The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here and here, historian of Nazi Germany Richard Weikart responds to yet another whitewash of Darwinism's role in helping to create a particularly malignant type of racism, this time by Darwinist Michael Ruse:

Last November at a conference on Darwinism I conversed with a graduate student in philosophy who embraced Ruse's position on the evolution of ethics, which is not all that unusual among evolutionists. He told me he believed that morality is a biologically innate response shaped by evolutionary processes. It has no independent, objective, or universal existence. I pressed this graduate student, asking him how far he was willing to take his ethical relativism. Upon his affirmation that he subscribed to it completely, I asked him if he thought Hitler was morally evil. After explaining that he personally found Hitler's views repugnant, he admitted that he had no basis for condemning Hitler and finally he conceded, "Hitler was OK."

I doubt Ruse would be comfortable saying that Hitler was OK, because Ruse's (and Darwin's) political views are miles apart from Hitler's. However, Ruse's worldview (and Darwin's own) does not, as far as I can see, provide any objective basis for opposing or condemning Hitler (or Stalin or Mao).

Weikart is repeatedly accused of saying things he does not say, principally, one suspects because the things he does say and can demonstrate are so damning that the only alternatives are acknowledgement or obfuscation.

Here's an interview I did with Weikart on how he got interested in Darwin and Hitler anyway (not how you might think?).

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 physicist Tipler's view on Stephen Hawking's recent decision that God is not necessary:

In 1966, Stephen Hawking published his first - completely valid - proof for the existence of God. Over the next seven years, he followed this with even more powerful valid theorems proving God’s existence.

So how did Hawking, who successfully proved God's existence, remain an atheist? Simple. He simply denied that the assumptions he used in his proofs were true. As a matter of logic, if the assumptions in a proof are not true, then the conclusions need not be true. What assumptions did the young Hawking make? He assumed that the laws of physics, mainly Einstein's theory of gravity, were true. In the summary of his early research, namely his book The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Hawking wrote:

It seems to be a good principle that the prediction of [God] by a physical theory indicates that the theory has broken down, i.e. it no longer provides a correct description of observations.

Hawking then began working on quantum gravity, in hopes that God would be at last eliminated from the equations. Alas, it was not to be: God was even more prominent - and unavoidable - in quantum gravity than in Einstein's theory of gravity. In his latest book, The Grand Design, Hawking has pinned his hope of eliminating God on M-theory, a theory with no experimental support whatsoever, hence not a theory of physics at all. Nor has it been proven that M-theory is mathematically consistent. Nor has it been proven that God has been eliminated from M-theory. There are disquieting signs (for Hawking and company) that He is also unavoidable in M-theory, as He is in Einstein’s gravity, and in quantum gravity.

In spite of what the atheist press is telling you, it's looking bad for atheism today. And it is extraordinary the lengths an atheist like Hawking will go to avoid the obvious: God exists.

Tipler is an entertainingly nutty physicist, capable of making some sharp points. The thing to see here is that the new atheists do not need evidence. What they have is much more valuable: They are not officially classed by most people as a religious position, so they can simply impose their view on institutions they did not found, do not own, and negligibly pay for, if at all.

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 a revealing PhysicsWorld paper on peer review:

After running the model with 1000 scientists over 500 time-steps, Thurner and Hanel find that even a small presence of rational or random referees can significantly reduce the quality of published papers. When just 10% of referees do not behave "correctly" the quality of accepted papers drops by one standard deviation. If the fractions of rational, random and correct referees are about 1/3 each, the quality selection aspect of peer review practically vanished altogether.

"Our message is clear: if it can not be guaranteed that the fraction of rational and random referees is confined to a very small number, the peer-review system will not perform much better than by accepting papers by throwing (an unbiased!) coin," explain the researchers.

Daniel Kennefick, a cosmologist at the University of Arkansas with a special interest in sociology, believes that the study exposes the vulnerability of peer review when referees are not accountable for their decisions. "The system provides an opportunity for referees to try to avoid embarrassment for themselves, which is not the goal at all," he says. (September 9, 2010)

The major problem, as I see it, is that peer review is sold to the public as a key determinant of quality, which it isn't and can't be, under the circumstances. Scientists know about and talk about this problem, but nothing much seems to get done about it.

(Note: "Rational" means self-serving enough to reject a paper that might draw attention away from one's own work - I guess they were looking for a polite way to put that ...)

I have written elsewhere about peer review.

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 to note a new blog:

The Bubble Chamber is a new blog written by historians and philosophers of science for discussing contemporary issues of science and society through the lens of historical context and critical analysis.

Founded by the University of Toronto's Science Policy Working Group, The Bubble Chamber is a forum for those interested in a critical assessment of science in society and the development, regulation, and trajectory of science.

Much of it would certainly interest ID types; for example, Mike Thicke on "Is Sam Harris on to something: Can science answer moral questions? Thicke quotes Darwinian atheist neuroscientist Harris:

I was not suggesting that science can give us an evolutionary or neurobiological account of what people do in the name of “morality.” Nor was I merely saying that science can help us get what we want out of life. Both of these would have been quite banal claims to make (unless one happens to doubt the truth of evolution or the mind’s dependency on the brain). Rather I was suggesting that science can, in principle, help us understand what we should do and should want—and, perforce, what other people should do and want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may one day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind.

So what do you think? Is Sam Harris just repeating Wilson’s mistakes, or is Hume’s is-ought divide best forgotten? Can we really find new ethical principles by studying biology, psychology, or neuroscience? What would they look like? What do you think of the principles Harris proposes in his TED talk?

Good for Mike for wondering; not as Thicke as some.

(The answer, of course, is no, unless we are zombies, in which case any principles would elude us anyway.There is no "science of mind" that is proof against temptation to do what we know to be wrong, though there could be zombification.)

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 is Clive Copus's review (23 September 2010) of Darwin skeptic James Le Fanu's Why Us?

Le Fanu writes beautifully - almost poetically, at times - but never loses sight of his underlying message. Beginning with an evocative account of the discovery of the artwork of Cro-Magnon man in a French cave, he marvels at the sudden and inexplicable emergence of mankind, with our unique powers of imagination, reasoning and abstract thought. The contrast with our primate 'cousins' should be self-evident, but the distorting lens of the Darwinian paradigm has served only to emphasise and exaggerate our similarities. Consequently, huge areas of potential research into what makes humans 'special' have been largely ignored, with disastrous consequences for the scientific enterprise.

[ ... ]

... both stunning and liberating: stunning because it is the very opposite of what scientists – working, of course, within the constraints of the Darwinian paradigm - expected to find; and liberating because it frees us from the rigid determinism of the selfish gene, with all that that implies for free will and objective moral values.

[ ... ]

... it provides the context for the author's main thesis - that cutting-edge science is providing us with an opportunity to break free of the shackles of materialist reductionism, and re-embrace the concept of the soul. In two areas in particular - genetics and neuroscience - research over the last 20 years has shown that we are much more than the sum of our brain's electrical impulses and our DNA's instructions. This is both stunning and liberating: stunning because it is the very opposite of what scientists - working, of course, within the constraints of the Darwinian paradigm - expected to find; and liberating because it frees us from the rigid determinism of the selfish gene, with all that that implies for free will and objective moral values.

Here's a bit more on Le Fanu from his site:

James Le Fanu was born in 1950 and spent his childhood in Scotland, East Africa, Yugoslavia and Cyprus. He studied the Humanities at Ampleforth College before switching to medicine, graduating from Cambridge University and the Royal London Hospital in 1974. He subsequently worked in the Renal Transplant Unit and Cardiology Departments of the Royal Free and St Mary's Hospital in London. For the past twenty years he has combined working as a doctor in general practice with contributing a weekly column to the Sunday and Daily Telegraph. He has contributed articles and reviews to The New Statesman, Spectator, GQ, The British Medical Journal and Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. He has written several books including 'The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine' that won the Los Angeles Prize Book Award in 2001 and 'Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves' that was published in Britain and the United States in February 2009.

Two comments:

Reviewer Copus seems to think that another good book exposing Darwinism's weaknesses will help weaken it as a social theory. Not so. We might no more expect that than we might expect astrology to be weakened as a social theory by exposure of nonsense. The Toronto Star, for example - street capo for all things Darwin - has an astrologer as well, Jacqueline Biggar, .

Second, and related, thousands upon thousands of academics and others make a living - often at tax expense - fronting Darwinian nonsense and foolishness. And what makes either Copus or Le Fanu think that these people actually want to be free?

(Note:When Darwin's chihuahua, Britmag New Scientist, went after Le Fanu, he appears to have threatened the mag with Britain's libel laws. The whole affair was a bit murky at first, and I got dragged into it because I was the only other person mentioned in the article - and, as it happens, am a free speech journalist, with little use for Britain's libel laws or libel tourism generally.

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

Adapting to Darkness: How Behavioral and Genetic Changes Helped Cavefish Survive Extreme Environment

Becoming eyeless is an adaptation of sorts, no?

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2010) - University of Maryland biologists have identified how changes in both behavior and genetics led to the evolution of the Mexican blind cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) from its sighted, surface-dwelling ancestor. In research published in the August 12, 2010 online edition of the journal Current Biology, Professor William Jeffery, together with postdoctoral associates Masato Yoshizawa, and Å pela Goricki, and Assistant Professor Daphne Soares in the Department of Biology, provide new information that shows how behavioral and genetic traits coevolved to compensate for the loss of vision in cavefish and to help them find food in darkness.

This is the first time that a clear link has been identified between behavior, genetics, and evolution in Mexican blind cavefish, which are considered an excellent model for studying evolution.

Actually, to the extent that the cavefish lost a trait rather than gained one, what we are studying here is devolution rather than evolution. Just how the main different types of eye evolved is a fascinating topic. How traits can get lost is interesting too, but not as relevant to the question of how great gains in information really occur.

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

At Intelligent Life (Autumn 2010), in "LIMITS OF SCIENCE," Anthony Gottlieb asks,"Plenty of today's scientific theories will one day be discredited. So should we be sceptical of science itself?":

At the end of her book "Science: A Four Thousand Year History" (2009), Patricia Fara of Cambridge University wrote that "there can be no cast-iron guarantee that the cutting-edge science of today will not represent the discredited alchemy of tomorrow". This is surely an understatement. If the past is any guide-and what else could be? - plenty of today's science will be discredited in future. There is no reason to think that today's practitioners are uniquely immune to the misconceptions, hasty generalisations, fads and hubris that marked most of their predecessors. Although the best ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Darwin, Einstein and others have stood the test of time and taken their place in the permanent corpus of knowledge, error remains inherent in the enterprise of science. This is because interesting theories always go beyond the data that they seek to explain, and because science is made by people. Examples from recent decades of scientific consensus that turned out to be wrong range from the local to the largest possible scale: acid rain was not destroying forests in Germany in the 1980s, as it was said to have been, and the expansion of the universe has not been slowing down, as cosmologists used to think it was.

Physicists, in particular, have long believed themselves to be on the verge of explaining almost everything. In 1894 Albert Michelson, the first American to get a Nobel prize in science, said that all the main laws and facts of physics had already been discovered. In 1928 Max Born, another Nobel prize-winner, said that physics would be completed in about six months' time. In 1988, in his bestselling "A Brief History of Time", the cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote that "we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature." Now, in the newly published "The Grand Design", Hawking paints a picture of the universe that is "different ... from the picture we might have painted just a decade or two ago". In the long run, physicists are, no doubt, getting closer and closer to the truth. But you can never be sure when the long run has arrived. And in the short run-to adapt Keynes's proverb-we are often all wrong.

Most laymen probably assume that the 350-year-old institution of "peer review", which acts as a gatekeeper to publication in scientific journals, involves some attempt to check the articles that see the light of day. In fact they are rarely checked for accuracy, and, as a study for the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, reported last year, "the data and computational methods are so seldom disclosed that post-publication verification is equally rare." Journals will usually consider only articles that present positive and striking results, and scientists need constantly to publish in order to keep their careers alive. So it is that, like the late comedian Danny Kaye, professional scientists sometimes get their exercise by jumping to conclusions. Historians of science call this bias the "file-drawer problem": if a set of experiments produces a result contrary to what the team needs to find, it ends up filed away, and the world never finds out about it.

Yes, indeed, and many people - especially older people - either know or sense this sort of thing. The "theory of everything problem is a huge handicap to getting taken seriously. It is evolutionary psychology (how your inner ape runs your life), for example, that makes Darwin's theory sound ridiculous in many people's eyes, not the bare bones theory itself, which is at least debatable:

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

From ScienceDaily, we learn,

Why 'Scientific Consensus' Fails to Persuade

(Sep. 14, 2010) If you are like most people, the answer is likely to be, "it
depends." What it depends on, a recent study found, is not whether the position that scientist takes is consistent with the one endorsed by a National Academy. Instead, it is likely to depend on whether the position the scientist takes is consistent with the one believed by most people who share your cultural values.

This was the finding of a recent study conducted by Yale University law professor Dan Kahan, University of Oklahoma political science professor Hank Jenkins-Smith and George Washington University law professor Donald Braman that sought to understand why members of the public are sharply and persistently divided on matters on which expert scientists largely agree.

An interesting article, but a little too self-pleasing for my taste. The reason people doubt expert science (or other) consensus is that they often know reasons why the consensus might not be correct, not just because they are biased but the experts are not. Sometimes a consensus is just a herd of independent minds, bellowing noisily as they gallop off a cliff. I am sixty years old, and it is interesting to reflect on all the expert opinion extant in my youth, and what happened to it.

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

According to Larry O'Hanlon at Discovery News, "Ancient animal explosion gets bigger with new finds" (9/9/2010),

At least eight new kinds of Earth's earliest animals from the mysterious and controversial Cambrian Explosion have been discovered in a unexpected section of ancient rock 30 miles from the famous Burgess Shale of Canada. The discovery suggests such old, rare fossils are more common than previously thought.

Like the fossils of the original Burgess Shale, the new discoveries are remarkable because they preserve features of animals which had no hard parts — like gills and eyes — and remained intact for more than half a billion years.

That's a time when animals evolved from being very small, simple organisms into a wildly creative, explosive variety of sometimes bizarre creatures.

These were culled by natural selection over time, leaving the more familiar main animal groups we see today.

I don't know how much of that is really due to Darwinism (that is, natural selection acting on random mutation), resulting in greater or less success at competing with other members of the species or other life forms for resources. Changing ecology probably played a big role, especially in massive extinctions, where the environment can just disappear:

Still, I suppose O'Hanlon must tip his hat to Darwin or else.

It would be nice to think that these new near-Burgess finds show that Cambrian explosion fossils are more common than previously thought. But they more likely just show that the Burgess area is not yet tapped out. The new find certainly warrants a wider area search.

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 a vid with Yale psychologist Laurie Santos, who claims that monkeys make stupid economic mistakes, as do humans.

Monkeys should speak for themselves (though they actually can't), but I've never really noticed that the human economy, left to itself, was irrational. It operates on some fairly simple and obvious principles:

1. People want what they want, and if they can pay for it, they will.

2. Everything that rises beyond its sustainable energy starts to fall.

3. As the old Italian proverb says, three women and a goose make a market.

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

Well, of course not. On the main point, he couldn't possibly be wrong,(in Boyles's view)and we are asking the "wrong question". In a linked article by Michael Reilly, his errors are grandfathered, much as if he were the prophet of a new cult, because "Mountains and mountains of evidence" support him. Just when the prophet's mountains are disappearing, too. But I will let you read it for yourself.

A lot of people invested heavily in Darwinism, which - it must be said, is too big to fail, and must now be propped up for the sake of vested interests.

While we are here, Steve Newton advises us at the Huffington Post that Darwin was not wrong when he argued that competition was the driving force ofevolution, suggesting that large-scale changes in ecology played a bigger role. Of course, they did. ... When an ice sheet covered much of Canada for thousands of years, it would not have mattered whether the preglacial creatures (mammoth, mastodon, ground sloth, saber-tooth cat, horse, camel, etc.) competed or not. When the ice melted, they were just gone. Bison, beavers, wolves, maples, and such were the big noise. How? Why? We don't know yet. One thing that sure isn't helping is 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).