The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A bid by Darwinists to acquire rights to the Expelled documentary on the ID theorists has failed. From TOAF:

Combined with the funds the Foundation already had on hand, we had just over $50,000 available to bid on the film (and pay the 10% buyer’s premium). The winning bid, however, was $201,000. Because all of the bidders were anonymous, we do not know identity of the winning bidder.

Film probably went to business interest. More later.

Update, just in: Walt Ruloff and his associates, who were the original producers of EXPELLED, won the auction. More later.

Timeline

Talk origins were trying to buy Expelled "The reason given is so they can then release unpublished material, but equally they could prevent future sales of the film."

href="http://www.uncommondescent.com/expelled/expelled-film-to-be-sold-due-to-bankruptcy/" target="another">sold due to bankruptcy. That was not a surprise.

There is a hiatus in significant coverage at this point because the companies that owned various aspects of Expelled lost touch with the people featured in it - for reasons still unexplained - despite the fact that the film was doing well.

23 October 2008 Expelled #1 in documentaries, #11 in DVDs

More here.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Welcome news from ScienceDaily (June 24, 2011), for people who are fed up with Genes Rule contending with Environment Rules:

Effects of Stress Can Be Inherited, and Here's How

"There has been a big discussion about whether the stress effect can be transmitted to the next generation without DNA sequence change," said Shunsuke Ishii of RIKEN Tsukuba Institute. "Many people were doubtful about such phenomena because the mechanism was unknown. Our finding has now demonstrated that such phenomena really can occur." Ishii and his colleagues now confirm that ATF-2 is required for heterochromatin assembly in multicellular organisms. When fruitflies are exposed to stressful conditions, the ATF-2 is modified and disrupts heterochromatin, releasing genes from their usual silenced state. Importantly, these changes in genomic structure are passed on from one generation to the next.

The researchers expect that this finding in flies has relevance for humans, noting that we also carry the ATF-2 gene. Those epigenetic changes may influence basic cellular functions as well as metabolism, behavior and disease. In particular, Ishii suggests that epigenetic causes may play a role in "lifestyle diseases," including heart disease and diabetes, and in psychological diseases, such as schizophrenia.

So in a number of critical situations, environment helps determine which genes rule.

Not that popular culture will get the picture any time soon, but sources say that epigenetics points to resolving some intractable social disputes.

Too familiar scenario: We are told, "it's in the genes" for [a given ethnic group] to have a high rate of diabetes, high blood pressure, or whatever. Members of the group reply angrily that, if only people recognized the stress they are under ... Turns out both are right, which means looking for practical solutions got a lot easier.

For example, a nurse can advise a patient, "Because - based on your family history - this lifestyle factor could be a higher stress for you than for a statistical sample of the public, pulled off the street, ... it's suggested that you avoid it," without risking legitimate accusations of stereotyping. We're not saying it's "in your genes because you're an X ", thus promoting defensiveness and denial. It's not "in her genes," it's a known, avoidable risk. It's up to the patient to take the advice, but now we have something science-based to tell her.

Goodbye, Gene War, and let the door smack you one hard in the face on the way out.

Here Any Coghlan offers New Scientist's take: "Unzipped chromosomes pass on parental stress" (27 June 2011)

Stress is thought to cause "epigenetic" changes that do not alter the sequence of DNA but leave chemical marks on genes that dictate how active they are. Previous studies have shown that if mice are stressed for two weeks after birth, their offspring will show signs of depression and anxiety, despite enjoying the usual levels of maternal care. And there is mounting evidence that common health problems including diabetes, obesity, mental illness and even fear could be the result of stress on parents and grandparents.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, a list was posted to Listverse identifying Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box as “#1 in a list of 10 books that screwed up the world” because “Despite much refutation from the Scientific community, many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true.”

At the time, we noted,

Also rans include Mein Kampf (7) and the The Manifesto of the Communist Party (3)

[ ... ]

And this beats der Fuehrer? So World War II was for nothing? Wow.

The list’s author tried to cover his base by asserting that his 10 through to 1 list order isn’t supposed to mean anything. Just an accident with numbers, like the universe itself?

Lists can be fun. So here’s the contest: List the ten most significant ID books of the last 25 years, and for the first three, give a brief explanation of what you think makes the book significant.

The prize is a copy of The Nature of Nature , the must-have collection of the best on both sides of the ID controversy.

Contest judged Saturday July 9.

Go here to enter.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, there have been a number of attempts to use science to make evil intelligible. Canadian columnist David Warren reflects here regarding a recent riot in Vancouver:

I am trying to draw attention to the very "zero" at the heart of that mob, and ultimately, any violent mob. The participants behave in ways that are finally unintelligible. To say they behave as animals would be unfair to animals, which are purposeful, and even merciful by comparison. (What they have no business with, they leave alone.)

It's not that the books don't explain anything. They tend to explain - either well or badly- how sociopaths or people with autism behave. And what they explain isn't the evil and doesn't finally shed much light on it.

The question isn't whether science can do it. Nothing can. The project is like trying to come up with a rational value for pi, which is irrational by nature.

The best that can be done is to shed more light on the circumstances under which people are led to do evil.

See also: "Slacker sociopath" says "Science of Evil" empathy test flawed

Humans evolved to get revenge

Evolutionary psychology has a go at autism

Evil as "empathy deficit disorder"

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Few or no documentaries. Okay, that doesn't matter. But this does: In unbylined "An Environmentalist's Lament" (Breakthrough Journal, June 2011), we learn, once again, about the high costs of hype when it does matter:

Take last summer's BP oil spill in Louisiana. Covering the spill was the Super Bowl of environmental journalism. You couldn't have asked for a better disaster: the never-ending gusher, the oiled birds and tar balls, the callous foreign corporation and corrupt government agency. [ ... ] I was in no position to go off chasing oil slicks -- but also with a certain discomfort I couldn't put my finger on until recently, when New Yorker staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian published an exhaustive investigation into the spill.

Because

Khatchadourian disputed the notion that the BP-funded response to the spill was mismanaged and willfully negligent, as much of the contemporary coverage implied. He described an enormous effort that, while necessarily improvised and Byzantine, was mostly effective in cleaning up and dispersing the oil.

More of a disaster, he argued, was the media coverage of and political response to the spill. In the early days after the Deepwater Horizon sank, says Khatchadourian, there were lots of tight-focus shots of oily marshes, with "suffocating swirls of shimmery crude and sickly pelicans. The scenes were riveting and heartbreaking," he wrote, "but they fundamentally misrepresented the situation." There was, in fact, very little oil to be found in Louisiana's marshland.

One reason all this was a problem is

But of course, hunt we did, and those images -- sensationalized depictions that exaggerated the spill's damage -- often spurred responders and politicians to insist on measures that were costly, ineffectual, and perhaps even harmful. It will be years before we fully understand the long-term effects of the oil and dispersants on the Gulf ecosystem and human health, but the Gulf of Mexico is thought to absorb more than 50 million gallons of oil a year from natural seeps in the ocean floor, and its biology is remarkably well-adapted to absorbing oil. It's less well-adapted to the dredging and building of artificial berms, and the placing of booms that Gulf Coast lawmakers insisted BP install in many ecologically sensitive areas as public outcry mounted. In his story, Khatchadourian asked the question that lingered in the back of my head all summer: is it possible that the breathless coverage of and knee-jerk responses to the disaster actually made the ecological damage worse?

What if we assume that nature - like it or not - is a product of design? That offers a context within which to evaluate scares.

It's worth considering because most hyped scares amount to nothing, but a great many unhyped scares are genuinely dangerous.

There's a reason for that: The coverage of a natural disaster that offers a gripping story with great pics - and reassurance that our personal politics have been right all along - is governed by saturation point, not by the actual threat posed.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

How'd that work out at a used car lot? In "Wrong Again: Planetologists Embarrassed" (Creation-Evolution Headlines, June 23, 2011), Dave Coppedge comments on getting it wrong about planets:

In most careers, being wrong too often is grounds for dismissal. False prophets in ancient kingdoms were stoned or shamed out of town. Only in science, it seems, can experts consistently get it wrong, and not only keep their jobs, but be highly esteemed as experts. Among the guiltiest of the lot are planetary scientists, whose predictions have been consistently wrong for almost every planetary body studied since the dawn of the space age. Their orbital mechanics is solid; they do get their spacecraft to arrive at the right place at the right time with uncanny accuracy. But what the missions reveal is often completely different from what scientists had told the public they expected to http://www.todaysbigfail.com/top10find. This has been true of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, comets, asteroids, and most of the moons of the solar system, where hasty revisions have had to be made after spacecraft data falsified the predictions. Here are some recent examples of “theory fail” in planetary science.

More here. How many materialist atheists who attained rock star status have ever feared being wrong - as a reason no one should pay attention to them?

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Darwinian Medicine and Proximate and Evolutionary Explanations," at Evolution News & Views (June 25, 2011), neurosurgeon Mike Egnor makes a critical distinction between proximate explanations and evolutionary explanations, as they apply to medicine:

Proximate explanations are the description of the process itself. A proximate explanation of type 1 diabetes is that it is caused by lack of insulin. A proximate explanation of Duchenne muscular dystrophy is that it is a recessive X-linked genetic disease that causes muscle degeneration, weakness and death. Males are affected, though females can be carriers. It is caused by a mutation in the dystrophin gene on the X chromosome (Xp21).

As you can see, proximate explanations are what medical researchers would call the scientific explanation for a disease. Proximate explanations are medical science and provide the foundation for all medical treatments.

[ ... ]

The difficulty with evolutionary explanations in medicine is:

1) All of the relevant pathophysiology is provided by the proximate explanations, which are the only explanations useful for treatment.

There are other difficulties but that one is the swish of Occam's Razor, as far as medicine is concerned.

Takin' it to the street: You tripped and sprained your ankle. What you need is a speculative history of the sprained ankle in vertebrates ... not!

The principle question is, what is evolutionary medicine meant to do, given that it is no use in the normal sense?

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, New Scientist has defended cryptobiologists, people who search for creatures presumed to no longer exist or never exist:

And the truth, of course, is that even in the 21st century, the natural world is still brimming with mystery. Tropical biologists commonly find that half or more of the insect species they capture in the rainforest canopy are new to science. Undiscovered fish and other species are frequently found in the deep sea. Up to half of all the plant species in the Amazon are still scientifically undocumented.

Not all of the new discoveries are small or obscure. The Mindoro fruit bat, discovered in the Philippines in 2007, has a 1-metre wingspan. The same year saw the discovery of a venomous snake in Australia and a large electric ray in South Africa.

And despite the misfire of the recent Tasmanian tiger video, there are many Lazarus species that have been rediscovered after having been presumed extinct. Until 1951, the Bermuda petrel had not been seen by scientists for 330 years. The Javan elephant, okapi, coelacanth, mountain pygmy possum, venomous Cuban solenodon and giant terror skink were also erroneously consigned to oblivion. The Laotian rock rat, discovered in 1996, is now the sole known representative of a rodent family that was thought to have vanished 11 million years ago. The Wollemi pine - the only known survivor of a 200-million-year-old plant family - was discovered in 1994 just a stone's throw from Sydney, Australia.

- William Laurance, “The call of the weird: In praise of cryptobiologists,” New Scientist, 22 June 2011

Yes exactly, and while we are here, one third of species believed recently extinct turn up again.

Sources suggest that the question of whether a species could exist or still exist should be based on biophysiology, not guffaws from the crowd. That would winnow out the crackpots, leaving room for serious students.

Is extinction harder than it used to be?

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At MSNBC's "Cosmic Log," Alan Boyle invites the audience to join a citizen science project to

help identify future targets for a NASA interplanetary flyby — in this case, for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. - "Join the search for icy worlds" (June 21, 2011).

Right now, the New Horizons team's top job is getting ready for the 2015 flyby past Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. But the Southwest Research Institute's Alan Stern, principal investigator for the $700 million mission, said he and his colleagues are already looking for follow-up targets in the Kuiper Belt, the wide disk of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Those targets will have to be selected before the Pluto encounter takes place.

But the targets must be selected in advance and they’re hoping citizen volunteers will beat them to it. Surprisingly, perhaps some could, using a Web browser:

The IceHunters are being asked to check composite images from ground-based telescopes, such as the 8-meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii or the 6.5-meter telescope in Chile, and mark the little blobs that could signal the existence of a Kuiper Belt object. ... "The website is filled with examples to help get people started.

Let UD News know if you find one. They do say you might get to name it.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

"Are we all travelling "incognito?", my latest at MercatorNet June 21, 2011), looks at Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman's book Incognito, focusing on his proposed neuroscience fix for criminal law:

"Those who break the social contracts need to be warehoused, but in this case the future is of more importance than the past."

"Warehoused"? How, exactly, is that a reform? We are also told that a criminal's "actions are sufficient evidence of a brain abnormality, even if we don't know (and maybe will never know) the details." Yes, but one may as well say that a criminal's "actions are sufficient evidence of infestation by Square Circle Disease, even if we don't know (and maybe will never know) the details." More.

Also: Capital punishment defendants unlikely to benefit from neurolaw:

This is not a controversy between the String ‘Em Up Gang and the Prison Reform Society. All parties want a just and humane system; they differ fundamentally as to whether they think that personal responsibility is an illusion.

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

In "Why liberals fell for 'Muslim lesbian blogger' hoax" (OC Register, June 17, 2011), Mark Steyn tells a story that shows why current Big Media won't likely recover from their current tailspin:

On Sunday, Amina Arraf, the young vivacious Syrian lesbian activist whose inspiring blog "A Gay Girl In Damascus" had captured hearts around the world, was revealed to be, in humdrum reality, one Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old college student from Georgia. The following day, Paula Brooks, the lesbian activist and founder of the website LezGetReal, was revealed to be one Bill Graber, a 58-year-old construction worker from Ohio. In their capacity as leading lesbians in the Sapphic blogosphere, "Miss Brooks" and "Miss Arraf" were colleagues. "Amina" had posted at LezGetReal before starting "A Gay Girl In Damascus." As one lesbian to another, they got along swimmingly. The Washington Post reported:

"Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian."

It got so crazy that three armed thugs were supposed to have captured "Amina" and a Free Amina Facebook page sprang up. Until, that is, the construction worker outed the college student ... then got outed himself. Front and centre: Media would have ignored these Yankee guys except that they were pretending to be gay Muslim girls and media had no means of establishing the facts. So they were all-day suckers.

(Meanwhile, in news no one notices, Syria's government killed 19 protestors at the biggest rallies yet ... )

Mark's right to say that "'Amina Arraf' is nothing more than the projection of parochial obsessions on to distant lands Western liberals are too lazy to try to figure out." But it's more than that: Today's media are obsessed with their writers' concerns, not their readers.

Have things changed? Yes they have. Fifty years ago, media sometimes obsessed foolishly. But their concerns (the Cold War comes to mind, as do space aliens) were in fact those of their readers. In recent years, they moved toward an untenable position: They should somehow force the writers' concerns on the readers - while remaining mainstream. And they've gone downhill in audience ever since.

Every medium gets hoaxed now and then. But out of touch media are more susceptible to damage from the hoaxes they fall for. When few readers share the hoaxed obsessions, few are sympathetic to the hoaxee.

Some media pros are grumbling about how the blogosphere causes this. No, it doesn't. All the blogosphere causes is communication potential, period. I used to teach kids, re the Internet in general: When in doubt, doubt, and if it sounds unbelievable, don't believe it.

Steyn also notes, "We have become familiar in recent years with the booming literary genre of the fake memoir, to which Oprah's late Book Club was distressingly partial." But again, the fake memoirs were believed because they catered to unexamined stereotypes among Oprah's audience. At least the Book Club wasn't expecting the rest of us to read and believe them too.

This problem will not get any better. The only solution is, find and support new media you trust. Yes, like Access Research Network.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Steve Fuller, reviewing Conor Cunningham's Darwin's Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Eerdmans, 2011) for Times Higher (24 March 2011), comments,

Let me start by conceding the central, most controversial thesis argued in this book: that neo-creationism and ultra-Darwinism are opposing offshoots of the same modernist root. Both read the Bible literally and take nature itself to possess a crackable code. Neither wishes science and theology to exist in separate spheres. To be sure, William Dembski and Richard Dawkins, say, differ radically on what should happen once the two are brought together: one infers natural theology, the other atheistic naturalism. These are the terms on which the ongoing "Darwin wars" are fought.

My disagreement starts with the suggestion in the subtitle that "both get it wrong" and that the author's preferred stance - a quasi-mystical version of theistic evolution - makes for good science and good theology.

[ ... ]

... if Cunningham did not regularly remind the reader that his take on God and nature is compatible with a close, albeit non-dogmatic, reading of Thomas Aquinas, it would be easy to confuse him with one of those benevolent pagans consigned by Dante to the outskirts of Hell.

Fuller studies the ID community; it's one of his specialties. He's not always right (of course), but he is a real expert.

Other reviews here.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here:

Why didn't polytheistic religions produce modern science?

The answer is that finite gods do not create the universe. Indeed, the universe creates them. They are generally said to arise out of some pre-existing, primordial "stuff." For example, in the genealogy of the gods of Greece, the fundamental forces such as Chaos gave rise to Gaia, the great mother, who created and then mated with the heavens (Ouranos) and the sea (Pontos) to give birth to the gods. Hence, in a polytheistic worldview, the universe itself is not the creation of a rational Mind, and is therefore not thought to have a rational order. The universe has some kind of order, of course, but one that is inscrutable to the human mind. And if you do not expect to find rational laws, you will not even look for them, and science will not get off the ground.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

... he said it was okay to believe in something beyond 'Cratworld, as long as we let science types like him do whatever they want, sign the chit, and shut up (remember NOMA, or "non-overlapping magisteria"). Plus, he wasn't exactly sure if he was a Darwinist. And he appeared on the Simpsons.

From PLOS Biology we learn (June 7, 2011):

1Stephen Jay Gould, the prominent evolutionary biologist and science historian, argued that “unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm” because “scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth” [1], a view now popular in social studies of science [2]–[4]. In support of his argument Gould presented the case of Samuel George Morton, a 19th-century physician and physical anthropologist famous for his measurements of human skulls. Morton was considered the objectivist of his era, but Gould reanalyzed Morton's data and in his prize-winning book The Mismeasure of Man [5] argued that Morton skewed his data to fit his preconceptions about human variation. Morton is now viewed as a canonical example of scientific misconduct. But did Morton really fudge his data? Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted? We investigated these questions by remeasuring Morton's skulls and reexamining both Morton's and Gould's analyses. Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould. In fact, the Morton case provides an example of how the scientific method can shield results from cultural biases.

So this can be published now?

Here's more:

Gould himself let political bias influence his scientific conclusions. He set out to demonstrate everybody is the same, that any differences are negligible, and that anyone who concluded there are meaningful differences in brain size were not only wrong but also stupid, depraved, evil, and racist, etc. And he did this to the exclusion of any opposing data or conclusion. He hurt a lot of people in the process. Perhaps he felt he had enough scientific credibility to burn in order to make himself into a hero--instead of a scientist. But I wouldn't want to start mind reading.

Gould wasn't worse than anyone else, just more noted and quoted.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In 2010, University of California Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology John C. Avise published a book titled Inside the Human Genome: A Case for Non-Intelligent Design, in which he wrote that "noncoding repetitive sequences--' junk DNA'--comprise the vast bulk (at least 50%, and probably much more) of the human genome." Avise argued that pseudogenes, in particular, are evidence against intelligent design. For example, "pseudogenes hardly seem like genomic features that would be designed by a wise engineer. Most of them lie scattered along the chromosomes like useless molecular cadavers." To be sure, "several instances are known or suspected in which a pseudogene formerly assumed to be genomic ' junk' was later deemed to have a functional role in cells. But such cases are almost certainly exceptions rather than the rule. And in any event, such examples hardly provide solid evidence for intelligent design; instead, they seem to point toward the kind of idiosyncratic tinkering for which nonsentient evolutionary processes are notorious."

- Jonathan Wells, The Myth of Junk DNA (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2011), pp. 26-27

Wells goes on to point out,

The following chapters cite hundreds of scientific articles (many of them freely accessible on the Internet) that testify to those functinos - and those articles are only a small sample of a large and growing body of literature on the subject. This does not mean that the authors of those articles are critics of evolution or supporters of intelligent design. Indeed, most of them interpret the evidence within an evolutionary framework. But many of them explicitly point out that the evidence refutes the myth of junk DNA>

Darwinism predicts something, based on its core principles, and it doesn't happen. And there are no consequences? Only on planet Darwin. Where all correct predictions originate in Darwin's theory and are grandfathered as such by his loyal heirs. All incorrect predictions are "proved" to have originated elsewhere, no matter where they originated.

At what point do we either have Darwin or evolution? "Science" or science?

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Scientific American, Leonard Susskind is profiled as the “Bad Boy of Physics”: "Leonard Susskind rebelled as a teen and never stopped. Today he insists that reality may forever be beyond reach of our understanding" (Peter Byrne, June 21, 2011),

Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind revels in discovering ideas that transform the status quo in physics. Forty years ago he co-founded string theory, which was initially derided but eventually became the leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. For years he disputed Stephen Hawking's conjecture that black holes do not merely swallow objects but grind them up beyond recovery, in violation of quantum mechanics. Hawking eventually conceded. And he helped to develop the modern conception of parallel universes, based on what he dubbed the "landscape" of string theory. It spoiled physicists' dream to explain the universe as the unique outcome of basic principles.

Physicists seeking to understand the deepest levels of reality now work within a framework largely of Susskind's making. But a funny thing has happened along the way. Susskind now wonders whether physicists can understand reality.

Is this a pattern or what?

Having built the huge meringue of evolutionary psychology out of his study of ants, Wilson then disowned the theory, leaving hundreds of enraged colleagues out to get him. Some think it a sign of the weakness, not the strength, of present-day science that vast, implausible theories can - in the fashion world’s terms - "totally dominate," and then the founder himself says, "Ah ... naw," leaving the lesser devotees to their own devices. And now James Shapiro is going around openly dissing Darwin from a non-bad boy establishment position.

Maybe John Horgan was right about the "end of science" - or maybe it’s time for fresh thinking about science. Does it exist, as Lewontin seems to think, to front atheism?

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At New Scientist, Michael Marshall reports, "It is human nature to cooperate with strangers" (13 June 2011):

It seems humans really are the cooperative ape. A nomadic society in east Africa that lacks a centralised government can still regularly muster armies of several hundred warriors, most of whom are strangers to each other.

These would be Turkana men, raising a crowd to risk their lives rustling cattle. Marshall observers,

We are the only species prepared to cooperate in large numbers with unrelated individuals. The feeling was that such behaviour was a recent development, requiring a centralised political authority. Now it seems possible that such cooperation could have predated these organisational structures and may have featured in numerous large prehistoric societies hundreds of thousands of years ago.

In that case, we are allowed to believe that such co-operation exists.

Interesting that researchers Mathew and Boyd - instead of theorizing from baboons and vervet monkeys and then making an announcement that lies in the face of everyday observation - observed humans in real life (the Turkana here standing in for Cave Man).

I have noted the same quality in a starkly non-violent situation: A Toronto subway shutdown at rush hour. If humans have an "innate tendency" to interpersonal violence or lack of co-operativeness, the shutdown should demonstrate it - thousands of people from all over the globe suddenly stranded together at a major urban intersection. What happened? Why?

Essentially, why do humans co-operate?: If for no other reason, humans use reason - if only as a tool - to sort between competing drives when making decisions. Reason is not an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in the brain, to the outcome of which the organism later randomly assigns a "cause" in order to reduce felt anxiety. Reason is a tool, as actual in Turkana Prairie as in Toronto.

Humans reason, and are conscious of reasoning, about whether they should cooperate and with whom. We know when we are reasoning. We are aware of conflicting desires and loyalties as a dilemma of reason, as well as of feelings. In the absence of such a tool, apes do not behave the same way, and those who are looking for evidence that "it's all just the same really" are wasting their time.

There are other ways of using reason, of course. A more sophisticated use finds the reasoner asking, "Should I be stealing cattle at all? Is that just?" But we are not quite there yet. We are still at the level of explaining why Turkana raiders work co-operatively with strangers or why Toronto subway crowds go dramatically passive, despite provocations, during shutdowns.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

InThe Guardian (25 May 2011), Mark Vernon reports on Princeton's Peter Singer's gradual coming round to the view that, if there is no objective truth, morality - and specifically the immorality of ignoring climate change - cannot be grounded in anything. Speaking to a group of Christian ethicists at Oxford, Singer said that his current focus is climate change, but he sees that the "preference utilitarianism" he was previously comfortable with,

... runs into problems because climate change requires that we consider the preferences not only of existing human beings, but of those yet to come. And we can have no confidence about that, when it comes to generations far into the future. Perhaps they won't much care about Earth because the consumptive delights of life on other planets will be even greater. Perhaps they won't much care because a virtual life, with its brilliant fantasies, will seem far more preferable than a real one. What this adds up to is that preference utilitarianism can provide good arguments not to worry about climate change, as well as arguments to do so.

Worse, some would add,

See also: "Ed Feser on Peter Singer's shift, and "Objective morality and Peter Singer."

it untethers climate change concerns from objectivity - either moral or evidentiary. That, alas, suits folk who enjoy running others' lives while remaining free of objective moral and intellectual demands themselves.

Urban dwellers may recognize that Peter Singer scenario all too well: "Concern" becomes - in itself - evidence of virtue and intelligence. It justifies bafflingly stupid assertions like "Raccoons are people too." One daren't respond, "Raccoons are not people, and if they were, they'd be guilty of trespassing, vandalizing property, and behaving cruelly toward cats and dogs." That shows "lack of concern." Which is the worst sin in the fact- and value-free philosophy that birthed Singer's animal rights.

Vernon tells us that, at the conference, Singer

described his current position as being in a state of flux. But he is leaning towards accepting moral objectivity because he now rejects Hume's view that practical reasoning is always subject to desire. Instead, he inclines towards the view of Henry Sidgwick, the Victorian theist whom he has called the greatest utilitarian, which is that there are moral assertions that we recognise intuitively as true. At the conference, he offered two possible examples, that suffering is intrinsically bad, and that people's preferences should be satisfied.

Both assertions are false. All learning involves suffering and satisfying one's preferences often points to jail, hospital, or hell on earth. In philosophy, there is no ducking the hard questions, it seems.

It's good that Singer recognizes these problems now. But climate change seems quite the wrong place to begin because so little depends on one's individual actions. And that is where all serious schools of moral thinking begin. Hence the temptation so many fall into, of (mentally at least) jetting the globe to tell others not to join the jet set.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Some think them a mirror of contemporary American society.

Recently, the Clergy Letter Project's Michael Zimmerman (getting the clergy to help sell Darwinism to their congregations) was publicizing Louisiana student Zack Kopplin's effort to repeal Louisiana's "discussion allowed" law on controversial issues in science:

Zack hasn't been content to simply complain about an educationally irresponsible law, however. His organizational skills have been nothing short of phenomenal and he's gathered a collection of supporters second to none. His repeal effort has been endorsed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest general science organization in the world with over 10 million members; the National Association of Biology Teachers, the country's main organization for biological educators; The Clergy Letter Project, an organization of more than 14,000 clergy and scientists recognizing that religion and science need not be in conflict; as well as a host of other scientific groups including the American Institute for Biological Sciences, The American Society for Cell Biology, the Society for the Study of Evolution, The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Additionally, the New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to support the repeal.

Ah yes, these student activists are always up on the barricades, opposing the establishment. Indeed, Zimmerman thinks Christopher Reeve would be proud of this young man, as an example of "Profiles in (Evolutionary) Courage."

In other news, a lowly Tennessee student, facing a similar issue, taking an opposite position, and not supported by the big science lobbies, said,

I had the opportunity to read Pam Strickland's column, "Legislatures should be lawmakers, not yahoos." I found some areas in it that were "sketchy." I would like to highlight a few points from her column.

She addresses the fact that state Rep. Bill Dunn is proposing a House bill that will "prohibit the teaching of two widely recognized scientific theories of evolution and global warming." I have read House Bill 368 and nowhere did I find any mention of prohibiting the teaching of evolution and global warming, instead it proposes that we show all the scientific evidence.

It is not logical to have both sides of an argument represented? It is a part of the scientific process to test a hypothesis, but if you only test the one variable, how are our future generations going to know the validity of the other side? This only demotes the very thing most Americans are searching for, knowledge. We will then be arming our citizens with ignorance instead of knowledge, while destroying the way to find knowledge. ...

- "Tennessee teen schools columnist on evolution and science education" (Evolution News & Views, June 8, 2011)

That kid is only 14, and he has it all figured out: When no one may critique the Establishment, anything they think is fact, anything they say is true, and anything they do is news.

Hope that kid has a strong support team.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "New Data Still Have Scientists in Dark Over Dark Matter," (ScienceDaily, June 8, 2011), we learn:

The new seasonal variation, recorded by the Coherent Germanium Neutrino Technology (CoGeNT) experiment, is exactly what theoreticians had predicted if dark matter turned out to be what physicists call Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).

"We cannot call this a WIMP signal. It's just what you might expect from it," said Juan Collar, associate professor in physics at the University of Chicago. Collar and John Orrell of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who lead the CoGeNT collaboration, are submitting their results in two papers to Physical Review Letters.

The researchers have not ruled out random fluctuation.

Dark matter accounts for nearly 90 percent of all matter in the universe, yet its identity remains one of the biggest mysteries of modern science. Although dark matter is invisible to telescopes, astronomers know it is there from the gravitational influence it exerts over galaxies.

Job's not easy:

The putative mass of the WIMP particles that CoGeNT possibly has detected ranges from six to 10 billion electron volts, or approximately seven times the mass of a proton. "To look for WIMPs 10 times heavier is hard enough. If they're this light, it becomes a nightmare," Collar said.

Also: Must beauty queens be Darwinists now?

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, we noted Baylor neuroscientist David Eagleman's new "neurolaw" book, Incognito. The basic idea, driven by evolutionary psychology, is that criminal law would improve if we dropped the illusion that people are responsible for their behaviour. Perhaps social justice minded supporters hope it will bring about prison reform, an end to capital punishment, and such.

They hope in vain. Here's my MercatorNet article explaining why that probably won't happen:

This is not a controversy between the String ‘Em Up Gang and the Prison Reform Society. All parties want a just and humane system; they differ fundamentally as to whether they think that personal responsibility is an illusion.

[ ... ]

First, brain scanning often doesn’t help the people many hoped it would. In capital punishment cases, for example, defense lawyers have lost out when it was used: As Timothy Capp, an Illinois lawyer who takes such cases, recounts, ...

Eagleman seems to be publishing his message in the right places, Britain's fashionable left New Scientist here and fashionable right Telegraph here.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At Cannuckian Yankee's comment 14 on Uncommon Descent Contest post "Why do people refuse to read books they are attacking?" (now being judged), we learn,

There’s a guy on Amazon who’s extremely anti-ID. He comments on or reviews just about every ID book, but it’s quite obvious that he never reads the books. He goes by "sillysilly" sometimes, and other names, but you can tell it’s him.

Sillysilly's "reviews" and comments are pretty much the same – "ID is religion and not science, and you're a lying jerk if you believe otherwise."

. But then we learn, at 22,

BTW, sillysilly now goes by Creationist_Nonesense_Ignored_by_Scientists, and most of his comments have been deleted by Amazon, which is not surprising.

To some, it is surprising. Many had despaired of the 'Zon ever getting the message that customers are not well served by a huge barrage of noise by non-readers against anyone who would read and seriously consider a book.

Also: Has anyone heard recently from Misshelver or A Man for Misshelver recently? Perhaps these anti-design folk have got together and started a family dedicated to complicating the lives of locally owned bookstores and their customers.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Probability’s Nature and the Nature of Probability, Don Johnson discusses the trilobite eye:

Physicist Riccardo Levi-Setti observes, "In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. "

The trilobite lens is particularly intriguing since the only other animal to use inorganic focusing material is man. The lens my be classified as a prosthetic device since it was non-biological, which also means the lens itself (with no DNA) was not suvbject to Darwinian evolution. The manufacturing andcntrolling of the lenses were obviously biological processes, with an unknown number of DNA-produced proteins for collecting and processing the raw materials to manufacture the precision lenses and create the refracting interface between the two lenses.

The lenses do not decompose as any other animal's lenses would, so they are subject to rigorous scientific investigation and determination of optical properties based on the actual lenses, from which infernces can be made as to their use.

(p. 64-65)

File under: If you were a student in Louisiana, you'd be allowed to ask ...

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Autism May Have Had Advantages in Humans' Hunter-Gatherer Past, Researcher Believes"
(ScienceDaily, June 3, 2011), we are told

The autism spectrum may represent not disease, but an ancient way of life for a minority of ancestral humans, said Jared Reser, a brain science researcher and doctoral candidate in the USC Psychology Department. Some of the genes that contribute to autism may have been selected and maintained because they created beneficial behaviors in a solitary environment, amounting to an autism advantage, Reser said.

Parents of autistic children will wonder about that. One such knowledgeable source commented, "But a feature of autistic/Asperger's people is that their focused attention is generally toward things that do not provide important survival skills and that they are not as aware of their surroundings"”

The paper looks at how autism's strengths may have played a role in evolution. Individuals on the autism spectrum would have had the mental tools to be self-sufficient foragers in environments marked by diminished social contact, Reser said.The penchant for obsessive, repetitive activities would have been focused by hunger and thirst towards the learning and refinement of hunting and gathering skills.

While no one disputes the ability of autists to focus on repeating one activity only, many doubt that the resulting loss of adaptability to a changing environment could be an advantage often enough.

No one knows the exact cause of autism/Asperger's. Depending on that, the question of why it isn't bred out of the population need not turn on usefulness at all.

Some individuals, particularly in advanced theoretical disciplines, do better because of Asperger's concentration potential, but the usefulness depends on having arrived at a useful subject to focus on.

Today autistic children are fed by their parents so hunger does not guide their interests and activities. Because they can obtain food free of effort, their interests are redirected toward nonsocial activities, such as stacking blocks, flipping light switches or collecting bottle tops, Reser said.

Presumably, Reser meant "non-useful" activities, since the "non-social" part is simply one aspect of a description of autism. Didn't prehistoric parents feed their children? It's not clear that being non-social was ever much of an advantage to humans, described by some sources as the most social of species - for better or worse.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here, Liz Else (New Scientist, (3 June 2011) tells us, that "recursivity" or "thoughts within thoughts" make us human:

Chimps, bonobos and orangutans just don't tell stories, paint pictures, write music or make films - there are no great ape equivalents of Hamlet or Inception. Similarly, theory of mind is uniquely highly developed in humans: I may know not only what you are thinking, says Corballis, but also that you know what I am thinking. Most - but not all - language depends on this capability.

Actually, no, other sources say, these qualities don't make us human. They identify us as human. They are a key characteristic, and not the only one, that we expect of humans, and would expect of intelligent space aliens.

The emerging point is that recursion developed in the mind and need not be expressed in a language. But, as Corballis is at pains to point out, although recursion was critical to the evolution of the human mind, it is not one of those "modules" much beloved of evolutionary psychologists, many of which are said to have evolved in the Pleistocene. Nor did it depend on some genetic mutation or the emergence of some new neuron or brain structure. Instead, he suggests it came of progressive increases in short-term memory and capacity for hierarchical organisation - all dependent in turn on incremental increases in brain size.

This is a critical insight in non-materialist neuroscience: The ability to think, not some supposed module in the ocean of the brain, explains such matters as language and religion.

That said, a Mark Hauser retro-man will surely come out shortly with a study claiming to have found it in chimpanzees. But to see it, you'd have to be him.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

"But guys, the classical atheist is typically a smart person who ... The new atheists, on the other hand ... "

Here's my Salvo "Deprogram" column, on atheists who are not Darwinists:

To hear it from the New Atheists, ï ˜Darwinism is the atheist's creation story, the Genesis from which no Exodus follows. As Richard Dawkins is often quoted as saying, Darwinism enables an atheist to be intellectually fulfilled. If so, there are a number of atheist and agnostic thinkers out there who are intellectually deprived. Or are they?

[ ... ]

Other atheists get off the train to nowhere at the origin of life or the origin of the human mind. In his famous essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", Thomas Nagel provides a sensitive account of the limits of human understanding of animals' minds.5 Less well known is the fact that he named Steven Meyer's ID-friendly Signature in the Cell (Harper One) a Book of the Year for 20096 and that he questions whether human intellect is explicable on Darwinian principles.7 Yet this is a man who also says, "I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."8

- "Neither God Nor Darwin? Atheists & Agnostics Who Dare to Doubt," (Salvo 17, Summer 2011)

I offer a suggestion about what an atheist or agnostic needs to make it work.

Also: Non-profit Salvo has just received a matching grant of $50,000, so if you donate a bit, thanks to the magic of a wealthy donor, your dollar becomes two - but only until June 30.

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