The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From the Australian (Paul Monk, February 7, 2011), on the dangers of consensus in science:

... we are justified in being wary of foreclosing major debates based on scientific consensus, since it can be in error. Second, it shows that the way to challenge and correct scientific consensus is not through polemic or denial, but through specifying crucial variables and deductions and testing them scrupulously, in the manner of Hubble. Third, it shows that there is, nonetheless, such a thing as scientific consensus and that when handled in the manner just described, it tends to prove self-correcting. Fourth, it shows that ideally such correction will occur, as it did between Hubble and Shapley, on the basis of lucid examination of "the various possibilities". Finally, it shows that overwhelmingly human beings have always lived oblivious to the truth about the natural world and that only exacting and brilliant science has been able to discover what that truth is.

Well, foreclosing debate is a way of enshrining mediocrities and enthroning tax burdens. If that's what you want, take it and run, please.

All that said, speaking for myself, I have no idea what "the truth about the natural world is." I'm not certain of my uncertainty but am certain of one thing: Whatever the truth is, is well beyond the reach of the dullard who wouldn't know what it would be like to doubt, for example, the Darwin lobby.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend reminds me of this 2004 paper on the busted molecular clock:

For almost a decade now, a team of molecular evolutionists has produced a plethora of seemingly precise molecular clock estimates for divergence events ranging from the speciation of cats and dogs to lineage separations that might have occurred ,4 billion years ago. Because the appearance of accuracy has an irresistible allure, non-specialists frequently treat these estimates as factual. In this article, we show that all of these divergence-time estimates were generated through improper methodology on the basis of a single calibration point that has been unjustly denuded of error. The illusion of precision was achieved mainly through the conversion of statistical estimates (which by de?nition possess standard errors, ranges and confidence intervals) into errorless numbers. By employing such techniques successively, the time estimates of even the most ancient divergence events were made tolook deceptively precise. For example, on the basis of just 15 genes, the arthropod–nematode divergence event was ‘calculated’ to have occurred 1167 6 83 million years ago (i.e. within a 95% confidence interval of ,350 million years). Were calibration and derivation uncertainties taken into proper consideration, the 95% confidence interval would have turned out to be at least 40 times larger (,14.2 billion years).

Personally, I blame the pop science press for much of this.

Am I just too idealistic about human nature? Maybe, but I think that many scientists would not pretend to certainty as much as they do, except for the sound bites propping up the media's evolution myth - a faith statement, if ever there was one - a certainty which has nothing whatever to do with straightening out the tangles of life's history.

I used to have an editor like that. I was writing on topics unrelated to Darwinism, but his basic gist was, get me statistics, how gathered or with what reliability makes no difference.

The special punishment meted out to people like him by nature or God or whoever is that he always missed the naturally verifiable in his pursuit of the naturally unverifiable. For example, the birth rate and life expectancy of given region tells you a great deal about what you might expect of the future under normal circumstances, but he wanted me to try to find out how many women would walk out on their husbands "if they could" - a classic meaningless figure.

Authors' Graur and Martin's quotation from Douglas Adams is most apt: ‘We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.’

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.