The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend sent me this item on the purely random evolution of the wiener dog (dachsund):

Our findings suggest that retrogenes may play a larger role in evolution than has been previously thought, especially as a source of diversity within species," said the study's first author, Heidi G. Parker, Ph.D. of NHGRI. "We were surprised to find that just one retrogene inserted at one point during the evolution of a species could yield such a dramatic physical trait that has been conserved over time."

In the past, retrogenes have been recognized as an important source of changes that have fueled the divergence of species. However, the dog findings are the first example of a retrogene that has spurred significant and long-lasting variation within a single species.

And it just happened to be conserved, too, by survival of the fittest. Amazing.

News flash!

Toronto (July 27, 2009) North of Lake Superior, Canadian wildlife biologists are reporting a dismaying reduction in wolf packs, with a few haggard, starving survivors haunting fast food dumpsters near riverside hunting lodges, in hopes of a stale donut or two.

Highly efficient wild packs of dachshunds have been attacking established timber wolf packs and seizing their moose kills.

Geez Freeple, a Toronto University-based wildlife biologist, explained, "Evolution bred the dachshunds to have short legs and weak jaws, so they never actually get anywhere near the kill until after the wolves have brought it down and opened it up. After that, it is an easy matter for the dachsunds to drive off the wolves. They just yap incessantly. Same principle as driving guests away from the dachshund owner's house. Of course, the wolves meekly surrender in just the same way as the house guest does and slink off.

"It continually amazes me that anyone doubts the power of unguided Darwinian evolution."

(Note: To avoid misunderstanding, this is not a serious post.

There are NO packs of wild dachshunds running loose in the boreal forests of Canada.

No Geez Freeple works at the University of Toronto.

No boreal wolf would see the dachshund as anything but about 2 kg of pleasant guts to devour, all the sweeter if it just had a meal of dog food.

And the yaps would cease pretty quickly too.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist

Speciation: If you don't sleep together, you soon won't cheep together?

Darwinism and popular culture: A columnist reminds me of its easy, empty phrases

Common descent, uncommon descent, and, hey, a ladderinto ...

Darwinism and popular culture: Well, aren't we all 30 per cent banana anyway?

Uncommon Descent: Contest Question 7: "Foul anonymous Darwinist blogger exposed. Why so foul?" Winners announced

Darwinism and academic culture: Why so many scientists no longer believe Darwin

Darwinism and popular culture: Real biology vs. Darwinism

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Synopsis Of The Third Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
By Robert Deyes
ARN Corrspondent

ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7 Imprint: HarperOne

"Watson, with his wild hair and perfect willingness to throw off work for a Hedy Lamarr film, and Crick, a dapper and no longer especially young fellow who couldn't seem to close the deal on his dissertation"(p.59). These are the uninspiring words that Stephen Meyer uses to describe the two men who would ultimately unravel the structure of DNA and thus ring in the molecular biology revolution.

With the chemical composition of DNA sufficiently well established, the world of science appeared poised for a major shake-up in its understanding of heredity. Still, the road of discovery up until that time had been anything but a 'walk in the park'. While important details concerning the components of DNA had been ironed out as early as 1909, several erroneous turns at the beginning of the twentieth century had thrown biologists 'off piste' into thinking that protein and not DNA lay at the heart of heredity.

In the 1940s the pioneering work of Erwin Chargaff brought heredity firmly back into its rightful place. Having shown unequivocally that DNA was made up of non-equal proportions of its constituent bases, Chargaff recognized that DNA might possess a language-style code that could act as the medium for inheritance. The intellectual journey that led James Watson to Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory in 1951 eventually finished of course with a stunning confirmation of Chargaff's suspicions.

Key to both Watson's and Crick's triumphant entry into the DNA race was their uninhibited drive to ask questions even if that meant revealing their ignorance. While others feared tarnished reputations should they expose any gaping holes in their understanding of the matter at hand, Watson and Crick had little to lose in their rise from obscurity. The Watson-Crick duo took valiant stabs at the DNA structure problem using data that others, notably Rosalind Franklin and Linus Pauling, had amassed. Indeed history tells of the tensions that existed between these rivals although many considered Watson and Crick to be nothing more than laughable 'know nothings' who had no business being where they were.

Using little more than plastic and metal models Watson and Crick brought substance to the idea that a double helix with phosphate backbones running on the outside accorded best with the data. The 'staircase structure' that they ultimately arrived at was in all senses revolutionary as was the nine hundred word-long 1953 Nature paper they published just weeks later. Famously, Crick entered the Eagle pub just around the corner from the Cavendish laboratory to inform the masses that the 'secret of life' had at long last been found.

Meyer does a marvelous job in conveying the personal tensions that so characterized the DNA story. His extensive coverage of 'turning point' historical moments reveals an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter. Like few other scientific discoveries, that of the structure of DNA brought fundamental changes to our understanding of the chemistry of life since life itself could no longer be considered to be a mere product of matter and energy. As Meyer elaborates, information in the form of a DNA code had emerged as the critical player in defining the hereditary makeup of nature.

Synopsis Of The Second Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer

ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7 Imprint: HarperOne

When the 19th century chemist Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea in the lab using simple chemistry, he set in motion the ball that would ultimately knock down the then-pervasive 'Vitalistic' view of biology. Life's chemistry, rather than being bound by immaterial 'vital forces' could indeed by artificially made. While Charles Darwin offered little insight on how life originated, several key scientists would later jump on Wohler's 'Eureka'-style discovery through public proclamations of their own 'origin of life' theories. The ensuing materialist view was espoused by the likes of Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow who built their own theoretical suppositions on Wohler's triumph. Meyer summed up the logic of the day

"If organic matter could be formed in the laboratory by combining two inorganic chemical compounds then perhaps organic matter could have formed the same way in nature in the distant past" (p.40)

Darwin's theory generated the much-needed fodder to 'extend evolution backward' to the origin of life. It was believed that "chemicals could "morph" into cells, just as one species could "morph" into another" (p.43). Appealing to the apparent simplicity of the cell, late 19th century biologists assured the scientific establishment that they had a firm grasp of the 'facts'- cells were, in their eyes, nothing more than balls of protoplasmic soup. Haeckel and British scientist Thomas Huxley were the ones who set the protoplasmic theory in full swing. While the details expounded by each man differed somewhat, the underlying tone was the same- the essence of life was simple and thereby easily attainable through a basic set of chemical reactions.

Things changed in the 1890s. With the discovery of cellular enzymes the complexity of the cell's inner workings became all too apparent and a new theory that no longer relied on an overly simplistic protoplasm-style foundation, albeit one still bound by materialism, had to be devised. Several decades later, finding himself in the throws of a Marxist socio-political upheaval within his own country, Russian biologist Aleksandr Oparin became the man for the task.

Oparin developed a neat scheme of inter-related processes involving the extrusion of heavy metals from the earth's core and the accumulation of atmospheric reactive gases all of which, he claimed, could eventually lead to the making of life's building blocks- the amino acids. He extended his scenario further, appealing to Darwinian natural selection as a way through which functional proteins could progressively come into existence. But the 'tour de force' in Oparin's outline came in the shape of coacervates- small, fat-containing spheroids which, Oparin proposed, might model the formation of the first 'protocell'.

Oparin's neat scheme would in the 1940s and 1950s provide the impetus for a host of prebiotic synthesis experiments, most famous of which was that of Harold Urey and Stanley Miller who used a spark discharge apparatus to make the three amino acids- glycine, alpha-alanine and beta-alanine. With little more than a few gases (ammonia, methane and hydrogen), water, a closed container and an electrical spark Urey and Miller had seemingly provided the missing link for an evolutionary chain of events that now extended as far back as the dawn of life. And yet as Meyer concludes, the information revolution that followed the elucidation of the structure of DNA would eventually shake the underlying materialistic bedrock.

Meyer's historical overview of the key events that shaped origin-of-life biology is extremely readable and well illustrated. Both the style and the content of his discourse keep the reader focused on the ID thread of reasoning that he gradually develops throughout his book.

Synopsis Of The First Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer

ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperOne

In August of 2004, philosopher Stephen Meyer published an article in the Proceedings Of The Biological Society Of Washington. The article raised media interest and outrage because it was the first to "advance the theory of intelligent design" in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The editor Richard Sternberg lost his position as a result of the ensuing debacle.

Just a few months later, renowned British philosopher Antony Flew shocked the world by reversing his life-long atheistic commitment and announcing his support for an idea reminiscent of that proposed by the modern intelligent design movement. That same month the ACLU declared it would be filing charges against the Dover, Pennsylvania school board for approving the teaching of Intelligent Design in its science classes.

Much of the controversy in all the above cases stems from a misunderstanding over what the intelligent design movement does and does not purport to explain. As many in the movement have re-iterated throughout the years, intelligent design is not in any way synonymous with biblical creationism. In the words of Stephen Meyer "intelligent design is an inference from scientific evidence, not a deduction from religious authority" (p.8).

In his recent book Signature In The Cell, Meyer presents a fresh outlook on one of the most compeling facets of the Intelligent Design case- that of biological information in DNA. When Watson and Crick published their famous paper in 1958, they not only solved the mystery of the structure of DNA but also unearthed the computer program-like nature of the information that it carried. While experience tells us that such information has its origins in the activity of conscious beings, evolutionary biologists have dismissed such a connection in biology. As an alternative, they have as we all know placed their belief in the blind activity of natural selection.

It would seem ironic therefore that these same scientists would then employ design-evoking metaphors such as 'code' and 'language' to describe DNA. They of course qualify this by stating that the apparent design of DNA is merely illusionary. Still as Meyer hammers home, the mystery of the origins of DNA and life itself remains one that modern day biology is finding difficult to unravel.

Meyer provides a lucid and personal account of his own experiences as a scientist and philosopher revealing to the reader the watershed events that led to his move towards the intelligent design alternative. Foremost in his initial exposee are the meetings he conducted with Charles Thaxton who, in his co-authorship of the book The Mystery Of Life's Origin, rejuvenated the idea of intelligent causation in biology.

Uncommon Descent: Contest Question 7: "Foul anonymous Darwinist blogger exposed. Why so foul?" featured the opposite outcome from Contest Question 6. Only one person entered Question 6 (winner announced here , possibly because most of us are sick of hearing the term "crisis" used to mean any situation (in this case, genomics) that someone finds upsetting. That's good news, really. Maybe we'll go back to saving "crisis" for the next eruption of Krakatoa or Pinatubo. Basically, there are no "crises" in cosmology or genome mapping.

Anyway, 198 people responded to Contest Question 7. Now, to recap, the topic had come up unexpectedly. An avatar blogger, "Canadian Cynic," had been posting obscenities for years against Canadian women (wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters) who espoused traditional values. I somehow got in his sights because of my interest in the intelligent design controversy.

The problem wasn't so much with the vile stuff he said but with the fact that no one knew who he was. But the enterprising Wendy Sullivan, the "Girl on the Right", found out, and allowed the world (his clients, colleagues, suppliers, acquaintances, neighbours, anyone who might be interested, really) to know that that is how he spends his time when he is not developing or writing about software.

That's all we wanted, really. Just to end the secrecy. The rest, we were pretty sure, would take care of itself. Okay, so that's history, but it raised an interesting question for Contest 7: Why do so many Darwinists spout so much filth, hostility, and aimless detraction?

In other words, why would stuff that earns applause at Panda's Thumb and After the Bar Closes get you kicked out of Uncommon Descent? And, incidentally, Darwin and his associates would doubtless be much more comfortable at Uncommon Descent than at Panda's Thumb or After the Bar Closes? What cultural change does this signify?

The part I find most interesting is that in polls, people like Canadian Cynic would doubtless proclaim themselves great defenders of the rights of women, more volubly maybe than men who would never behave that way in print.

Most of our 198 entries responded to one aspect or another of this charged issue., but a number were genuine entries. After reading them over and thinking about them, I found I could not choose between two entries, EndoplasmicMessenger at 105 and Cannuckian Yankee at 163, so I am declaring them joint winners. Both need to provide me with a postal address if they wish to receive their free copy of the Expelled DVD.

Here are their entries, reproduced:

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend writes,

This weekend I watched Alien From Earth- a documentary that outlines the consternation that the 'Man of Flores' has caused amongst evolutionary anthropologists. Here is what Nature science editor Henry Gee had to say on the matter ('Evolution of the Gaps' is once again all too evident):

Despite decades of patient work we still know rather little about the evolution of humanity ... the remains we have are very scarce and very meager and that means that there are probably lots of different species that existed, lived for hundreds of thousands of years and then became extinct and we know nothing about them ... All you need is just one to completely blow apart your well entrenched comfortable idea of the linear progress of evolution.

Basically, it's not clear that the one-metre tall humans who occupied Indonesian island Flores for millennia lived any differently from other ancient humans, so the obsession with classifying them as a different species sounds like just that - an obsession.

See also:

Flores find a clear misfit for human evolution sequence?

The little lady of Flores files

First "hobbits" [an early name for Flores humans], now Pygmies?

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Top Ten mysteries in science 2007 (Golden oldie!)

Human evolution: We know little, and with good reason

Academics as conformists?: No, they just want to be non-conformists, like everybody else

David Tyler: Used to be horse feathers, but now it's dinosaur feathers?

David Tyler: Tetrapod family tree looks like a bush

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Second Genesis: Life, but not as we know it," Bob Holmes (New Scientist, March 11, 2009) provides a summary of attempts to create artificial life (paywall).

We're still stuck with Life 1.0, the stuff that first quickened at least 3.5 billion years ago. There's been nothing new under the sun since then, as far as we know.

That looks likely to change. Around the world, several labs are drawing close to the threshold of a second genesis, an achievement that some would call one of the most profound scientific breakthroughs of all time.

However,

Venter's team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, plans to remove the genome from an existing bacterial cell and replace it with one of their own design. If successful, this will indeed result in a novel life form, but it is a far cry from the ultimate goal of a second genesis, as Venter would be the first to admit.

Other teams, however, are striving directly for that ultimate goal. The most ambitious of them do not even rely on the standard set of molecular parts, but seek to redesign a living system from first principles. If successful, they would provide an entirely new form ...

Meanwhile, others look for a shadow biosphere, an independent type of life sharing the planet with us.

My sense is that the people who use existing manufactured parts will have the best luck with their work.

Here's University of Colorado (Boulder) philosophy prof Carol Cleland'sargument in Astrobiology Magazine (12/01/06) for looking for a shadow biosphere:

The discovery of a shadow microbial biosphere would be philosophically and scientifically important. It is clear that familiar Earth life has a common origin, and hence represents a single example of life. Logically speaking, one cannot generalize on the basis of a single example. If we are to achieve a satisfactory understanding of the general nature of life, we need examples of unfamiliar forms of life.

Also, Holly Hight asks ("Does Earth harbour a shadow biosphere of alien life," Cosmos: The Science of Everything, 16 February, 2009 ):

Finding life that doesn't fit with the types we already know would be a strong indication that life developed more than one time here on Earth, increasing the chances of finding it elsewhere, said Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

But nobody has ever seriously searched for microorganisms - or any form of life - different from the carbon-based, DNA-centred type of life about which we have long known.

If we do look, Davies said, "It's entirely feasible that we'll find a shadow biosphere," he told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago.

"Our search for life [has been] based on our assumptions of life as we know it. Weird life and normal life could be intermingled, and filtering out the things we understand about life as we know it from the things we don't understand is tricky."

It must be hard to write science fiction these days.

Also just up at Colliding Universes:

Cosmology: Crisis of the month - gravitation

You never know what'll turn up useful

Multiverse: Getting comfortable with a zillion of everything that is unique

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy: Origin of life (with Charles Garner)

Origin of life: This time it's salt water

Colliding Universes is my blog on competing theories about our universe.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The significant thing about this Scientific American podcast on the recent disfavour into which evolutionary psychology has fallen is that no one appears to be throwing a fit about it.

This looks like another one for the Top Ten Darwin and Design stories of the year. But basically, it makes sense. You can only sound like the "Relationships" section of the weekend paper for so long, while pretending to do some kind of science, before people who actually do some kind of science start to get a bit nervous about what they are expected to endorse.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Michael Bloomberg, check your messages. In "Weak Link: Fossil Darwinius Has Its 15 Minutes: Skepticism about a fossil cast as a missing link in human ancestry" (Scientific American, July 21, 2009), Kate Wong observes,

And in an elaborate public-relations campaign, in which the release of a Web site, a book and a documentary on the History Channel were timed to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing her in PLoS ONE, Ida's significance was described in no uncertain terms as the missing link between us humans and our primate kin. In news reports, team members called her "the eighth wonder of the world," "the Holy Grail," and "a Rosetta Stone."

The orchestration paid off, as Ida graced the front page of countless newspapers and made appearances on the morning (and evening) news programs. Gossip outlets, such as People and Gawker, took note of her, too. And Google incorporated her image into its logo on the main search page for a day.

And then it all just melted away, with SciAm being only the latest source to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Shut off the canned wonder track for a minute, will you?"

I will certainly propose for this overall story as a down-list item for the ten top Darwin and Design stories of the year (here is 2008's list). It's rare indeed that popular media actually revolt against a proposition in "evolution," even one as patently foolish as this one - but evidently it happens. And who knows? - raindrops seldom fall solo. More Wong:

Critics concur that Ida is an adapiform, but they dispute the alleged ties to anthropoids. Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago charges that some of the traits used to align Ida with the anthropoids do not in fact support such a relationship. Fusion of the lower jaw, for instance, is not present in the earliest unequivocal anthropoids, suggesting that it was not an ancestral feature of this group. Moreover, the trait has arisen independently in several lineages of mammals—including some lemurs—through convergent evolution. Martin further notes that Ida also lacks a defining feature of the anthropoids: a bony wall at the back of the eye socket. “I am utterly convinced that Darwinius has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of higher primates,” he declares.

The real story here is the desperate need for a secular materialist establishment to find icons of evolution to venerate, Bloomberg-style - and it won't be their fault if they don't get a bunch more bogus relics.

My instinct about what went wrong is this: Popular media consider themselves gatekeepers when it comes to creating a craze, and they resent scientists, like the Ida team, who usurp their time-honoured right. Hence their swift revenge.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and pop culture: Attempts to pretend that Darwin did not extend his theory to human society

Francis Collins: The Good News guy faces tough questions now

Darwinism and popular culture: Attacking Collins hurts science, Chris Mooney argues

Uncommon Descent Contest 6 winner announced: Why waste a crisis, especially in genomics?

Extinction: A 62-million-yearitch?

Enforcement of Textbook Orthodoxy Annals: Xist Gene X-ed

So when is Harlequin going to come out with their Neanderthal romance series?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's my Mercator.Net story on Francis Collins as new NIH head:

President Obama has chosen an evangelical Christian as the new head of the National Institutes of Health. He is coming under fire from both sides of the culture wars.

[ ... ]

Of course, his advocacy of faith as a public scientist has received mixed reviews, to the point of attracting histrionics about looming "theocracy."

But now that Collins faces confirmation hearings before the Senate, the focus will shift from his persona to his view on issues relevant to his new job. He seems much more relaxed about abortion and human embryonic stem cell research than the average evangelical leader, so it will be interesting to see if he attracts any flak on that account.

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

This was the question:

Here's On the Epistemological Crisis in Genomics by Edward R Dougherty, which moved in Current Genomics, April 2008.

Abstract

There is an epistemological crisis in genomics. At issue is what constitutes scientific knowledge in genomic science, or systems biology in general. Does this crisis require a new perspective on knowledge heretofore absent from science or is it merely a matter of interpreting new scientific developments in an existing epistemological framework? This paper discusses the manner in which the experimental method, as developed and understood over recent centuries, leads naturally to a scientific epistemology grounded in an experimental-mathematical duality. It places genomics into this epistemological framework and examines the current situation in genomics. Meaning and the constitution of scientific knowledge are key concerns for genomics, and the nature of the epistemological crisis in genomics depends on how these are understood.

He kvetched,

The rules of the scientific game are not being followed. Given the historical empirical emphasis of biology and the large number of ingenious experiments that have moved the field, one might suspect that the major epistemological problems would lie with mathematics, but this is not the case. While there certainly needs to be more care paid to mathematical modeling, the major problem lies on the experimental side of the mathematical-experimental scientific duality. High-throughput technologies such as gene-expression microarrays have lead to the accumulation of massive amounts of data, orders of magnitude in excess to what has heretofore been conceivable. But the accumulation of data does not constitute science, nor does the a postiori rational analysis of data.

What's happened since? Another black hole?

Contest question, for a free copy of Expelled?: What rules of science are relevant for genomics. Are they being followed?

This one didn't attract a lot of entries and they were all from the same person. Principally, I suppose, that is because many people interested in genomics react to the "crisis" the way I reacted to a recent claim about a "crisis" in cosmology around gravity. To most of us, a crisis is when you lock yourself out of the house and see through the window that the dog has tipped the candlabra and set fire to the carpet. If you don't do something useful right this minute, you soon won't have a house or a dog.

Okay, and the winner is, by acclamation, Lock, for 2:

From Edward R Dougherty: "But the accumulation of data does not constitute science, nor does the a postiori rational analysis of data."

I assume he uses an a priori framework with which to make that judgement?

Of course he does. And rightly so. And that lens is the one science should be using (and does ... but not consistently).

Here is the insanity ... science uses this lens religiously, except that when doing so the evidence points to religious conclusions.

Denyse, you asked: "What rules of science are relevant for genomics?"

Available empirical data examined consistently through the lens of the 'law of non-contradiction'.

"Are they being followed?"

Really now ... is that question necessary?

While Lock says he already owns Expelled, it may make a handy gift item, so he needs to be in touch with me at oleary@sympatico.ca, to arrange shipment of his prize.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Why microbes are smarter than you thought," Michael Marshall at New Scientist (June 30, 2009) intros and links many stories of the amazing ways microbes manage without brains and can even appear to think ( well, not really, but ... ). Here's my favourite, but go here for more:

Many single-celled organisms can work out how many other bacteria of their own species, are in their vicinity - an ability known as "quorum sensing".

Each individual bacterium releases a small amount of a chemical into the surrounding area - a chemical that it can detect through receptors on its outer wall. If there are lots of other bacteria around, all releasing the same chemical, levels can reach a critical point and trigger a change in behaviour.

Pathogenic (disease-causing) bacteria often use quorum sensing to decide when to launch an attack on their host. Once they have amassed in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the immune system, they collectively launch an assault on the body. Jamming their signals might provide us with a way to fight back.

How about a culturally (so to speak) adapted version of "Suicide is Painless"?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "The Quantum Life" (Physcisworld.com, July 1, 2009), Paul Davies, astrobiologist and director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, examines the case for quantum mechanics kickstarting the origin of life (Q-life):

But why should quantum mechanics be relevant to life, beyond explaining the basic structure and interaction of molecules? One general argument is that quantum effects can serve to facilitate processes that are either slow or impossible according to classical physics. Physicists are familiar with the fact that discreteness, quantum tunnelling, superposition and entanglement produce novel and unexpected phenomena. Life has had three and a half billion years to solve problems and optimize efficiency. If quantum mechanics can enhance its performance, or open up new possibilities, it is likely that life will have discovered the fact and exploited the opportunities. Given that the basic processes of biology take place at a molecular level, harnessing quantum effects does not seem a priori implausible.

It's intriguing, the way he attributes to "life" and, elsewhere, "evolution" the attributes of a planning and thinking intelligent agent.

He almost persuades himself but

Although at least some of these examples add up to a prima facie case for quantum mechanics playing a role in biology, they all confront a serious and fundamental problem. Effects like coherence, entanglement and superposition can be maintained only if the quantum system avoids decoherence caused by interactions with its environment. In the presence of environmental noise, the delicate phase relationships that characterize quantum effects get scrambled, turning pure quantum states into mixtures and in effect marking a transition from quantum to classical behaviour. Only so long as decoherence can be kept at bay will explicitly quantum effects persist. The claims of quantum biology therefore stand or fall on the precise decoherence timescale. If a system decoheres too fast, then it will classicalize before anything of biochemical or biological interest happens.

. So we are now into the business of persuading ourselves that, based on a few studies, that would not be the normal fate of Q-life. And in the end,

How would Q-life evolve into familiar chemical life? A possible scenario is that organic molecules were commandeered by Q-life as more robust back-up information storage. A good analogy is a computer. The processor is incredibly small and fast, but delicate: switch off the computer and the data are lost. Hence computers use hard disks to back up and store the digital information. Hard disks are relatively enormous and extremely slow, but they are robust and reliable, and they retain their information under a wide range of environmental insults. Organic life could have started as the slow-but-reliable "hard-disk" of Q-life. Because of its greater versatility and toughness, it was eventually able to literally "take on a life of its own", disconnect from its Q-life progenitor and spread to less-specialized and restrictive environments - such as Earth. Our planet accretes a continual rain of interstellar grains and cometary dust, so delivery is no problem. As to the fate of Q-life, it would unfortunately be completely destroyed by entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

All this reminds me of a beautiful Edith Wharton short story, "Pomegranate Seed", on line here, and not wrecked by some clueless ethnicity/class/gender-driven analysis. The point of the story is that it looks as though a ghost drove a story character to suicide - but there is no actual evidence. (If you ever think of writing a ghost story, take Wharton as your guide. What make her stories work is: No one can prove anything happened, apart from catastrophic emotional impacts, and yet everyone is sure that something happened.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Everybody seems to be taking a whack at evolutionary psychology these days, and David Brooks gets in his shot in "Human Nature Today" (New York Times, June 26, 2009).

Evolutionary psychology has had a good run. But now there is growing pushback. Sharon Begley has a rollicking, if slightly overdrawn, takedown in the current Newsweek. And "Spent" is a sign that the theory is being used to try to explain more than it can bear.

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We're learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn't take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.

Moreover, we've evolved to adapt to diverse environments. Different circumstances can selectively activate different genetic potentials. Individual behavior can vary wildly from one context to another. An arrogant bully on the playground may be meek in math class. People have kaleidoscopic thinking styles and use different cognitive strategies to solve the same sorts of problems.

Evolutionary psychology leaves the impression that human nature was carved a hundred thousand years ago, and then history sort of stopped. But human nature adapts to the continual flow of information—adjusting to the ancient information contained in genes and the current information contained in today’s news in a continuous, idiosyncratic blend.

Sharon Begley's account, in my view, was not overdrawn, it was overdue. Re "Spent" - this sounds-like forgettable book takes evolutionary psychology to the shopping mall to show what we are genetically "hardwired" to buy and why, according to six (count 'em) big traits.

The book might have made a bigger splash before the recession hit. To listen to local retailers wail, many people just now have hardwired their wallets to their pockets. But surely Pleistocene cave men did the same thing, so there must be a module for that too somewhere in there ...

Essentially, two things killed evolutionary psychology: Neuroplasticity, as Brooks notes, and Occam's Razor. It's never been clear that EPs' selfish genes and brain modules ever existed, or ever needed to. Evolutionary psychologists keep looking for things that their current interpretation of human evolution can explain - which is to say, anything and everything, provided speculation is freely allowed.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neuroscience: The default brain network -humming along while we're idle

Evolutionary psychology: David Brooks on the growing pushback

Human evolution: Oldest hand-crafted flute so far is 35,000 years old

Meditation: Research scientist learns benefits personally

Neuroscience: Reducing minds to brains a deep dark rabbit hole?

Book review and online vids:The Mind and the Brain

Animal minds: Humans project guilt feelings onto their dogs?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "How to map the multiverse" (04 May 2009), Anil Ananthaswamy explains:

Greene's transformation is emblematic of a profound change among the majority of physicists. Until recently, many were reluctant to accept this idea of the "multiverse", or were even belligerent towards it. However, recent progress in both cosmology and string theory is bringing about a major shift in thinking. Gone is the grudging acceptance or outright loathing of the multiverse. Instead, physicists are starting to look at ways of working with it, and maybe even trying to prove its existence.

If such ventures succeed, our universe will go the way of Earth - from seeming to be the centre of everything to being exposed as just a backwater in a far vaster cosmos. And just as we are unable to deduce certain aspects of Earth from first principles - such as its radius or distance from the sun - we will have to accept that some things about our universe are a random accident, inexplicable except in the context of the multiverse.

Also

However, if our universe is part of a multiverse then we can ascribe the value of the cosmological constant to an accident. The same goes for other aspects of our universe, such as the mass of the electron. The idea is simply that each universe's laws of physics and fundamental constants are randomly determined, and we just happen to live in one where these are suited for life. "If not for the multiverse, you would have these unsolved problems at every corner," says Linde.

Let's see. We don't need to prove fine tuning. It's just there. But there's no evidence for the multiverse; it is an attractive idea because it makes our current cosmological values and fine tuning appear random. I love this line: " ... starting to look at ways of working with it, and maybe even trying to prove its existence".

Question: How fit are people in this state of mind to evaluate what they are seeing?

Also just up at Colliding Universes, my blog about competing materialist and non-materialist theories about our universe:

Cosmology: Crisis of the month - gravitation

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy: Origin of life (with Charles Garner)

Origin of life: This time it's salt water

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Science, Spirituality, and Some Mismatched Socks" (Wall Street Journal, May 5, 2009)", Gautam Naik explains how "researchers turn up evidence of 'spooky' quantum behavior and put it to work in encryption and philosophy.":

Last year, Dr. Gisin and colleagues at Geneva University described how they had entangled a pair of photons in their lab. They then fired them, along fiber-optic cables of exactly equal length, to two Swiss villages some 11 miles apart. During the journey, when one photon switched to a slightly higher energy level, its twin instantly switched to a slightly lower one. But the sum of the energies stayed constant, proving that the photons remained entangled. More important, the team couldn't detect any time difference in the changes. "If there was any communication, it would have to have been at least 10,000 times the speed of light," says Dr. Gisin. "Because this is such an unlikely speed, the conclusion is there couldn't have been communication and so there is non-locality."

Right, so there is no common-sense explanation of quantum mechanics. About the encryption?

Some researchers are using the uncertain state of photons to solve real-world problems. When encrypting sensitive data such as a bank transfer, both the sending party and the receiving party must have the same key. The sender needs the key to hide the message and the receiver to reveal it. Since it isn't always practical to exchange keys in person, the key must be sent electronically, too. This means the key (and the messages) may be intercepted and read by an eavesdropper. An electronic key is usually written in the computer binary code of "ones" and "zeros." Quantum physics permits a more sophisticated approach. The same "ones" and "zeros" can now be encoded by using the properties of photons, like spin. If someone intercepts a photon-based message, the spins change. The receiver then knows the key has been compromised. MagiQ Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., refreshes its quantum keys as often as 100 times a second during a transmission, making it extremely hard to break. It sells its technology to banks and companies. Dr. Gisin is a founder of ID Quantique SA in Switzerland. The company's similar encryption tool is used by online lottery and poker firms to safely communicate winning numbers and winning hands. Votes cast in a recent Swiss federal election were sent in a similar way.

We live in a mysterious world, where uncertainty is better for security than certainty - but at the quantum level only. The person who left his keys stuck in the front door all night is one dumb bunny and can be grateful that most thieves wouldn't expect to get so lucky, which is why he was the first person to discover the problem in the morning.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The guy had successfully hidden his identity for about five years, while posting all kinds of sexually charged abuse to the Internet about many people, including me. But now we know.

Wendy Sullivan, the Girl on the Right, has officially found out who the mysterious Canadian Cynic is. Here is stuff he has said about me. He is Robert PJ Day. Small business owner. Computer genius. Well-read book nerd. Anti-creationist debater

A Linux genius, apparently. [Foul language warning re his posts and any reports on them. ]

Here isthe contest question: Why do so many of Darwinists spout so much filth, hostility, and aimless detraction?

The winner will receive a free copy of Expelled.

Go here for more information, links to the above, and to enter.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Francis Collins, well known as the genome mapper who sat with President Clinton and others on the White House lawn in 2000, is the new head of National Institutes of Health.

As others have noted, he may be as well known for his recent book, The Language of God, part personal testimony and part explanation of how there need be no conflict between faith and science.

Some are skeptical. David Klinghoffer writes,

Do you ever notice how religious believers are always cited by the media as "devout" precisely when they are equivocating on basic Judeo-Christian moral and theological tenets? Dr. Francis Collins has some startling ideas on abortion. Startling, that is, from an Evangelical Christian who is Obama's choice to head up the National Institutes of Health. He's a favorite church speaker with Evangelical audiences, especially on how Darwinism poses no threat to their faith.

Klinghoffer offers some examples of his concerns: Go here for more.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Brain detects happiness more quickly than sadness" (Eurekalert), we learn:

The results, published in the latest issue of the journal Laterality, show that the right hemisphere performs better in processing emotions. "However, this advantage appears to be more evident when it comes to processing happy and surprised faces than sad or frightened ones", the researcher points out.

"Positive expressions, or expressions of approach, are perceived more quickly and more precisely than negative, or withdrawal, ones. So happiness and surprise are processed faster than sadness and fear", explains Aznar-Casanova.

The finding doesn't particularly support the famous "left brain, right brain" thesis, that is so embedded in popular culture that even your cousin, who never reads a book, knows about it.

Two theories are currently "competing" to explain the pattern of cerebral asymmetry in processing emotions. The older one postulates the dominance of the right hemisphere in the processing of emotions, while the second is based on the approach-withdrawal hypothesis, which holds that the pattern of cerebral asymmetry depends upon the emotion in question, in other words that each hemisphere is better at processing particular emotions (the right, withdrawal, and the left, approach).

When we are miserable, we should seek out people we believe to be right-brained (chances are they will intuit our needs), and when we are happy, we should go to the races with people who are left-brained. (And get them to help us decide where to place our bets).

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack:

Evolutionary psychology: Why it is on the way out, with last year's magazines

Daydreaming: Neuroscientist calls it key to creativity, unimaginative boss still calls it loafing

Empathy: Hath not a Jew eyes?

Free will: Understanding what it means

Neuroscience and science fiction: Can we cure everything by advanced technology?

The Mindful Hack is my blog on neuroscience and spirituality issues, which supports The Spiritual Brain.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Issue 9 of Salvo (Summer 2009) has come out, with many fine articles. The feature article is on the explosion of kids watching Internet porn.*

A number of interesting features on topics related to the intelligent design controversy:

Gimme that Spacetime Religion: Seeking Salvation in Science by Regis Nicoll, about the effort to transform Darwinism into a religion with all the trappings - except actual guilt for sin.

Wesley J. Smith, describing himself as a "Human Exceptionalist" talks about the effect that the growing practice of equating humans with animals and plants has on bioethics, pointing out, "If they really wanted to be reductionist, they could also say that because carrots are made out of carbon molecules, there is no distinction between carrots and humans either. You can't get far enough ahead of these guys in terms of satire."

Twin Features: The Big Problem That Design Convergence Posses to Darwinian Evolution by Hugh Ross: Remember the Tree of Life we were taught in high school, that proved Darwin was right? "The problem for the Darwinian perspective is this: Life forms that are only distantly rrelated, if at all, nevertheless show amazing similarities in their morphological features (some are identical). This is not what Darwinists expect." He recounts a good deal of examples, including Lenski's famous simulation, showing that repeated design is a better explanation. We are now down to the club moss of life, I guess. Turns up everywhere.

The Flop: Betting Against Darwin's Tree of Life by Casey Luskin: A great companion to the above. Luskin explains how a famous Darwinist, self-cited as one of the "world's leading experts on the tree of life" tried to bluff the Texas State Board of Education that Darwin's Tree of Life was in great shape - when current science lit shows it is collapsing. Or, as Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, said, "... today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence." One of the world's leading experts should spend less time bluff and more time reading the evidence. Even the Texas Board can find this stuff out now. (If they don't, it won't be Luskin's fault.)

Old Bones: The Story of a Girl with a Birth Defect by Michael Cook: About a severely retarded child who lived over 500 000 years ago. "Now here's the remarkable thing. The hunter-gatherer Middle Pleistocene family of Cranium 14 must have cared for the child, or she would not have survived for at least five years, and perhaps as many as twelve. In the dry-as-dust words of the article, 'It is obvious that the [Sima de Huesos]' hominin species did not act against the abnormal/ill individuals during infancy, as has happened along our own history in many cultures.'"

My regular Deprogram column is about Phineas Gage - the Lecture Room Psychopath. It seems he wasn't a psychopath in his lifetime, but became one after his death, when he was needed to demonstrate to Psychology 101 students that brain injury radically changes personality. "Sadly, Intro to Psych 101 professors didn't need a workingman who had independently adapted to his disability - without government funding - and found work on his own. They needed an aimless, sociopathic drifter."

Only the first of these ID-relevant articles seems to be online. If you thought this was a hint that you should subscribe or buy just this one issue, or support Salvo - well yes, it is!

Americans, Happy July 4!

(*As a mother and grandmother, I would say key controllable factors are more chores, more sports, more homework, and more supervision. A busy, supervised kid is not watching porn whether it is available or not, for the same reason that a busy, supervised kid isn't smoking (or not often) even if he can buy cigs from a complicit shopkeeper.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).