The ID Report

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).