I understand why Maloney refers to me as The Maine kid with an English degree who can’t read: his writing reads like a child’s and maybe he’s looking for (made-up) excuses why everyone else does so much better. Honestly. Aside from the fact that he has qualified that an English degree is unable to read (which I suppose is true), his rhetoric is about as strong as his medical background. But then he’s taken all sorts of homeopathic classes. Maybe that explains why the strength of his responses are so diluted?

At least Giberson has figured out how the Internet works.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Coyne on Hawking

Posted on June 11, 2010 by Michael

Hawking, willfully misunderstood by those desperate to harmonize science with faith, recognizes their profound incompatibility.

~Jerry Coyne

Filed under: Religions, Science | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

How science has already tested the assertions of supernatural faith

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Michael

Via Jerry Coyne:

* The earth was suddenly created, complete with all its species, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. This was falsified by science. The falsification likewise goes for other religions’ creation myths, like those of Hindus and the Inuits.
* God put the earth at the center of the solar system and the universe. Also falsified.
* God is both omnipotent and benevolent. Falsified by the data.
* All humans descend from Adam and Eve, who also lived a few thousand years ago. Falsified by genetic data.
* Praying for sick people makes them better. Falsified by the intercessory prayer study.
* People who lived in the past can be reincarnated as modern people, complete with their earlier memories. Investigation has shown no evidence for this.
* Jonah was swallowed and regurgitated by a giant fish (or whale). Probably impossible; nobody has survived such an occurrence.
* God confounded all the languages at once at the Tower of Babel. False: languages diverged gradually from common ancestors.
* Tribes colonized North America from the Tower of Babel several thousand years ago. (Book of Mormon). No evidence.
* Faith by itself can cure dire diseases and medical conditions, which result not from organic conditions but from imperfect belief. (Christian Science). No evidence for such faith healing.
* U.S. soldiers will return to South Pacific islands bearing wonderful goods for the inhabitants. False: won’t happen.

Don’t forget water-to-wine and virgin births. Of course, we haven’t given David Blaine a crack at these magic tricks yet.

Filed under: Religions, Science | Tagged: , , , , | 16 Comments »

Thought of the day

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Michael

It seems like the key to becoming an effin’ huge example of marine life is to just eat a bunch of plankton.

Via Jerry Coyne

Filed under: Science | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

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