evolution
stcynic | April 3, 2004I've been having a bit of an exchange with Rusty in the comments on his blog. Because those comments only allow 1000 words, I'm posting this here. You can see the beginning of the exchange in this post and the comments that follow it. The argument concerns two things. First, Rusty quotes this passage from the Understanding Evolution website:Misconception: Evolution and religion are incompatible.
Response: Religion and science (evolution) are very different things. In science (as in science class), only natural causes are used to explain natural phenomena, while religion deals with beliefs…
stcynic | March 30, 2004John Baez from UCal-Riverside, in addition to his many contributions to the field of mathematical physics, has given to us the enormously useful Crackpot Index. His index, which awards varying point values based upon the attributes of the claims being made, gives a fairly reliable indication of whether what is being offered is a genuinely useful new idea in science and what is simply crank science.
14. 10 points for each new term you invent and use without properly defining it.
The ID crowd LOVES to invent new phrases - irreducible complexity, complex specified information, etc.. They are…
loom | March 24, 2004A great blog is born: The Panda's Thumb is a multi-authored blog that blasts a firehose of reason at distortions of evolution.
loom | March 24, 2004Our ancestors branched off from those of chimpanzees some six million years ago. Since then, our lineage became human--and distinctly unlike other apes. Figuring out how that difference evolved is one of the grand challenges of biology. Until now, scientists have gotten most of their clues by looking at the fossils of extinct hominids. These fragments of bones only preserve a little information, but it's not a random smattering of data. It's more like a scaffolding on which other clues can be fixed, so that a picture of how we became human can gradually emerge. That's because the changes…
loom | March 22, 2004Last week I wrote about an important new study showing that three very different groups of species--plants, butterflies, and birds--have all been declining at the same alarming rate for over 40 years in Great Britain. The authors concluded that if the pattern is global, it may mean that we are entering one of the biggest bouts of mass extinctions in the past 500 million years.
The media handled the story pretty well, although some reports got ahead of the science. Here's a story that may give you the impression that the study documented the extinction of entire species, for example. The…
stcynic | March 19, 2004Well this was predictable. Say something in defense of evolution and one thing you can count on is Batman The Lone Ranger The Cisco Kid Inspector Cluseau Joseph Mastrapaolo and his faithful assistant Tonto Cato Poncho Robin Karl Priest showing up to issue the "Life Science Challenge". Brian Leiter is the latest.
The Life Science Challenge is basically a $10,000 bet on whether you can prove in a court of law that creationism is religion and evolution is science. Never mind that this challenge has actually been answered in court twice, McLean v Arkansas and Edwards v Aguillard, and the ruling…
loom | March 18, 2004When I ask scientists what's the biggest misunderstanding people have about their work, they often talk about how they know what they know. People tend to think that a scientist's job is to gather every single datum about something in nature--a mountain, a species of jellyfish, a neutron star--and then, simply by looking at all that information, see the absolute truth about it in an instant. If science departments were filled with angels, that might be the case. But they're staffed by humans with finite brains, with tight research budgets, and with only so many years left before retirement or…
stcynic | March 17, 2004After reading this, I just have to ask....where's my hate mail?
By the way, the Discovery Institute copied Hunter Baker's article on their website today with no mention of the replies that were made to it. They also listed Hunter Baker as a "freelance writer in Texas". Not as the grad assistant of the person whose book was reviewed in the article under dispute, just a freelance writer. And remember folks, the Discovery Institute says that believing in ID is the key to good ethics. Another irony meter bites the dust.
stcynic | March 17, 2004One of the most powerful lines of evidence for common descent (the theory of evolution) is often referred to as molecular phylogenetics. In brief, it's the use of protein sequences to discern how closely two species are related. As the National Center for Biotechnology Information explains it,Evolutionary theory states that similarity among individuals or species is attributable to common descent, or inheritance from a common ancestor. Thus, the relationships established by phylogenetic systematics often describe a species' evolutionary history and, hence, its phylogeny, the historical…
loom | March 17, 2004In one of the weirdest attempts to pretend that creationism is a real science, a student at Harvard Law School wrote a favorable review in the Harvard Law Review of a book about Intelligent Design. You'd think that this would be so irrelevant that it would vanish off the cultural radar in a flash. But it has ballooned into something of a blogospheric hurricane, mainly because the National Review Online wants to pretend that criticism of the review is an Inquisition-style persecution. It's a cute way to distract attention from the basic issue of whether creationism in any of its manifestations…
stcynic | March 16, 2004One of the main arguments that Lawrence VanDyke makes, both in his Harvard Law Review book note and in the ongoing exchange over Brian Leiter's criticism of that note, is that ID is not creationist. His evidence for this is that the two largest Young Earth Creationist (YEC) organizations have said they don't consider ID to be creationism because they won't take a position on the age of the earth or a literal biblical interpretation. But then those organizations don't think Old Earth Creationists like Hugh Ross, who completely rejects evolution, to be creationist either. This strikes me as a…
stcynic | March 16, 2004Here is an excellent example of a scientist taking on the claims of an ID advocate and pretty much leveling them. The University of Rochester biologist Allen Orr takes on Dembski's No Free Lunch, a book that attempts two basic tasks - to apply the No Free Lunch theorems to biological evolution, and to shore up Behe's Irreducible Complexity (IC) idea. Orr points out that Dembski is misapplying the NFL theorems and that Behe's best examples of IC - the flagellum and the blood clotting cascade - have in fact been shown to be quite reducible, and that there are very plausible evolutionary…
stcynic | March 16, 2004Lawrence VanDyke has posted a response to me on the Exparte blog, the blog of the Harvard Federalist Society. I will reply to that as well as a comment he made to my first post on this subject.
VanDyke's response begins with Adam White saying:Lawrence VanDyke continues to defend himself against the vicious attacks of Professor Brian Leiter and others. He posts this reply to Ed Brayton regarding Leiter's attack.
For the record, I don't think my posts on this situation can fairly be portrayed as a vicious attack. Professor Leiter's reply, I suppose, might be called such. While I agree with him…
stcynic | March 15, 2004Lawrence VanDyke has left a comment below, which I would like to bring up here to address in more detail. Lawrence wrote:I left out the "in support of ID" because I assumed that much was obvious in context. You make it sound like I was trying to make Leiter say ID proponents haven't published any articles in peer reviewed journals at all. If I were trying to say that, my response to Leiter's statement would have been much simpler and I wouldn't have bothered to address Pharyngula's post. Nice try.
But the two links you provided don't address what Brian said. They do not provide a single…
stcynic | March 15, 2004One of the best blogs to read on both legal issues and evolution is that of Brian Leiter, director of the Law and Philosophy Program at the University of Texas Law School. He writes fairly extensively on evolution and the ongoing controversy of Intelligent Design. Recently, he took to task a young Harvard law student named Lawrence VanDyke, who had written a positive review of a pro-ID book in the Harvard Law Review. Leiter wrote a rather scathing review of VanDyke's book note on his blog. The book in question was Darwinism and Public Education: The Establishment Clause and the Challenge of…
loom | March 15, 2004For over two centuries, opponents of evolution have searched for examples of natural complexity that could have only been created by design. Reverend William Paley was fond of the eye, with its lens, retina, and other components all beautifully fine-tuned to work with one another. These days, the Intelligent Design camp tries to invoke blood clotting cascades or the flagella that bacteria use to move around in the same way. (See here for some refutations of these arguments.) Ironically, one of the most successful, intricate examples of complexity in nature is something creationists never…
stcynic | March 12, 2004Rob McEwen has left a comment on a post that has slipped way down the page, and as it's worth responding to and fisking in some detail, I thought I'd bring it up top to answer it.
Pre-script: Turns out this guy left this same comment, word for word and breathless exclamation point for breathless exclamation point, on Paul Myers' blog. Hilarious.
In his comment, Rob pretty much pulls out the first 3 chapters of what I facetiously refer to as the Creationist Jokebook. This consists of a laundry list of arguments that anyone who has followed this dispute for any period of time has heard over…
loom | March 12, 2004I have been grievously mum in response to the many comments that readers have been sending to the Loom. My silence is not hostile--it is the result of way too much traveling, too much magazine writing, and the standard sleep deprivation that comes with life with two young daughters. In fact, reading comments is one of the favorite things I like about this blog.
As a case in point, today Nick at talkdesign.org explored the link between the subject of two recent posts: the ongoing adaptation of bacteria to manmade pollutants and the ongoing pollution of biology education with creationist…
loom | March 10, 2004Ohio's Board of Education has taken a big step towards forcing its students to waste their time on creationist pseudo-objections to evolution. PZ Meyers has a good round-up of this sad situation.
stcynic | March 5, 2004Once more into the breach, dear friends. Rusty has posted a reply to me on the subject of evolution and morality, but the issue is really whether evolution equates with atheism or not. I'm getting a bit tired of hashing and rehashing this with both he and Ilona, primarily because they keep moving the goalposts. To wit, Rusty says:Its interesting to note his response to my rhetorical request, I would ask Ed to give me a list of those people who hold to the evolutionary paradigm who also believe that the supernatural exists in the form of some sort of deity that interacts with the natural order…