The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN reporter

Here's my latest Deprogram from Salvo, a magazine you should support. The stuff you are about to split a gut laughing while reading is all true:

FIT FOR A ZOMBIE
Evolutionary Brand Marketing for Your Survival[ ... ]

Hogshead is a brand marketing specialist; she helps executives persuade us to pay more for their brands. She has even formulated a theory, developed from the study of apes and neuroscience: to sell is to cast a spell, and the best strategy for casting a spell is to "fascinate" people. She has identified seven Darwinian triggers for successful sales spells.

These triggers are not the fundamental reasons why we buy things, of course. We buy shoes to protect our feet, but brand marketers get some people to pay $800 a pair for what is otherwise a market-price commodity. And Hogshead offers some revealing insights into the clog-eat-clog world of weaving lucrative illusions around a shoe brand.

She begins by disposing of free will. The person to be fascinated (manipulated) into buying something is a "zombie," and the marketers must discover and trigger the knobs that control it. Yes, yes, we used to call this sort of thing the occult, but Darwin's crack troops rode swiftly to the rescue, rebranding it as "science."

Hogshead must fight nascent rationality in her customer, which she does by invoking lust: "Lust conquers the rational evaluation process, freeing us to stop thinking and start feeling." But then we get down 'n' dirty into promoting vice. Yes, vice: "A little vice goes a long way, so customize your message by using it in combination with other triggers."

Go here for more.

You may not laugh so hard when you see what effect Darwinian marketing concepts have on the historically successful American business model.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here, der Spiegel gives Richard Dawkins the floor (03/02/2011), as his book, The Greatest Show on Earth is published in German:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Has religion not been very successful in an evolutionary sense?Dawkins: The thought that human societies gained strength from religious memes in their competition with others is true to a certain extent. But it is more like an ecological struggle: It reminds me of the replacement of the red by the gray squirrel in Britain. That is not a natural selection process at all, it is an ecological succession. So when a tribe has a war-like god, when the young men are brought up with the thought that their destiny is to go out and fight as warriors and that a martyr's death brings you straight to heaven, you see a set of powerful, mutually reinforcing memes at work. If the rival tribe has a peaceful god who believes in turning the other cheek, that might not prevail.

- "Interview with Scientist Richard Dawkins: 'Religion? Reality Has a Grander Magic of its Own'"

It's hard to tell exactly what Dawkins is trying to say here, but curiously, "a peaceful god who believes in turning the other cheek" was exactly what the early Christians preached and they went from being a persecuted people in the Roman empire to running the show in the course of about two and a half centuries. But your mileage may vary.

We also learn,

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Aren't you afraid that some of these people might be alienated by the sometimes strong language in the book?Dawkins: What strong language do you mean?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You call your opponents "Holocaust-deniers," "ignorant," "ridiculous" and "deluded to the point of perversity."

Dawkins: My suspicion is that more people will find it amusing. If I read an author who is ridiculing some idiot, I myself am rather amused. There may be some who will be turned off and I will have lost them in those passages. But I suspect they'll be outnumbered by those who are amused.

I suspect he is right, but none of that adds up to an argument, nor even heads in the direction of one.

Which reminds me, why is der Spiegel calling Dawkins a "scientist"? When did he last do any actual science?

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Jonathan Wells has just published The Myth of Junk DNA, and offers answers to some questions posed by Denyse O’Leary:

So, for those who dropped science after Grade Ten, what is junk/non-coding DNA?

"Non-coding" in this context means "non-protein-coding." An important function of our DNA is to specific the sequences of subunits (amino acids) in the proteins that (along with other types of molecules) make up our bodies. When molecular biologists discovered in the 1970s that about 98% of our DNA does not code for proteins, some biologists called non-protein-coding DNA "junk."

Why was it called "junk" in the first place? And why does all this remind me of one of those auction program episodes where someone is storing leftover carpet nails in what turns out to be a Ming dynasty vase?

According to Charles Darwin's theory, all living things are descendants of common ancestors that have been modified solely by unguided natural processes that include variation and selection. In the modern version of his theory—neo-Darwinism—genes control embryo development, variations are due to differences in genes, and new variations originate in genetic mutations. In the 1950s, neo-Darwinists equated genes with DNA sequences (Francis Crick called DNA "the secret of life") and assumed that their biological significance lay in the proteins they encoded. The 98% of our DNA that does not code for proteins was attributed to molecular accidents that have accumulated in the course of evolution.

"The amount of DNA in organisms," neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins wrote in 1976, "is more than is strictly necessary for building them: A large fraction of the DNA is never translated into protein. From the point of view of the individual organism this seems paradoxical. If the 'purpose' of DNA is to supervise the building of bodies, it is surprising to find a large quantity of DNA which does no such thing. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing. But from the point of view of the selfish genes themselves, there is no paradox. The true 'purpose' of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA." (The Selfish Gene, p. 47)

Since the 1980s, however, and especially after completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, biologists have discovered many functions for non-protein-coding DNA. If the Ming vase is a living cell and the leftover carpet nails are "junk DNA," it turns out that the nails are not only made of gold, but they also make an essential contribution to the beauty of the vase.

Interestingly, in the "nail dump is Ming vase" story, no one insists that nobody ever thought it was just another piece of junk. [They almost always say, "Yes, we thought so but had no idea ..."] So what’s behind that?

More http://www.uncommondescent.com/junk-dna/jonathan-wells-on-his-book-the-myth-of-junk-dna-yes-it-is-a-darwinist-myth-and-he-nails-it-as-such/" target="another">here.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN reporter

... invest the money in something really safe, and then get out. Lines from the real world of lots of skill and lots of chance:

The vast sums of money shuttled among the accounts of these young professionals - and the shocking aggressiveness and recklessness with which they played - deepened the divide between the young online players and the older guard who earned their millions when poker was still a game played by men sitting around a table. Since the rise of online poker in the early 2000s, every principle of the game, every lesson learned over hundreds of thousands of hours of play, every simple credo uttered in some old Western gambling movie - all those tersely stated, manly things that made up the legend of poker - has been picked apart and, for the most part, discarded.

The game was revolutionized in this way by video game addicts, one of who explains,

“ ... because we're all competitive, we want to have the highest score. But really, we don't know what making $400,000 or losing $800,000 means, because we don’t have families or whatever. This blind spot gives us the freedom to always make the right move, regardless of the amount at stake, because our judgment isn't clouded by any possible ramifications.”

It is unclear whether Cates actually does understand that the money is real.

Look, I kid you not, Cates couldn't figure out why a restaurant would be more crowded on Valentine's Day.

Note: My best guess is that the kids' success stems largely from the fact that they are rather alike in many ways, so they can guess what to expect more accurately than most of us. But the failures occur because no such system works well indefinitely.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In this review of Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo, Christian historian Pearcey revisits the broader question of how science broke loose from reason. (I am thinking of all the "our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth" rubbish from people who honestly believe that they are on the right side of science, and that that idea somehow helps science.)

Many thinkers were so impressed by the scientific revolution that they began to regard science as the sole source of truth. Whatever could not be known by the scientific method was not real. Science was no longer merely one means for investigation the world. It was elevated into an exclusivist worldview - scientism or positivism. (91)

- Evolution News & Views (March 22, 2011)

Yes. I couldn't know that I liked sushi until a brain scan told me. My behaviour at the buffet wouldn't be accepted as evidence. More significant was how it affected the world of the artsie:

Pearcey describes naturalism as an outgrowth of realism, only "...grittier, harsher, more pessimistic. It portrays humans as nothing but biological organisms, products of evolutionary forces." (145) The Darwinian influence was most noticeable in literature. This literature was rugged, harsh, and at times blurred the lines between man and animal. Jack London was profoundly influenced by the writings of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and we see in his writings a harsh, unforgiving world where survival of the fittest reigns supreme. (144, 150)

To see what this means, consider, artsies did not used to be considered flakes. Was Leonardo a flake? Michelangelo? Jane Austen? No, the flake who thinks that chimps trampling paint on a canvas is art was a product of these new ideas, not the old ones. There ceased to be any way of making a distinction. If it is in a frame, as Catbert said, it will look like art to you.

But one thing she said really set me thinking. She mentioned Jack London. Ah yes, the Call of the Wild, and the Yukon. My birth province is Saskatchewan, but I passed part of my childhood in that frozen hell/land of opportunity/"land that God forgot"or however you like to see it, called Yukon (a territory of Canada). It is humans that define and set boundaries for nature, not the other way around, and we give pieces of it the names we see fit. That is the point, if anyone cares, of Genesis 2, 19-20 .

Here's the funny thing: We knew nothing whatever of Spencer's/Darwin's "survival of the fittest." Yes, I read the book:

This is the Law of the Yukon:

"Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane --

[ … ]

But the others -- the misfits, the failures -- I trample under my feet.

Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,

Ye would send me the spawn of your gutters -- Go! take back your spawn again.

But, in real life in the Yukon of my own childhood in the late 1950s, people would think you were a dangerous nutter if you acted on such assumptions. And the nutter would have the problem, not the rest of us, believe me.

The real Law of the Yukon was: People had the right to break into an unoccupied dwelling, burn wood and eat food, provided they replaced it.

We lived that way. You couldn't live there any other way. I wasn't by any means the fittest kid myself but no one took that into account. Kids without competent parents were parcelled out into the community and, if possible, adopted, usually down south. A number of children actually stayed at our home, awaiting transit far down south to their adoptive parents, including a beautiful little two-year-old girl with the same name as me. I still can't think why her mother would give her up (but it may not have been in her hands, after all; perhaps she was a TB patient). I can only hope the kid had a better life as a result, and one day understood.

Yes, doubtless, out in the boreal scrub, the northern wolf takes a wholly different view of life. So? If you had moved him to Hawaii, he'd still be a wolf, and if you had moved us to Hawaii, we'd still be human. There's no getting past that. There's just sinking of one's own standards. Which is pretty much what Pearcey is taking about, and I am glad to sink the myth of the Law of the Yukon.

(Note:: For a real-world discussion of "animal art", go here.)

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

My latest MercatorNet column

A choice argument
Did you choose to cheat on your taxes? Or snub a friend? Free will makes an unexpected comeback.

Possibly no issue between traditionalists and new atheists rankles more than this one: Are we simply the products of our genes and neurons, or can we make authentic choices?

Traditional religions encourage repentance for sin, which just means, "I knew what I was doing and it was wrong." No one repents of slipping on the ice, and ending up in traction. But a new doctrine has been highly seductive. You never choose.

In a blog entry, "No soul? I can live with that. No free will? AHHHH!!!," on the Psychology Today website, Tamler Sommers, professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, explains why he thinks no free will is no big deal. He acknowledges that most materialists have not wanted to confront the issue directly.

To bring his idea home: Why should a man suffer any penalty if he kills your spouse, rapes your daughter, and maims your son? By definition, he is not responsible for his behaviour. That's not because he passes normal tests of insanity, but because no one is ever responsible for their behaviour. Ever. At all.

Sommers cites one study where we learn that ... more

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Earlier this year, sociobiologist E. O. "Dear Pastor" Wilson disowned his "inclusive fitness" (kin selection) theory, developed from his study of ants and bees. According to his theory, among life forms that live in groups, many members may give up the chance of reproducing their selfish genes so that the group as a whole is more fit. The problem is that it's not clear how this situation could arise.

He hadn’t long to wait for a reaction from his colleagues:

Online today in Nature, nearly 150 evolutionary biologists challenge Harvard University's Edward O. Wilson, one of the world's most preeminent scientists, and two colleagues. At issue is the usefulness of a 50-year-old theory about the role of relatedness in the evolution of complex social systems like those of ants, bees, and humans. Wilson, along with Harvard mathematicians Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita argue that the theory, called inclusive fitness, does not explain how these complex societies arose; in a rebuttal today in Nature and in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, their critics say that the Harvard trio have misrepresented the literature and are simply wrong.

- Elizabeth Pennisi, "Researchers Challenge E. O. Wilson Over Evolutionary Theory" Science Insider (23 March 2011)

Of course. If it is not Darwin, or whatever people think is Darwin, it must be wrong, and not only that, but dead wrong and dangerous.

I never "got" Wilson's theory because it was not clear who, among the ants and bees, had ever made these high-order calculations. That's probably what's bugging him, too. As Teilhard de Chardin would have put it, ants do not think, but something in them thinks. If that something is "kin selection"/"inclusive fitness", then Wilson has discovered a Designer. But my guess is he never meant to invoke so deep a power.

Anyway, efforts to apply the theory to human society are a time sink because humans, unlike ants and bees, make individual decisions. There is no reason to think that a man's decision to become a childless Buddhist monk, for example, adds "inclusive fitness" to his community. The decision could just as well detract from the community but was taken with utter indifference to fitness, because that is the whole point of becoming a monk.

Jerry "I don't have time to invent him, but couldn't anyway" Coyne has announced, with respect to Wilson's change of mind:

“If the Nowak et al. paper is so bad, why was it published? That's obvious, and is an object lesson in the sociology of science. If Joe Schmo et al. from Buggerall State University had submitted such a misguided paper to Nature, it would have been rejected within an hour (yes, Nature sometimes does that with online submissions!). The only reason this paper was published is because it has two big-name authors, Nowak and Wilson, hailing from Mother Harvard. That, and the fact that such a contrarian paper, flying in the face of accepted evolutionary theory, was bound to cause controversy. Well, Nature got its controversy but lost its intellectual integrity, becoming something of a scientific National Enquirer.

The lesson: if you're a famous biologist you can get away with publishing dreck. So much for our objective search for truth - a search that's not supposed to depend on authors' fame and authority.”

Lots of us would conga that, but maybe Jerry wouldn't like the vast, swinging line.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

David L. Chandler asks,

Are we all Martians? According to many planetary scientists, it's conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. If that's the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence.- "Are you a Martian? We all could be, scientists say -- and new instrument might provide proof" (Physorg March 23, 2011)

The article provides a useful summary of the state of the evidence, capped by

Christopher McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA-Ames Research Center in California who specializes in research related to the possibility of life on Mars, says this work is "very interesting and important." He says, "it is not implausible that life on Mars will be related to life on Earth and therefore share a common genetics. In any case it would be important to test this hypothesis."

Parts of the project I don't get: The idea seems to be to search for sequences of DNA and RNA molecules that are "nearly universal in all forms of terrestrial life."

Okay, but isn't (almost) universal common descent the accepted explanation for that? Why drag Mars into it?

The researchers hope to find "living microbes" or their remains in Martian soil samples, and analyze them for the nearly universal code. Suppose they find some. Why should we suppose that we came from Mars rather than that the microbes came from Earth? The latter is vastly more plausible, I would say.

So far, it sounds like great sci-fi TV, and it would be a shame to take Occam's Razor to it, so we won't.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

"Will the real Baby Einstein please stand up?" is the hedder on a university media release aimed at pop science central:

When it comes to what causes genius, nature may be ready to pull a stunning upset over nurture. University of Alberta researcher Martin Mrazik has put forward the argument that an increased presence of a naturally-occuring hormone could mean that genius is determined before birth.

In a recent article in Roeper Review, Mrazik and a colleague posit that genius may be caused by prenatal exposure to an excessive level of testosterone. Mrazik notes that there is evidence that this high exposure facilitates increased brain connection. This hormonal "glitch" in-utero, Mraizk notes, would explain why children are born with an affinity for certain areas such as math, science or arts.

I was invited to e-mail or call for details.

Now, the nice thing about Roeper's thesis is that it is undemonstrable. Roeper is unlikely to suggest that we overdose a thousand male babies on testosterone and then give them IQ tests ten years later.

Notice the exquisite political correctness with which the PR department avoids the obvious issue: This, if plausible, would account for why so many more men than women are geniuses, a fact about which I have written here:

One way of looking at it: If you picture human achievement as a sort of bell curve, you will find that, absent serious social oppression of women, the women's achievement curve is of equal height to that of men, but fits inside it. Thus there are more male supergeniuses out there, and there are also more men in prison for essentially stupid offenses.

In the middle of the curve, women hold down normal jobs just as well as men - deliver the mail, doctor your dog, fix your teeth, et cetera. But at the outer edges on BOTH sides, it's mostly, though not entirely, a guy's world.

Which is the central weakness of Roeper's theory: It is hardly likely that low or negative achievement in men can be accounted for by low testosterone.

Accounting for a truly rare phenomenon is difficult by nature, and its origin can hardly be a simple one.

Note: As a matter of a policy, I, being a blogger, do not respond to invitations that don’t include a link, and I don’t have the time to hunt and peck for more information about a proposition in which I have no confidence anyway. Hence no link and no follow-up.

Further note: Obviously no marketing genius was involved in designing that PR approach. Imagine! In the world of the Internet!

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies--How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, Michael Shermer explains it all for you. And Publishers Weekly’s reviewer offers

As the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, author of Why People Believe Weird Things, and a columnist for Scientific American, Shermer is perhaps the country's best-known skeptic. His position is as clear as it is simple: "When I call myself a skeptic I simply mean that I take a scientific approach to the evaluation of claims." But now Shermer is interested not only in why people have irrational beliefs, but "why people believe at all." Our brains, he says, have evolved to find meaningful patterns around us. But why do people believe they see patterns--whether "evidence" of angels, conspiracy theories, or UFOs--where none exist? Drawing on evolution, cognitive science, and neuroscience, Shermer considers not only supernatural beliefs but political and economic ones as well. He demonstrates how our brains selectively assess data in an attempt to confirm the conclusions we've already reached.

Except for Shermer's political and economic beliefs which are, doubtless, "a scientific approach."

And then we read,

Informative and difficult to put down, this book adds a compelling and comprehensive case to the growing number of arguments about the importance of scientific reasoning, marred only by Shermer's repeated citing of his own works and public appearances.

Well, of course. Why cite anyone other than the final authority?

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Common sense comes in for a bit of support in “Still Red in Tooth and Claw” (The Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2011), on animal morality:

Though stories of seemingly altruistic animals tug at the heartstrings, humans are nature's sole moralists.

Nothing tugs at the anthropomorphic heartstrings, though, more strongly than accounts of compassion or altruism in the animal world. A spate of books by authors such as Steven M. Wise, Jeffrey Masson, Jane Goodall, Marc Bekoff and Frans de Waal accordingly offer up examples of animals acting not just intelligently but virtuously. Dolphins lovingly tend sick comrades, elephants grieve over the death of relatives, and apes stage daring rescues of people, injured birds or other beings in distress. In the last category, virtually certain to make an appearance is Binti, a gorilla at a zoo outside of Chicago who became a "bona fide hero" (according to newspaper accounts) by saving a 3-year-old boy who had fallen into the gorilla

Fine, but it turns out that not only are we the only moralists, we are also the only fabulists:

In Binti's case, the gorilla did not (as her keepers have repeatedly pointed out, in vain) "rescue" the boy at all: He was in no immediate danger, and the other gorillas were quickly shooed out of the pen by zookeepers wielding high-pressure fire hoses. Moreover, it turns out that, prior to this incident, Binti had been systematically trained to carry a doll and bring it to her keepers. This was done because many zoo-reared gorillas fail to develop normal maternal instincts; the zookeepers wanted to be sure that her impending newborn would receive immediate care. Binti's feat was the equivalent of a dog playing fetch, and she might well have reacted very differently, even aggressively, had the boy not been knocked senseless by his fall.

The general problem, it seems to me, is that for anything like morality, one needs first theories of mind and reality, to identify situations where an exercise in morality may be called for ("That dog looks as though he is neglected,") and second, principles of judgment, ("I should really speak to someone about it"). It is usually accompanied by a struggle (free will), as in "But I could be seen as a busybody, so ..." That is, it must be possible not to do what one perceives to be moral. However simple it appears, morality requires some pretty complex mental abilities.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN reporter

is not an illusion after all (New Scientist16 March 2011):

But new, more precise measurements of supernovae, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, clash with the simplest version of the void model. That model could be made to fit previous supernova measurements and other cosmological data, but only if the local expansion rate is about 60 kilometres per second per megaparsec or less. (One megaparsec is 3.26 million light years.)

That was within the possible error of previous measurements, but the new, more precise measurements give an expansion rate of 74 kilometres per second per megaparsec, plus or minus 2.4.

"It looks more like it's dark energy that's pressing the gas pedal," says Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who led the observations. The results appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

And I had only just learned to live with it as an illusion.

Here Michael Marshall, (New Scientist 10 March 2011) we are told, “Fluid societies powered human evolution”:

Human hunter-gatherer societies swap members more flexibly than groups of other animals do. That could help explain why humans developed such powerful brains and advanced technology, while chimpanzees didn't.

People have been hunter-gatherers for almost all our 200,000-year history, so modern hunter-gatherer societies are a window on our past, argues Kim Hill of Arizona State University in Tempe.

Hill and colleagues gathered census information on 32 hunter-gatherer societies around the world. In all of them, both males and females could leave the group into which they were born for another, or could remain. In typical animal societies, only one sex disperses like this; in chimps it is normally the females.

Because of the mixed dispersal, many members of a hunter-gatherer society are unrelated. Hill says this could explain our willingness to cooperate with unrelated individuals.

Big surprise. From what I have heard from the "Apes r' Us" crowd about chimp "societies", most females would be better off in an animal shelter run by caring, 'intelligent people. At the shelter, at least, abuse is labelled as such, and may even be actionable.

However, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California, Davis, is not convinced that human societies are as unique as Hill claims. Some other species may extend cooperation to non-kin, she says. And humans are not the only species, nor the only primate, in which either sex may sometimes disperse. Howler monkeys are one example of a primate that behaves this way, she says – but their societies are less well-studied.

Hmmm. I think any human would disperse pretty quickly, given an opportunity, whether the species is well-studied or not.

See what happens? In the frenzy to deny human exceptionalism, people sail gloriously past common sense about how we all behave, based on the use of reason, into uncharted, unchartable waters. Most is paywalled, but for once, that is just as well.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Escapes trampling by troll competitors - Tells reporters: "Real thinkers don't read books"

Here, at Amazon, the indispensable Nature of Nature (a compendium of the pro- and anti-ID writings of many of the world's best champions on either side), has attracted a "review" by one, Colonel Zen, who allows us to know that he actually has not read the book.

Well, I haven't read this ... and at their vanity press price am unlikely to, but I'd take bets.

I say"review", not review because if the Colonel has not read the book, it is not a review, by definition.

If you would like to go to the liked site and join the commenters by pointing out that fact, please do. Amazon could use your help in spotting these people and helping them find other uses of their time.

And, as it happens, I know of a job for him: He wouldbe an ideal prof for "Misshelver" and her "man": Darwinists who misshelve ID theorists' books in bookstores, to avoid "misleading" the public. (No, I am not making that up. Go here for her and here for him.) They should all get along great, as he doesn't read books and they don't let others do so.

(Note: To see the "review", go soon. It could get pulled, due to the frank admission that he hasn't read the book. Amazon is, after all, in business to sell books, not to host diatribes from people who don't read.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Since self-organization theory, the Darwin lobby, and the Texas science standards have all been in the news lately, it's only fair that we have a look at the Texas Darwin lobby’s view of self-organization or self-replicating life (standard proposed in 2009):

(9) Science concepts. The student knows the significance of various molecules involved in metabolic processes and energy conversions that occur in living organisms. The student is expected to:

(D) analyze and evaluate the evidence regarding formation of simple organic molecules and their organization into long complex molecules having information such as the DNA molecule for self-replicating life.

The response from the Darwin lobby’s house expert John Wise is

This is a clear example of the incorporation of intelligent design/creationist language into student expectations and parallels the "complexity of the cell" language found in the new TEKS (7)(G). The problematic assertion here stems mainly from the writings of Discovery Institute Fellow William Dembski. Dembski asserts that an intelligent designer must be involved in the creation of meaningful information whenever "specific complexity" is found because his own "Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information" prevents natural selection from increasing the amount of information in a genome (see reference 1 and citations within). Dembski’s argument requires that information be complex (have a very low probability of being produced by random processes) and that it be "meaningful." Meaningful information in the case of genetic sequences such as in DNA can be inferred to be those that increase the fitness of an organism (make it well adapted or better adapted to its environment).

Gosh, whatta reason. A lot of us are Bill Dembski fans/friends/friendly critics/people he lets park in his back yard for free. So far as I know, Dembski was never a self-organization of life fan and has nothing to do with the development of the theory. Indeed, the self-organization guys have been known to critique his theories too.

The skinny: Only a tinfoil hatter would think Dembski so important that he is the reason Texas students cannot be told about self-organization theory when, in fact, it is increasingly the direction of origin of life studies, and he has nothing to do with it.

Wise recommends that

We must use the time available in our children's science education for presenting real evolutionary mechanisms – supported by scientific evidence – and not dilute curriculum materials with unsubstantiated musings of intelligent design creationists.

Real evolutionary mechanisms?

Out there, we hear about everything from "chemical minestrone" to "silica world." The current hot theory is ammonia; next year, maybe, baking soda. It's part of my job to record this origin of life stuff, and I can't keep up.

My suggestion to Texas would be, just don't emphasize origin of life in school. I'm not saying it's not science or not interesting, but it is in no fit state to be presented in the classroom in any serious way. If, despite my excellent advice, Texas teachers must address the subject, they should certainly be free to mention self-organization, whether the local foilhats like it or not.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Going through Suzan Mazur’s Altenberg 16, after reading Bill Dembski’s post yesterday on genome mapper Craig Venter “coming out” as a disbeliever in the sacred teaching of common descent - in the very presence of Darwin’s high priest Dawkins* - I couldn’t help recalling New Zealand journalist Suzan Mazur's effort to get a reaction from National Center for Science Education (the Darwin in the schools lobby), and its outcome:

... when I called Kevin Padian, president of NCSE's board of directors and a witness at the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial on intelligent design, to ask him about the evolution debate among scientists - he said, "On some things there is not a debate." He then hung up.

- Suzan Mazur, The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry, North Atlantic Books, 2010, p. 29, here.

I wonder how long Darwinists can just keep hanging up on all the problems. My best guess is, as long as key politicians stump for them, judges decide for them, and the public decides that "scientists" (as in Kevin Padian??) must know better than the rest of us.

*Dawkins claimed to have sworn off Darwinism as a religion in 2008, but then, the cat claimed to have sworn off cream that year too, and he is still one fat cat.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

David Deming, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and the author of Science and Technology in World History (Vols. 1 & 2) decided to dissent from Darwinism, because

In 2008, I published a critique of intelligent design theory in the peer-reviewed journal Earth Science Reviews. I concluded that intelligent design cannot be construed as a scientific theory, and that the apparent goal of the intelligent design movement was to restore Christian theology as the queen of the sciences.

But I also argued that to the extent creationists were highlighting areas in which scientific theory was inadequate they were doing better science than biologists. We ought to stop pretending that science has all the answers.

Science is an empirical system of knowledge, and we never have all the data. It is the fate of every scientific theory to be superseded. Even the invincible edifice of Newtonian mechanics crumbled before the onslaught of relativity theory.

And that's why I signed the Discovery Institute's Dissent from Darwinism. Not because I'm a creationist, but because I'm a scientist. Religion is conservative and dogmatic. But science is progressive and skeptical. We can't save science by turning it into religion.

Somewhere, a Darwin troll is bawling up a storm in his digital cave.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend put me onto this human genetic research program (no, no, it all sounds reasonable, keep your shirt on; no one is looking for the missing link and you are him and the genetic police are waiting outside ... wake UP, will you?):

Ethnically diverse people are donating DNA to science, and the wealth of genomic data emerging from the project already is shedding light on human evolution.A decade ago it was a big deal to spell out the entire DNA sequence of a single human being. That event marked the success of the initial Human Genome Project. Now hundreds of human genomes have been decoded. Scientists who study human evolution are using the new data to make discoveries about how Homo Sapiens may have adapted to an ever-changing, ever-challenging environment.

But a puzzling claim immediately follows:

New traits become established in human populations because they confer a survival and reproductive advantage. In Darwinian terms they are "positively selected." Individuals who lacked the genetic variant responsible for an important trait often did not survive long enough to leave progeny.Mutations in general may be harmful or of no consequence, but some mutations make for a better-adapted organism. Over time these new and advantageous genetic variants can usurp those that dominated previously.

Yes, but one problem that set me thinking was loss of adaptive traits. I tried explaining it to a friend in this way:

Let us say that, as an evolutionary legacy, a woman is immune to leprosy. She has always lived in a northern climate where she was unlikely to be exposed to the disease. If her daughters marry immigrant men who do not have that immunity and the trait is lost over time, it would still be of no consequence provided they all stayed in that climate. In the end, no one would get leprosy, maybe no one would know about the existence of the trait, and the trait, which doesn't matter where they live anyway, would just get lost.

So, I asked, don't beneficial evolved traits get lost all the time? Is this correct?

The friend wrote back to say,

Yes, they do get lost all of the time, and they are more likely to be lost when there is no consequence to the loss.

Hmmm. Still more trouble for Darwinism: The rare beneficial trait that results from natural selection has no special protection from just getting lost.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In a review of several recent science books, Dartmouth professor Alan Hirshfeld offers us a view of the Royal Society (former employer of sinner in the hands of an angry god, Michael Reiss), and similar societies, as engines of perpetual revolution (The Wall Street Journal), opining "The Royal Society's history of open-minded debate epitomizes science as a self-correcting process":

The group is more effective than the individual at sussing out weak hypotheses, flawed experiments or biased observations, and one of the vital contributions of Europe's "natural philosophers" during the Enlightenment was the creation of societies to disseminate and evaluate their ideas. Such conclaves served as intellectual hubs before the rise of modern research universities and institutes, and remain important today.

That was then. And, as mathematician David Berlinski says, now it is now.

A statement like that, applied to current science, has the flavour of the after-dinner speech we wash down with fresh, hot coffee from the tanker. The current science we skewer so often here is not the product of great minds but of lecture room mediocrities and tax-hungry lobbies. Never mind "weak hypotheses, flawed experiments or biased observations", it’s hard to get past the tide of scandals in this atmosphere.

If "science is self-correcting" means only that heads roll in the wake of a really big one, then science doesn't differ appreciably from politics, religion, finance, or the military.

The real difference is the inappropriate authority granted to science by the public today, given the circumstances.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent
In response to someone who wondered whether American scientists might be letting their imaginations run away with them about this spectacular new alien life find, Rob Sheldonoffers "absolutely not". Au contraire, the French were onto it and NASA dropped the ball. On why that happened, he says, NASA's attitude is an example of

... "pathological science" and was extensively discussed by Irving Langmuir in 1953 and subsequent publications

I can assure you, nothing in Hoover's [the discovering scientist’s] work comes within a mile or so of being pathological. Hoover has several gigabytes of pictures taken in every single CI meteorite he can get his hands on. The pictures have made him a sensation in the French Academy, the Belgian Academy and the Russian Academy. Experts in microbiology have examined the pictures and not only verified their biological identity, but asked how he obtained such clarity that exceeds what they can accomplish in the laboratory. (Freeze dry for a thousand years...) The only people that continue to shun him are the US and NASA. Ultimately it is ideology that prevent people from taking the pictures seriously, a prior commitment to "life only exists on Earth". Some of those people are conservative Christians, some are dedicated Darwinists. I really don't think it is a well-reasoned position, but still, there' a lot of ideological opposition.

By the way, Fox News is offering updates, comments from relevant scientists, though as of ten minutes ago, I couldn’t yet find them. Keep checking back.

I suppose some Evolution Sunday clergy will now be preaching sermons about how to adjust to the fact that we now “know” how life got started purely by chance (abiogenesis). Our ID community’s rebbe, Moshe Averick, told me,

I don't think it has any implications at all for abiogenesis. No one really has much of a clue how abiogenesis could have occured on earth, the best that could be said is that not only is life on earth inexplicable, but life elsewhere in the universe is also inexplicable.

Our George Hunter will doubtless comment shortly on his regular blog, but I overheard him say,

It is particularly interesting that this finding rubs just about everyone the wrong way. For evolutionists, this stretches their OOL [origin of life] fairy tales even beyond their own liberal limits. You need the warm little pond, or deep sea vents, lightning, etc. OOL taking place on a meteorite is simply too far out. As Shostak discussed in the story, it forces them actually to take seriously Crick's notion that OOL is so unlikely it must have come from the cosmos. But how did it get onto these meteorites?

Ah, but George may not be counting on the sheer density of TV talk show hosts, to convey the very message that the Darwinists dare not try to convey themselves. There is a pathology in modern media similar to what Sheldon observes for science.

As for Seth Shostak, whom Hunter mentions, he said,

Maybe life was seeded on earth - it developed on comets for example, and just landed here when these things were hitting the very early Earth,” Shostak speculated. "It would suggest, well, life didn’t really begin on the Earth, it began as the solar system was forming."

Seth, Seth, do you have any idea what you are saying? Yes, we know that this will make your career, but it is not only science; it is - much more important these days - "science" - the preserve of tenured mediocrities, miked up bubbleheads, and Darwin’s broomstick. Have a care how you go, man!

Some wrote me wondering why the study wasn't published in Science or Nature, and I think Sheldon explains that above.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Frogs Evolve Teeth - Again: Mysterious re-evolution challenges evolutionary theory, scientists say", Christine Dell'Amore, (National Geographic News, February 10, 2011) tells us,

Lower-jaw teeth in frogs re-evolved after an absence of 200 million years, a new study says. The discovery challenges a "cornerstone" of evolutionary thinking, according to experts.

Of the more than 6,000 species of frogs, only one, a South American marsupial tree frog called Gastrotheca guentheri, has teeth on both its upper and lower jaws. Most frogs have only tiny upper-jaw teeth.

Apparently, G. guentheri has acted in violation of Dollo's law, according to which traits lost through evolution cannot be regained.

"It's a very clear case of reacquisition of a lost complex morphological structure, which, according to current thinking, should not be possible."

Well one thing for sure, that frog's gotta go. Worse:

"The fact that toothlike structures appear more often than real teeth means that tooth evolution doesn't automatically occur when the need arises, Yale's Wagner noted.

With that in mind, natural selection - the process by which favorable traits become more common over time within a species - is "not enough to explain" why the marsupial tree frog regained its lower teeth.

"I can confidently say that we don't know," Wagner said. "It's an extremely interesting question."

A friend wonders, "Did this guy get shot for saying this?"

I dunno. Anyone seen him around lately?

Texas Darwin lobby, please note. Another one to cross off the list of what students can hear about.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

... seems to have sunk like a stone:

An objective overview of the biggest controversy in American education.

Intelligent Design is one of the hottest issues facing parents and educators to day, but it can be hard to separate the facts from the heated rhetoric. This expert and objective guide gets to the bottom of the questions: What is Intelligent Design? Should it replace or complement traditional science? What’s all the fuss about?

• Explains the terms, the controversy, and the involvement of the American courts
• Indispensable guide for concerned educators and parents
• Written by an expert in the field

About the Author

Christopher Carlisle, M. Div., is a professor and the Episcopal chaplain at the University of Massachusetts. He created the popular course BELIEF, which explores the interdisciplinary study of religion and science in the 21st century, and is the co-founder of The God and Science Project.

W. Thomas Smith, Jr., has written four books, as well as thousands of articles for a variety of publications, including USA Today, George, U.S. News & World Report, and BusinessWeek.

I'd suspected trouble for the book early on and said so because no one on my beat, pro or con ID, even seemed to know about it. So at the time I thought it would just be the usual "faithing our science" forgettable, and got an angry note from the principal author as a result. I suspected I wasn't on the list for a review copy, and was right. A friend later said it was good, but if so, who knew? To judge from the reviews, it fell into the hands of Darwin trolls, with no defenders. Lesson learned: Book Authorship 101: Connect ... only connect ... always connect ...

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

tjm, here, comments on crickets' 100 million years of stability:

Interesting isn’t it? Evolution can explain any result at all. It explains stasis over 100 million of years and it explains change over 100 million years. As they say, a theory that explains anything, explains nothing. Living fossils should falsify evolution. Unchanged fossils, like this one, that are supposedly ancient, should falsify evolution, but no, it gets twisted into evidence for evolution.

Hmmm. Not sure if that's quite fair.

Stasis, where demonstrated, shows that there is no consistent "force" driving evolution.* Evolution happens where there is pressure for it and it is possible; where there is no pressure, the result is stasis, and where there is pressure but evolution is not possible, the result is extinction.

In this respect, evolution can be contrasted with the rise of warmer molecules in the atmosphere over colder ones. We can explain many things, even about as uncertain a process as the weather, just by knowing that this process will always be observed, anywhere that it is not hindered. Evolution is not like that. It need not happen and usually does not happen.

However, many literary artists whom students will (should) study in school, like playwright George Bernard Shaw, believed in Evolution, a driving force, ever onward and upward, etc. These beliefs can be inspirational, but can also do considerable harm, especially when people conclude (as they do) that they have now found science evidence for their own superiority to their neighbours. Teaching evolution based on the general picture of the evidence would help counter that tendency.

It ought to be obvious to everyone who is not a member of the Texas Darwin school lobby why we must teach stasis, alongside evolution and extinction, irrespective of whether stasis provides a plank in their evangelism for the Beard Almighty.

* Of course evolution can be guided, and I think the evidence points to that. But it is guided by a design of which it is the outworking, not pushed along by a force.

Oh, and, should we study the designer? I don't see why, particularly. If I want to teach how a four-stroke engine works, I doubt I'd bring up the biography of the designer. It'll be enough to get students to grasp the basic concepts. Besides, I'll have my hands full dealing with people who think that there is a spirit in the car, a spirit that moves it along, when what there actually is, is an intelligent design by which it can be got to move.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how evolution can act…on evolution, yielding mechanisms that allow both adaptation and heritability within the course of a lifetime. And such paradigm shifts almost always have societal consequences. Manel Esteller shows that epigenetics also impacts the “dark genome” in a way that may improve cancer diagnostics.

So says Andrew D. Ellington in "Epigenetics and Society: Did Erasmus Darwin foreshadow the tweaking of his grandson’s paradigm?"(The Scientist, Volume 25 | Issue 3 | Page 14). He means, roughly, a revival of Lamarckism, the idea that life forms can acquire genetic information from their environment as well as through Darwin's natural selection acting on random mutation. Why that was controversial, I will never know.

But, he warns,

We can expect that epigenetics will be held up as the forerunner of that bastard child of Creationism, Intelligent Design. Dribs and drabs of this are already appearing on the Interwebs, but it may soon come to a school board near you.”

If so, that will mainly be because this is the current paradigm: Mediocrities camped in lecture rooms spout Darwin-only and obsess about the possibility that high school teachers may be preparing their students to ... doubt! Well, I always say to students, when in doubt, doubt. And when spouted over by mediocrities, keep quiet until you are clear of the mess, and meanwhile doubt plenty.

(David Tyler may well write more on this.)

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's the abstract of a just-published paper:

Nature 470, 438 (24 February 2011) doi:10.1038/470438b

NASA's Kepler mission to find habitable planets orbiting Sun-like stars has turned up its first rocky planet. The project uses the Kepler space telescope to identify extrasolar planets by watching for dips in the intensity of light from up to 170,000 target stars.

Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University in California and her group spotted Kepler 10b, which is about 4.56 times the mass of Earth. Although similar in size to Earth, its orbit lasts just 0.84 days, making it likely that the planet is a scorched, waterless world with a sea of lava on its starlit side.

Despite the pop science media's tendency to reach for gee whiz adjectives, many are laudably resisting a temptation to which Carl Sagan certainly succumbed at times, to write as though desired finds were just around the corner because ... well, because otherwise we would seem too important. See, for example, "Hostility to life is norm for exoplanet, senior astronomer says" and "Immanuel Kant, meet Carl Sagan and Frank Drake.

Or do they fear that funding would be cut? That seems unlikely because the public worldwide likes the show anyway. With apologies to Phantom of the Opera,

The whole cast disappears

But the crowd still cheers

.

Which is as it should be. The trouble begins if some insist that the phantom is really an alien being.

(Note: The Nature paper costs US$32.)

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