The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The title, The Moral Landscape, refers to a hypothetical space between the "heights of potential well-being" and "the deepest possible suffering." Harris advocates a form of utilitarianism (well-being as the goal), but his thinking seems confused. For example, at p. 62 he calls himself a "consequentialist," yet by p. 66, his sympathies lie with "moral realism." The two are incompatible in many circumstances: A consequentialist may say that one is justified in stealing from an unjust employer; a realist would say it was not justified to steal, period. In any event, well-being is, Harris says, "perpetually open to revision" due to new circumstances and findings. So Harris is a relativist after all.

Many atheists write good philosophy; Raymond Tallis and Thomas Nagel come to mind. But Harris, unfortunately, has not thought long, deeply, or broadly enough to be numbered among them.

For more, go here.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Life began with a planetary mega-organism" (New Scientist, 25 November 2011) Michael Marshall reports,

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism.

It was, of course, an RNA world, in which error control for proteins was poor. Nevertheless, it all worked because "It was more important to keep the living system in place than to compete with other systems." So the last universal common ancestor knew what ws important and had goals?

Behold the increasing velocity of the tailspin of current attempts to find/describe the last universal common ancestor

And tell us again: Why is James [Margulis collaborator] Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis off the wall if this isn't?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "The Roots of Violence: Scientists discover the earliest evidence of human-on-human aggression etched in an ancient skull." (The Scientist , November 23, 2011)'
Bob Grant reports,

A millennia-old human cranium from China bears the oldest documented marks of violence between humans, according to a team of researchers who studied the find. The skull, which is likely 150,000-200,000 years old, was discovered in a cave near Maba in southern China more than 40 years ago.

A projectile is suspected as the cause, and evident healing suggests that the victim lived for "weeks or months" after the attack. The researchers suggest that this

... may indicate the existence of care and support networks among ancient humans. "They hit each other, they squabbled, they had weaponry," Trinkaus said. "But at the same time, they were helping each other out."

Of course, it could have been an accident. That would, of course, explain the care provided to the victim.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

And it's not just the skull. In "Neanderthal Neuroscience" (Discover, November 14, 2011), Carl Zimmer reports,

ome of our genes have mutations also found in Neanderthals and Denisovans, but not in chimpanzees. They must have evolved into their current form between 5 million and 800,000 years ago. Other genes have mutations that are found only in the human genome, but not in those of Neanderthals and Denisovans. Paabo doesn't have a complete list yet, since he's only mapped half the Neanderthal genome, but the research so far suggests that the list of new features in the human genome will be short. There are only 78 unique human mutations that changed the structure of a protein. Paabo can't yet say what these mutations did to our ancestors. Some of the mutations alter the address labels of proteins, for example, which let cells know where to deliver a protein once they're created. Paabo and his colleagues have found that the Neanderthal and human versions of address labels don't change the delivery.

Other experiments Paabo and his colleagues have been running have offered more promising results. At the talk, Paabo described some of his latest work on a gene called FoxP2. Ten years ago, psychologists discovered that mutations to this gene can make it difficult for people to speak and understand language. (Here's a ten-year retrospective on FoxP2 I wrote last month in Discover.) Paabo and his colleagues have found that FoxP2 underwent a dramatic evolutionary change in our lineage. Most mammals have a practically identical version of the protein, but ours has two different amino acids (the building blocks of proteins).

The fact that humans are the only living animals capable of full-blown language, and the fact that this powerful language-linked gene evolved in the human lineage naturally fuels the imagination.

Doesn't it just? Coming right up, another episode for the world's longest-running soap opera, Us n' Them!

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Deep sea fishing for tuna began 42,000 years ago" (New Scientist 24 November 2011), Wendy Zukermanreports that the recent find blows evidence for fishing with hooks or spears arund 12,000 years ago "out of the water":

Sue O'Connor at the Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues dug through deposits at the Jerimalai shelter in East Timor. They discovered 38,000 fish bones from 23 different taxa, including tuna and parrotfish that are found only in deep water. Radiocarbon dating revealed the earliest bones were 42,000 years old.

Also hooks.

By way of explanation, investigator Sue O'Connor observes that they really had to learn such skills:

"Apart from bats and rats, there's nothing to eat here."

Besides, sea levels were 60-70 m lower than today. But were they fishing from shore or watercraft? With luck, the group practiced ship burial, as at Sutton Hoo, and O'Connor's team will find the craft.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In conversation with CNN's John Zarrella (November 22, 2011),

Every time we learn something new about the universe, what we learn is that our situation doesn't seem all that special. And that suggests that life is not all that special either.

Curious words coming from a man whose project of finding intelligent life outside of Earth has been rewarded with 100 per cent failure so far.

Some have wondered what the effect on ID would be of finding such life. Nothing in particular because the reasons for thinking that life - as we know it - is designed would apply wherever it is found.

Some of us do question current science media's handling of ET questions, an abysmal low point.
For example, how many hosts think of challenging Shostak's claim that "our situation doesn't seem all that special," in the light of known facts about Earth, his own zilch track record, and the failure of any research group so far to find exoplanets likely to host life?

The only reasonable conclusion one can draw from the evidence is that, for whatever reason, Earth is special. But if pop science media figures started drawing reasonable conclusions, they would probably collapse, leaving a void to be filled later by reality-based thinking. Won't be any time soon.

See also: Tom Bethell reflects on ET's no-show, and what it means for popular culture

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Best known for her theory of endosymbiosis. Here's one of her books on it.

A Discover interview with her earlier this year, and Suzan Mazur's interview.

Here's Michael Ruse in Chronicle of Higher Education.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Nudge thyself" (Financial Times, November 18, 2011), a review of Robert Trivers' Deceit and Self-Deception, Steven Cave allows us to know that "Economists have more to learn from the natural sciences if they are to claim a realistic model of human behaviour." We make irrational choices, it seems. But do we?

The book is vast in scope, covering every aspect of our lives from sex to religion, family to war. But Trivers reserves particular ire for the failings of economic theory: it "acts like a science and quacks like one" he writes, but it is not one. Its key ideas are naive and circular: it assumes we make our choices as rational utility maximisers, for example. And what is utility? It is whatever we, in fact, choose. There is no room in such a theory for me to plan to buy a salad, then persuade myself when faced with the cheeseburger that it is the superior option ("just this once") only to regret it later. "Yet," he rages, "such is the detachment of this 'science' from reality that these contradictions arouse notice only when the entire world is hurtling into an economic depression based on corporate greed wedded to false economic theory."

Steady on. How did we decide that choosing fast food rather than health food is irrational? Forget the evolutionary psychology mumbo-jumbo about our alleged carnivore ancestors, who supposedly rule our desires today. Forget even the considerable evidence that the ancient human diet was varied, as we might reasonably expect. Let's just focus on the proposition itself for a moment:

If Double Fries With That honestly believes that this life is all there is and that - before he ceases to exist - he would rather be happy in the present moment than down the road, is that irrational? Why?

Of course, he might become a problem to others down the road if he gets sick, but that doesn't make his choice irrational - rather, selfish. Others might refuse to look after him, in the end - and he might just accept that, for the right to live as he pleases.

Back of Trivers' "rage" is a moral preference for self-discipline and prudence over self-indulgence and living for now. But Trivers has no basis for that morality; it is merely a preference he wishes to impose on a heedless world. Absent a transcendent frame of reference, his rage is mere prejudice against people who don't choose to live the way he wants.

One need hardly point out that a transcendent frame of reference is not equivalent to God. It could be the ancient Greek or Chinese philosophers' "good life" or "way of the gentleman." It is a value beyond this life, one to which Double Fries With That is urged to aspire because it is intrinsically better for a man than burying his face in grease and starch. To this conception of life, evolutionary psychology can add nothing but petulant demands for conformity without vision.

While Cave's review is generally laudatory, he acknowledges evolutionary psychology's defects:

Trivers would like to see economics rebuilt on new foundations: those of evolutionary biology. But many of his specific claims are far from solid. They suffer from the broader weakness of his discipline: that claims about the evolutionary usefulness of this or that trait are notoriously difficult to test and relatively little is known with certainty about our prehistoric past. Some of Trivers' theories, therefore, go far beyond the evidence – such as his claim that the rate at which new religions emerge is a function of the number of diseases in a given area. Perhaps Trivers, a grand old man of his field, can indulge himself in such speculations, safe in the knowledge that a generation of graduate students will earn their spurs trying to fill in the gaps.

Alternatively, they will learn why he rages so.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's an oldie (2007), but worth considering anyway: In "What happens when 50,000 spiders hunt together?" (Globe and Mail, Oct. 27, 2007), Elie Dolgin reports,

spider teamwork depends on the size of their dinner: They join together when faced with the larger prey of lowland rain forests, but go it alone at higher elevations, where insects are smaller.

"Being social and co-operating allows spiders to enter an ecological niche that's not available to solitary individuals," she says.

Social spiders live in self-contained nests that house up to 50,000 insects. Group living can enhance foraging success and provide better protection against strong rains and predators such as wasps, ants and praying mantises. But all this togetherness also leads to high rates of inbreeding, leaving colonies vulnerable to disease.

And there are exceptions to the rules that Prof. Avilés has observed. She has discovered one new social species living 1,800 metres above sea level - about 1,000 metres above where loners were thought to take over. Prey insects are smaller at this elevation, however, so the species lives in smaller groups than its lowland cousins.

Either spiders and insects are smarter than we think or (more likely) something in them is smarter than we think.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Nature thinks this paper could "rock quantum theory to its core": Excerpt:

"On a related, but more abstract note, the quantum state has the striking property of being an exponentially complicated object. Specifically, the number of real parameters needed to specify a quantum state is exponential in the number of systems n. This has a consequence for classical simulation of quantum systems. If a simulation is constrained by our assumptions – that is, if it must store in memory a state for a quantum system, with independent preparations assigned uncorrelated states – then it will need an amount of memory which is exponential in the number of quantum systems." - Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, Terry Rudolph, "The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically"

Recalling the New Scientist editor who, acknowledging that the riddle of free will is unsolved, is convinced that there is no free will, due to the compete derminism of the universe: One asks, How could he know that, if it would be exponentially difficult to even specify a quantum system (which is not determinist anyway)?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Eugenics as philanthropic 'best practice'" (Philanthropy Daily , November 14, 2011), William Schambera reflects

As I was pulling together the research for my recent Chronicle of Philanthropy op-ed on philanthropic involvement in North Carolina's eugenic sterilization program — a program highlighted recently on Brian Williams' new TV program "Rock Center" — I was struck by this thought:

Were it not for the niggling little fact that it is now understood to be an utter moral abomination, eugenics would be touted today as one of American philanthropy's most significant and successful undertakings.

It had grand vision, minute organization, and backing from every enlightened sector of society. Eugenicists spoke the language of science and appealed very successfully to progressives.

Founded in 1910 as part of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, the ERO would be readily recognizable today as a full-service progressive think tank, with purposes ranging from scientific and policy research to public education and political advocacy. As the primary independently funded eugenics institution in America, it helped organize and train the vast cadre of professional experts whose job it was to "bring technical concepts and knowledge to bear" on the problem of defective protoplasm, and to make efficient, rational plans for its elimination.

The philanthropies that created the [Eugenics Record Office] were not only true to the progressive, root-causes philosophy, they also employed techniques that could be lifted directly from the pages of the most recent popular guide to "strategic grantmaking."

It certainly was, to judge from how thoroughly they penetrated society with the message that there are too many rabble and they are ruining everything.

But - in fairness - elites have always believed that from time immemorial. Which means that any time it is true is probably accidental, and we should not assume either that ours is the exceptional time or that any fact base has been created by their agreement in the matter.

We did a series of interviews with an author of a book on the culture that grew up around eugenics, here.

The sobering fact is that eugenics was not discredited as science until the aftermath of World War II, when its staggering cost was revealed. That's what it took to wake people up.

Meanwhile, it's interesting to note that the textbook showcased at the Scopes trial, featured in the new film Alleged, explicitly taught eugenics. Incidentally, one public sock puppet for eugenics was "Ada Jukes, mother of criminals," a regular feature of textbooks. The pseudonymous Mrs. Jukes appealed to the educated consensus because she appeared to demonstrate that criminality can be inherited, leading to "calls for compulsory sterilization, segregation, lobotomies and even euthanasia against the "unfit." One presumes that Ma Barker and Ma James - who promoted enough havoc in the early West - didn't count, because they were actually encouraging their sons' criminality. Materialist science - actual or pseudo - can't address that, so the hunt was on for the "criminal gene" instead.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A Brazilian contact tells us that

Olavo de Carvalho, a very controversial and polemical Brazilian philosopher, living in auto-exile in the States now. He is not a fan of Charles Darwin, but thinks that he invented Intelligent Design.

=Contact adds, "I don't believe he has really understood ID." Probably not.

Hat tip: Pos-DarwinistaHat tip: Pos-Darwinista

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "'Sweet spot' for life's chemistry found, scientists say," Irene Klotz reports, "Methanol discovery has implications for understanding where to look for life."

Methanol (wood alcohol), we are told, can trigger complex organic chemistry, so given that it didn't likely exist on early Earth, some researchers have sought it in space.

In other words, find the methanol and scientists believe you find the chemical pathways to life.

"Searching for methanol in various regions in space will tell researchers where to look for other complex organic molecules, which will eventually lead to the formation of life," astronomer Sachindev Shenoy, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News.

And some young stars do produce methanol.

Now that we have learned that complex, organic molecules lead eventually to the formation of life, we learn

"The clouds we're observing appear to harbor more favorable conditions for life than the pre-solar cloud from which our solar system formed. And there is life in our solar system," Amanda Cook, a post-doctoral research fellow at NASA Ames, told Discovery News. "The implication is that life may have an even easier time taking root, so to speak, in other parts of the galaxy."

So Earth has life even though our solar system doesn't meet these people's criterion, which proves that solar systems that do meet their criterion foster life more easily. Not that we have evidence or anything.

It's come to this.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's the Abstract:

Problematic megafossils in Cambrian palaeosols of South Australia

Gregory J. Retallack

Article first published online: 15 NOV 2011

Palaeontology

Volume 54, Issue 6, pages 1223–1242, November 2011

Abstract: Red calcareous Middle Cambrian palaeosols from the upper Moodlatana Formation in the eastern Flinders Ranges of South Australia formed in well-drained subhumid floodplains and include a variety of problematic fossils. The fossils are preserved like trace fossil endichnia but do not appear to be traces of burrows or other animal movement. They are here regarded as remains of sessile organisms, comparable with fungi or plants living in place, and are formally named as palaeobotanical form genera under provisions of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. Most common are slender (0.5–2 mm) branching filaments flanked by green-grey reduction haloes within the red matrix of palaeosol surface horizons (Prasinema gracile gen. et sp. nov.). Other axial structures (Prasinema nodosum and P. adunatum gen. et spp. nov.) are larger and show distinctive surface irregularities (short protuberances and irregular striations, respectively). The size and form of these filaments are most like rhizines of soil-crust lichens. Other evidence of life on land includes quilted spheroids (Erytholus globosus gen. et sp. nov.) and thallose impressions (Farghera sp. indet.), which may have been slime moulds and lichens, respectively. These distinctive fossils in Cambrian palaeosols represent communities comparable with modern biological soil crusts.

Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

It's the twentieth anniversary of Phillip Johnson's seminal Darwin on Trial and people are starting to remember the difference Johnson made. Even by 1991, many were getting restless. It wasn't just the solemn nonsense propounded in science journals in the name of the Beard. "Evolutionary psychology" was catching on, promising to explain everything, including stuff like why black people are less moral than white people. Not to worry, a different evolutionary psychologist, given a budget and a guarantee of publication in a respected journal - and scads of attention from the pop science press - can come up, we are sure, with reverse nonsense. (One psychologist actually made a good stab at that, but was fingered for fraud; we don't know if that paper was directly implicated.)

Anyway, in the midst of it all, a Berkeley law prof published a book examining the Darwinists' claims from a legal - not religious - perspective, and suddenly millions found the courage to say, yes, that's sort of what we were thinking too. But could never have so clearly explained it.

Here's the statement that may well have had the most effect:

"I do not think that the mind can serve two masters, and I am confident that whenever the attempt is made, naturalism in the end will be the true master and theism will have to abide by its dictates. If the blind watchmaker thesis is true, then naturalism deserves to rule, but I am addressing those who think the thesis is false, or at least are willing to consider the possibility that it may be false.

Such persons need to be willing to challenge false doctrines, not on the basis of prejudice or blind adherence to a tradition, but with clear-minded, reasoned arguments. They also need to be working on a positive understanding of a theistic view of reality, one that allows natural science to find its proper place as an important but not all-important part of the life of the mind." - Johnson P.E., Darwin on Trial, Second Edition, 1993, Inter Varsity Press, Illinois, p. 169

In the age of ASA and BioLogos, Johnson's words are good to keep in mind. Christians, for one thing, can feel free to leave the Word of the Beard and other religious matters to the Christian Darwinists. And just plain doubt.

When in doubt, doubt.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

An art exhibit at Princeton is called "Intelligent Design." Here's New Scientiston it:

This year contest organisers chose the theme "intelligent design" - a rubric they confess was intentionally picked to be provocative. The term, they decided, suggests a theme that can be interpreted broadly enough to encourage submissions from any number of fields. But given its wide use in attacks on the theory of evolution, contest organisers hope to push scientists to reclaim the term, and remind one another of all its other possible connotations: the intelligently designed product of a thoughtful engineer, or the clever new simulation from a creative computer scientist.

They can reclaim the term any time they want, except for one thing: Darwinism explicitly teaches that there is no design, intelligent or otherwise, that there is no mind, only a brain, and that what we think it beautiful is merely what helps spread our selfish genes. That view - strenuously promoted by New Scientist, is what actually stops them from reclaiming the term - not that one would expect arterati looking for a media buzz to think about it or care.

Here's PhysOrg.

Hat tip Creation-Evolution Headlines.

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "Mid-Ocean Creatures Control Light to Avoid Becoming Snacks" (em>ScienceDaily, Nov. 10, 2011), we learn:

Transparency is the default state of both Japetella heathi, a bulbous, short-armed, 3-inch octopus, and Onychoteuthis banksii, a 5-inch squid found at these depths. Viewed from below against the light background, these animals are as invisible as they can be. Their eyes and guts, which are impossible to make clear, are instead reflective. But when hit with a flash of bluish light like that produced by headlight fish, they turn on skin pigments, called chromatophores, to become red in the blink of an eye.

Okay, headlight fish: A deep-sea fish with a luminescent patch on its head. It's a "bring your own light" environment.

During ship-board experiments over the Peru-Chile trench in 2010, Zylinski shined blue-filtered LED light on specimens of both creatures to watch them rapidly go from clear to opaque. When the light was removed, they immediately reverted to transparent. On a second research cruise in 2011 in the Sea of Cortez, Zylinski measured the reflectivity of the octopuses and found they reflected twice as much light in their transparent state as in the opaque state.

Amazing the way this stuff just happens to evolve in response to selective pressure.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Happy Carl Sagan Day" (The Best Schools, November 12, 2011) James Barham offers to help us celebrate the late, great Carl Sagan (1934-1996), along with thousands of atheists and "skeptics":

Wait a minute. The great who?

If you are under the age of 40, it is unlikely you've ever heard of Carl Sagan (1934–1996). He was an astronomer at Cornell University, who enjoyed a brief hour of celebrity in the early 1980s with some pretty good popular science books and an interesting TV series called Cosmos. Maybe you can still catch the reruns on the Discovery Channel or someplace.

Today, though, he is mostly remembered for being lampooned as the guy who repeated the phrase "billions and billions of stars" at every opportunity with a special smarmy emphasis. I think it was supposed to be about putting all those late-20th-century folks who still thought the earth was at the center of the universe in their place.

They still cite the "billions and billions"TM schtick today, for the same purpose, usually without acknowledgement. Some persist in seeing the fact that Sagan was never elected to the national Academy of Sciences as due to envy. In his case, it's more likely that they realized that there just wasn't much science, as such, in what he was saying.

Sagan's greatest legacy is this: He cemented in popular media and culture the following assumptions about the relationship between "science" and "religion":

"Science" is about the presumed accidental nature of our universe. "Religion" is about the evidence for fine-tuning.

"Science" argues that if Earth is fine-tuned for life, there "must be" billions and billions of Earths out there, plus aliens galore. "Religion" points out that we have no single bit of evidence for any of them.

"Science" says most DNA is junk. "Religion" says, wait and see. We did, and guess what?

"Science" claims that apes will one day write autobiographies. "Religion" claims that there is no evidence of any such thing, and points to the low quality of the evidence that apes are just like people.

Sagan was hardly the pioneer in this area, but he played a key role in establishing that the "science" of popular media is mostly bunk directed at supporting atheism and that any evidence-based assessment of life in our cosmos is the province of "religion" where people tend to classify us.

Nice goin', dude. The UD News desk salutes ya!

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Behavioral Economics Foils an Obama Tax Cut?" (Bloomberg Businessweek November 10, 2011), Drake Bennett reports, "New research finds that a trendy economic theory backfired on the Obama Administration. Or did it?

In the past decade, this new set of ideas about economic behavior has gone from the margins of academia to the intellectual mainstream. In 2002 one of its godfathers, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and the years since have seen a growing list of best-sellers (Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's Nudge, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational) describing and drawing on its findings. Unlike neoclassical economists, behavioral economists don't see people as rational actors coolly weighing costs and benefits. Behaviorists argue instead that people rely on a set of instincts, biases, and cognitive shortcuts to make decisions, which often lead them to choices they come to regret. We save too little and spend too much, we stick with the status quo even when it costs us money, we avoid smart risks and take dumb ones.

You don't shop; your inner ape does.

In 2009 this theory held obvious appeal to the incoming Administration. If the country's ills were in part the result of poor financial decisions people made unconsciously, perhaps those problems could be fixed through behaviorally informed public policy. The Administration's first big legislative push, its stimulus bill, presented an opportunity to test some exciting new ideas on a national scale.

One of them was to give people tax rebates in dribs and drabs, instead of in lump sums, based on the behavioural economics theory:

A series of slightly bigger paychecks feels like an increase in income and is more likely to be spent.

(The government wished to encourage spending.)

That's not what happened in practice, according to Sahm, Slemrod, and Shapiro. In a study of the 2009 stimulus, based on 500 telephone interviews, the authors found that only 13 percent of Making Work Pay recipients reported that the tax credit would lead them to increase spending. This was just half of the 25 percent spend rate the researchers found for the traditional lump-sum tax rebate in President Bush's 2008 stimulus.

The reason the Making Work Pay program flopped is obvious: If a family gets a $750 cheque - and there is an outstanding need, like new laundry machines - they'll probably spend it on the new machines.

If, however, the money comes in dribs and drabs, they may not even notice it because it is not solving any obvious problem. They neither spent it nor saved it; they just lost track of it. No wonder they reported that they wouldn't increase spending on its account. This is not an instinct, a bias, or a cognitive shortcut; it's a reflection of the fact that only the very poor have the time to deal in small change.

The fact that no one even considered this possibility illustrates the problem with applying these new EP-driven theories to anything approaching reality.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From our moral and intellectual superiors, no less.

From Granville Sewell's In the Beginning:

A recent (November 10, 2008) article in News at Princeton entitled "Evolution's New Wrinkle: Proteins with Cruise Control Provide New Perspective," reports on research by four Princeton scientists, published in a Physical Review Letters article:"

The experiments, conducted in Princeton's Frick Laboratory, focused on a complex of proteins located in the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell. ... Chakrabarti and Rabitz analyzed these observations of the proteins' behavior from a mathematical standpoint, concluding that it would be statistically impossible for this self-correcting behavior to be random, and demonstrating that the observed result is precisely that predicted by the equations of control theory. ...

he authors sought to identify the underlying cause for this self-correcting behavior in the observed protein chains. Standard evolutionary theory offered no clues. ...

Chakrabarti said. "Control theory offers a direct explanation for an otherwise perplexing observation and indicates that evolution is operating according to principles that every engineer knows."

The scientists do not know how the cellular machinery guiding this process may have originated, but they emphatically said it does not buttress the case for intelligent design,...

Oh, why not?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From Metamorphosis, the companion book to the film ...

Monarchs that emerge in the spring or early summer live for about two to four weeks. But the generation that emerges in late August is genetically equipped to live up to nine months. It's called the "Methuselah Generation." This enables these tropical butterflies (that would die if exposed to the freezing winter temperatures of the Midwest and Canada) to migrate as far as 3,000 miles, to a small area of forest in the transvolcanic Mountains of central Mexico. There, the conditions are right to ensure the survival of the Monarchs until the spring.

In March, the Monarchs become sexually active for the first time. They mate and then begin their return migration north. When they reach southern Texas, the females lay their eggs (only on milkweed plants - the only food source their caterpillars will eat) and soon die. Throughout the summer months, new generations of Monarchs emerge and move north - living, again, between two and four weeks.

Then, in early September, a new Methuselah Generation - three or four generations removed from the Monarchs that migrated the previous year - travel from as far north as Canada to the same trees that provided sanctuary for their grandparents and great grandparents, the year before. (P. 22)

The navigational systems they use to reach a forest in Mexico that they have never seen weigh less than a quarter of an ounce.

Note: The issue here is not whether the Monarch's generational cycles require a miracle, but whether this whole pattern is at all likely to have arisen as a result of natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism), as opposed to inbuilt design. Or something else altogether?

Darwinists are stuck at the level of "explaining" metamorphosis, the creature's total-destruction-recreation life cycle, never mind its community life, strictly as an outcome of their theory - natural selection acting on random mutations - and there they will remain.

See also: Granville Sewell on Metamorphosis

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "The Smallest "Astronauts" Set for Launch November 8" (Scientific American, November 4, 2011), David Warmflash reports on a useful Russian experiment:

Did space rocks seed Earth with life? To test that idea, a Russian probe is about to see whether microbes can survive a round-trip to Mars

Could life on Earth have originated on Mars? over the past two decades that question has left the pages of science fiction and entered the mainstream of empirical science. Planetary scientists have found that rocks from Mars do make their way to Earth; in fact, we estimate that a ton of Martian material strikes our planet every year. Microorganisms might have come along for the ride.

Only a few meteors get here in a year or so, and the question is, could a microorganism survive the trip?

One creature to be tested is the animal, tardigrade (water bear), which can survive temperatures approaching absolute zero and above boiling point, as well as massive doses of radiation.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At Telic Thoughts, Techne tells us that on "Fitness: A Battle is Raging" (November 5, 2011):

In an earlier post it was pointed out that John O. Reiss argues that the fitness landscape metaphor has teleological implications. If evolution is anything close to the metaphor then the process is fundamentally teleological.

The rigor of this approach, however, is lessened because there is as yet no universally agreed upon measure of fitness; fitness is either defined metaphorically, or defined only relative to the particular model or system used. It is fair to say that due to this lack, there is still no real agreement on what exactly the process of natural selection is. This is clearly a problem.

We're not sure whether any battle really is raging.

The obvious reason that there is "still no real agreement on what exactly the process of natural selection is" is that the case for Darwinism would then fall apart in the face of disconfirming evidence.

Here's what would go wrong: Let's say a Darwinist forthrightly declares that he sees no evidence for Dawkins's "selfish gene." Very well, he cannot then invoke selfish gene arguments in his own defense of Darwinism. It's better to avoid specifics, bellow that "evolution is fact, Fact, FACT," and refuse to debate the subject. That way his defenses can go in all directions at once, like a bee gathering nectar.

What possible fact base can dislodge such a strategy, given that it is accepted as legitimate?

But we'd love to be wrong.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Surely by now we've outgrown the soul?" (The Independent , 16 October 2011), neuroscience PhD student Martha Robinson informs us,

Although no branch of scientific thought has all the answers, we have known for some time that there is no theoretical need to look outside of the human body for a explanation of the many and varied phenomena that we collectively refer to as 'consciousness'.

Apparently, she has not noticed the utter failure of materialist explanations to even get a handle on what the materialist would explain.

She writes as though the problem is that we are "afraid" that materialists would discover the secret of consciousness. Actually, most people are afraid of the cascade of nonsense we will be subjected to as they fail, decade after decade.

The nonsense, she concedes:

Neuroscience certainly hasn't done itself any favours in this argument. We've all read over-hyped and nonsensical reports in national newspapers about scientists discovering the neural location of love or the brain areas responsible for iPhone addiction. Even more accurate stories, exemplified by the recent fantastic work by Professor Mintz's lab in Tel Aviv, tend to be over-sold: while amazing, replacing one functional loop does not an 'artificial cerebellum' make. This kind of 'neurotrash' allows eminent fuzzy-dualists like Ray Tallis to bandy around accusations of 'Neuromania' with some credibility – which is then used to shore-up the rejection of any and all scientific approaches to the explanation of human consciousness. To do this is to wastefully throw the baby of good science out with the sensationalist bathwater.

Hey, just a minute!

Martha Robinson, we don't have any reason to believe that a "baby of good science" exists in this case. They faked up the pregnancy. That's how the situation came to be overwhelmed in the media by nonsense.

When good science is being done, there is a distant pop pop fizz fizz of nonsense in the background (NASA is hiding space aliens, cell phones cause cancer ... ) but it does not dominate. It dominates where science has lost its way.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Caroline Crocker at AITSE is interviewed at BestSchools.org:

I began to entertain "politically incorrect views" while I was studying for my PhD. Basically, I did not see how evolution by random mutation and natural selection could lead to the kind of intricate nanotechnology that I was seeing inside a cell. Aspects of evolutionary theory conflicted with what I knew of science. I've heard people say that eventually we will figure out how mistakes in copying lead to increased information, but that belief takes more faith than I have. I think that it might make more sense to just evaluate the scientific evidence and follow where it leads rather than try to fit the new evidence about the copious amounts of information found in cells into a theory that was suggested over 150 years ago when cells were thought to be simple blobs of protoplasm.

When I began to teach, I noticed that the assigned textbooks were written in a way so as to encourage students to memorize, rather than critically assess, some of the information. I did not think this practice would lead to their success in future biology classes nor in their chosen careers in science. Therefore, in keeping with Yale recommendations on teaching controversial subjects, my habit was to teach students "not to argue from authority and to link their claims and assertions to appropriate evidence whenever possible."

For example, when teaching about the function of steroids in cellular communication, I had the students go beyond the text and encouraged them to speculate on the possible side effects of hydrocortisone. In the same way, in the single cell biology lecture where I presented the information the textbook provided on evolution and the origin of life, I suggested that the students critically assess the claims made. I asked questions like, "Is microevolution is a legitimate 'proof' of macroevolution?" or "How much does the synthesis of a racemic mixture of individual amino acids in a closed system add to a discussion of the origin of life?" I encouraged them to think about what they were being taught, making it clear that disagreeing with the professor was okay—provided they backed their opinions up with science. The students enjoyed this method of teaching and clamored to get into my classes. Their letters can be found in my book Free to Think: Why Scientific Integrity Matters.

My first inkling of trouble was the day that my supervisor called me into his office and told me that I was going to be disciplined for allegedly "teaching creationism."

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "City Lights Could Reveal E.T. Civilization" (ScienceDaily, Nov. 3, 2011), we learn:

In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, astronomers have hunted for radio signals and ultra-short laser pulses. In a new paper, Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Edwin Turner (Princeton University) suggest a new technique for finding aliens: look for their city lights. "Looking for alien cities would be a long shot, but wouldn't require extra resources. And if we succeed, it would change our perception of our place in the universe," said Loeb.

Yes! Just think! Someone else to blame for electricity waste, as in "THEY is worse than Us."

As with other SETI methods, they rely on the assumption that aliens would use Earth-like technologies. This is reasonable because any intelligent life that evolved in the light from its nearest star is likely to have artificial illumination that switches on during the hours of darkness.

Unless, of course, eyes never evolved on that planet ...

In that context, see this story by H. G.Wells, about a sighted man who thought he could rule over a society in which everyone else was blind. It didn't work out because the society was adapted to sightlessness and people assumed he was delusional when he claimed to "see" stuff - just like Madame Baloney claiming to "see" the future.

Hey look, it's Saturday morning, folks. Serious science news later.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?" (New York Review of Books,
November 24, 2011), Anthony Grafton reviews a number of "what's wrong with universities" books, one of which offers some genuinely interesting information:

In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Take that, world of ideas.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

From "'Saber-Toothed Squirrel': First Known Mammalian Skull from Late Cretaceous in South America" (ScienceDaily, Nov. 2, 2011), we learn:

Paleontologist Guillermo Rougier, Ph.D., professor of anatomical sciences and neurobiology at the University of Louisville, and his team have reported their discovery of two skulls from the first known mammal of the early Late Cretaceous period of South America. The fossils break a roughly 60 million-year gap in the currently known mammalian record of the continent and provide new clues on the early evolution of mammals.

Cronopio was shrew-sized, about 4-6 inches in length, and was an insectivore with a diet of the insects, grubs and other bugs of the time. It lived when giant dinosaurs roamed Earth -- more than 100 million years ago -- and made its home in a vegetated river plain.

The skulls reveal that Cronopio had extremely long canine teeth, a narrow muzzle and a short, rounded skull. "These first fossil remains of dryolestoids … give us a complete picture of the skull for the group," John R. Wible, Ph.D., curator of mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said. "The new dryolestoid, Cronopio, is without a doubt one of the most unusual mammals that I have seen, extinct or living, with its elongate, compressed snout and oversized canine teeth. What it did with that unusual morphology perhaps may come to light with additional discoveries… ."

The squirrel moniker comes from Skrat, a "sabre-toothed" squirrel in Ice Age, in case you wondered. One somehow doubts Cronopio had many squirrelly habits.

A reader writes to say:

And interesting aspect that was omitted from ScienceDaily and mentioned in Nature was the unexpected fact that Cronopio is highly specialized. The ArsTechnica article put it this way:

Although Cronopio is older than other South American dryolestoids, it is far more specialized. Researchers are still working to put this new find in its proper ecological and historical context.

In other words, file this under "Evolutionary prediction falsified. More complex than thought. Stand by for postulation of ghost lineages."

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here:

Abstract

Fossilized compound eyes from the Cambrian, isolated and three-dimensionally preserved, provide remarkable insights into the lifestyle and habitat of their owners.

The tiny stalked compound eyes described here probably possessed too few facets to form a proper image, but they represent a sophisticated system for detecting moving objects.

The eyes are preserved as almost solid, mace-shaped blocks of phosphate, in which the original positions of the rhabdoms in one specimen are retained as deep cavities. Analysis of the optical axes reveals four visual areas, each with different properties in acuity of vision. They are surveyed by lenses directed forwards, laterally, backwards and inwards, respectively. The most intriguing of these is the putatively inwardly orientated zone, where the optical axes, like those orientated to the front, interfere with axes of the other eye of the contralateral side.

The result is a three-dimensional visual net that covers not only the front, but extends also far laterally to either side. Thus, a moving object could be perceived by a two-dimensional coordinate (which is formed by two axes of those facets, one of the left and one of the right eye, which are orientated towards the moving object) in a wide three-dimensional space.

This compound eye system enables small arthropods equipped with an eye of low acuity to estimate velocity, size or distance of possible food items efficiently. The eyes are interpreted as having been derived from individuals of the early crustacean Henningsmoenicaris scutula pointing to the existence of highly efficiently developed eyes in the early evolutionary lineage leading towards the modern Crustacea.

So where are those really simple eyes that just sort of happened by accident back then?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain. Follow UD News at Twitter!