by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Scientocracy Rules

Welcome to the Scientocracy, where unless you fully accede to the consensus view, then your opinion not only doesn't matter, it might even be dangerous. On this episode of ID the Future Casey Luskin shows how a recent move to redefine scientific literacy from an understanding of science into wholesale capitulation to the "consensus" damages true scientific literacy - including the right to debate and dissent.

Go here to listen.

Luskin's article appeared in Salvo Magazine's Winter 2009 issue. For more information on Salvo, go here.

Well, all I can say is, first, I write the Deprogram column for that mag (not usually on line), and second, that the mag is one of the few that is not dedicated to simply fronting an establishment consensus about Darwinism.

2. Okay, also,

Why Consensus Doesn't Count

Darwinists often point out that Darwin's theory is supported by a majority of scientists and so only the evidence that supports the theory should be presented to students. On this episode of ID The Future, CSC's John West explains that when it comes to setting public policy, dissenting views on science can be critically important and should be encouraged.

Go here to listen.

Basically, consensus is for herding sheep. When you want to hear evidence for the value of consensus, always ask a sheep.

3. Plus

200 Years After Darwin -- What Didn't Darwin Know?

This special video episode of ID the Future celebrates Darwin Day with a look back at the man and his theory by three scientists and scholars who join in the scientific dissent from evolution.

Biologist Jonathan Wells, author and M.D. Geoffrey Simmons, and molecular biologist Douglas Axe shed light on the problems with Darwin's theory as they share what led each of them to their skepticism.

Jonathan Wells first became skeptical of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, but it was in his studies in embryology that he became skeptical of common ancestry. Dr. Wells takes a historical look at the impact of Darwin's theory and discusses how unnecessary it is for modern science.

Geoffrey Simmons, M.D., explains how he became a Darwin skeptic after looking at the evidence and finding the evidence for evolution lacking.

[From Denyse: It's not - in my view - that evolution doesn't happen - but that the evidence usually accepted is so poor.]

And molecular biologist Douglas Axe from Biologic Institute explains the problems genetic mutations pose for Darwin's theory.

Listen in to their stories and appreciate again the scientific evidence against Darwin's theory.

Well, of course. Go here to listen.

It's far easier to think of evidence against the Darwin nonsense than to explain its hold on the public. Oh, wait ... Darwinism is both tax-supported and a get-out-of-jail free card. (Like, it's not you who did it, it is your selfish genes and/or your ancestral ape heritage.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

"Of all whale species, by far the noisiest, chattiest, most exuberant, and most imaginative is the humpback. It is the noisemaker and the Caruso of the deep, now grating like an old hinge, now as melodious as an operatic tenor" (1). These were the words of the late oceanographer Jacques Cousteau in his epic volume Whales, originally written in French under the more descriptive title La Planete Des Baleines. The male humpback in particular had been a source of fascination for Cousteau's exploration team precisely because of its exquisite song-making capabilities. Star Trek aficionados will no doubt remember the long-range distress calls of these ocean-faring giants in the movie blockbuster The Voyage Home.

Humpbacks can be heard for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers creating discernible noise sequences or 'themes' that can last as long as 20-30 hours (1,2). The available repertoire of vocalizations requires that "bursts of air" be channeled up from the lungs and through the trachea (3). The frequency range of these vocalizations is formidable- 8-4000 Hz (compared to 80-1300 Hz for a singing human; (4)). While certain sounds might serve to maintain contact between distant herds (2) others are clearly used to attract mates in the shallow breeding grounds of the tropics (5).

The sperm whale's characteristic clicking has likewise been intensely studied and marine biologists have in the last decade described this creature's 'pneumatic sound generator' in great detail (6). Usual clicks serve for echo location while so-called 'coda' clicks are used for maintaining the "complex social structure in female groups" (6). Remarkably the amount of air used to make each click is so small that even at depths of 2000 m, where the air volume is significantly reduced, sperm whales can phonate successfully (6). The mechanism of sound generation is exquisitely selective for the two modes of communication: "the marked differences between coda clicks and usual clicks are caused by differential sound propagation in the nasal complex" (6).

Other whale species are known to 'talk to each other': blue whales, fin whales, rights and bowheads all display the use of what has tentatively been called a rudimentary language (7). Equally captivating is the auditory apparatus that picks up these sounds (8). Unlike terrestrial mammals, whales sport freely-vibrating ossicles in the middle ear for more sensitive distance hearing:

"The bones of the middle ear, although fused to each other, are not directly connected to the rest of the skull; they are suspended from it by means of ligaments. All around them is a complex network of cavities and sinuses filled with a foamy mucus that further insulates the ear from the skull and provides yet another means by which whales filter out all but the essential sounds."(9)

What are we to make of the evolutionary origins of these key designs? In the summer of 2009 a seminal publication in the journal Mammalian Biology provided fodder for one popular idea (10). Using the aquatic escape behavior of Bornean mouse deer as primary evidence for their claims, researchers from Indonesia and the Australian National University in Canberra proposed that whales might have descended from ancient members of the ruminant family tragulidae which today includes cattle, sheep, goats and deer (11). Local villagers have observed tragulids submerging themselves in rivers and streams for over five minutes at a time as a way of eschewing would-be predators (10).

The Australian-Indonesian publication came hot on the heels of a cladistic study that claimed to have found a whale 'sister group' called Indohyus - "a middle Eocene raoellid artiodactyl from Kashmir, India" (10, 12). The overarching conclusion of this earlier work was nothing short of profound:

"Our analysis identifies raoellids as the sister group to cetaceans and bridges the morphological divide that separated early cetaceans from artiodacyls." (12)

We might therefore reasonably expect that the hearing and vocalization of modern cetaceans could be drawn into a gradual evolutionary sequence, perhaps going as far back as the land-sea transitioning mammals from which they are supposed to have been derived. But like so many evolutionary just-so stories, the devil is in the details. Indeed Darwinists admit that significant differences in the morphology of sensory organs make cetaceans unique (12).

In 2004 a group headed by professor of anatomy Hans Thewissen published what appeared to be the definitive answer on the evolution of whale hearing (13). Their 'integrated interpretation of evolving sound transmission mechanisms' came as a result of fossils that were collected from 35-50 million year-old deposits (13). The base specimen of their cladistic interpretation, a 50 million year old fossil of a terrestrial mammal called pakicetus, benefited from bone conduction of sound through a loosely suspended tympanic bone (13). Later aquatic mammals such as remingtoncetus and protocetus possessed large so-called mandibular fat pads that further improved bone-mediated sound transmission (13). For all three phyletic groups a terrestrial auditory structure called the external meatus allowed efficient capture of airborne sounds (13). Thewissen's final chronological group, the basilosauroids, sported yet one further innovation- air-filled sinuses that acoustically isolated the ear from the rest of the skull (13).

The most striking omission in the above sequence, and perhaps the most important of all, is the explanation for how a fleeting mouse deer somehow adapted to the acoustic rigors of underwater living. A five minute escapade in the shallows of a river is a far cry from the mate searches that would have been so vital for an aquatic lifestyle. Pakicetus was in fact a fast-running, land-dwelling long-necked quadruped (more like a dog than a deer) that lacked any sort of sub-aquatic anatomy (14, 15). Indeed one alternative interpretation of the data is that the pakicetus middle ear structure was more consistent with what one might expect for a subterranean habitat in which the head is in direct contact with the ground (14).

While Remingtoncetus was undoubtedly a four-legged semi-aquatic mammal that had a long slender snout, small eyes and ears and an overall size perhaps no bigger than a sea otter (16, 17), the above descriptive of the origins of its auditory innovations fits more in line with what one might expect for, say, a saltationist view of life than any sort of gradual evolutionary process. The same can be said of the supposed transition from protocetus to basilosauroids. In fact the fossil evidence reveals that in remingtoncetus the foundations of the modern whale underwater auditory mechanism had already been realized (13). Ironically the most convincing set of ear transitional forms in the whale evolutionist's armory- that of the decrease in size of the semicircular canal system of the inner ear (involved in balance) - only shows evolution bringing about small changes to already existing functional innovations (15).

Hippopotamids are of course hot favorites for the title of the closest living terrestrial relatives of whales (18, 19). Like whales, modern hippos are furnished with bone-mediated hearing and exhibit effective underwater communication (18). Still, morphology-based phylogenies to-date have yielded conflicting results and the identification of intermediates that supposedly spanned the divide between hippos and the common ancestor is controversial (20). Different analyses show anywhere between 3 and 40 million years of unrecorded evolution depending on which sister groups one chooses to grab along the way (20).

Over a decade ago one high school biology textbook asserted that there were no clear transitional fossils linking land mammals to whales (21). Such a position has been upheld by the most recent peer-reviewed literature. In fact hypotheses on the evolution of sound generation in whales and delphinids hinge upon the selective "drivers" that purportedly brought about change (eg: hunting, increased sociality, predator avoidance) while leaving out the mechanistic details of how such change took place (22, 23, 24). In contrast, the co-integrated nature of whale sound transmission, both in its vocalization and capture, has led some to the inference that intelligent rather than mindless design is at play. As one review noted:

"The anatomical structure, biological function, and way of life of whales are so distinctly different from those of terrestrial mammals that they cannot possibly have evolved from the latter by small genetic changes; aquatics require the simultaneous presence of all their complex features to survive. Perfect acoustical and other constructions are required for their serenades and way of life in the vastness of the ocean; they could only exist from a detailed preliminary plan. Employing sounds to allure their mates has another interesting feature, considering the entirety of the animal kingdom. Although each species emits sound signals that resemble signals of other species, the animals never mistake the sounds for those of other species...Harmony between sounds and sound-receiving organs likewise presupposes the...requirement of simultaneous appearance, while excluding the possibility of gradual evolution." (8)

In short, the latest evidence on whale communication cuts deep into the fishing nets of evolutionary dogma. Darwinist trawlers have every reason to be concerned.

Literature Cited
1.Jacques Cousteau and Yves Paccalet (1986) Whales, W.H. Allen & Co, London, pp. 236-38.

2.Eduardo Mercado III (1998) Humpback Whale BioAcoustics: From Form To Function, PhD thesis, University of Hawaii, http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~emiii/diss.pdf p.16.

3. Ibid p.25.

4. Ibid p.37.

5. Planet Earth Series: Shallow Seas, Narrated by David Attenborough, BBC Video, 2008.

6. P. T. Madsen, R. Payne, N. U. Kristiansen, M. Wahlberg, I. Kerr and B. Mohl (2002) Sperm whale sound production studied with ultrasound time/depth-recording tags, The Journal of Experimental Biology, Vol 205, 1899-1906.

7. Jacques Cousteau and Yves Paccalet (1986) Whales, W.H. Allen & Co, London, p.234.

8. Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi (2009) Nature's IQ: Extraordinary Animal Behaviors That Defy Evolution, Torchlight Publishing, Badger, CA, pp.102-104.

9. Jacques Cousteau and Yves Paccalet (1986) Whales, W.H. Allen & Co, London, p.161.

10. Erik Meijaarda, Umilaela, GehandeSilva Wijeyeratne (2009), Aquatic escape behaviour in mouse-deer provides insight into tragulid evolution, Mammalian Biology, doi:10.1016/j.mambio.2009.05.007

11. Matt Walker (2009) Aquatic Deer And Ancient Whales, BBC Earth News, 7th July, 2009, See http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8137000/8137922.stm

12. J. G. M. Thewissen, Lisa Noelle Cooper, Mark T. Clementz, Sunil Bajpai & B. N. Tiwari (2007) Whales originated from aquatic artiodactyls in the Eocene epoch of India, Nature, Vol 450, pp.1190-1194.

13. Sirpa Nummela, J. G. M. Thewissen, Sunil Bajpai, S. Taseer Hussain, Kishor Kumar (2004) Eocene evolution of whale hearing, Nature, Vol 430, pp.776-778.

14. J. G. M. Thewissen, E. M. Williams, L. J. Roe & S. T. Hussain (2001) Skeletons of terrestrial cetaceans and the relationship of whales to artiodactyls, Nature, Vol 413, pp.277-281.

15. F. Spoor, S. Bajpai, S. T. Hussain, K. Kumar & J. G. M. Thewissen (2001) Vestibular evidence for the evolution of aquatic behaviour in early cetaceans, Nature, Vol 417, pp.163-166.

16. Remingtoncetidiae, See http://www.neoucom.edu/DEPTS/ANAT/Remi.html

17. Sunil Bajpai and J. G. M. Thewissen (2000) A new, diminutive Eocene whale from Kachchh (Gujarat, India) and its implications for locomotor evolution of cetaceans, Current Science, Vol 79, pp.1478-1482, See http://tejas.serc.iisc.ernet.in/currsci/nov252000/1478.pdf

18. The Animal Communication Project, See http://acp.eugraph.com/elephetc/hippo.html

19. Whale and hippo 'close cousins' BBC News, Monday, 24 January, 2005, See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4204021.stm

20. Jean-Renaud Boisserie, Fabrice Lihoreau, and Michel Brunet (2005) The position of Hippopotamidae within Cetartiodactyla, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci, Vol 102, pp.1537-1541.

21. Percival Davis, Dean H Kenyon, Charles Thaxton (1993) Of Pandas And People: The Central Question Of Biological Origins, Haughton Publishing Company, Richardson, Texas.

22. Laura J May-Collado, Ingi Agnarsson, Douglas Wartzok (2007) Phylogenetic review of tonal sound production in whales in relation to sociality, BMC Evolutionary Biology 2007, Vol 7, p.136, See http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2148-7-136.pdf

23. Migrating Squid Drove Evolution Of Sonar In Whales And Dolphins, Researchers Argue
http://migration.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/squid-migration-drives-whale-sonar-evolution/

24. Morisaka T, Connor RC (2007) Predation by killer whales (Orcinus orca) and the evolution of whistle loss and narrow-band high frequency clicks in odontocetes, Journal Of Evolutionary Biology, Volume 20, pp.1439-58.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Go here for my first column ("Some claim that Satan is a great motivator, just like God"). Sure, especially if you think you could save money by having hellfire heat your house.

and here for my second, ("Faked embryos back at PBS, December 29, 2009.")

No really. The fudged embryos are back. As a "learning tool," in total ignorance of the development hourglass. The "hourglass" just means that embryos look different when very young, similar later, and different again when older. That says nothing about common descent, one way or the other (that is just the trouble, right?)

Embryos, like cakes, dresses, and renovations, look different at different stages.

I think common descent is probably true in most cases, but we cannot necessarily use embryos to prove it.

I wonder how long this Examiner thing will last? I registered at Beliefnet on the advice of a friend, but they deleted my profile. And my query about the matter has received no response.

Shrug. I like Examiner better anyway.

Anyway, read it there while you can.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

A previous blog drew attention to negative feedback mechanisms in the Earth's climatic system as a mark (though not a proof) of design. An interesting study by Lindzen and Choi has recently appeared which gives an informative analysis of satellite data spanning 16 years (to 1999). These measurements provide evidence bearing on the Earth's radiation imbalance and climatic feedbacks. From the abstract:

"The observed behavior of radiation fluxes implies negative feedback processes associated with relatively low climate sensitivity. This is the opposite of the behavior of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same SSTs."

Figure 2 from the new paper. "The observed relationship between ocean temperature changes (x-axis) and radiation flux to space (y-axis) is contained in the graph with the red box around it. The other graphs depict the relationship as predicted by 11 different climate models." (Source here)

The data source is the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) which allows measurement of the heat energy emitted by the Earth. Solar energy drives the Earth's climatic system and the incoming radiation is that of a body with a temperature of about 6000 deg K. The Earth absorbs much of this heat energy and emits radiation corresponding to a temperature of about 255 deg K. In a state of equilibrium, the absorbed energy is balanced by the emitted energy.

The equilibrium state is altered by clouds and greenhouse gases (such as water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane). These materials act like an insulating layer, inhibiting energy emission. Equilibrium is restored when the effective temperature of the Earth rises. Carbon dioxide has been the focus of interest over the past two decades, and climate scientists have come to use the term "climate sensitivity" to define the equilibrium response obtained when doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that climate sensitivity is in the range 1.5-5.0 deg C.

The hypothesis made by many climate scientists is that higher carbon dioxide levels increase the global temperature and this allows more water vapour to be held in the atmosphere. This leads to an increasing cloud cover and a greater blanketing effect: a positive feedback mechanism. Thus, the effect of the CO2 increase is amplified and global temperatures rise to restore equilibrium. This is the hypothesis that has been tested by Lindzen and Choi utilising the climate models currently favoured by climate scientists. The observed sea surface temperatures over the 16 year period have been fed into the models to calculate values for the heat energy radiated from the Earth. The results were compared with empirical observations derived from satellites. The findings, plotted in their Figure 2 (above), show that the model predictions are in marked contrast to the ERBE data. The authors point out that the latter reveal negative feedback mechanisms (as yet undetermined) in contrast to all the models which have positive feedback, described by the authors as "spurious positive feedback".

Lindzen and Choi go on to present revised climate sensitivity figures. Whilst the range of variation used in the models is 1.5-5.0 deg C, the authors say that their results "appear to demonstrate a climate sensitivity of about 0.5 deg C". This implies strong negative feedback. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases do warm the planet, their effects would not be distinguishable from natural climatic variations.

Scientists should have liberty to interpret the negative feedback mechanisms as a pointer to our planet's climatic system being designed for life. The Earth's climate is far more stable than the alarmists think. Their views are buttressed by incorporating positive feedback mechanisms into their models to amplify small climatic perturbations and, as Lindzen and Choi have shown, this approach is in tension with the empirical evidence.

It may be of wider interest to discuss a link between this topic and my earlier blog on "Darwin's boulders". The common thread is uniformitarianism adversely affecting the judgment of scientists. Much of climate science is concerned with the present and with short-term forecasting. However, not so many thousand years ago, all are aware of radically different climates during glacial periods. The causes of ice ages have been extensively discussed: some have favoured catastrophism whereas others offer uniformitarian explanations. Recently, the pendulum has swung very strongly towards acceptance of Milankovitch Cycles as the key to understanding glaciations. There are three dominant cycles, affecting the Earth's eccentricity, axial tilt and precession. The variations in solar energy relate to seasonality and geographic location.

Using these cycles, glaciations are said to occur because of predictable causal mechanisms affecting the Earth as it orbits the Sun. The mathematical formulas developed by Milutin Milankovitch are very suitable for incorporating into climate models and simulations, so they have proved to be attractive to climate scientists seeking to explain glaciations. Since the net annual solar radiation falling on the Earth is a constant, the irradiation differences identified by Milankovitch need to be amplified so that they can trigger large scale effects. This necessitates the use of positive feedback in model-building. The root problem is that the science that emerges is built on the assumption of uniformitarianism and model validation using empirical data has been far from rigorous.

This analysis of the way uniformitarianism is a hidden presupposition of much climate science is, of course, a personal view. ID is concerned with design inferences and there is no reason why ID scientists should not take different views on these particular issues. The reason why I am sharing these thoughts is because making design inferences about the Earth's climate system is not a no-go area, and my previous blog explained the basis for a prediction: that negative feedback mechanisms predominate. This is a testable prediction, as the research discussed in this blog has shown. It is just possible that if climate scientists were more alert to design issues, they would have been more critical of their own models (which demanded positive feedback and relative climatic instability). And it can be argued that the presumption of uniformitarianism (Lyell's legacy to the present generation) has not only led to flawed science, it has also cost billions of dollars in a misguided attempt to save the planet.

On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data
Richard S. Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi
Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L16705,2009 | doi: 10.1029/2009GL039628

Abstract: Climate feedbacks are estimated from fluctuations in the outgoing radiation budget from the latest version of Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) nonscanner data. It appears, for the entire tropics, the observed outgoing radiation fluxes increase with the increase in sea surface temperatures (SSTs). The observed behavior of radiation fluxes implies negative feedback processes associated with relatively low climate sensitivity. This is the opposite of the behavior of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same SSTs. Therefore, the models display much higher climate sensitivity than is inferred from ERBE, though it is difficult to pin down such high sensitivities with any precision. Results also show, the feedback in ERBE is mostly from shortwave radiation while the feedback in the models is mostly from longwave radiation. Although such a test does not distinguish the mechanisms, this is important since the inconsistency of climate feedbacks constitutes a very fundamental problem in climate prediction.

See also:

Tyler, D. Was Lyell's "project simply the worldview of naturalism"? ARN Literature Blog, 6 July 2007.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, a correspondent was advising me that business is about Darwinian competition.

Naturally, my mind wandered to self-described Darwinian capitalist Conrad Black, who did not fare too well in the United States's justice system. Admittedly, Canadian journalists were inclined to give him a bad rap because of his habit of suing journalists, so I will not make him an issue.

Anyway, as a long-time business teacher for people in media, I replied as follows:

This much I know is true, so let me restate it:

Darwinism is worthless as an explanation of how prosperous economies operate, though clever analogies can be drawn to "evolution, speciation, extinction, mutation, survival of the fittest" by people with the time, inclination, and contracts for books destined for the airport kiosk.

Reality check: Darwinism is - to use Edward Banfield's book title as a phrase - "the moral basis of a backward society."

In a state of practical Darwinism, families, clans, and tribes form tight little groups with little interest in the public welfare. They distribute public assets among themselves. So public assets are minimal and poorly maintained, as far as the general public is concerned. For example, money is stolen at the Post Office, but "no one" is responsible for the theft. It's untraceable.

Here is an example: When I used to write for a road building association trade mag, I heard about a contractor who had lost a brand new bulldozer. He went on a vacation in a far away country, and guess what - he saw his own 'dozer at work on a site - and they hadn't even bothered to unscrew the Canadian licence plate! That's how he knew for sure it was his. No one cared that the 'dozer was stolen goods. He assumed, rightly or wrongly*, that it would be useless to contact the police there.

*I would think that any foot patrol officer might wonder why that service vehicle bore a Canuck licence plate. Couldn't the owner be dinged for not getting a local plate?

No wonder such a country is "less developed." They are never going to get anywhere unless they give up practical Darwinism, and adopt codes of business ethics that owe nothing to Darwinism.

Why? Because few investors want to front large, complex businesses in such places. One never knows when the power or water will be off, due to corruption and incompetence - leaving a firm's technical staff with an unscheduled but paid vacation.

The fundamental basis of prosperous societies is co-operation, not competition. The power is on, the water is clean, the roads are maintained, your business taxes go to something other than graft, the police target criminals (not dissidents), girls are in school (not in brothels), and if you smash up on the highway, a paramedic ambulance will arrive promptly to pick up whatever remains of you and try to snuff it back to life. That owes nothing to Darwinism, and everything to co-operation between large groups of individuals in the public interest - which helps the private interest as well, and thus promotes prosperity.

As far as I am concerned, as a business owner and business teacher, you can take Darwinism and blow it out the window. It is not what builds up a good environment for business.

Yes, of course there is competition in a favourable environment for business. But it is the favourable environment that makes competition viable. Practical Darwinism (= everyone out only for his own pack or herd) breaks down the needed environment for prosperity.

Golly, I hope someone listens.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Tom Heneghan advises, “As Darwin Year ends, some seek to go ‘beyond Darwin,’” (Reuters Faith World: Religion and Ethics, December 14, 2009).

So I was intrigued by a conference held at UNESCO here in Paris recently about scientists who believe in evolution but want to go "beyond Darwin." Organised by French philosopher of science Jean Staune, its speakers argued that Darwin could not explain underlying order and patterns found in nature. "We have to differentiate between evolution and Darwinism," said Jean Staune, author of the new book Au-dela de Darwin (Beyond Darwin). "Of course there is adaptation. But like physics and chemistry, biology is also subject to its own laws."

Well, say it in French or in English, but just say it out loud: "le darwinisme, c’est incroyable;" “Darwinism is unbelievable."

Still, here is the story in a nutshell: Once a person claims to me that the chimp in the zoo is 99% identical to one of my grandkids, I know I am dealing with an unbelievable belief. Just how to deal with it is a difficult question, especially if the belief is government-funded and supported by all the right people (who don't think I should have grandkids anyway).

Michael Denton, a geneticist with New Zealand's University of Otago, said Darwinian "functionalists" believed life forms simply adapted to the outside world while his "structuralist" view also saw an internal logic driving this evolution down certain paths. His view, which he called "extraordinarily foreign to modern biology," explained why many animals developed "camera eyes" like human ones and why proteins, one of the building blocks of life, fold into structures unchanged for three billion years.

Here's more from Denton:

Q: What do you think of "intelligent design" now?

I have some sympathy with the intelligent design movement. I can see their point. But in the end, I think natural self-organising matter plus natural selection can probably explain it. I don't like the attitude of the Darwinian establishment towards intelligent designers because one thing the Darwinist establishment certainly can't explain is the origin of life. That's for sure. Probably special creation is better than what they've got. That's almost like confessing a murder, I know, but I don't mind being quoted on that. Because I personally see so much fitness in the cosmos for the ends of life, then that it is at least compatible with a design hypothesis like Aristotle or Aquinas. I'm quite irritated by the way the Darwinists claim they have all the answers. I don't think they can explain the fitness of the universe for life. They can't explain the origin of life. So I think they should be a little bit more humble.

Well, Michael Denton has himself been going beyond Darwin a long time. He has been described as a post-Darwinian, and his views have been vindicated by evidence. His book Nature’s Destiny is a long explanation of why he doesn’t believe the garbage fronted - by law - to publicly funded schools in places where you, gentle readers, probably pay taxes. Merry Christmas - no, not to you, serfs, but to your Darwinist masters, whom you support.

Many of us doubt that Denton's self-organizing matter can explain the origin of information. That's like thinking the Scrabble pieces can organize themselves in such a way that when you scatter the pieces they form a perfect, intelligible message. Friends have suggested that Denton read Polanyi and Yockey. Otherwise, he is stuck with "the mother gives birth to herself."

But I recommend Denton anyway because he understand marsupial mammals, and many North American pundits do not. We have only one: the Virginia opossum. I have never seen an opossum in the Toronto area; they are not well furred and apt to suffer from frostbite.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In a review in First Things by David B. Hart, of Richard Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth, we are informed - on the mag's cover - that Dawkins "gets a gold star" for his book of that name (January 2010 Number 199).

Indeed, he does get the gold star from reviewer Hart. Hart is full of praise for Dawkins, though daintily demurs at his hardline atheism. But he is a total, unwavering convert to the greatest scam ever conceived in the history of biology, that Darwinism - a conservative aspect of wild nature that trims out life forms unsuited to an ecology - actually has vast creative powers.

I can't yet seem to find the review on line, but that was not for lack of trying.

Now the contest: Here's what Hart has to say about design in nature:

The best argument against ID theory, when all is said and done, is that it rests on a premise - "irreducible complexity" - that may seem compelling at the purely intuitive level but that can never logically be demonstrated. At the end of the day, it is - as Francis Collins rightly remarks - an argument from personal incredulity. While it is true that very suggestive metaphysical arguments can be drawn from the reality of form, the intelligibility of the universe, consciousness, the laws of physics, or (most importantly) ontological contingency, the mere biological complexity of this or that organism can never amount to an irrefutable proof of anything other than the incalculable complexity of that organism's phylogenic antecedents.

For a free copy of Expelled, can you spot the mistakes in the quoted passage above? I mean, actual mistakes, as opposed to "He isn't making any sense." There is enough of the former, but you will find plenty of the latter too, I am afraid.

Here are the contest rules. Most important: No more than 400 words.

Also: If you won a previous contest quite recently and your prize is late, it is most likely because our post office here has four days off at this time of year, and I can't do a thing about that. If you won a long time ago and never got your prize, write me at oleary@sympatico.ca

Go here to enter. You must register to comment, but it is painless WordPress stuff.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here is her interview with David H. Koch, a Darwin-thumping multi-millionaire who has done much to front the cult to the public ("Evolution Sea Change?: David H. Koch Weighs In ," Archaeology Today, February 17, 2009). Mazur made headlines last year when she wrote about the Altenberg 16, scientists who met in Austria to plan a way of understanding evolution that was free of tax-funded Darwin worship. Anyway, among other things, we learn:

Next year, the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins opens at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where evidence of 6 million years of human evolution will be part of an interactive display that includes the Laetoli footprints and a reconstruction of Lucy. Visitors will be able to pass through a time tunnel to view early humans "floating in and out of focus," touch models of ancient human fossils as well as watch their own faces morph into those of extinct species. The Smithsonian display follows the creation of the American Museum of Natural History's David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing.

Rendering of proposed "Human Characteristics" display at the Smithsonian's David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, now in development. (Courtesy David Koch)
Richard Potts, director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program, explained about the new exhibition, "David's commitment to science and the study of human evolution will enable the Smithsonian to bring the latest discoveries in this field to the broadest audiences. The exhibition, still in the planning stages, encourages the public to explore the lengthy process of change in human characteristics over time. It also presents one of the new research themes in this field--the dramatic changes in environment that set the stage for human evolution. Although the subject can be controversial, the unearthed discoveries that bear on the question of human origins are a source of deep interest and significance for everyone to contemplate."

David Koch is Executive Vice President of $110 billion Koch Industries (he owns 42%) and CEO of its subsidiary, Koch Chemical Technology Group. He is often described as Manhattan's wealthiest resident, and contributes to Lincoln Center, Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the fertility clinic at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, to name a few. He is also is the principal private funder of PBS's Nova series.

It gets better when she begins to challenge him:

Suzan Mazur: As a man committed to the principles and practices of freedom, including scientific freedom, and as a scientist yourself with degrees from MIT in chemical engineering - is it your perspective that we are now witnessing a sea change in evolutionary thinking? That even as the global celebration begins for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, the man who brought us the theory of evolution by natural selection 150 years ago--Darwinian selection, or survival of the fittest, is now being viewed by serious evolutionary scientists as not enough to explain our existence?

To quote from my interview several months ago with NASA astrobiologist Chris Mckay, who was featured in the recent Nova Mars documentary you helped underwrite: "Something had to precede Darwinian natural selection. The Darwinian paradigm breaks down in two obvious ways. First, and most clear, Darwinian selection cannot be responsible for the origin of life. Second, there is some thought that Darwinian selection cannot fully explain the rise of complexity at the molecular level." So the question is: Is it your perspective that we are now witnessing a sea change in evolutionary thinking?

David Koch: No. I don't think it's a sea change. The sea change occurred back when Darwin published his evolutionary theories, backed up by massive, overwhelming evidence. What's happened since is that there's been a rather steady progressive acceptance of the concepts of evolution in the general public. It's amazing to me that in America a large faction of the population still doesn't believe in it.

Suzan Mazur: But the point is that Darwin started with life. He addressed what happens once you have life. He didn't address the origin of life. That's what Chris McKay, the NASA astrobiologist is saying.

And so it goes, until she gets him to admit that he does not know what he is talking about.

Well, we must give the guy marks for honesty. The average third-rate biology prof is just content to emit Darwin noises and know as little as possible about real challenges.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: Mathematician Jeffrey Shallit weighs in

Signature in the Cell: Darwinist demands to rewrite product copy

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

As a young man aboard HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin was fascinated by erratic boulders. After completing his voyage, he wrote several papers about their origin. Tierra del Fuego was of particular interest, for he found boulder trains at different elevations at a place known as Bahia San Sebastian, which faces the Atlantic Ocean. Darwin actually delayed the survey work of HMS Beagle so he could gather more extensive information. On returning to the UK, he made the boulders the focus of two geological papers published in 1841. The route by which Darwin reached his conclusions is instructive for all of us involved in research today.

Some of "Darwin's Boulders" (Source here)

It is well known that Charles Lyell's writings were a major influence on Darwin. Captain Fitzroy acquired Volume 1 of Principles of Geology for the library of HMS Beagle. Darwin not only read it but afterward said that "it altered the whole tone of one's mind" and that, thereafter, he saw everything in the light of Lyell's ideas. He made a point of acquiring the other volumes as they were published. Lyell's approach to making geology a science was to relate all geological interpretations to the operations of present-day processes. He championed uniformitarianism as a methodological principle - and Darwin drank it all up. He followed Lyell's lead in explaining landscape evolution in terms of gradual, incremental changes of sea level.

"Darwin's thinking was profoundly influenced by Lyell's obsession with large-scale, slow, vertical movements of the crust, especially as manifested in his theory of submergence and ice rafting to explain drift. In turn, Lyell profited greatly from Darwin's observations, including uplift of the Pacific coast of Chile during the Talcahuano earthquake. Lyell celebrated these observations because they supported his idea of uniformitarianism - that continued small changes, as witnessed in the field, could account for dramatic changes of Earth's surface over geologic time."

Lyell had noted how sediments carried along by icebergs could be deposited far from their source, and Darwin extended the observations by documenting the way boulders were transported by icebergs. He then developed an ice-rafting model to explain erratic boulders. In 1845 he pointed out that if these boulders were close to glaciers, they were likely pushed into position, but if far from source, they were ice-rafted.

"Few geologists now doubt that those erratic boulders which lie near lofty mountains have been pushed forward by the glaciers themselves, and that those distant from mountains, and embedded in subaqueous deposits, have been conveyed thither either on ice-bergs or frozen in coast-ice."

Darwin supported this model for the Tierra del Fuego boulders using two arguments: first, that the land surface on which the boulders lay were free of mounds and ridges which might point to glacial action; and second, that the boulders were angular - which would not be expected if they were pushed such a great distance. Darwin "considered the possibility that glaciers could have extended" much further than they do today, but rejected the idea because it departed too much from uniformitarian thinking. Darwin's approach to interpreting landscape anomalies is described by the authors of a recent paper as "inductive reasoning". This is discussed further below.

The new research sets out to revisit "Darwin's Boulders" and to review the causal mechanism. The authors have mapped the Bahia San Sebastian train of boulders on the east coast (which number about 500) and also a second train at Bahia Inutil on the west coast (which number about 1000). All the boulders are medium-grained hornblende granodiorites, several hundred kilometres from the nearest source. The authors write:

"Of the three plausible mechanisms for emplacement of these distal erratics - iceberg rafting, stream-ice rafting, or direct deposition from glaciers - we support the latter. Overwhelming evidence for complete glaciation of Tierra del Fuego, from coast to coast, has been unchallenged for almost a century. It is unlikely that stream ice could have transported such large boulders over hundreds of kilometers while maintaining such a tight distribution, and there is no evidence of a capable fluvial environment in the immediate vicinity of either boulder train."

To expand on the relevant points: mapping of the surface sediments of Tierra del Fuego has revealed that the whole region has been glaciated. The boulder trains at Bahia San Sebastian train and Bahia Inutil have been mapped as resting on moraine crests. The "tight distribution" has been documented and ice-rafting has never been observed to result in anything like this. Direct deposition, however, is observed. Landslides onto glaciers can leave large boulders on the ice which can then be transported however far the glacier extends, leaving a linear train of blocks when the ice melts away.

I want now to return to the "inductive reasoning" comment noted earlier. Inductive reasoning starts with observations and philosophical premises, uses reason to identify patterns, which lead to the proposal of initial hypotheses. These can then be tested and confirmed hypotheses lead to theories. Darwin's observations were of angular erratic boulders, the ability of icebergs to carry large rocks over long distances, and relatively short glaciers in the upland areas. His philosophical premise was uniformitarianism. Put these together and the hypotheses were iceberg rafting or stream-ice rafting. The angularity of the boulders ruled out stream-ice rafting, so Darwin drew the conclusion that the mechanism was iceberg rafting.

The problems with this start with the philosophical premises. Once uniformitarianism was accepted as essential to science (as Lyell argued), Darwin felt honour-bound to adhere to it. His thinking became constrained. He was only prepared to work with hypotheses that were compatible with uniformitarianism - all else would be regarded as speculation or even antiscience. This led him to overlook data that was right in front of him: the "tight distribution" of the boulders that was inconsistent with the hypothesis. It also delayed the recognition of the glacial features that covered Tierra del Fuego.

The problem goes back to Francis Bacon, who wanted to move away from the deductive methodology of the Aristotelians and establish something more grounded in empiricism. Induction was a key stage in his methodology - but he underplayed the human dimension. Researchers have to bring philosophical premises to bear on their work. How can we avoid becoming slaves to our adopted premises? Uniformitarianism lasted a century before researchers accepted that catastrophism was just as viable as a philosophical presupposition. What matters is that we use these philosophical approaches to generate testable hypotheses. Multiple working hypotheses are to be commended as long as ways are found to put them to the test.

Charles Darwin never escaped uniformitarianism. It pervaded his geology - as is apparent from the example before us here. It entered his thinking about biological transformation: the natural selection of small incremental variations. (Unfortunately, this constraint is still with us today, as Darwinians are unwilling to concede anything significant to the theory of punctuated equilibrium or to evo-devo.) Darwin missed out in understanding heredity, because he was looking for gradual change rather than discontinuous variation. (For more on why Darwin did not discover the laws of inheritance, go here).

Philosophical premises are of crucial importance. We cannot afford to leave discussion of this to the philosophers. Scientists bring philosophical premises whether they know it or not - and, as Darwin demonstrated, it matters. This is why the issues raised by Intelligent Design are of such importance. Should design inferences be part of science? Those who say 'no' are united in the belief that design cannot be inferred in the natural world. They 'know' this, not because they have empirical evidence to show it, but because their philosophical starting point is naturalism. All causation must be by Law or by Chance, they say. ID advocates have repeatedly pointed out that this stance involves circular reasoning, because they can envisage no scientific test to prove or disprove design. Consequently, disproofs of design are always theological: 'God would not do it that way!' However, philosophical naturalism has within it the seeds of its own destruction: like Darwinism, it is a universal acid that eats up our humanity (consciousness and free agency), our values (all morality is relative and socially constructed) and ultimately our science. That's why ID advocates must persevere until the urgently needed changes come.

Enigmatic boulder trains, supraglacial rock avalanches, and the origin of "Darwin's boulders", Tierra del Fuego
Edward B. Evenson, Patrick A. Burkhart, John C. Gosse, Gregory S. Baker, Dan Jackofsky, Andres Meglioli, Ian Dalziel, Stefan Kraus, Richard B. Alley, Claudio Berti
GSA Today, December 2009, 19(12), 4-10.

Charles Darwin considered himself to be a geologist and published extensively on many geologic phenomena. He was intrigued with the distribution of erratic boulders and speculated upon their origins. In his accounts of the voyage of the HMS Beagle, Darwin described crystalline boulders of notable size and abundance near Bahia San Sebastian, south of the Strait of Magellan, Tierra del Fuego. Influenced by Charles Lyell's reflections upon slow, vertical movements of crust, submergence, and ice rafting to explain drift, Darwin proposed that the boulders of Bahia San Sebastian were ice-rafted. Benefiting from 170 years of subsequent study of the glacial history of Tierra del Fuego, petrography, and terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide measurements, we revisit the origin of "Darwin's Boulders" at Bahia San Sebastian. We suggest that they, as well as another train of boulders to the west, at Bahia Inutil, represent rock falls of Beagle-type granite from the Cordillera Darwin onto glacial ice flowing into the Bahia Inutil-Bahia San Sebastian lobe. These supraglacial rock avalanche deposits were subsequently elongated into boulder trains by glacial strain during transport and then deposited upon moraines. The cosmogenic nuclide exposure dates support the correlation of Andean glaciations with the marine oxygen isotope record and the glacial chronologies recently proposed for Tierra del Fuego.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

This controversy erupted over estimates of war deaths since World War 2 (1939-1945):

Researchers from Canada, the UK and Sweden have slammed the influential British Medical Journal (BMJ) for publishing an error-filled study on global war deaths, refusing an equivalent rebuttal article and having a flawed peer-review process.

Apparently, the contested article took issue with the fact that Oslo's International Peace Research Institute data show that global war deaths "declined by more than 90 per cent between 1946 and 2002."

"This is not some trivial academic disagreement," says Andrew Mack, director of the Simon Fraser University-based Human Security Report Project (HSRP), which p published a detailed critique of the BMJ's claims in the December issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (JCR).

"Accurate statistics on the health impacts of war are critically important not just for researchers but also for humanitarian organizations whose assistance programs save millions of lives around the world."

The BMJ doesn't deny the problem:

"But the BMJ is well aware that its peer review process is flawed," says Spagat. "A recent study, whose authors include the journal's current editor, revealed that, on average, only a third of the 'major errors' deliberately inserted in a BMJ article were picked up by reviewers."

In what other line of work would such incompetence be accepted? Would you like your electrician to achieve only this level of competence? He only "gets" one third of the electrical safety hazards in your home?

And remember, if you live in the UK, your taxes pay for these scholars to "do their thing."

Adds Mack: "There appears to be no way of effectively rebutting BMJ articles that contain unwarranted -- and damaging -- critiques of the work of other scholars.

A couple of years back, I wrote on the problem of peer review: Often, it is simply the way establishment hacks prevent competition from new information and new interpretations.

Re war deaths, two notes:

- It would hardly be surprising if deaths in battle declined steeply, post World War II, because battlefield medicine has greatly improved. Indeed, it was improving during the war itself (1939-1945), and some sources credit the Allies' victory in part to discovery of penicillin, which restored personnel who might otherwise have been disabled or dead. Plasma, anti-malarials, and other drugs also received a huge boost due to the War.

- Modern warfare increasingly targets civilians. It could be 9-11. Or 7-11. Or it could be someone's granny, shopping at a Halal meat market in Iraq, to prepare a family celebration. When the conflict is between a trained terrorist and your granny, you should expect lw "battlefield" casualties. That is not a battlefield, after all; it is a monstrous crime scene.

- Still, it ought to be possible to maintain another point of view, with solid references. That's one thing peer review should enable, but it is increasingly obvious that peer reviewers do not want to bother.

Anyway, the intelligent design controversy is hardly the only area where peer review can merely maintain a convenient consensus - or tweak beards in a politically correct way.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

1. What makes Darwinism politically correct?

This episode of ID the Future features Robert Crowther interviewing CSC senior fellow Dr. Jonathan Wells on his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Dr. Wells explains the peer-pressure involved with Darwin's theory and shares from his studies in 19th century Darwinian controversies and evolutionary development at Yale and UC Berkeley, respectively.

Listen here.

The book's Web site is here.

In my view, Darwinism is politically correct because it is a tax-funded racket parasitizing real science. It attracts the sort of people who like free form speculation about the tyrannosaur's parenting skills, Neanderthal man's sex life and why homo sapiens (modern man) believes in God (not because some had an encounter with God, of course; such an idea could never be entertained).

2. The Design of Life: What the Evidence of Biological Systems Reveals

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin discusses The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems with author Dr. William Dembski. Is design in nature just an "illusion," as Richard Dawkins proclaims? Dembski and co-author Dr. Jonathan Wells show the answer is "no." Biologists have and continue to use the assumption of design successfully, precisely because design in biology is not an illusion but real.

Listen here. Design is not an illusion, but then neither is the cushy position that current society grants to people who claim it is. Almost any other position, no matter how ridiculous, can be fronted (space aliens, multiple universes ... and I suspect that is only a start.)

3. How to teach responsibly without getting sued?

This episode of ID the Future features Casey Luskin interviewed by Kevin Wirth on the key legal cases involving teachers teaching evolution. What does the case law say about teachers' rights and free speech?

Luskin, a lawyer with a science background, published a survey of case law in Hamline University Law Review to help the public understand what the courts have ruled on the topic of teaching origins.

This survey of twenty-one cases investigates the question many teacher, parents, and students ask: what is legal when it comes to teaching evolution? Can public schools teach scientific critiques of evolution? What does Discovery Institute recommend for teaching in schools? Find out by downloading the survey of case law here.

Listen here.

Two reasons I realized years ago that the legacy mainstream media are gone cats are

a) the inability of the average reporter to get certain basic facts straight, for example:

Doubts about Darwin do not turn on the age of the Earth, but on implausible claims about the origin of high levels of information - you know, the jumbo jet slowly materializes from the scrap heap, with no intelligent input at all ... And so does the trilobite and the tyrannosaur, and man. And that Alfa Romeo you always wanted (but you had to buy a minivan when your wife had twins)? Yeah, really.

b) passive, gullible acceptance of completely stupid claims about human psychology, whose only purpose is to prop up Darwinism.

As I wrote to some friends recently:

I have said this many times, but indulge me while I say it again: The "big bazooms" theory of human evolution - taken seriously by Psychology Today as the biggest truth - is a classic in the field.

Allegedly, men prefer well-endowed women so that their selfish genes can determine whether the woman is fertile.

Oh? So it has nothing to do with the reasons many men prefer big steaks, big mugs of beer, SUVs vs. Golf Minis, bagging a moose vs. bagging a prairie chicken?

Who knew? Who could ever have guessed?

As I have pointed out elsewhere, animals show similar preferences to people.

Wolf packs prefer bringing down a caribou or a beefalo to bringing down a deer. The deer is as much trouble to chase, but doesn't give anywhere near the number of servings.

So if we want to talk about the evolution of the preference for abundance vs. non-abundance, we must go way, way back into mammal or vertebrate evolution. No need to spend a lot of time with Old Stone Age Man.

The only reason for the Darwinist's Old Stone Age Man schtick is to find a question that "evolutionary" psychology can supposedly answer in a materialist way.

I have yet to see it perform better than psychology in real time.

Yet sponsored Darwinist nonsense is everywhere now, and it corrupts both thinking and behaviour.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here we read,

The idea was to correlate findings from his family's brain scans with a parallel analysis of genes thought to be associated with aggression and violence. Changing activity in certain parts of the brain relates to aggression, emotion and the inhibition of impulsiveness. Dr. Fallon's previous research on murderers had suggested that many killers show distinctive patterns in these brain areas.

"There's gonna be bad news, but I don't know where it will pop up," Dr. Fallon said in September, before he had seen the family data.

- Gautam Naik, "What's on Jim Fallon's Mind? A Family Secret That Has Been Murder to Figure Out: Nature Plays a Prank on a Scientist Looking for Traits of a Killer in His Clan", Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2009

Whatever happened to a fundamental rule of medicine that you do not practice on family members – with or without a license?

Naik decently points out what many miss:

The idea of the "born criminal" has a long history and is deeply controversial. Drawing conclusions about the biology of psychopathic murderers is especially hard because data are scarce. Those in jail rarely agree to a genetic or brain analysis. As a result, scientists rely a good deal on inference. While many people can be aggressive, violent and impulsive, only a tiny fraction become psychopathic killers, capable of committing bone-chilling crimes without empathy, remorse or a sense of right and wrong. Dr. Fallon says his research and other findings suggest that psychopathic killers often have lower intelligence than most people, which can be the result of brain damage.

Dr. Fallon and other scientists increasingly believe that violent offenders emerge when three factors are combined: several "violent" genes; damage to certain brain areas; and exposure to extreme trauma and poor parental bonding in childhood. In other words, nature and nurture.

Notice how personal choice has dropped out of the picture.

I don't know about any of this stuff:

"'violent'" genes? Most people want to live and thrive, however misguided their approach. Whether violent crime results depends on where and how they live, what they expect from life, and how it squares with legal and social codes.

"damage to certain brain areas"? Well, that is unlikely to be inherited, but bad memories of brain damaged adults, passed down as stories, may well be a cultural inheritance.

"exposure to extreme trauma and poor parental bonding in childhood"? Sure, but for every person I have met who shipwrecked on the shoals of life on these accounts, I have met at least six who decided, "I will not live the way I learned."

Anyway, in my experience, the dictum that one should not practise on family members is a sound one.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neurosurgery: Does "slice n' dice" cut it, when mental disorders are in question?

Neuroscience and popular culture: How much are science journalists to blame for pop science culture?

Psychology: Think positively - or peel potatoes!

Pop Neuroscience and spirituality: "Dear God, please don't exist, so I can get lucrative assignments, and maybe tenure, teaching easily digested " rot ...

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Go here for the contest and here for the results.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Students of evolution are taught to avoid incorporating the idea of progress to the theory. Law + Chance do not allow the incorporation of an over-riding goal. One Evolution 101 course expresses it this way: "It is tempting to see evolution as a grand progressive ladder with Homo sapiens emerging at the top. But evolution produces a tree, not a ladder - and we are just one of many leaves on the tree." The Darwinian mechanisms of mutation + natural selection emphasise Chance over Law, with the corollary that the evolutionary process is unpredictable. Readers of Stephen Jay Gould will know that this was one of his favourite themes, to which he repeatedly returned. In a recent paper, Simon Conway Morris consciously challenges the status quo and points a way to a different perspective on evolutionary transformation:

"Specifically, I argue that far from its myriad of products being fortuitous and accidental, evolution is remarkably predictable."

Are humans an "evolutionary inevitability" or just one of many leaves on the Tree of Life? (Source here)

Conway Morris has wrestled with the question: why, if evolution is fortuitous and accidental, are there so many evidences of convergence? Over-specialisation has meant scientists escape the overwhelming evidence for convergence being ubiquitous. Their research "tends to track the particularities and peculiarities of a given group and seldom enquires whether there are any wider or deeper sets of explanations". This needs to change, and the advocates of neo-Darwinism need to acknowledge the deficiencies of their theory.

"Here, I will suggest that one central tenet of the current neo-Darwinian synthesis, that evolution is for all intents and purposes open-ended and indeterminate in terms of predictable outcomes, is now open to question. Thus, not only is life suspended between permanently uninhabitable regions that are either locked into crystalline immobility or in continuous and chaotic flux, but that the lines of evolutionary vitality thread through a landscape that leaves evolution with surprisingly few choices. The basis of this view relies on the phenomenon of evolutionary convergence."

We can commend Conway Morris for his willingness to support "the heterodox idea" that there is more predictability in evolutionary biology than the Darwinians will admit. We need scholars who are prepared to think rather than operate within a theoretical straitjacket. However, what Conway Morris does not do is to critique the paradigm that makes "fortuitous and accidental" mechanisms the key to the mystery of life's origins. He thinks that "something is missing" and that he can bolt on something that will somehow turn these stochastic components into an engine for delivering "ubiquitous evolutionary convergence". He wants to do this by bringing in contributions from developmental biology and epigenetics. Key words for the new way of thinking include: emergent phenomena, self-organisation and nonlinear systems.

"[T]hese concepts can be melded with the currency of evolution in the form of developmental constraints (the role of which may be exaggerated) and epigenetics to suggest that indeed something is missing in the Darwinian synthesis."

Is something missing? Hardened Darwinists will interpret this as merely a refinement of their essential mechanisms: with an acknowledgment that living things are products of history: genetic variations and natural selection can only work with the source material that is there. This is how structuralism can be integrated within the evolutionary synthesis. But Darwinists are not showing any signs of acknowledging that anything significant is missing from their theory! The evolution of life is still essentially fortuitous, but the options open for transformation are constrained by history.

Conway Morris does not talk about mechanisms that challenge the "fortuitous" thesis. Rather, he gives numerous examples of striking convergences that allow him to suggest that evolutionary trajectories are predictable. However, the argument presupposes common ancestry and the early (existing in the Precambrian) appearance of life forms that exhibit "an extraordinary degree of complexity". His story effectively starts with complexity and it is this complexity that is transformed as the Tree of Life extends its branches. The process is described as an apparently "baffling series of self-organizations".

"In many cases, we also see that the particular molecules show a remarkable versatility of function in what appear to be unrelated contexts. It is most probable that these molecules are homologous, but in many cases the overall architecture and the iron constraints of active sites (or equivalents) suggest that convergence should not be automatically dismissed. It is also striking how in general the idea that primitive groups are simple, almost skeletal constructions in comparison to their descendants, is simply incorrect and in precursors as diverse as the last common ancestor of the eukaryotes or choanoflagellates we either infer or see an extraordinary degree of complexity. Rather than imagining that this arose by a series of conveniently cryptic prior stages, we may have to face the possibility that evolution involves what to us seem to be a baffling series of self-organizations."

None of the above is understood at the level of mechanism - Conway Morris is developing a theoretical model that tries to make sense of twigs without being able to trace the branches. "What we do not understand is how organisms assemble as exceedingly complex functional entities nor why they repeatedly navigate to convergent solutions." There is no insight here as to how complexity is built from simple precursors - just an appeal to self-organisation. This, however, is the weak point of the argument. The origin of biological information cannot be a matter of self-organisation because DNA is a code. The precursor molecules have physical and chemical bonds that permit all possible different codes to be carried. There is no innate process of organisation that can generate information.

Nevertheless, Conway Morris has put his finger on data that needs an explanation. Working within his adopted paradigm, Law (rather than Chance) must be invoked if there is to be predictability. This is the hope behind the appeal to self-organisation, developmental constraints and epigenetics. Will this deliver predictability? I think the answer to this is "yes" - but in a more limited sense than that intended by Conway Morris. Developmental biology has taken us beyond the genocentric view of organisms. For example, concentration gradients of morphogens regulate tissue differentiation and morphogenesis in multicellular organisms. Where a pattern of development can be described mathematically, the application area is limited to a limited range of organisms. These ideas can be applied, in principle, to predict diversification within the basic types of life, but beyond this, the empirical base is speculative.

This is where design thinking has enormous potential to move the discussion forward. If we allow Design to stand alongside Law and Chance, there are ways to move the discussion of biological information forward and to ensure theoretical ideas are both informed and constrained by empirical research. Conway Morris' descriptions of ID as "anti-evolutionary dogma" and "scientific fiction" fail to do justice to scholars who "in any other respect fail to manifest any obvious sign of mental instability".

How do we know that "convergence" is the right description of the phenomena described in this paper? Could some of them be design motifs? How can the different explanations of Law and Design be evaluated? This is a contribution ID scientists can bring to the table.

Evolution: like any other science it is predictable
Simon Conway Morris
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, (January 12) 2010 365, 133-145 | doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0154

Abstract: Evolutionary biology rejoices in the diversity of life, but this comes at a cost: other than working in the common framework of neo-Darwinian evolution, specialists in, for example, diatoms and mammals have little to say to each other. Accordingly, their research tends to track the particularities and peculiarities of a given group and seldom enquires whether there are any wider or deeper sets of explanations. Here, I present evidence in support of the heterodox idea that evolution might look to a general theory that does more than serve as a tautology ('evolution explains evolution'). Specifically, I argue that far from its myriad of products being fortuitous and accidental, evolution is remarkably predictable. Thus, I urge a move away from the continuing obsession with Darwinian mechanisms, which are entirely uncontroversial. Rather, I emphasize why we should seek explanations for ubiquitous evolutionary convergence, as well as the emergence of complex integrated systems. At present, evolutionary theory seems to be akin to nineteenth-century physics, blissfully unaware of the imminent arrival of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Physics had its Newton, biology its Darwin: evolutionary biology now awaits its Einstein.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The question was,

For a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD, about the unique position of Earth, provide the clearest answer to this second question: Is backwards or forwards time travel really possible, even for particles? Why or why not? What are the consequences if it is true?

Go here for the contest and here for the results.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The question was,

For a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD, about the unique position of Earth, provide the clearest answer the following question: Nine billion dollars and 15 years later, what is the Large Hadron Collider likely to tell us that is worth the cost and trouble?

Go here for the contest and here for the results.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Want to know more about the Amazon.com bestselling book that made the Times Literary Supplement's Top Books of 2009? Robert Deyes has a review of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell.

Click HERE for review.

WORLD Magazine's 12th annual Daniel of the Year does not save lives abroad, as Britain's Caroline Cox and Sudan's Michael Yerko do. Nor does he regularly save lives of the unborn, as Florida's Wanda Cohn does through her pregnancy center work. No, Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, fights to show that those lives have eternal value because they are the work of a Creator and not the product of chance.

This fall Meyer came out with a full account of what science has learned in recent decades: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Harper One, 2009) shows that the cell is incredibly complex and the code that directs its functions wonderfully designed. His argument undercuts macroevolution, the theory that one kind of animal over time evolves into a very different kind. Meyer thus garners media scorn for raining on this year's huge celebration of the birth of Charles Darwin 200 years ago and the publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

More later from the magazine's December 19th release date.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Apparently, evolutionary biologists/psychologists (if there is any difference, I would be glad to know*) are trying to get jobs adding to the cost burden of medical schools, fronting their speculations to doctors in training, a friend advises. See this story by Daniel Cressey ("Groups say med school training must evolve," Nature Medicine 15, 1338 (2009) doi:10.1038/nm1209-1338a, paywall, of course):

Medical training must adapt to include coursework covering evolutionary biology, according to a group of leading researchers.Momentum for such change seems to be building.

I bet. In an age of skepticism about all the nonsense evolutionary biologists front, they need to attach themselves to a system that people are still willing to fund.

"The case for ensuring that physicians and medical researchers are able to use evolutionary biology just as fully as other basic sciences is compelling," says Randolph Nesse, of the University of Michigan, lead author of the paper. "The constraints that inhibit change are severe, however. Most medical schools do not have a single evolutionary biologist on the faculty."

Nesse's paper cites examples of where evolutionary knowledge can benefit those working in medicine. An awareness of why humans have evolved the fever response, for example, could help doctors understand when it is safe to use drugs to block fever.

Rubbish. Pharmaceutical studies on living patients in real time do that. No one proposes to give the drugs to Old Stone Age Man, but rather to a toddler, an overworked near-retirement executive, or a frail older senior. The latter two would not even have been alive in the Old Stone Age.

As I have written to friends,

... Joe Roofer shows up in the family doctor's office griping about his arthritis.

Who cares if Stone Age man had arthritis? Joe Roofer is paying, one way or another, for what helps him now. He must get back to work and supervise his men ...

Sure, speculations about Old Stone Age Man are interesting.

But "interesting" doesn't cut it in medicine - and I have plenty of relatives in medicine who can tell me so.

What works for Joe Roofer today cuts it. So Joe can hop back on a ladder, supervise his men, please his clients, and meet his payroll Friday.

Medicine is real time. So what use is Darwinism when we are dealing with people over 60 years of age - a lifespan rarely attained in practice in ancient times, and irrelevant to natural selection?

Bioethics is the major concern now because most people who need significant medical care are old.

Oldsters take longer to heal than youngsters but if they stick it out, they often live many more years than expected, under modern conditions. But they are on pension, so ...

This story owes nothing to Darwinism and no Darwinist was abused in making it. But anyone who cannot see where all this is going is half asleep, in my view. Remember eugenics? We are now seeing it at the back end, rather than the front end.

One friend noted in response to my mug-waving, "Two words. Downright ridiculous." Someone she knows is in medical school and is busy enough without learning atheist culture's creation myth.

*Actually, I suspect there isn't really any difference between evolutionary biology and "evolutionary psychology", which is why the evolutionary biologist is forever linked to his idiot siamese twin, the "evolutionary psychologist" (= "Why women love shopping," "Why men are big spenders," etc.)

If evolutionary biologists wanted to denounce the nonsense, they could sever the skin tie, but then they'd be expected to address the nonsense they front themselves. How many months has it been since the "Ida" fossil rolled through pop culture?

Don't tell me science is "self-correcting." Ida shouldn't have got anywhere near the traction it did. In this area, science is about as self-correcting as a driverless car heading off a cliff.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist, my blog on the intelligent design controversy:

Coffee!! Marxists celebrate Darwin, denounce design - and line up all afternoon for sausages, unless they are Party members, in which case ...

Intelligent design and elite culture: These are the people who invented silk stockings for men, so what should I
expect?

This is not a coffee moment: Canadian columnist advocates worldwide one-child policy - fast back to the Stone Age

More coffee!! Your doctor needs to know what would have worked for someone's hypothetical reconstruction of Stone Age man before she can treat you effectively ...

Coffee!!: Should we reject Darwinism due to its obvious support for new atheism?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Ulrich Kutschera is a German biologist and Darwin scholar who has reached the conclusion that Darwin's 1859 treatise conveys a "philosophical imperative". By this is meant the strict separation of "scientific fact and theories from religious dogmas". Kutschera rejects the claims of some that "evolutionary theory and Bible-based myths are compatible". From an ID perspective, Kutschera's essay warrants a critical analysis because there are points of agreement and major areas of disagreement.

Sailing along with Darwin - Ulrich Kutschera is third from the right (Credit: N. Spencer, source here).

Let us start with the central claim that Darwin "strictly" separated scientific facts and theorising from religion. It is fair to say this was his stated approach - but did he achieve it? Darwin presented himself as working in the Baconian tradition, but how did he implement induction? In his writings, he makes frequent references to the religious concept of creation. Characteristic of his reasoning is that a Creator could not be responsible for the world portrayed in On the Origin of Species. Repeatedly, theological reasons are provided to support Darwin's conclusion. ID authors have drawn attention to this style of argument: notably Nelson (1998) and Hunter (2001).

Once it is acknowledged that theological arguments can be used in scientific discourse to reject design and advance evolution, then it follows that responses to these arguments which affirm design are also, in principle, legitimate within science. This is not, of course, what Kutschera and his colleagues want. Significantly, Darwin advocates never interact with ID authors about these matters.

Continuing with the core theme of Kutschera's paper, Darwin's metaphysical stance is described as philosophical naturalism. This means that only natural causes are admitted within science (although exceptions are permitted for archaeological science and forensic science where evidences of intelligent design are always of great interest). ID advocates have generally agreed with Kutschera regarding Darwin's philosophical naturalism, but not with the way he has reached this conclusion.

Kutschera presents the young Darwin as someone accepting the 'natural theology' of William Paley, but who gradually lost his Bible-based beliefs. This interpretation of events can only be followed if Darwin's autobiographical writings are regarded as authoritative. However, this leads to an approach to Darwin studies that is short on critical appraisal. This is significant because numerous statements made by Darwin appear to some of us as either inconsistent or incoherent. An example would be Darwin's explanation of his use of the word "Creator" in the last paragraph of the Origin - discussed below.

Without going into detail, an alternative interpretation of Darwin's spiritual pilgrimage is as follows. Darwin learned his naturalistic philosophy from his father and grandfather. It was reinforced during his time at Edinburgh University. However, he was forced to question these beliefs at Cambridge, where he was deeply influenced by Christians (notably John Stevens Henslow and Adam Sedgwick) and then on the Beagle (Robert FitzRoy). However, it was Charles Lyell, through his writings on geology, who had a more profound ideological impact and Darwin emerged from his travels fully signed up as an advocate of philosophical naturalism.

Another area where Darwin enthusiasts promote their own reading of history is the furor theologicus, highlighted in the title of Kutschera's article. The fury of theologians is supposed to have been poured on poor Darwin's head, making him insert the 'unscientific' word "Creator" in the last paragraph of the Origin. Darwin's 1863 letter to Hooker is quoted to reveal an author who had "long regretted" truckling to public opinion. What Kutschera does not discuss is why Darwin retained the offending words in every subsequent edition of his book. Also, Kutschera does not interact with Van Wyhe's (2007) paper on why Darwin did not publish the Origin before 1859. He shows (convincingly) that Darwin was not in the least troubled by being out of step with theologians or the public. His concern was to gain acceptance of his theory among his peers.

"[N]o unambiguous evidence has been found that Darwin was particularly concerned about a hostile reception. In fact, all of the evidence that does exist points to other forms of expected objections, gaps in the theory or its evidence for example. None of Darwin's written considerations of difficulties suggests an unwillingness or even a reluctance to go public." (Van Wyhe, 2007, p.184-5)

Darwin's ideas received far more criticism from fellow scientists than from theologians. What Kutschera totally fails to acknowledge is this scientific opposition to Darwinism. The furor theologicus is mentioned several times but never documented. The result is a distortion of history.

Kutschera views Darwinism through a filter of positivist philosophy. There is no recognition that Darwin adopted a theoretical framework of uniformitarianism and naturalism with which he interpreted the data. He claimed to be an inductive thinker, but demonstrated deduction. Nevertheless, Kutschera writes:
"[T]he attempt to depict evolution, labelled as "Darwinism", as though it were a political or religious ideology, [. . .] is a misrepresentation of the way scientists work and think. Evolutionary biology is a non-dogmatic system of modifiable theories that is based exclusively on empirical facts and data."

The real problem in this paper is not that it presents an air-brushed Darwin, but that it appears in a journal designed to be read by teachers and students. What is the message getting through to schools and colleges? Instead of help in developing a critical analysis of the issues, young people are fed with propaganda. These students ought to be assessing the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of Darwinism. They ought to be evaluating the effectiveness of the theory to explain empirical facts and data. Instead, it looks as though anyone seeking to apply critical thinking skills to Darwinism will be regarded as guilty of subverting science!

Darwin's Philosophical Imperative and the Furor Theologicus
U. Kutschera
Evolution: Education and Outreach, (December 2009) 2(4), 688-694 | DOI 10.1007/s12052-009-0166-8

Abstract: In 1859 Charles Darwin submitted a manuscript entitled "An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection" to John Murray III, who published the text under the title On the Origin of Species. On many pages of this book, Darwin contrasts his naturalistic theory that explains the transmutation and diversification of animals and plants with the Bible-based belief that all species were independently created. On the last page of the first edition, published in November 1859, where Darwin speculated on the origin of the earliest forms of life from which all other species have descended, no reference to "the Creator" is made. In order to conciliate angry clerics and hence to tame the erupted furor theologicus, Darwin included the phrase "by the Creator" in the second edition of 1860 and in all subsequent versions of his book (sixth ed. 1872). However, in a letter of 1863, Darwin distanced himself from this Bible-based statement and wrote that by creation he means "appeared by some wholly unknown process." In 1871, Darwin proposed a naturalistic origin-of-life-concept but did not dare to mention his "warm little pond hypothesis" in the sixth definitive edition of the Origin (1872). I conclude that the British naturalist strictly separated scientific facts and theories from religious dogmas (Darwin's "philosophical imperative") and would not endorse current claims by the Catholic Church and other Christian associations that evolutionary theory and Bible-based myths are compatible.

See also:
Van Wyhe, J., 2007, Mind The Gap: Did Darwin Avoid Publishing His Theory For Many Years? Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 61, 177-205 | doi:10.1098/rsnr.2006.0171

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

(Note: Go here for Contest 16 ("Are materialist atheists smarter than other types of believers?") and here for Contest 17 ("Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion?"). )

We have, we are told, three brains - reptilian, mammalian, and primate. Here is a conventional science explanation, and here is the pop psychology that results.

It all sounds bit too neat to me, for two reasons: First, all the areas are interconnected, and second, it is not clear that reptiles uniformly fail emotionally compared to many mammals. See here, for example.

Honestly, it all sounds like pop psychology, straight from the airport paperback kiosk to the bored passenger. But I would be glad to know more. Here is a popularrendition of "reptile brain" theory, as employed by some lawyers in law courts.

So, for a free copy of The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper One 2007), which argues for non-materialist neuroscience, answer this question: If so, how? If not, why not? What can it really tell us?

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 18 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Also, here are some posts at The Mindful Hack that may be of some use or interest:

Reptile brain: Even reptiles don't have one, or not exactly, anyway

Rooks in captivity show more feats using tools. [How come some birds are so smart and others are fairly stupid?]

Great majority of neuroscientists on wrong track?

Is your brain full of anachronistic junk?

Reptilian brain a barrier to investment?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, it certainly sounds like debunking to me. According to the evolutionary psychologists, either compassion is a useful gene or it somehow spreads our selfish genes or it is an accidental "spandrel" in our makeup. Or whatever. It's not a choice, and it's not identification with another human being derived from the independent reality of a mind thinking today. Humans do it the way ants might do something else.

Evolutionary psychologists never feel the need to debunk rage or deceit, for example, so why compassion?

Here, I reference Robert ("Non-Zero") Wright's effort to explain the evolution of compassion. See also Clive Hayden here and Steve Pinker here.

Darwinists and materialists in general keep scratching this itch. Why? What is the threat? Also, how convincing are their claims that society will be better off if we accept their version?

So, for a free copy of The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper One 2007): Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion? What's in it for them?

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 17 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

(Note: For the record, compassion is not necessarily a virtue. The social worker who inappropriately identifies with an abusive mom, as opposed to the child she is employed by the government to protect, is showing misdirected compassion that can end in the child's death. Compassion must be allied with reason and virtue in order to count as reasonable or virtuous.)

Notes on compassion that may be of interest:

Psychology: Compassion is an emotion, not a virtue unless disciplined, prof says

The philosopher and his mother, a moral tale

Entrepreneur doctor honours promise

Desperate atheist rage

Is the altruism spot edging out the God spot in pop science?

The power of one: Compassion is strictly a one-to-one thing

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At any rate, so claimed a 1986 study about which Regis Nicoll writes here.

I say "smarter than other types of believers" because atheism is a form of belief like any other. Usually, in North America today, materialist atheism is meant. There are non-materialist varieties of atheism, but they are not usually strident, like the new (materialist) atheists.

Interestingly, materialist atheism tends to develop structures similar to other religious institutions (the latest is summer camps for kids). It all reminds me of Julian Huxley's 1959 proposal for a religion of evolution - but that for another day.

So, for a free copy of the The Spiritual Brain, which argues for non-materialist neuroscience, provide the best answer to this question: Are materialist atheists really smarter than other people? By what measure would we know? What difference does social privilege - such as tenure at a tax-funded institution and general acceptance in popular media make in determining who is smart?

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 16 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

Here's a bit of background on the subject.

Atheism and popular culture: Religious commitment as mild dementia

Albert Einstein on the importance of faith in the reality of what we see

An event I did not happen to attend: British atheist graces Toronto

Spirituality and popular culture: Amazon's #1 atheist book is Christian

Religion: There is atheism, and then there is materialist atheism

The new atheists: Santa's sleigh came and went, and never gave them what they needed

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The Andes mountains opened up on both sides of us as we drove on one July afternoon along a highway that links Quito, the capital of Ecuador, with the smaller town of Ambato almost three hours further south. The setting sun shone head-on upon two volcanic giants- Tungurahua and Cotopaxi with its snow covered peak just visible through the cordillera. I had traveled along this road many times in previous years and had been repeatedly awe-struck by the sheer beauty of the surrounding land. Today fields extend as far as the eye can see, with the lights of small communities and villages illuminating the mountain slopes.

Volcanoes that periodically eject dangerous lava flows are a rich source of soil nutrients for Ecuadorian farmers. Still, in the eyes of organic chemists such as Claudia Huber and Guenter Wachtershauser there exists a more pressing reason for studying the world's 'lava spewers'- one that has everything to do with the unguided manufacture of prebiotic compounds (1). Huber and Wachtershauser's 2006 Science write-up on the synthesis of amino acids using potassium cyanide and carbon monoxide mixtures was heralded as groundbreaking primarily because of the 'multiplicity of pathways' through which biotic components could be made using these simple volcanic compounds (1).

Others have similarly weighed in with their own thoughts on volcanic origins (2-6). In the words of one notable Russian research team "the opportunity to define the pressure and temperature limits of [volcanic] microbiological activity as well as constrain its rate of evolution in a primordial environment is an exciting one, with implications for the origin of life on earth and existence of life elsewhere in the solar system" (3).

Whether it be Darwin's warm little pond or contemporary speculations over life-seeding environments we see in both a search for continuity from the non-living to the living- a search that was exemplified in Walt Disney's color and sound extravaganza Fantasia almost seventy years ago. Disney popularized origin of life theories by artistically proclaiming that volcanoes exploding and comets colliding were all that were needed to get life under way. According to such a portrayal the evolution of more complex multi-cellular forms would then naturally follow (7). Disney enthusiasts will no doubt find comfort in the decade-old New York Times prescription for a life-yielding brew:

"Drop a handful of fool's gold (the mineral iron pyrites) and a sprinkle of nickel into water, stir in a strong whiff of rotten eggs (caused by the gas hydrogen sulfide) and carbon monoxide, heat mixture near the crackle and hiss of a volcano and let simmer for an eon." (8)

Along a similar thread, journalist Tony Fitzpatrick cavalierly asserted that "conditions favorable for hydrocarbon synthesis also could be favorable for other life ingredients and complex organic polymers, leading...eventually to all sorts of cells and diverse organisms" (9). Of course skeptics of such depictions have their own armory of scientifically-valid reasons for denying that naturalistic earth models could have given us anything more than a geothermal sludge.

Perhaps the most persuasive of these comes from philosopher Stephen Meyer who in his most recent book Signature In The Cell supplied a mathematical treatise on the synthesis of bio-molecules (10). Following in the footsteps of fellow ID advocate William Dembski, Meyer has done us all a great service by showing how the chance assembly of a 150 amino-acid protein (1 in 10exp164) pales in front of the available probabilistic resources of our universe (10exp139 is the maximum number of events that could have occurred since the big bang) (10). In other words, we are stopped dead in our tracks by a probabilistic impasse of the highest order before we have even begun assessing the geological plausibility of competing origin of life scenarios.

The scientific method commits us to finding the best explanation for the phenomena we observe. Drawing from the opinions of NIH biologist Peter Mora, Meyer shows us how the chance hypothesis- that purports to explain how life arose without recourse to design or necessity- has been found wanting particularly in light of the ever-growing picture of the complexity of the cell (10). But the debate-clincher in Meyer's expose comes from his comprehensive summarization of the bellyaches associated with chemist Stanley Miller's controversial spark discharge apparatus (10).

Former colleagues of Miller concede that the highly reducing conditions he used in his experiments could not have been the mainstay of prebiotic earth (4). Nevertheless they further posit that localized atmospheric conditions around volcanic plums may have been reducing after all and that these could have given rise to life-seeding compounds (4). In their assessment:

"Even if the overall atmosphere was not reducing, localized prebiotic synthesis could have been effective. Reduced gases and lightning associated with volcanic eruptions in hot spots or island arc-type systems could have been prevalent on the early Earth before extensive continents formed. In these volcanic plumes, HCN, aldehydes, and ketones may have been produced, which, after washing out of the atmosphere, could have become involved in the synthesis of organic molecules. Amino acids formed in volcanic island systems could have accumulated in tidal areas, where they could be polymerized by carbonyl sulfide, a simple volcanic gas that has been shown to form peptides under mild conditions." (4)

Of course with so many 'could-haves' and 'may-haves' such a picture leaves us sitting on a vacuous flow of speculation rather than on a substantive bedrock of firm evidence. For seasoned biologist David Deamer the realization of implausibility, at least for a direct volcanic origin, comes from his own direct observations:

"Deamer carried with him a version of the "primordial soup"- a mixture of compounds like those a meteorite could have delivered to the early Earth, including a fatty acid, amino acids, phosphate, glycerol, and the building blocks of nucleic acids. Finding a promising-looking boiling pool on the flanks of an active volcano, he poured the mixture in and then took samples from the pool at various intervals for analysis back in the lab at UCSC. The results were strikingly negative: life did not emerge, no membranes assembled themselves, and no amino acids combined into proteins. Instead, the added chemicals quickly vanished, mostly absorbed by clay particles in the pool. Instead of supporting life, the bubbling pool had snuffed it out before it began." (6)

Not only has Meyer's probabilistic analysis supplied us with the odds that end the discussion for 'chance-philes', but contemporary extravagations over prebiotic earth have done nothing to bolster their credibility. We are left with little choice but to discard chance as a serious contender in the 'life origins' debate.

Literature Cited
1. Claudia Huber and Guenter Wachtersheuser (2006) a-Hydroxy and a-Amino Acids Under Possible Hadean, Volcanic Origin-of-Life Conditions, Science, Vol 314, pp. 630-632

2. A.J Teague, T.M Seward, A.P Gize, T. Hall (2005) The Organic Chemistry of Volcanoes: Case Studies at Cerro Negro, Nicaragua and Oldoinyo Lengai, Tanzania, American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #B23D-04

3.John Eichelberger, Alexey Kiryukhin, and Adam Simon (2009) The Magma-Hydrothermal System at Mutnovsky Volcano, Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, Scientific Drilling, No. 7, March , 2009, pp. 54-59

4. Adam Johnson, H. James Cleaves, Jason Dworkin, Daniel Glavin, Antonio Lazcano, Jeffrey L. Bada (2008) The Miller Volcanic Spark Discharge Experiment. Science 17 October 2008: Vol. 322, p. 404

5. David Grinspoon (2009) This Volcano Loves You, Denver Museum Of Nature & Science, COMMunity Blogs, See http://community.dmns.org/blogs/planetwaves/archive/2009/03/19/this-volcano-loves-you.aspx

6.Chandra Shekhar (2006) Chemist explores the membranous origins of the first living cell, UC Santa Cruz, Currents Online, See http://currents.ucsc.edu/05-06/04-03/deamer.asp

7.Fantasia, Walt Disney Home Video, Copyright by the Walt Disney Company, 1940

8. Nicholas Wade (1999) Evidence Backs Theory Linking Origins of Life to Volcanoes, New York Times, Friday, April 11, 1997

9.Tony Fitzpatrick (2000) Life's origins: Researchers find intriguing possibility in volcanic gases, http://record.wustl.edu/archive/2000/04-20-00/articles/origins.html

10. Stephen Meyer (2009) Signature In The Cell: DNA And The Evidence For Intelligent Design, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, pp. 215-228

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Can evolution explain religion?

In a recent issue of the leading journal Science , Elizabeth Culotta offers a variety of speculations in an article titled "On the Origin of Religion." Explaining religion without God is quite the growth industry these days among evolutionary psychologists. Some argue that religion exists because it increases evolutionary fitness (survival of the fittest). Others argue that it makes no difference to fitness. It is merely a glitch in our thinking that doesn't kill us off. They can't both be right, but they could both be wrong. Let's see.

For the rest, go here.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience and spirituality, plus related issues

Can evolution explain religion?

Neuroscience and society: Emotional harm?

Neuroscience and society: Hate Area of Brain Identified?

How much attention should we pay to pundit predictions?

Intellectual freedom: The difference the blogosphere makes

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

With millions of eyes on Copenhagen, this seems an appropriate time to ask whether ID thinking has any relevance to understanding the Earth's environment. Can design concepts help us weigh the diverse and often conflicting messages? I think ID is helpful, because features of the Earth's environments and ecologies start to take on new meaning. In this blog, I am thinking particularly of negative feedback mechanisms. Human design engineers will use negative feedback to promote stability and positive feedback to amplify an input signal. They select the mechanisms they need to achieve the desired effect. By analogy, if the Earth is designed for life, we would expect to see negative feedback mechanisms predominating to achieve stable environments. What do we find?

Higher levels of carbon dioxide have accelerated the growth rates of quaking aspen, one of North America's most important and widespread deciduous trees (Source here)

In the scientific news recently are two research papers relevant to biological feedback mechanisms. The first concerns the quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides), a dominant species in many northern forest ecosystems. "Aspen growth has increased an average of 53% over the past five decades, primarily in response to the 19.2% rise in ambient CO2 levels."

"Trees are already responding to a relatively nominal increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 50 years," says Rick Lindroth, a UW-Madison professor of ecology and an expert on plant responses to climate change. [. . .] The study's findings are important as the world's forests, which cover about 30 percent of the Earth's land surface, play an important role in regulating climate and sequestering greenhouses gases. The forests of the Northern Hemisphere, in particular, act as sinks for carbon dioxide, helping to offset the increase in levels of the greenhouse gas, widely viewed as a threat to global climate stability.

A second study is concerned with the impact of fertilisers on the species diversity of grasslands. These chemicals more than double the availability of nitrogen and whilst this stimulates some plants to thrive, others are quickly out-competed and they die off.

"In a long-term open-air experiment, grassland assemblages planted with 16 species were grown under all combinations of ambient and elevated CO2 and ambient and elevated N. Over 10 years, elevated N reduced species richness by 16% at ambient CO2 but by just 8% at elevated CO2. This resulted from multiple effects of CO2 and N on plant traits and soil resources that altered competitive interactions among species. Elevated CO2 thus ameliorated the negative effects of N enrichment on species richness."

These are but two examples of negative feedback to promote stability. There have been many examples like this in the past, and there will be many more to come. Examples of positive feedback are rare. The effect this has in my mind is to reinforce the thought that the Earth's environments and ecosystems have a robustness about them. This means that when a catastrophe comes, like the eruption of Mt St Helens volcano, recolonisation rarely takes as long as was first anticipated. Whilst this does not prove the Earth is designed, the marks of design are easy to find and the evidence is fully consistent with design.

How does this relate to Copenhagen? A frequently heard message is that the Earth is heading for a doomsday crisis: rapid melting of ice caps, rapid sea-level rise, ocean currents that flip and runaway climate change, etc. These scenarios all invoke positive feedback mechanisms and avalanche processes. What seems to be overlooked is the dominance of negative feedback processes, many of which we are not yet aware of, that counter such dramatic changes. One way to handle such thinking is to analyse feedback mechanisms that we know are operating and check whether they are positive or negative. If mainly positive, the case for sustainable green energy is strong. However, if the findings show mainly negative feedback, it is fair to conclude that the predictors of doomsday are alarmists. We still need to work towards a sustainable future, but intelligent evolution (rather than revolution) will be the agenda.

Rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 have increased growth in natural stands of quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides)
Christopher T. Cole, Jon E. Anderson, Richard L. Lindroth, Donald M. Waller
Global Change Biology, Published Online: Oct 22 2009 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.02103.x

Abstract: As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, temperate and boreal forests in the Northern Hemisphere are gaining importance as carbon sinks. Quantification of that role, however, has been difficult due to the confounding effects of climate change. Recent large-scale experiments with quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides), a dominant species in many northern forest ecosystems, indicate that elevated CO2 levels can enhance net primary production. Field studies also reveal that droughts contribute to extensive aspen mortality. To complement this work, we analyzed how the growth of wild aspen clones in Wisconsin has responded to historical shifts in CO2 and climate, accounting for age, genotype (microsatellite heterozygosity), and other factors. Aspen growth has increased an average of 53% over the past five decades, primarily in response to the 19.2% rise in ambient CO2 levels. CO2-induced growth is particularly enhanced during periods of high moisture availability. [. . .] Owing to aspen's role as a foundation species in many North American forest ecosystems, CO2-stimulated growth is likely to have repercussions for numerous associated species and ecosystem processes.

Elevated CO2 Reduces Losses of Plant Diversity Caused by Nitrogen Deposition
Peter B. Reich
Science, 326, (4 December 2009), 1399-1402 | DOI: 10.1126/science.1178820

Abstract: The interactive effects of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and elevated nitrogen (N) deposition on plant diversity are not well understood. This is of concern because both factors are important components of global environmental change and because each might suppress diversity, with their combined effects possibly additive or synergistic. In a long-term open-air experiment, grassland assemblages planted with 16 species were grown under all combinations of ambient and elevated CO2 and ambient and elevated N. Over 10 years, elevated N reduced species richness by 16% at ambient CO2 but by just 8% at elevated CO2. This resulted from multiple effects of CO2 and N on plant traits and soil resources that altered competitive interactions among species. Elevated CO2 thus ameliorated the negative effects of N enrichment on species richness.

See also:

Collins, S.L. Biodiversity Under Global Change, Science, 326 (4 December 2009), 1353-1354 | DOI: 10.1126/science.1183271

Devitt, T. Greenhouse gas carbon dioxide ramps up aspen growth. University of Wisconsin-Madison News (4 December, 2009)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A philosopher wrote to some friends, including me, with the following problem: He was tired of the stupidity that passes for discussion over at certain Darwinist blogs that we will leave unnamed at present. He proposed to engage the bloggers and commenters in discussion.

Well, he certainly isn't the only person who has proposed this idea to me recently, and I offer no advice, only an observation: Nearly eighty percent of the academic evolutionary biologists are pure naturalists = no God and no free will. My friend intended confronting the Internet entities that are attracted to these key Darwinists, and help them out by pouring abuse on anyone who disputes the Law given on Mount Improbable.

My friend tells me, "... this is the strategy of the skunks. We need to let them stink alone and turn our attention elsewhere." Sensing I should say something in reply, I responded,

I hope you do not expect too much.

Science today is in a state of corruption, as Climategate shows.

The key problem is overreaching. Pretending to know things we don't in a very complex world, and using our pretense as an opportunity to promote an agenda to society.

Physicist Larry Krauss who spoke at our national science writers' meet in May, is an atheist who knows exactly how the universe will end, for sure, due to "science."

Look, every apocalyptic nut in a "The End Is Near" sandwich board knows that too.

Similarly, the Climategate scientists, their spinoff industries, and their media enablers know that human-caused global warming is true - and they know it in an essentially occult way.

The reason they behave as they do around data is the same as the reason Madam Rosa (a supposed psychic) does. Once people have decided to jettison facts in favour of what they need to believe - or need others to believe - they must protect a large and growing deficit.

One way of protecting the deficit from an honest evaluation is to attempt to discredit those who know about it and speak out. This works better if a mystique surrounds them (= we are "science") and if they are well thought of by elite social groups (= we support "science").

Darwinism is no different. In the absence of a large body of clearly established facts, speculation reigns triumphant. As the press release on Kombuisia (an Antarctic fossil) shows, publicity is often pursued for undisguised political ends. We really do not know very much about this very long extinct animal at all. But it can be co-opted for the global warming uproar.

Hence the chorus of ridicule you will face from the Darwinists and their hangers-on. They need Darwinism to be true, both for philosophical and pragmatic reasons, and treat as enemies of the truth anyone who questions it - and on so poor a ground as lack of evidence! What is the world coming to?

If evidence cannot be found, it will be grandfathered, manipulated, or speculated into existence. Anyone who doubts this process is labelled an "enemy of science," which saves a lot of bother with evidence.

Are people today truly afraid of science? Let's think this one out. Assume I have cancer, and the prognosis is poor. However, cancer researchers come up with a treatment protocol that scores a high success rate (without obvious ethical failings). Would I refuse to taxi down to the clinic to get it pronto, because of some theory about science?

In my experience, very few people are anti-science when a science fact base is demonstrated. If most patients (including myself) in this hypothetical case go into long-term remission, the fact base is demonstrated.

It is the same with crop science. Few farmers in the Third World turned down the Green Revolution, which is why the UN is now obsessing about a worldwide obesity problem, instead of the formerly more common “walking skeletons” problem.

Note that, in neither case does anyone much care what naysayers think. So there is no need for "Climategate" tactics in these matters.

But today, too much of what is called “science” is protected from honest evaluation by obfuscation, appeals to authority, attempts to control science media, concealment, labelling those who cannot replicate the results as cranks, persecution of dissenters, and pretending that speculation is evidence, among other unconstructive responses. Say what you want about that stuff, it is not a matrix for new discoveries.

I have every confidence that my friend will find a way to make the best use of his time.

Incidentally, skunks don't stink alone. Why be a skunk apart from the chance to stink in someone's face? That's the whole point.

Also at the Post-Darwinist, my blog on the intelligent design controversy:

Darwinism and popular culture: Socrates, the employment line forms out back, eight blocks from here, in front of a boarded-up door ...

Interview with me: What makes O'Leary tic - but those Word Guild people have ways of making me toc

Human evolution: Now "the Hobbit" may revise "major tenets of human evolution"?

Evolutionary psychology: If they are going to chase their tails anyway, why don't they stick to origin of life?

(Note: This series may sometimes be interrupted by news from the crisis in intellectual freedom in Canada. If you are not interested, just scroll down.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Win a free Privileged Planet DVD, courtesy the producers, for the best post answering any of the following questions:

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 13: The Large Hadron Collider is back up and running, but why?

Nine billion dollars and 15 years later, what is the Large Hadron Collider likely to tell us that is worth the cost and trouble?

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 14: Is backwards or forwards time travel really possible?

Two physicists have suggested that Hadron's woes are due to particles travelling back in time. Their theory has been received with the amusement one might expect, but it raises an interesting question, one that is a staple of sci-fi literature - is forward or backward time travel possible, even for particles?

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 15: Can Darwinism - or any evolution theory - help us predict life on other planets?

At Britain's Telegraph (November 04, 2009), Tom Chivers advises that "Darwinian evolutionary theory will help find alien life, says Nasa scientist."

Here are the contest rules, not many. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Enter as many as you like.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist, my blog on the intelligent design controversy:

Afternoon coffee: If Darwinists worked in the private sector

Speciation: It’s all in how you play the tune?

Discovery Institutesuing California Science Center over alleged undisclosed documents

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

As many of us commence our holiday festivities toasting the year's end while earnestly drawing up personal lists of events that have shaped our lives, I would like to take a brief look at three achievements in the biological sciences- two historical and one more recent- that have struck me as nothing short of momentous in their significance. The first is the publication of a book which today continues to be an outstanding and extremely readable overview of the state of research in the genetics of animal embryology. The second is a landmark study that has brought into sharp focus the molecular mechanisms through which specific epigenetic factors modulate animal behavior. The third is the functional characterization of recBCD- a DNA-unwinding protein complex that plays a crucial role in bacterial recombination. I consider the scientists involved in each of these achievements to be pioneers- 'podium grabbers' who have performed medal-winning science in their respective fields of expertise.

I begin with accomplished Drosophila biologist Peter Lawrence who in his 1992 volume The Making Of A Fly: The Genetics Of Animal Design detailed with inimitable clarity how the patterning of body plans during embryogenesis is dependent on 'positional information' - the program through which cells recognize their positions within the body and differentiate accordingly. As Lawrence so eloquently described, individual cells recognize their positional coordinates through the activities of complex proteins called morphogens that form highly specified concentration gradients across the embryo.

Morphogens tend to be transcription factors that exert their effects by activating gene-specific promoters. In all there are four independent morphogen systems that determine embryonic patterning: (i) the anteroposterior bicoid protein gradient, (ii) the posterior Nanos protein gradient, (iii) the torso protein terminal system that defines the head and tail areas and (iv) the dorsoventral system which relies upon the activation of a cellular receptor called Toll. These four systems determine the fate of cells by acting as triggers for specialization. Strikingly each system exhibits a high degree of specification. That is, particular genes are only activated above defined morphogen concentration thresholds. Indeed dramatic experiments have shown just how disastrous variations in these thresholds can be to development.

The hierarchical nature of morphogenetic activation is the overarching feature of Lawrence's narrative. Gradient built upon gradient supply the different levels of genetic interpretation while so-called 'gap genes' play a critical role in the development of thoracic and abdominal body regions. Lawrence has written the story of embryogenesis in a language that debutant biologists can easily understand. His enviable ability to weave factual detail with the relevant experimental work makes The Making Of The Fly in every sense unique.

Beyond embryogenesis, the post-natal experiences of animals contribute to the shaping of long term behavior- a factor which I now consider in my second medal-winning choice. It has long been known that events during the early life of rodents have a marked effect on mental and physical health in adulthood. In particular mood and cognitive abilities can be adversely altered following prolonged periods of infant-mother separation. Animals experiencing such a maternal deficit during their early days later suffer from extreme hypersensitivities to stress-inducers. Now a group at the Max-Planck Institute Of Psychiatry in Germany has drawn a direct link between such behavioral anomalies and the methylation state of well-defined regions of DNA.

More specifically, infant-mother separation has been shown to cause a reduction in methylation of enhancers for the arginine vasopressin (AVP) hormone gene increasing the expression of AVP and ultimately disturbing brain endocrine hormone function. The resulting phenotypic changes are nothing short of remarkable- a significant loss of memory and decreased mobility in affected mice. Encouragingly these changes can be partially reversed using AVP receptor agonists- a finding that could have important medical ramifications given that these same enhancer regions are to be found across species including humans.

"This is the first study to depict a molecular mechanism by which stress early in life can cause effects later in life" McGill University epigeneticist Moshe Szyf noted in an interview with The Scientist magazine. The so-called hypomethylation of the AVP enhancer region was specific to an area of the brain that is intimately involved in stress related hormone release. The Max-Planck group further characterized the methylation-state interpretation enzymes, notably a protein called MeCP2, that couple DNA methylation to transcriptional repression. MeCP2 in particular represses transcription of AVP by binding to well-defined methylated regions of DNA. In animals suffering from maternal deficit, such a repression is reversed.

Nanomachines such as those that regulate transcription and DNA replication are ever-present throughout nature. A hot favorite of mine, the bacterial recombination recBCD complex, is also my third and final medal-winning choice. Andrew Taylor and Gerald Smith from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle have brought the recBCD complex to life by showing how recB and recD operate as motors that allow the entire complex to travel along vast stretches of DNA. If either recB or recD de-couples from its DNA track the other is still there to guide the complex along in much the same way that an airplane with one engine down keeps flying albeit at a greatly reduced efficiency.

The recBCD complex epitomizes the general picture of a bacterial cell with all its components interacting in the most exquisite fashion to achieve highly specified functions. It is clear from Taylor and Smith's work that essential cellular processes require multi-component machines that mirror in concept and exceed in precision those that are used in our own designs. Coupling systems that resemble cable cars, monorail trains and tramways work in the cell ensuring that important cargo arrives where it is needed at exactly the right time.

So there we have it- a selection of biology 'faves' to ring in the holiday season. Between bites of turkey and forkfuls of ham we should spare a moment for those lab-bound researchers who have given us much food for thought in their daily ventures. After all, there remain many unanswered questions beyond the already-solved enigmas of science. As Lawrence himself cautioned, "there are glimpses of clarity- enough to see the immensity and beauty...and enough to know that there is still a long and challenging journey ahead".

Further Reading
Peter Lawrence (1992) The Making of a Fly- The Genetics Of Animal Design, Blackwell Scientific Publications, London

Chris Murgatroyd, Alexandre V Patchev, Yonghe Wu, Vincenzo Micale, Yvonne Bockmuehl, Dieter Fischer, Florian Holsboer, Carsten T Wotjak, Osborne F X Almeida & Dietmar Spengler (2009) Dynamic DNA methylation programs persistent adverse effects of early-life stress, Nature Neuroscience, published online 8 November 2009; doi:10.1038/nn.2436

Jef Akst (2009) Early Stress Alters Epigenome, The Scientist, Posted on 8th November, See http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56139/

A.F. Taylor, Gerald Smith (2003) RecBCD enzyme is a DNA helicase with fast and slow motors of opposite polarity, Nature Volume 423, pp. 889-893

The Galapagos Islands have long been recognised as the home of numerous endemic species, stimulating questions about how such species came into being. Those responding with answers have supported their views more by theory than observation. But Peter and Rosemary Grant are different, because they have pioneered longitudinal studies of the Galapagos finches, particularly on the small (and relatively isolated) island of Daphne Major. A newly reported study of an immigrant male ground finch (Geospiza fortis) covers the period 1981 to the present.

"We have followed the survival and reproduction of this individual and all of its known descendants, here termed the immigrant lineage, for seven generations (F0 to F6) spanning 28 years."

This finch's odd beak and song make it unpopular with the locals. (Credit: Peter Grant/PNAS, Source here)

The Grants have observed a clustering of male territories of the immigrant lineage and have established that these birds formed a new, albeit small, breeding population. The story is one of interbreeding followed by inbreeding. The authors consider they have gained an "important insight into the process of speciation" - although they hasten to add that they do not regard these birds as a new species.

"How many generations of exclusively within-group mating are needed before the group is recognized as a separate species that deserves taxonomic status? There is no nonarbitrary answer. We treat the endogamous group as an incipient species because it has been reproductively isolated from sympatric G. fortis for three generations and possibly longer."

This is not a story involving new mutations, or any significant genetic change outside the normal range of groundfinches. It is relevant to discussion of sympatric speciation, because the new population coexists with other medium groundfinches on the same island and interbreeding did take place in the earlier generations of the lineage. So what factors are associated with a barrier to interbreeding? The Grants identify two factors: one is morphological (immigrants have larger beak dimensions) and the other is song (immigrants differ from residents lower maximum frequency and higher note repetition rate).

"Our observations provide insight into speciation and hence, into the origin of a new species. They show how a barrier to interbreeding can arise behaviorally and without genetic change in sympatry. A necessary condition was prior ecological divergence, and introgressive hybridization was possibly another. Evidently it takes only a single diploid immigrant to start the process by breeding with a resident, and tolerance of the effects of inbreeding is needed to complete it."

These observations, and the emerging ecological perspective on speciation is interesting - but how does it relate to the broader issues faced by evolutionary biologists? In particular, does it help to understand how innovation occurs? The answer must be - no. There are no genetic changes that can be associated with novel characteristics and although this population is currently reproductively isolated, a few environmental traumas could easily lead to unification. Darwinism is exactly where it has always been - explaining the origin of complexity by appealing to theory and the imagination.

On the other hand, these data can be understood readily in terms of speciation by gene pool reduction. Although normally presented in terms of allopatry, this model considers the possible loss of alleles when a breeding population is split. The resultant populations may not have the genetic diversity of the parent population, and whilst this may be workable in the short-term, environmental change may reveal that the daughter population(s) are unfit and the end result may be extinction. Clearly, this perspective on the data has nothing to give Darwinism but it is compatible with several non-Darwinian perspectives on speciation.

Science reports of stories relevant to evolutionary theory can degenerate to the level of cheer-leading for a favoured cause. One account of the Grants' research refers to "a real-time record of evolution in action. In the PNAS paper, they describe something Darwin could only have dreamed of watching: the birth of a new species." For more, please refer to Jonathan Wells comments here.

The secondary contact phase of allopatric speciation in Darwin's finches
Peter R. Grant and B. Rosemary Grant
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition, Nov. 16, 2009 | doi 10.1073/pnas.0911761106

Abstract: Speciation, the process by which two species form from one, involves the development of reproductive isolation of two divergent lineages. Here, we report the establishment and persistence of a reproductively isolated population of Darwin's finches on the small Galapagos Island of Daphne Major in the secondary contact phase of speciation. In 1981, an immigrant medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis) arrived on the island. It was unusually large, especially in beak width, sang an unusual song, and carried some Geospiza scandens alleles. We followed the fate of this individual and its descendants for seven generations over a period of 28 years. In the fourth generation, after a severe drought, the lineage was reduced to a single brother and sister, who bred with each other. From then on this lineage, inheriting unusual song, morphology, and a uniquely homozygous marker allele, was reproductively isolated, because their own descendants bred with each other and with no other member of the resident G. fortis population. These observations agree with some expectations of an ecological theory of speciation in that a barrier to interbreeding arises as a correlated effect of adaptive divergence in morphology. However, the important, culturally transmitted, song component of the barrier appears to have arisen by chance through an initial imperfect copying of local song by the immigrant. The study reveals additional stochastic elements of speciation, in which divergence is initiated in allopatry; immigration to a new area of a single male hybrid and initial breeding with a rare hybrid female

See also:

Cressey, D. Darwin's finches tracked to reveal evolution in action, Nature News (16 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1089

ENV reports that Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design is being named one of the top books of 2009 in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement (TLS) annual "Books of the Year" issue.

The selection was made by prominent philosopher (and noted atheist) Thomas Nagel at New York University. The books issue is not online yet, but the TLS website has posted a preview of Nagel's endorsement of the book.

More...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

It's the ultimate branding strategy. Just slap "neuro" before a word and the goofiest speculation becomes respectable science." Here:

Unfortunately, neurotrash may not always be harmless nonsense in marketing departments about what color of car people choose. Increasingly, in the form of neurolaw, it is catching on in the legal profession, in the same way that lie detector tests did decades ago. What happened there was that some people learned to fake results - people who may well have committed serious crimes. Who knows how many others were damaged by false results when they were innocent?

A serious ethical question also erupts as to why the accused's brain should be scanned anyway. It is not a crime to think about a crime, only to act outside the law. Even if a brain scan showed the accused was thinking about it, that would never prove he did it. Lots of employees hate their boss and wish the boss would just drop dead. If you scanned their brains... well, let's say it's better not to go there. Very few employees actually commit a violent crime against the boss, so the brain scan evidence - even if reliable, which it probably isn't - is not worth gathering.

Also, we must consider traditional principles of law. Under English common law, if a person cannot be convicted on the external evidence of their intent and actions, that person cannot be convicted. Period. It is too bad if the prosecution team loses, even when morally certain that the accused is guilty. But that is an incentive to improve their procedures in normal ways.

Yes, it matters. Your family doctor should be reading this.

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

A lawsuit has been filed against the California Science Center by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA) for cancelling the AFA's contract to screen the Darwin's Dilemma documentary on October 25th.

More...

The TimesOnline reports that two children chosen to front Richard Dawkins's latest assault on God could not look more free of the misery he associates with religious baggage. With the slogan "Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself", the youngsters with broad grins seem to be the perfect advertisement for the new atheism being promoted by Professor Dawkins and the British Humanist Association.

Except that they are about as far from atheism as it is possible to be. The Times can reveal that Charlotte, 8, and Ollie, 7, are from one of the country's most devout Christian families.

More...

Stephen Meyer op-ed appears on CNN's Web site.

Click HERE to read...

A first edition of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," which had been kept in a bathroom bookcase in England for years, fetched 103,250 pounds ($171,000) at auction Tuesday, around twice its pre-sale estimate.

Christie's auctioneer offered the book at a sale held in London on the 150th anniversary of the evolutionary work's original publication.

The copy was bought by the family of the current owners for "a few shillings" (dollars) over 50 years ago, the auctioneer said.

----------------------------------------------------

It will be interesting to see what else is underneath their "Holiday Tree" this December 25th.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At the Mail Online, Allan Hall reports (November 23, 2009) on the case of a man who was conscious for 23 years, but no one knew because he was paralyzed.

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.

'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.

Read more here.

I think doctors should be much more careful with the "persistent vegetative state" (PVS) diagnoses than they sometimes are - if consequences follow. Some people - like Rom Houben, above - can be conscious without being mobile. We aren't even sure what consciousness is , after all, so why be definitive about who has it?

Here are some more articles about persistent vegetative state:

Is the patient vegetative or minimally conscious?

Neuroscience: Can locked-in sufferers tweet, using brain signals alone?

Another "human vegetable" turns out to be wired for thought

Also just up at The Mindful Hack is my blog on neuroscience and spirituality issues, which supports The Spiritual Brain:

Sociology: Should you add Satan to your Board of Directors?

Neuroscience and popular culture: Reasons not to buy "neuronovels" for people for Christmas

Neurolaw: Confusing intent with motive is a threat to civil rights

Neuroscience: "The Young and theBureau"

Spiritual Brain: Me 'n YouTube: Discussing my "Hot Apple Cider" essay

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At Britain's Telegraph (November 04, 2009), Tom Chivers advises that "Darwinian evolutionary theory will help find alien life, says Nasa scientist.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution may give pointers in the search for alien life, says a Nasa astrobiologist." Here, we learn two competing views:

And so the limits of Darwinian evolution will define the range of planets that can support life - at least Earth-like life."

but

... alien life may not be entirely Earth-like. Dr Baross said: "I'd like to point out there are many different ways for non-Earth-like life to not use light or chemical energy but use some other form like radiation energy, wave energy, or ultraviolet energy."

. And then how can we know that the way they proceed is by Darwinian evolution?

We also learn

"I think all of us really believe that rocky planets, like Earth, are going to be found at some point," said Baross.

Well, lots of people have really believed lots of things that never happened. I happen to agree with him re rocky planets, because in a galaxy the size of ours, we will doubtless find lots of things, possibly extraterrestrial life ...

I am a little more concerned about the underlying agenda in some cases. NASA could be undermining its chances via Darwin worship.

Some more exoplanet stories:

Does our solar system occupy a unique position in the universe or just an ordinary one?

Rare? Solar systems like ours are rare?

Astronomer argues that we can test whether Earth is fine-tuned as a science lab

Serious push to find more exoplanets

Exoplanets: Will intelligence be common or rare?

Also just up at Colliding Universes:

Cosmology: We have now identified the "evil" alternative universe Stand by to open fire

Large Hadron Collider: If this "backwards time travel" is not a joke, it
should be

Coffee!! Bird drops piece of bread: Adds to Large Hadron Collider (God Machine) woes

Exoplanets: The recent pilgrimage to Darwin's shrine

Cosmology: If you needn't worry about paying the rent Friday, you can worry about this stuff

Colliding Universes is my blog on competing theories about our universe.

Hat tip The Mustard Seed.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The search for extra-terrestrial life has been a passionate focal point of space exploration for decades. While the idea of aliens eking out an 'other-world' existence continues to fuel scientific and religious debate, most recently with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences' astrobiology conference (1), a similarly concerted search for life has focused on primitive unicellular organisms (2). Astrobiologist Richard Hoover and others have long advocated the idea that simple life exists outside of our own earth (3-4). Since NASA's Galileo spacecraft flyby mission to Jupiter's moon Europa in 1998, there has been no end to discussions over whether or not this ice-bearing moon might today harbor bacteria (5-6).

The notion that life could simply evolve wherever appropriate environmental conditions are to be found is of course one that entails an enormous 'leap of faith'. It is a notion that pushes aside a multitude of critical factors not least of which is the origin of some sort of information-rich genetic material. As Stephen Mojzsis from the University of Colorado analogized, just because the stage is set in a theater does not mean that the actors are present and ready to play their respective roles (7). What processes would have been operational to take a maelstrom of chemical compounds to the required level of minimal function upon which Darwinian natural selection could get a hold?

Paleontologist Niles Eldredge captured the pertinence of this question in his discourse on evolutionary tempos when he wrote how "there is a tremendous difference between a collection of organic molecules unable to abstract the energy needed to catalyze their own replication and an organized system that can do precisely that" (8). Prominent thinkers such as Paul Davies have made their appeal to chance by espousing the idea that life was able to begin precisely because it 'managed' to liberate itself from the shackles of physical laws and the deterministic, algorithmic world (9). Davies argues that for genomes to become as information-rich as they are, life would have had to have originated from random polymers since, according to Davies, an initial randomness is the only way that we could have arrived at specified biological complexity (9). Still, how could chance-generated polymers that lacked any functional and replicative activities have gained such activities purely through random events?

The last twenty years have given us some interesting avenues of research in the field of catalytic RNA. Experiments in the late 1980s and 1990s revealed that certain types of RNA had intrinsic catalytic activities (10). Renowned RNA biochemists such as Tom Cech, Dan Hershlag, Luc Jaeger and Anne Marie Pyle provided key details on how RNA could fold into catalytically active forms (10-12). With the demonstration of its enzyme and information-bearing capabilities, RNA became a hot candidate for the molecule that might have kick started the beginnings of life (13). The message promulgated by supporters of the much-publicized 'RNA World' was that through Darwinian natural selection random mutations might have produced catalytic activities that were further improved through successive generations of replication (13).

Perhaps to the disappointment of 'RNA Worlders', Duke University chemist David Deamer and others convincingly discredited such a message on the grounds that those processes necessary for the formation of RNA polymers would have been highly inefficient on a lifeless earth. Their conclusions were profound:

"It is now clear that an RNA world (or even its molecular precursor, pre-RNA) would be difficult to achieve directly from simple organic molecules dissolved in a global ocean (Joyce, 1991). Even if it were possible to generate chemically activated nucleotides capable of polymerizing into RNA in solution, in the absence of some concentrating mechanism these would be greatly diluted, and no further reactions could occur...[Such] inherent inefficiencies would seem to be inconsistent with moving beyond the initial stages of generating monomers and perhaps random polymers." (13)

My own research during my time at the University of Strasbourg served to further strengthen my own skepticism over the role of RNA in biological origins (14). Using RNA folding algorithms, I worked with others to design special catalytic RNAs called ribozymes that would target and cut highly defined mRNA sequences within the cell (See Figure Below; Ref 15). As I soon found out, not only did these molecular 'scissors' have to meet strict sequence requirements if they were to discriminate between target and erroneous mRNAs but they also had to be short enough so as to free themselves from their reaction products and become available for further rounds of cutting (16). This latter point is of critical importance if catalytic RNA is to exhibit what enzymologists call 'multiple turnover' behavior- that is, the ability to repeatedly catalyze a given reaction (17).

FIGURE: 12% Polyacrylamide Gel showing: Lanes 1,3- target RNA; Lanes 2,4- ribozyme RNA; Lanes 5-7- Time course of in vitro ribozyme digestion (note the cleavage products in the lower half of gel)

One could hardly claim that my meticulous crafting of RNA into functional catalysts paralleled the Darwinian process of selection. Had I not chosen my sequences carefully I would not have obtained the desired effects when I introduced these RNAs into the cell. My own findings echoed the sentiments of protein structuralist Thomas Creighton who commented how "the primary difficulty with the scenario of the RNA world is that it is difficult to explain how RNA molecules could have been synthesized chemically in the primordial soup" (18).

While several types of activity have now been identified in synthetic ribozymes including peptide bond formation and RNA ligation, the range of such activities pales in comparison to the extensive repertoire of known protein functions (19). To what extent can we therefore consider catalytic RNA to be sufficient for the formation of components that might later assemble into the simplest forms of life? Moreover, achieving such activities in the laboratory is only possible through the directed guidance of random RNA molecules towards pre-determined functional end points (19, 20).

Writing in the 1970's, Richard Dawkins cooked up the following 'requiem to naturalistic causation':

"[The Primeval Soup] must have become populated by stable varieties of molecules; stable in that either the individual molecules lasted a long time, or they replicated rapidly, or they replicated accurately. Evolutionary trends toward these three kinds of stability took place in the following sense: if you had sampled the soup at two different times, the later sample would have contained a higher proportion of varieties with high longevity/fecundity/copying-fidelity. This is essentially what a biologist means by evolution when he is speaking of living creatures, and the mechanism is the same- natural selection." (21)

Thirty years on we still have no meat on the bones of Dawkins' dreamy peregrinations. From an RNA World perspective at least I remain thoroughly unconvinced.

Literature Cited
1. Tom Chivers (2009) The Vatican Joins The Search For Alien Life, See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/6536400/The-Vatican-joins-the-search-for-alien-life.html

2. David Malin (2004) Heaven and Earth: Unseen by the Naked Eye, Phaidon Press, UK 2004, p.284

3. Kate Tobin (2009) Extremophile Hunter: The search is on for extremophiles that may provide insights about life elsewhere in the cosmos, See http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/extremophile.jsp

4. Jeff Hecht (2001) Life will find a way, New Scientist, 17th March, 2001, p.4

5. Patrick Barry (2009) A Tale Of Planetary Woe, See http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/06nov_maven.htm?list207640

6. Clues To Possible Life On Europa May Lie Buried In Antarctic Ice (1998) See http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast05mar98_1.htm

7. Stephen Mojzsis spoke on the origins of life in a NOVA documentary that aired on PBS on the 28th of September 2004, entitled "Origins: How Life Began"

8. Niles Eldredge (1987) Life Pulse: Episodes From The Story of The Fossil Record, Facts On File Publications, New York, p.30

9. Paul Davies (1999) The Fifth Miracle, The Search for the Origin and The Meaning of Life, Simon & Schuster, New York, pp.250-257

10. T. R. Cech and D. Herschlag (1997) Group I Ribozymes: Substrate Recognition, Catalytic Strategies and Comparative Mechanistic Analysis, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.1-17

11. L. Jaeger, F. Mitchel, E. Westhof (1997) The Structure Of Group I Ribozymes, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.33-51

12. A.M. Pyle (1997) Catalytic Reaction Mechanisms and Structural Features of Group II Intron Ribozymes, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.75-107

13. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002) The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology, Vol 2 pp.371-381

14. Robert Deyes (1998) Unpublished observations, Work done at LPCCNM-UPRES 2308, Faculte De Pharmacie, Universite Louis Pasteur, Illkirch, France

15. Michael Zuker (2003) Mfold web server for nucleic acid folding and hybridization prediction, Nucleic Acids Res, Vol 31 pp.3406-15 (this is an update on the version I used in my research)

16. Daniel Herschlag (1991) Implications Of Ribozyme Kinetics For Targeting The Cleavage Of Specific RNA Molecules In Vivo : More Isn't Always Better, Proc. Natl, Acad, Sci. USA, Vol 88 pp.6921-6925

17. Thomas Creighton (1993) Proteins, Structure and Molecular Properties, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, p.387

18. Ibid, p.107

19. Michael P. Robertson and William G. Scott (2007) The Structural Basis of Ribozyme-Catalyzed RNA Assembly, Science, Vol. 315 pp.1549-1553

20. Gordon C. Mills and Dean Kenyon (1996) The RNA World: A Critique, Origins & Design 17:1, See http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od171/rnaworld171.htm#note4

21. Richard Dawkins (1989) The Selfish Gene, 2nd Ed, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, p.18

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Question 12: Can Darwinism beat the odds?, we have declared a winner, and it is Philip W at 11.

Philip W must provide me with a valid postal address* via oleary@sympatico.ca, in order to receive the prize, a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD.

Philip W tells me that he is a pilot, and I liked his analysis of issues around flight:

Darwinian evolution can not possibly explain the life which we find on this planet. Let's explore one of these methods by asking the question "How, and why, did flight originate?" Before any creature took to the air there was nothing there to eat and so why would any creature, even an intelligent creature, want to fly. There could have been no powerful survival benefit in flight beyond perhaps escaping a predator to recommend it. Also, there are many other and far simpler ways to escape a predator. Flight is perhaps the most complicated and sophisticated activity that any creature possesses which means that it would have taken an extraordinary number of attempts by random evolutionary methods to make it a reality. There is another and even more fundamental question which underlies biological flight. Did nature, completely unguided by intelligence, just somehow know that flight was even possible or achievable? Humans, with their intelligence, were able to make gliders and toy airplanes long ago but they had an objective and they also had the model of the birds to follow. Even at that it took a long time to achieve human flight despite the huge cost in time, effort, and treasure which they were willing to expend. No amount of tinkering, especially without a conscious objective, could possibly account for biological flight. There are simply too many things which would have had to happen all at once for that to be possible. Remember that nature had no way of knowing that flight was possible and it certainly had no previous conception of flight. Without having an objective how can random tinkering achieve anything?

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

According to James Pusey, writing in Nature, "Charles Darwin's banner was first unfurled in China during the Reform Movement of 1895-98, in response to China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War." There were two groups seeking change: the reformers, who were loyal to the Manchu Qing Dynasty, and the revolutionaries, who wanted a clean break with the past.

"The watchword of the reform movement was 'bianfa', meaning 'change our institutions'. But the very word 'change' was anathema to the conservative officialdom of China. So reformers turned to Darwin as a foreign authority on change, presenting him not first and foremost as a natural scientist who had discovered an amazing fact of life, but as a political scientist who had discovered a cosmic imperative for change."

Some today see Darwin as inspiring revolution (Source here)

This led to a change in the way intellectuals approached ethics: reform meant that traditional codes of conduct were fast losing their appeal.

"Meanwhile, the Europeans waved Darwin's banner to justify imperialism. Dubbing themselves 'the fit', they declared their right to rule the 'unfit'. And some Chinese accepted this argument. Liang Qichao, one of the leading reformers, said in 1898: "If a country can strengthen itself and make itself one of the fittest, then, even if it annihilates the unfit and the weak, it can still not be said to be immoral. Why? Because it is a law of evolution.""

The reformers were very interested in democracy, but realized the people were totally unprepared to handle it. Their solution was to emphasise the step-by-step gradualism of Darwinism with direction and stability provided by an appeal to natural law. The revolutionaries also embraced Darwin, drawing inspiration from the thought that the "superior survive and the inferior are defeated". "The man who introduced Darwinian evolution to the reformers of 1895 was Yan Fu."

"Yan wanted democracy for China - even anarchic democracy, without presidential rule. In Whence Strength? his call for reform was revolutionary: "Establish a parliament at the capital and let each province and county elect its own officials." But 'Darwin' held him back from real revolution. Yan believed that step-by-step progress was a fixed natural law, so stages had to be taken in order. America had skipped constitutional monarchy and gone straight to democracy, but a resulting class war, he felt, would be their undoing. "Should we, then, now throw away all loyalty to our ruler?" he asked in his essay. "We most certainly should not! Because the time has not arrived. ... Our people are not yet ready to rule themselves.""

The reformers and the revolutionaries debated vigorously "with both sides wildly waving Darwin's banner" The leaders of these movements imbibed the message of scientific racism coming from America and Europe and presented themselves as 'fit' to rule.

"Sadly, both camps also accepted the pervasive Western view that Darwin had proven races unequal - that one race was 'fitter' and therefore better than another. The reformers had originally done so to disassociate themselves from those who had fallen prey to the imperialists, such as the Africans and Indians. But in their exile in Japan, reformers and revolutionaries alike turned angrily on the Manchus as scapegoats, labelling them evolutionary low life, whose 'unnatural' conquest of the Han Chinese was responsible for China's peril."

The tensions after the end of World War I were extreme. The traditional pacifist Chinese philosophies were perceived as weak and this led to a philosophical and political vacuum. In their place came Marxism: this "seemed to them the fittest faith on Earth to help China to survive".

"This was not, of course, all Darwin's doing, but Darwin was involved in it all. To believe in Marxism, one had to believe in inexorable forces pushing mankind, or at least the elect, to inevitable progress, through set stages (which could, however, be skipped). One had to believe that history was a violent, hereditary class struggle (almost a 'racial' struggle); that the individual must be severely subordinated to the group; that an enlightened group must lead the people for their own good; that the people must not be humane to their enemies; that the forces of history assured victory to those who were right and who struggled.
Who taught Chinese these things? Marx? Mao? No. Darwin."

Ideas have legs and ideas walk. These developments are possible because Darwinism is more than a scientific theory: it is fundamentally a philosophical stance about the nature of reality. The materialism that underpins the Darwinian worldview has spawned scientific racism + eugenics in the West, and revolutionary fervor in the East. We should help the next generation understand and recognize the significance of such matters, and encourage them to ask questions about the philosophical roots of science.

Global Darwin: Revolutionary road
James Pusey
Nature 462, 162-163 (12 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462162a (Restricted access link)

In China, under the threat of Western imperialism, interpretations of Darwin's ideas paved the way for Marx, Lenin and Mao, argues James Pusey in the third in our series on reactions to evolutionary theory.

The American Freedom Alliance will sponsor The Origin of Life Debates at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, California on December 30th.

This will be a Public Debate featuring...
Stephen Meyer, Rick Sternberg, Michael Shermer and Don Prothero

Two advocates for Intelligent Design; Two advocates for Evolution

More here...

The audio of this interview is on this LINK.

And Stephen Meyer will be on the Dennis Miller Show again on December 2nd. Here's the LINK.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Question 11: Can biotechnology bring back extinct animals?, we have declared a winner, and it is binary! Twins!

Aussie ID and Nakashima.

I loved Aussie ID's information about the specifics of attempts to restore the thylacine - he calls it a Tasmanian tiger. Possibly due to culture issues, I am more familiar with hearing the animal called a Tasmanian wolf. But anyone interested should review his information.

I'd love to know what a staked out* sled pack in northern Canada would make of the marsupial Tasmanian. He doesn't look to me like he has three coats of hair, so he might need to work in the office.

I also appreciated Nakashima's thoughtful reflections on the question of how behaviour might not follow the physical recreation of an animal. I suspect he's right; it's an open question indeed.

Each of you must provide me with a valid postal address** in order to receive the prize, a free copy of Steven Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009).

If you go here, you will get a bit of background on the contest, and read many interesting contributions, but for now, here is the skinny:

This one's a bit of fun, but there is a serious purpose behind it.

In "A Life of Its Own: Where will synthetic biology lead us?" (September 28, 2009 New Yorker mag), Michael Specter reports, "If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us."

Jurassic Park, anyone?

Additional notes on interesting posts as well.

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Earlier this year, Eugene Koonin published a masterly analysis of the impact of genomics on evolutionary thinking. This proved to be too meaty a study for a concise blog, and my initial draft was abandoned. Happily, a shorter overview has now been published, and this abstracts salient points from the research paper. Koonin notes that the 1959 Origin centennial was "marked by the consolidation of the modern synthesis" but subsequent years have witnessed great changes which have undermined its credibility.

"The edifice of the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair."

It is time for a paradigm change - but neoDarwinists are stuck because they have so much philosophical baggage holding them down (Image credit: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images, Source here)

Koonin uses the metaphor of "the landscape of evolutionary biology". There are three distinct revolutions have occurred over the past half-century: the molecular, the microbiological and the genomic revolutions.

"[T]his year is the perfect time to ask some crucial questions: how has evolutionary biology changed in the 50 years since the hardening of the modern synthesis? Is it still a viable conceptual framework for evolutionary thinking and research?"

The molecular revolution culminated, says Koonin, in the neutral theory, which means that purifying selection is more common than positive selection. The microbiological revolution brought the world of prokaryotes into the domain of evolutionary biology, but it then became apparent that the concepts of Darwinism and the modern synthesis "applied only to multicellular organisms". The genomic revolution revealed that the living world was "a far cry from the orderly, rather simple picture envisioned by Darwin and the creators of the modern synthesis". In particular, it is now interpreted as an "extremely dynamic world where horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is not a rarity but the regular way of existence, and mobile genetic elements that are vehicles of HGT are ubiquitous".

"The discovery of pervasive HGT and the overall dynamics of the genetic universe destroys not only the tree of life as we knew it but also another central tenet of the modern synthesis inherited from Darwin, namely gradualism. In a world dominated by HGT, gene duplication, gene loss and such momentous events as endosymbiosis, the idea of evolution being driven primarily by infinitesimal heritable changes in the Darwinian tradition has become untenable."

Koonin is serious in saying that all the concepts of the modern synthesis are in need of a fundamental overhaul.

"Moreover, with pan-adaptationism gone forever, so is the notion of evolutionary progress that is undoubtedly central to traditional evolutionary thinking, even if this is not always made explicit.
The summary of the state of affairs on the 150th anniversary of the Origin is somewhat shocking. In the postgenomic era, all major tenets of the modern synthesis have been, if not outright overturned, replaced by a new and incomparably more complex vision of the key aspects of evolution. So, not to mince words, the modern synthesis is gone."

Koonin tentatively identifies two candidates to fill the vacuum left by the discarded modern synthesis. The first of these appears to emphasis the role of chance; the second appears to emphasise law.

"The first is the population-genetic theory of the evolution of genomic architecture, according to which evolving complexity is a side product of non-adaptive evolutionary processes occurring in small populations where the constraints of purifying selection are weak. The second area with a potential for major unification could be the study of universal patterns of evolution such as the distribution of evolutionary rates of orthologous genes, which is nearly the same in organisms from bacteria to mammals or the equally universal anticorrelation between the rate of evolution and the expression level of a gene. The existence of these universals suggests that simple theory of the kind used in statistical physics might explain some crucial aspects of evolution."

It is not difficult to predict that Koonin's analysis will not be received quietly by the very vocal leaders of evolutionary biology. They are still entrenched in neoDarwinism and show no signs of conceding any ground to anyone. From a design perspective, Koonin's analysis of the changing landscape of evolutionary biology is spot on. His two candidates for moving forward the theoretical framework are interesting - but lack any recognition of purposeful design in nature. Dembski's design filter concept is relevant here: there are features in the biological world that are best understood in terms of stochastic processes; there are other features that are best understood in terms of natural law; but there are also features that require a design perspective in order to understand them. It is the latter element, prominent in the thinking of design-orientated scientists, which needs to be part of any discussion of where evolutionary biology is heading.

The Origin at 150: is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight?
Eugene V. Koonin
Trends in Genetics, 25(11), November 2009, 473-475.

Abstract: The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin and the 150th jubilee of the On the Origin of Species could prompt a new look at evolutionary biology. The 1959 Origin centennial was marked by the consolidation of the modern synthesis. The edifice of the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair. The hallmark of the Darwinian discourse of 2009 is the plurality of evolutionary processes and patterns. Nevertheless, glimpses of a new synthesis might be discernible in emerging universals of evolution.

Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics
Eugene V. Koonin
Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, 37(4), 1011-1034 | doi:10.1093/nar/gkp089

ABSTRACT: Comparative genomics and systems biology offer unprecedented opportunities for testing central tenets of evolutionary biology formulated by Darwin in the Origin of Species in 1859 and expanded in the Modern Synthesis 100 years later. Evolutionary-genomic studies show that natural selection is only one of the forces that shape genome evolution and is not quantitatively dominant, whereas non-adaptive processes are much more prominent than previously suspected. Major contributions of horizontal gene transfer and diverse selfish genetic elements to genome evolution undermine the Tree of Life concept. An adequate depiction of evolution requires the more complex concept of a network or 'forest' of life. There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a nonadaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation. Several universals of genome evolution were discovered including the invariant distributions of evolutionary rates among orthologous genes from diverse genomes and of paralogous gene family sizes, and the negative correlation between gene expression level and sequence evolution rate. Simple, non-adaptive models of evolution explain some of these universals, suggesting that a new synthesis of evolutionary biology might become feasible in a not so remote future.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

My concern with "neurolaw" (the attempt to scan brains to identify criminal behaviour) is this: Law is, or should be, concerned with "intent", not "motive."

Yes, yes, in detective fiction, everything hinges on motive: Cousin Harry murdered Aunt Sally to get her fortune; plain Jane murdered pretty Kitty because Kitty got the man; squadron leader Beeder murdered that guy because of a long ago wartime betrayal ....

However, real law depends on design inferences, not speculations about motive. Here is the story I sometimes tell to explain that:

Tom and Dick are enjoying beer and wings in a pub.

Suddenly, the conversation becomes loud and animated.

Tom seizes a dinner knife and tries to plunge it into Dick's chest. He is restrained by burly patron Harry and several others.

The whole thing is caught on videocam.

Mid-uproar, the bartender calls the police, who charge Tom with attempted manslaughter.

The police need not know his motive, only his intent - which was pretty obvious. That's a design inference.

Later, the investigating officer learns how the quarrel began: Dick had informed Tom that he was seeing Tom's girlfriend, so Tom should just buzz off. Tom didn't like that idea.

Knowing a person's motive certainly helps us understand the story. But intent - the demonstrated attempt at murder in this case - is what matters in law.

Here's the difficulty: Suppose Tom had just got up from the table and left, and spent three months fantasizing in the wee hours about killing Dick - without ever seeing either Dick or the former girlfriend again. He has plenty of motive, but the fact is, he never did anything.

Then Tom is of no interest to the law, as it now stands - though his family doctor should be concerned. Tom needs a more constructive way to deal with rejection. (He also needs a more faithful girlfriend, but all in good time.)

However, in a materialist environment, I would hardly be surprised to hear theories about Tom's violence genes and violence neurons, some based on neuroscience techniques - even if all the violence was inside his own head. Some may argue for action against Tom "pre-crime". That's where the threat to civil liberties comes in.

Neurolaw seems like materialism applied to law, hence a threat to civil rights, because it can easily confuse motive with intent - overturning centuries of progress in justice.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Intelligently Designed Nanotechnology

As Casey Luskin reveals in this episode of ID the Future, eminent biologists have said that they must continually remind themselves that what they see in biology evolved, and was not designed. But now engineers are turning to biology to replace human technology because biological pathways provide superior solutions to biomedical-technological needs. Is this trend more consistent with an evolved biosphere, or an intelligent designed one? Listen to this podcast and decide for yourself.

Listen here.

Yes, but sometimes people don't see the forest for the trees. The majority of humans think, where it is safe to do so, that there is a God, based on personal experience. No surprise there. If there is a God, he can communicate with humans when he wishes to do so, just as Elizabeth, Queen of England, can do*. And she would be the first to say that her rank is at a fundamentally much lower grade.

The question is, why is this controversial? Why should it be any surprise? Why do I keep running into efforts to prove it is not true?

If that is really science (space aliens, multiple universes), I could not distinguish it from witchcraft or some other foolishness. I think we'd just get more done if we accepted, with Antony Flew , that There IS a God and got on with useful projects in science, like cures for AIDS and non-polluting sources of energy. Oh, and weight loss programs for people who used to suffer from famine but are now afflicted with obesity - an outcome of modern science.

*I still have my father's commission, courtesy Elizabeth's father, advancing him to the rank of officer.

Also: Chris Mooney's War on Intelligent Design

Listen here.

On this episode of ID the Future, CSC's Rob Crowther interviews Casey Luskin about his in-depth response to Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, correcting fourteen major factual and logical errors in Mooney's chapter on intelligent design. How can Chris Mooney be so wrong on this issue? Listen in and find out.

Read the original response to Mooney here.

Yes, well, I don't know why anyone should be surprised. Darwinism has morphed into a major public enterprise and anyone who wants his finger in the pie ... I think we can wait a long time before a guy like Chris Mooney even needs to get anything right.

More stories from the Post-Darwinist:

Interesting design inference concerning a historic photo

Morning coffee!! Bear meets cat ... No! No! Not what you think!

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy, with comments

Darwinism and popular culture: A tour of the textbooks

(Note: This series may sometimes be interrupted by news from the crisis in intellectual freedom in Canada. If you are not interested, just scroll down.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Today Amazon.com announced their bestselling books of 2009 and Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne) by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer made the top ten in the science category.

More...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Does curiosity kill more than the cat?, prof Stanley Fish wonders

Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, "Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?"

Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson's "trinity of inalienable rights: 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'" Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, "a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality."

Interesting, considering that academic freedom is under huge assault these days.

I have said in private correspondence as follows:

It is good to be curious about the exact cause of Alzheimer syndrome or whether that fellow hanging around in the parking lot has lawful business around here.

It is not good to be curious about whether my neighbour is a closet racist or having an affair with the letter carrier.

I'd say curiosity is an inescapable and necessary human quality that must be steered in an appropriate direction.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose PS: I know a bit about cats. Curiosity does kill cats sometimes. But kidney disease is their biggest problem. Cats are obligate carnivores. So they generally last as long as their kidneys - or so a vet once told me, and in my experience it is certainly true.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience issues:

Do you really need a refrigerator when you have this?

Materialism and popular culture: The human brain as a machine?

Spiritual Brain: Polish translation rights bought

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Darwin was a great composer of metaphors, of which "natural selection" is the best known. Today, few are aware of negative responses from scientists uncomfortable with Darwin's imagery. One of these was Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-originator of evolution by natural selection.

"Wallace remarked, in his article Mr Darwin's Metaphors Liable to Misconception (1868), that the Malthusian progressions and struggle for existence were self-evident "facts". Yet because natural selection seemed to personify a perceptive and forward-thinking selector, or god, he urged Darwin to replace the term with "survival of the fittest". [See also here]
Darwin, however, had brushed him off. "Everyone knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions," he had demurred. "And they are almost necessary for brevity"."

Does "natural selection" have the dominant role in unravelling Darwin's entangled bank? (source here)

In a perceptive essay, Daniel Todes focuses attention on the reactions of Russian biologists to Darwin's writings. Many of these naturalists "were evolutionists before 1859", so they did not dissent from common ancestry. However, their experiences of the living world were quite different from Darwin and Wallace, who drew their inspiration from densely populated tropical forests and related habitats. They witnessed a struggle for existence that matched the description Thomas Malthus had given of human communities. Using the same logic, Darwin and Wallace were stimulated to think about winners and losers in populations of animals and plants. The Russian scientists lived in a different world.

[They] "investigated a vast under-populated continental plain. For them, nature was not an "entangled bank" - the image Darwin took from the Brazilian jungle. It was a largely empty Siberian expanse in which overpopulation was rare and only the struggle of organisms against a harsh environment was dramatic."

The Russian response to living in a harsh environment was to develop "the language of communalism - stressing not individual initiative and struggle, but the importance of cooperation within social groups and the virtues of social harmony." The analysis of Malthus did not match the biological communities in their part of the world, so Darwin's metaphor of the "struggle for existence" was not, in their view, well grounded.

"Russian political commentators of the left, right and centre reviled Malthus as an apologist for predatory capitalism and soulless individualism." [. . .]
"[F]ew Russians shared Darwin and Wallace's respect for Malthus, and [. . .] many saw the struggle for existence as an infusion of the British enthusiasm for individualistic competition into natural science. Darwin's theory, as Danilevskii put it, was a "purely English doctrine"."

Dissent did not apply just to the "struggle for existence" metaphor. Natural selection was equally controversial. The Russians wanted to give more emphasis to concepts like the "harmony of nature" and "cooperation". Many of them advocated "the theory of mutual aid". Indeed, Todes says that it became a "staple of Russian evolutionary thought".

"Darwin too had called attention to such cooperation, but the theory of mutual aid went further. It held that the central aspect of the struggle for existence is an organism's struggle with abiotic conditions, that organisms join forces in this struggle, that such mutual aid is favoured by natural selection, and that cooperation so vitiated intraspecific competition as to render it unimportant in the origin of new species."

This essay highlights issues which have been discussed often by design-orientated scientists. These are identified below.

1. Scientific criticism of natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism. It will come as a surprise to many that dissent about the role of natural selection comes from within science. Such dissent was present in Darwin's day and it is still significant. This blog has drawn attention to relevant papers here and here. Those who portray requests for a 'critical evaluation of the role of natural selection' as religiously motivated are living in denial of history and are undermining the integrity of science.

2. Scientific analysis of harmony within the natural world. Due to the dominance of Darwinism, ecological studies have been imbalanced. Evidences of populations regulating their own numbers and of cooperative behaviour have been underplayed or reinterpreted in terms of a "struggle for survival".

3. Science is not a culture-free discipline. Objectivity is a worthy aspiration but it cannot be fully realised because scientists are unaware of most of the cultural norms they bring to their work. Since many aspects of culture are linked to religious/secular convictions, it is absurd when individuals and organisations try to set up demarcation arguments to separate science from ideology (whether religious or atheistic).

"Researchers bring their life experiences and culture with them into the field and laboratory, and in the course of their investigations actively originate, interpret, develop and reject metaphorical pathways. As is shown by the reception of Darwin's theory in Russia, the deployment and criticism of metaphors are part of the ineffably human process by which scientists mobilise their experiences and values to explore the infinite complexity of nature."

Global Darwin: Contempt for competition
Daniel Todes
Nature 462, 36-37 (5 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462036a (restricted access here)

Darwin's idea of the 'struggle for existence' struck a chord with his fellow countrymen. But Russians rejected the alien metaphor, says Daniel Todes, in the second of four weekly pieces on reactions to evolutionary theory.

See also:

Todes, D.P. Darwin's Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought, 1859-1917, Isis, 78(4), December 1987, 537-551

Monday, November 16th, Stephen Meyer and Chris Mooney will be on The Michael Medved Show (second hour, 1pm PT/4pm ET).

Mooney is a diehard Darwin defender that various Fellows here at the CSC have debated in the past, and he is someone we have reported about over the years. His view of science is elitist and arrogant, and he has recommended such things as suppressing dissenting views from the media, to spinning science in such a way as to manipulate public opinion.

More...

Casey's op-ed piece in the Washington Examiner.

More...

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Ad hominem attacks do serve as conversation stoppers when the other side has nothing to offer. Well done Casey!

A description of the Craig-Ayala debate was provided by Bradley Monton, moderator of the debate, which you can access HERE.

In Thinking Matters you can access the audio of the debate, and William Lane Craig's take on the debate. Click HERE.

Ask PZ Myers. Next Monday, November 16th in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Dr. Jerry Bergman and Dr. PZ Myers will be debating the topic: "Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?"

This event is sponsored by the Christian Student Fellowship and Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists.

The event is held at the North Star Ballroom, St. Paul Student Center (Buford Ave. near Cleveland Ave.) 7:30 to 9:30 PM, student center, St. Paul campus.

Neuroscience is, unfortunately, increasingly taken over by what I often describe as neurobullshipping. You know, neuroeconomics,, neurolaw ... It basically amounts to determining which regions of the brains of carefully chosen subjects light up when certain propositions are introduced.

Relief at last!

Here, at New Humanist, Raymond Tallis rallies the neuroskeptics ("Neurotrash", Volume 124, Issue 6, November/December 2009). 'Bout time someone did, I'd say. What's really good is that it comes from an unexpected quarter, at least for me.

He writes,

Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix "neuro-". Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers - who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism - have entered the field with the discipline of "Exp-phi" or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced "neuro-ethics", in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people's moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet's experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.

Yes, pop neuroscience is beginning to sound more like "evolutionary" psychology all the time.

Responding to Tallis's article's title, "Neurotrash", I wrote to friends to say, more or less,

What we need is a really big neuro-trash can.

The result of all this nonsense is that neuroscience gets discredited when it is, used appropriately, an immense help in medicine.

Remember, it was neuroscience that established that stroke victims were losing use of limbs through learned helplessness, not irreversible brain damage. Jeffrey Schwartz, Vince Paquette, Mario Beauregard and others have also demonstrated that non-drug, non-invasive treatments of mental disorders actually work - especially important for those disorders that cannot be effectively treated by drugs or surgery. (I am sure there are others whose work I do not know.)

Here's what I know for sure: I remember the rows on rows of beds in the chronic care hospital I used to volunteer at in the 1960s. Compare that to the much more favourable prospects brought about by the Decade of the Brain (1990s)! But it wasn't easy. One neuroscientist all but lost his career introducing the "learned helplessness" concept (why stroke patients, in many cases, lost the use of limbs through simple non-use). Only neuroscience could really have uncovered that.

That's the real story, and Tallis talks about it. We should stick to it.

It's also why I always say neuroscience should stay close to medicine and far from silliness - like which area of the brain lights up if a woman decides to buy the flaming yellow pants with movie star decals instead of the quiet brown pair*.

Seriously, however, in the justice system, neuroscience, inappropriately used, could be quite dangerous. Cf neurolaw.

If we can't convict an alleged perpetrator of a crime on the external evidence, we should not be trying to scan his brain.

Who cares what that guy thinks anyway?

It's not a crime around here to think, only to act in a way that is outside the law. If the prosecution can't prove he did it, then ... they can't make their case, and that's just too bad for them.

And, as I like to say, if you don't like English Common Law (= whose basic principle is that the accused is innocent unless proven guilty), please live in some jurisdiction where no one has ever heard of it. We like it here.

In the meantime, enough with this neurolaw stuff.

(*The Unforgivably Bad Taste region, maybe? Wonder where it is? Not many women could make that work.)

Review Of The Ninth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7; Imprint: Harper One

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

Former Nature editor Philip Ball once commented that 'there is no assembly plant so delicate, versatile and adaptive as the cell" (1). Emeritus Professor Theodore Brown chose to wax metaphorical by likening the cell to a fully-fledged factory, with its own complex functional relationships and interactions akin to what we observe in our own manufacturing facilities (2). In recent years the seemingly intractable problem of explaining how the first cell came into existence through chance events, otherwise known as the 'Chance Hypothesis', has become more acute than ever as scientists have begun to realize that a minimum suite of functional components must exist for cells to be operational. Stephen Meyer's summary of the current state of this so-called 'minimal complexity' research is profoundly insightful:

"The simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium - a tiny bacterium that inhabits the urinary tract requires "only" 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions and 562,000 bases of DNA...to assemble those proteins...Based upon minimal-complexity experiments, some scientists speculate (but have not demonstrated) that a simple one-celled organism might have been able to survive with as few as 250-400 genes" (p.201).

For renowned biochemist David Deamer the first cell would at the very least have needed a polymerase enzyme to transcribe from a template such as DNA, a constant source of supplementary materials notably nucleotides, amino acids and ATP and enzymes that faithfully carry out DNA replication during cell division (3). To suppose that even a hypothetical first cell would just come together from a gimish of prebiotic compounds undergoing continuous destructive dilution is to appeal to the miraculous (4). Attempts to reconstruct such a cell start off from a fairly elaborate point of departure in which enzymes and other catalysts are already present and functional (5).

Just how important these functional enzymes are was brought to bear in a study led by University of North Carolina biochemist Richard Wolfenden (6). Wolfenden's team was able to demonstrate how a reaction with a half life of 2.3 billion years occurred in milliseconds when supplied with the necessary enzymes. Such spectacular differences are not uncommon. As Wolfenden remarked:

"What we're defining here is what evolution had to overcome...the enzyme is surmounting a tremendous obstacle, a reaction half-life of 2.3 billion years...Without catalysts, there would be no life at all, from microbes to humans. It makes you wonder how natural selection operated in such a way as to produce a protein that got off the ground as a primitive catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction." (6)

Through a molecular technique known as random mutagenesis, scientists have now quantified the amino acid sequence variability that functional proteins can tolerate. Worthy of note in this field is the work of former Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe whose data forms a pillar for the case that Meyer presents in his book. Using locally-randomized sequence libraries of a portion of the antibiotic resistance enzyme Beta lactamase, Axe calculated that somewhere between 1 in 10exp50 and 1 in 10exp77 150 amino acid-long protein folds form configurations with a Beta lactamase function (7). Of these one in 10exp50 to 1 in 10exp74 form folded structures that might perform any number of alternative functions (7).

Based on the structural requirements of enzyme activity Axe emphatically argued against a global-ascent model of the function landscape in which incremental improvements of an arbitrary starting sequence "lead to a globally optimal final sequence with reasonably high probability" (7). For a protein made from scratch in a prebiotic soup, the odds of finding such globally optimal solutions are infinitesimally small- somewhere between 1 in 10exp140 and 1 in 10exp164 for a 150 amino acid long sequence if we factor in the probabilities of forming peptide bonds and of incorporating only left handed amino acids.

In a 1981 legal challenge involving the Arkansas Board Of Education, astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe appeared for the defense as an expert witness. Taking on the dogmatic neo-Darwinist view on the origins of life, Wickramasinghe unwaveringly proclaimed that the probability of obtaining the information necessary for making the simplest cell by chance was 1 in 10exp40,000 (8). These estimates not only exceeded by many powers of 10 the total number of atoms available in the universe but also closely matched the minimal complexity predictions discussed above. By pulling together these probabilistic threads of evidence in Signature In The Cell, Meyer has relegated naturalistic life origin models to little more than fanciful speculation. His piece-by-piece dismissal of the chance hypothesis is beautifully executed as is the personal narrative that interconnects the various portions of his scientific story.

Additional Literature Cited
1. Philip Ball (2001) Life's Lesson In Design, Nature, Vol 409 pp. 413-416
2. Theodore Brown (2003) The Art of the Scientific Metaphor, The Scientist, Volume 17, Issue 21, p. 10
3. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002) The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology, Volume 2, pp. 371-381
4. Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen (1984) The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, Published by Lewis and Stanley, Dallas, Texas, pp.42-68
5.Tamsin Osborne (2008) 'Artificial Cell' Can Make Its Own Genes, New Scientist,1 April, 2008, See http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13568-artificial-cell-can-make-its-own-genes.html
6. Without Enzyme, Biological Reaction Essential To Life Takes 2.3 billion Years: 2008 UNC Study, See http://www.med.unc.edu/www/news/2008-news-archives/november/without-enzyme-biological-reaction-essential-to-life-takes-2-3-billion-years-unc-study/?searchterm=Wolfenden
7. Douglas D. Axe (2004) Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds, Journal Of Molecular Biology, pp. 1295-1315
8. See Chandra Wickramasinghe's testimony at the 1981 Arkansas trial on creation which can be found at http://www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm

The symposium will take place from 9:30 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 10, in the Frey Moot Courtroom of at the School of Law, located on St. Thomas' downtown Minneapolis campus.

The symposium, free and open to the public, will bring together scholars to debate and analyze various constitutional and philosophical issues surrounding evolutionism and intelligent design, particularly as they affect U.S. public schools.

Among the speakers will be Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute.

More...

This topic forces us to assess the relationship between science and spirituality: is the invisible spiritual realm generated from the material or should it be considered as having a separate existence? Is religion a phenomenon that can ultimately be explained by science in naturalistic ways, or does religion represent a dimension of reality that cannot be directly probed by the methodologies of science? In an essay in Science, Elizabeth Culotta writes:

"[I]n the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin's lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the human mind. This new field, the cognitive science of religion, draws on psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the mental building blocks of religious thought."

Neanderthal burial, considered to be 60,000 years old (Kabara, Israel). Material culture analysis can stimulate hypotheses but the interpretations can easily be dominated by researcher presuppositions. (Source here)

Darwin approached the topic from the perspective of his thesis on the origin of species. He looked for evidence that religion itself could be explained by small incremental steps in human cognition and social structure. He started his "story" with the idea that primitive people had no belief system in an all-powerful God. He wrote: "There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea." But if the enquiry starts at a much more rudimentary level of spirituality, the emerging picture is different:

"If, however, we include under the term "religion" the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies, the case is wholly different; for this belief seems to be almost universal with the less civilised races. Nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose. As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally have craved to understand what was passing around him, and have vaguely speculated on his own existence." (Source here)

Culotta quotes the above passage to illustrate the thought that "to Charles Darwin, the origin of religious belief was no mystery". Yet those following in Darwin's footsteps have been puzzled, because humans put extraordinary resources into "elaborate religious buildings and rituals, with no obvious boost to survival and reproduction". Her article suggests that while there is no consensus yet among scientists, "potential answers are emerging from both the archaeological record and studies of the mind itself".

Archaeology certainly offers some data that is potentially relevant: geometric designs interpreted as an indication of symbolic behaviour; deliberate burials of the dead pointing to "the birth of metaphysical anguish", and carved figurines suggestive of shamanism. The problem with all these is that the metaphysical messages are read in different ways by scholars: these artefacts may stimulate thoughts about belief systems, but they are not hard evidence that reveals the minds of our ancestors.

Cognitive psychologists often start with children, who are said to reflect innate, rather than cultural, biases. It is not difficult to show that "young children prefer "teleological" or purpose-driven, explanations rather than mechanical ones for natural phenomenon". This leads them to perceive nature as purposefully designed by a designer. For children older than age 5, the researchers refer to the "theory of mind" which is our understanding that other humans have intentions, desires and beliefs like us.

"If you suspect that an agent was responsible for some mysterious event, it's a short step to thinking that the agent has a mind like your own. "Higher order theory of mind enables you to represent mental states of beings not immediately or visibly present, and who could have a very different perspective than your own," says Barrett. "That's what you need to have a rich representation of what it might be like to be a god." (It's also what is needed to have a functional religion, because people need to know that others share their beliefs.) As Darwin put it, humans developing religion "would naturally attribute to spirits the same passions, the same love of vengeance, or simplest form of justice, and the same affections which they themselves feel.""

Although these cognitive models are regarded as building on Darwinian foundations, there is a recognition that they have not provided satisfactory answers. One researcher is quoted as saying: "Deriving belief from the architecture of the mind is necessary but not sufficient". What drives all this? What gives religion the fitness to survive? The adaptationist approach of Darwinism comes to the rescue:

[Religion] "promotes cooperative behavior among strangers and so creates stable groups. Other researchers hypothesize that religion is actually adaptive: By encouraging helpful behavior, religious groups boost the biological survival and reproduction of their members. Adhering to strict behavioral rules may signal that a religion's members are strongly committed to the group and so will not seek a free ride, a perennial problem in cooperative groups."
[. . .]
But others [. . .] counter that this adaptationist explanation is itself light on data. "It is often said that religion encourages or prescribes solidarity within the group, but we need evidence that people actually follow [their religion's] recommendations," says Boyer. "The case is still open."

So the "potential answers" Culotta mentions at the outset have the word potential in bold and the rest is in the imagination. What is strikingly lacking in these studies is any questioning of the materialist mindset of the researchers. The most significant way they follow Darwin is in excluding any thought that intelligent design issues need to be addressed before we can properly understand humanity. Indeed, the researchers set up a culture that portrays teleology as anti-science. Culotta reports on the findings of cognitive psychologists working with some undergraduate students:

"When the undergrads had to respond under time pressure, they were likely to agree with nonscientific statements such as "The sun radiates heat because warmth nurtures life." "It's hard work to overcome these teleological explanations," says Kelemen, who adds that the data also suggest an uphill battle for scientific literacy. "When you speed people up, their hard work goes by the wayside." She's now investigating how professional scientists perform on her tests. Such purpose-driven beliefs are a step on the way to religion, she says. "Things exist for purposes, things are intentionally caused, things are intentionally caused for a purpose by some agent. ... You begin to see that a god is a likely thing for a human mind to construct.""

These attitudes are deeply worrying, because the researchers have started with the premise of philosophical naturalism. If a teleological perspective is correct, these researchers have no way of discovering the truth. When we look at the radiation that life needs to be sustained, and then look at the radiation emitted by the sun, the match is superb. It is perfectly reasonable to make design inferences and to test teleological hypotheses.

The real problems are with researchers who say that the material processes that create the physical bodies of animals and plants are no different in essence from the material processes that create religion and morality. We can make a prediction that these researchers will continue to grope around in the dark, looking for a answers but never finding them. In the end, they will conclude that religion, morality and consciousness are spandrels.

On the Origin of Religion
Elizabeth Culotta
Science, 6 November 2009, 326, 784 - 787 | DOI: 10.1126/science.326_784

How and when did religion arise? In the 11th essay in Science's series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Culotta explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities. No consensus yet exists among scientists, but potential answers are emerging from both the archaeological record and studies of the mind itself. Some researchers, exploring religion's effects in society, suggest that it may boost fitness by promoting cooperative behavior. And in the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin's lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the human mind. This new field, the cognitive science of religion, draws on psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the mental building blocks of religious thought.

Today Tom Woodward interviews Dr. David Berlinski on our Darwin or Design radio show. You can listen live via the Internet on Saturday mornings (10AM E.T.) at The BridgeFM. To celebrate the occasion we are offer The "Berlinski Bundle" of books and DVDs by Dr. Berlinski.

The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions by Dr. David Berlinski has just been released in paperback after the hardback edition sold out in weeks. ARN is offering the Berlinski Bundle at a 20% discount off our regular prices which includes Devil's Delusion, his new collection of 32 stunning essays, The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays, and the entertaining and informative interview DVD, The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski. Individually these items normally cost $70, but you can buy the Berlinski Bundle for a limited time for only $50 which includes free shipping anywhere in the US.

Sooner or later, students of abiogenesis will encounter Darwin's 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker with his speculations on the spontaneous generation of life. He was returning some pamphlets which triggered the reaction: "I am always delighted to see a word in favour of Pangenesis, which some day, I believe, will have a resurrection." The next paragraph has his "big if" dream:

"It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, - light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."

Bon appetit Mr Darwin! (Source here)

When taken alongside other comments Darwin made on this theme, it is clear that his public stance was to be cautious. The science of his day was unable to say anything positive about spontaneous generation. He felt the power of Pasteur's experiments which brought to an end all the earlier speculations about life emerging from non-life. The authors of a paper reviewing Darwin's thinking summarises the "big if" in this way:

"In the absence of any real corroborative evidence, it is impossible to guess what Darwin thought about the nature of the first living beings. In any case, Darwin's remarks should not be read to imply that he was thinking in terms of prebiotic chemistry, but rather that he recognized that the chemical gap separating organisms from the non-living was not insurmountable."

Also to be considered is the reference to a "Creator" in the last sentence of all the editions of his magnum opus bar the first:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." (Source on page 490 here)

Does this mean that Darwin was a Deist, invoking the Creator to explain the first cells that can be called living? What is this "breathing" he refers to? Is it a link with the biblical account of origins? Why was the "Creator" absent from the 1st edition but present thereafter? The authors draw attention to Darwin's own explanation, contained in an 1863 letter to Hooker and shortly afterwards another to the Athenaeum, based on the profound ignorance within science of any route for life to have emerged from non-life:

"[to Hooker] But I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant "appeared" by some wholly unknown process. - It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter."
[to the Athenaeum] "Now is there a fact, or a shadow of a fact, supporting the belief that these elements, without the presence of any organic compounds, and acted on only by known forces, could produce a living creature? At present it is to us a result absolutely inconceivable. Your reviewer sneers with justice at my use of the "Pentateuchal terms", "of one primordial form into which life was first breathed": in a purely scientific work I ought perhaps not to have used such terms; but they well serve to confess that our ignorance is as profound on the origin of life as on the origin of force or matter."

In the light of these comments, it is curious that Darwin did not drop the word "Creator" in subsequent editions. Whatever regrets he expressed in 1863, they were not deep enough to excise the injudicious word. The authors note the consistency in Darwin's view that science did not have any insights into spontaneous generation. They show from his comments to Haeckel, from the apochryphal account of Darwin's encounter with fossils in a meteorite, and from several other comments made in letters, that Darwin was publicly silent because he could find no basis in science for making any positive statements.

"As for myself I cannot believe in spontaneous generation & though I expect that at some future time the principle of life will be rendered intelligible, at present it seems to me beyond the confines of science." (Letter 5282, 1866)
"I have met with no evidence that seems in the least trustworthy, in favour of the so-called Spontaneous generation. I believe that I have somewhere said (but cannot find the passage) that the principle of continuity renders it probable that the principle of life will hereafter be shown to be a part, or consequence of some general law; but this is only conjecture and not science." (Letter to Wallich, 1882)

This being said, the authors are also at pains to point out that Darwin was consistently predisposed to the origin of life being a wholly natural phenomenon. "Although he insisted over and over again that there was no evidence of how the first organisms may have first appeared, he was firmly convinced it was the outcome of a natural process that had to be approached from a secular framework."

"The intimate relation of Life with laws of chemical combination, & the universality of latter render spontaneous generation not improbable." (2nd Notebook, 1837)
"Though no evidence worth anything has as yet, in my opinion, been advanced in favour of a living being, being developed from inorganic matter, yet I cannot avoid believing the possibility of this will be proved some day in accordance with the law of continuity. [. . .] If it is ever found that life can originate on this world, the vital phenomena will come under some general law of nature." (Letter 13711, 1882)

The "secular framework" of Darwin resulted from his adoption of philosophical materialism. He was a child of Enlightenment rationalism, along with Lyell, Huxley and Hooker. He knew that some others wanted to put his ideas into a theistic or a deistic framework, but Darwin always resisted this. His explanation of using the word "Creator" ("I truckled to public opinion") simply reinforces the conclusion that Darwin's science was wholly secularised. It is surprising, therefore, to read this comment of the authors about people who misread Darwin:

"Indeed, a careful examination and critical reading of his public and private writings shows that what appear to be contradictory opinions on the problem of the emergence of life are the result of texts read out of context, sometimes maliciously, as shown by some publications of creationist groups and advocates of the so-called intelligent design."

It is remarkable how often such comments appear in scholarly work, nearly always unsupported by references or quotes. On this occasion, as is generally the case, the charge is erroneous and entirely misplaced. By and large, creationist and ID scholars have exactly the same understanding of Darwin's secular framework as the authors of this paper. Where they differ is in thinking that this secular framework is profoundly wrong and is an inappropriate foundation for science. Here is an example of an ID advocate who gives the same interpretation of events as the authors:

"Nor should we be misled by a sop Darwin attached to later editions of his Origin of Species. The first edition ended with the famous flourish: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one [. . .]" To smooth ruffled feathers, later editions read: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one [. . .]" Some are fooled by this sop even to this day. But what did Darwin himself say about this little addition? "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used [a] Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process."" (Wiker, B. 2009)

Those who should be accused of taking Darwin out of context are the Theistic Evolutionists, who do not want to acknowledge Darwin's philosophical materialism. They generally refer positively to Darwin's reference to a Creator and try to suggest that Darwinism can be harmonised with Theism. Examples include Richard Aulie, Darwin and spontaneous generation, Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, 22, 1970, 31-33 (cited by the authors!), William Phipps, Darwin, the Scientific Creationist, Christian Century, 1983, 809-811, Denis Alexander, Creation or Evolution - do we have to choose? Monarch Books 2008, and Nick Spencer, Darwin and God, SPCK 2009. The latter two names are associated with the "Rescuing Darwin" project, funded by The Templeton Foundation, which seeks to find a harmony between Darwinism and God's creative process. For some Christian comment on the project, go here.

As a final thought, Darwin was intellectually honest enough to see the difference between his philosophical materialism (which demanded some form of spontaneous generation) and empirical science (which gave no support for it). My question is: when does it become reasonable to use the findings of abiogenesis research as evidence against spontaneous generation? We have a large body of evidence today and it is telling us something! Some of us have concluded that the materialist paradigm cannot succeed because it fails to recognise the importance of biological information. The question (When does it become reasonable?) is never asked by philosophical materialists because they cannot entertain the notion that causation may be intelligent.

Charles Darwin and the Origin of Life
Juli Pereto, Jeffrey L. Bada and Antonio Lazcano
Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, 39(5), October, 2009, 395-406 | doi 10.1007/s11084-009-9172-7

Abstract: When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species 150 years ago he consciously avoided discussing the origin of life. However, analysis of some other texts written by Darwin, and of the correspondence he exchanged with friends and colleagues demonstrates that he took for granted the possibility of a natural emergence of the first life forms. As shown by notes from the pages he excised from his private notebooks, as early as 1837 Darwin was convinced that "the intimate relation of Life with laws of chemical combination, & the universality of latter render spontaneous generation not improbable". Like many of his contemporaries, Darwin rejected the idea that putrefaction of preexisting organic compounds could lead to the appearance of organisms. Although he favored the possibility that life could appear by natural processes from simple inorganic compounds, his reluctance to discuss the issue resulted from his recognition that at the time it was [not] possible to undertake the experimental study of the emergence of life.

See also:

Dawkins, R. There is Grandeur in this View of Life, The Edge (30 September 2009)

Wiker, B., What were Darwin's Religious Views? Discovery Institute (1 May 2009)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Sometimes, when discussing the much misunderstood Scopes Trial, I have referred to the textbook from which Scopes was teaching, Hunter's Civic Biology, which seems to have been an amalgam of civics and biology, with a dose of eugenics thrown in, and smug assertions about "highest" or "lowest". Bad idea. Enough already with total subject confusion, ecological misunderstanding, and useless social conflict. Here's an interesting site where Ron Ladouceur gives us a tour of exotic textbooks of our storied past.

I am glad my own biology teachers focused on the cell theory of life, the germ theory of disease, and the life and times of the endangered ribbon snake (= ecology).

There is only so much students will take away when they graduate (if they do) , and you want it to be something they can make sense of in dealing with their own life and environment.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

A reminder that the Indiana University debate between Dr. William Lane Craig and Francisco J. Ayala will place on Thursday, November 5th.

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Sophia Lee, of the USC Daily Trojan, reports that with nothing but a projector screen and folding chairs, the tiny Embassy Auditorium of the Davidson Conference Center is a far cry from the 50-foot-high IMAX theater where Darwin's Dilemma was originally scheduled to be screened. Even though the California Science Center recently backed out of its contract to host the film's Los Angeles premiere, the tensions created by the controversial documentary's release followed the event to its new location.

The final installment of Illustra Media's long-planned Intelligent Design trilogy, this documentary brings to light the contradiction between the fossil record and Darwin's theories. It focuses on the Cambrian explosion, a time period in the earth's history in which there was a sudden "explosion" of complex species without any ancestral trace.

Though unmistakably pro-intelligent design, Darwin's Dilemma takes on a purposefully secular stance. The word "God" is never mentioned. Instead, less threatening euphamisms like "information source" and "designer" are used. In fact, post-screening panelist and anti-evolution activist Jonathan Wells emphasized that intelligent design is not creationism or natural theology.

"Intelligent design is not a random, convenient solution to evolution," Wells said. "In fact, it actually opens more doors to scientific research and investigation."

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What I consider a fair and balanced report on the Castle Rock Intelligent Design Conference was offered by Bradley Monton.

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In ENV, Casey Luskin writes on the landmark Epperson v. Arkansas, the first case regarding the teaching of evolution to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision was handed down in 1968, where the Court effectively declared it illegal to ban the teaching of evolution.

An informative summary and commentary can be viewed by clicking HERE.

Alongside all the public interest in sporting prowess, recent research has added significantly to our knowledge of how the human body actually works. Many characteristics we take for granted now appear to be critical success factors. Take, for example, our toes. We do not need long toes, like monkeys and apes, because our toes are not used for grasping branches. But are they vestigial - withered remnants of once-grand appendages? The answer is: most definitely not! Whilst it is possible to walk comfortably with longer toes, running is different. Increase toe length by just 20% and there is a doubling of the peak digital flexor impulses and the mechanical work required.

An image like this shows just how different the human foot is from the apes (Source here)

It emerges that the human body has numerous traits that all support the ability to run. In an informative piece in the New York Times, author Parker-Pope refers to the research into short toes saying that it:

"showed that the short toes of the human foot allowed for more efficient running, compared with longer-toed animals. Increasing toe length as little as 20 percent doubles the mechanical work of the foot. Even the fact that the big toe is straight, rather than to the side, suggests that our feet evolved for running. "The big toe is lined up with the rest, not divergent, the way you see with apes and our closest non-running relatives," Dr. Bramble said. "It's the main push-off in running: the last thing to leave the ground is that big toe." Spring-like ligaments and tendons in the feet and legs are crucial for running. (Our close relatives the chimpanzee and the ape don't have them.) A narrow waist and a midsection that can turn allow us to swing our arms and prevent us from zigzagging on the trail. Humans also have a far more developed sense of balance, an advantage that keeps the head stable as we run. And most humans can store about 20 miles' worth of glycogen in their muscles."

A few years ago, one of the authors, Daniel Lieberman, was involved in a related study. This was concerned with the gluteus maximus, said to be the the largest muscle in the human body. Parker-Pope also reports on this work, which found that the gluteus maximus is primarily engaged during running.

"Your butt is a running muscle; you barely use it when you walk," Dr. Lieberman said. "There are so many features in our bodies from our heads to our toes that make us good at running."

There would appear to be potential for clarifying the use of this muscle. It is important for posture, and another has made the comment: "As all weightlifters know, the primary purpose of the gluteus maximus is to raise the body from a deep squat." There is more to be said on these matters.

A noticeable element of this research is that the data are consistently interpreted in terms of natural selection pressures acting on natural variation. This is nothing unusual, because most biologists working in this field have come to accept Darwinism as their interpretative paradigm. Richard Dawkins speaks for many when he wrote in The Blind Watchmaker (Chapter 3) that "We have seen that living things are too improbable and beautifully designed to have come into existence by chance." Natural selection is perceived as giving direction to hereditable variation and results in incremental adaptation. This is how Lieberman and his colleagues approach the 'evolution' of short toes:

"The data suggest that having longer pedal phalanges, in the hallux and to some extent in the lateral toes, increases digital flexor force and work and might contribute to an increased risk of overuse injury during running. Although these effects presumably have negligible fitness consequences for habitually shod recent-modern humans who do not run long distances daily, they might have been significant enough to impose the kind of selective pressures that led to the observed changes in phalangeal size and shape during human evolution. For example, partial foot remains recovered at Hadar, Ethiopia, suggest that, by 3.6 million years ago, the lateral phalanges of A. afarensis were shorter than in the African great apes, but approximately 40% longer and more curved than in modern humans. This intermediate phalangeal morphology is thought to reflect a mixed behavioral repertoire comprising substantial arboreality and facultative terrestrial bipedalism."

What makes this a matter for concern is that no one appears to be talking about testing alternative hypotheses. It is as though the Darwinian explanation wins by default, and this does not make for healthy science. In particular, one hypothesis that is held by a great many people but is not admitted to academic debate, is that the human body is a product of intelligent design. The strength of this approach rests (a) in the holistic character of the alleged design; (b) the exquisite nature of the various characteristics; and (c) the claim that some of these features are irreducibly complex. (as in chapter 2 of Stuart Burgess' book The Origin of Man.

There are ways to test the Darwinian hypothesis. The presumed ancestor had elongated foot bones, illustrated here. To transform this stage to a short-toed human foot by natural selection demands gradual change and this is how the hypothesis can be tested. Where is the evolutionary pathway? Incidentally, the australopithecine feet should not be compared with the African great apes (as Lieberman) but with other ancestral apes contemporary with Australopithecus afarensis. This same line of reasoning about hypothesis testing means that design-based predictions of abrupt appearance can also be evaluated. Are evolutionists willing to allow this testing process to occur? Is this a debate that can be permitted in academic literature and in educational contexts?

Almost invariably, in the past, the idea that ID leads to testable hypotheses is blocked by the philosophical principle that all causes in science must be natural (law or chance). Despite repeated efforts to point out this is a metaphysical block, not one required by science, few take the time to address the point. However, it is encouraging to find some shifts in opinion from time to time. An example, surprising to most of us, is the concession Richard Dawkins gave to John Lennox in a debate last year.

"The deist god would be one that I think it would be [pause] one could make a reasonably respectable case for that. Not a case that I would accept, but I think it is a serious discussion that we could have." (The audio of this exchange can be accessed via http://www.fixed-point.org)

This is a welcome acknowledgement. For those wanting more input on this, the day after the debate, Melanie Phillips had an article in Spectator Magazine drawing attention to the significance of Dawkins' admission. The offer of a serious discussion is welcome. ID scientists do not ask for anything more than the freedom to present a respectable case. What is needed is for academics to abandon their doctrinaire attachment to methodological materialism in science.

Another perspective on this issue is to consider what needs to be done to build a robot that walks and runs. This task certainly focuses the mind and clarifies the issues. For an insight into the state-of-the-art, go here. PETMAN is wearing normal athletic shoes and exhibits a normal heel-to-toe gait. This robot is the product of intelligent design: many man-hours of effort by highly skilled scientists and engineers. Those who think natural selection acting on natural variations would do well to consider the immensity of the task they are expecting Darwin's mechanisms to accomplish.

Walking, running and the evolution of short toes in humans
Campbell Rolian, Daniel E. Lieberman, Joseph Hamill, John W. Scott and William Werbel
Journal of Experimental Biology 212, 713-721 (2009) | doi: 10.1242/jeb.019885

Abstract: The phalangeal portion of the forefoot is extremely short relative to body mass in humans. This derived pedal proportion is thought to have evolved in the context of committed bipedalism, but the benefits of shorter toes for walking and/or running have not been tested previously. Here, we propose a biomechanical model of toe function in bipedal locomotion that suggests that shorter pedal phalanges improve locomotor performance by decreasing digital flexor force production and mechanical work, which might ultimately reduce the metabolic cost of flexor force production during bipedal locomotion. We tested this model using kinematic, force and plantar pressure data collected from a human sample representing normal variation in toe length (N=25). The effect of toe length on peak digital flexor forces, impulses and work outputs was evaluated during barefoot walking and running using partial correlations and multiple regression analysis, controlling for the effects of body mass, whole-foot and phalangeal contact times and toe-out angle. Our results suggest that there is no significant increase in digital flexor output associated with longer toes in walking. In running, however, multiple regression analyses based on the sample suggest that increasing average relative toe length by as little as 20% doubles peak digital flexor impulses and mechanical work, probably also increasing the metabolic cost of generating these forces. The increased mechanical cost associated with long toes in running suggests that modern human forefoot proportions might have been selected for in the context of the evolution of endurance running.

See also:

Lieberman, D.E., Raichlen, D.A., Pontzer, H., Bramble D.M. and Cutright-Smith, E., The human gluteus maximus and its role in running, Journal of Experimental Biology 209, 2143-2155 (2006) | doi: 10.1242/jeb.02255

Parker-Pope, T., The Human Body Is Built for Distance, New York Times (October 26, 2009)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "When Listening to Music, Your Brain Is ‘Moving’ Even If You Are Not," a news release from the Society for Neuroscience (10/15/06), we learn,

One of the best-studied features in orientation maps is known as a pinwheel, a small region in which all orientations are represented in segments that appear to come to a point. "A long-standing question is, 'How are neurons arranged in the pinwheel centers?'" says R.C. Reid, PhD, of Harvard Medical School.

Reid provided the answer by using two-photon calcium imaging, which determines the physiological response of hundreds of cells simultaneously as well as their precise location in the cortical circuit.

"By recording from hundreds to thousands of neurons at each pinwheel center, we demonstrated that pinwheel centers are remarkably well organized," he says.

"Neurons selective to different orientations are arranged in an orderly manner even in the very center," he adds. "There was virtually no mixing of cells with different orientation preferences even at the center. Thus, pinwheel centers truly represent singularities in the cortical map." This finding is suggesting extraordinary precision in the development of cortical circuits.

and much else.

Ignore all the yap about evolution in the article, which is - as typical - intended to distract attention from the obvious conclusion.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

There is a Web site of the upcoming event "Intelligent Design: Is it Viable?" It will be a debate between Dr. Francisco J. Ayala and Dr. William Lane Craig. Moderated by Dr. Bradley Monton. The debate will occur on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 7 p.m. EST at Indiana University Auditorium.

Here you will find all of the information you need to attend the event.

Go to Web site...

In ScienceDaily, it is reported that thhe mantis shrimps in the study are found on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and have the most complex vision systems known to science. They can see in twelve colours (humans see in only three) and can distinguish between different forms of polarized light.

Special light-sensitive cells in mantis shrimp eyes act as quarter-wave plates -- which can rotate the plane of the oscillations (the polarization) of a light wave as it travels through it. This capability makes it possible for mantis shrimps to convert linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light and vice versa.

Dr Nicholas Roberts, lead author of the Nature Photonics paper said: "Our work reveals for the first time the unique design and mechanism of the quarter-wave plate in the mantis shrimp's eye. It really is exceptional - out-performing anything we humans have so far been able to create."

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And how did this evolve through only natural processes? Given enough time anything can happen?

On October 21st Richard Dawkins appeared on the syndicated Hugh Hewitt talk show to promote his new book, "The Greatest Show on Earth".

It was a lively and interesting discussion...

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Cornelius Hunter blogged on Dawkins afterwards. Here is the link.

Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design by Bradley Monton is a breakthrough book in the origins debate. Why? Because an atheist professor of philosophy at a secular university has written a book to defend intelligent design. As Monton would admit, it's a partial defense, as he does not find ID arguments overwhelmingly convincing, but he also does not find them trivial, and he believes they should be allowed on the table and in the classroom for discussion. He even went so far as to defend ID in a public debate in 2008, and his position as a true educator seeking truth has brought the wrath of Darwinists and fellow atheists down on his head. Welcome to the club Dr. Monton!

His work on a rigorous definition of intelligent design in chapter 1 is worth the price of the book alone. While most ID proponents use sound byte definitions to communicate the essence of ID to the public, Monton develops a rigorous definition that he feels will help in testing ID theory. We wouldn't expect any less of a philosophy of science professor and we think his definition will generate a more meaningful dialogue. But don't worry, you don't have to be a philosopher to understand this book. Monton has done a great job of making his arguments accessible to the general reader. This book is now available at ARN.

Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski and John West are all featured speakers at The Legacy of Darwin Intelligent Design Conference to be held at the Douglas County Event Center in Castle Rock Colorado this weekend October 30-31. The Conference fee is $10. For more information visit www.shepherdproject.com/idconf/notabene.html or call 1-800-253-1869. Registrations will also be taken at the door. The conference begins 7 pm Friday night.

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

When it comes to academic triumphs and laudatory honors it can be said that mycologist Paul Stamets has his fair share. Stamets has authored six books on mushrooms, holds over twenty patents, is a winner of the Collective Heritage Institute's Bioneers Award and owns a wholesale business selling alternative medicines. Today he also runs a facility that boasts twenty four laminar flow benches across four laboratories processing between 10-20 thousand kilos of mycelia each week. He has close to a thousand mycelium cultures growing at any given time and is renowned across the world for his view of fungi as the 'grand molecular dissemblers of nature'.

Stamets describes himself in his youth as a hippy with a stuttering habit who could not look people in the eye. He also fondly recalls once telling his charismatic Christian mother that the forest is where he goes to church on Sundays. He spent many years as a microscopist at the Evergreen State College in Washington studying mushroom mycelia with the aid of an electron microscope. There he developed an intense passion for all things fungal even to the extent that he now occasionally appears in public sporting a hat made from Amadou- a fungus that, he boldly maintains, was essential for the portability of fire during man's much-heralded migration out of Africa.

When it comes to mushrooms, Stamets' most radical concept, and perhaps his most attractive one, draws on a human parallel. In fact he proposes that that organized networks of mycelia under our feet form the earth's own 'internet' of sorts carrying antibiotics and enzymes as well as huge numbers of signaling chemicals across trillions and trillions of end branchings. In short, he sees our own Internet superhighway as a mere replica of a highly-successful system that already exists in nature's own backyard. Perhaps surprisingly these networks are not confined to land habitats. Indeed aquatic underwater mushrooms have been discovered in the streams of southern Oregon and mycologists are now busily investigating how these hydrophiles survive and affect surrounding ecosystems.

Agarikon is yet another fungal species that gets mycologists such as Stamets visibly excited. Otherwise known as the 'elixir of long life', this impressively-sized fungus has been used for years as an effective treatment for respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and is now known to exhibit a very potent effect against the smallpox and flu viruses. There is strong evidence that the active anti-virals in Agarikon might also serve well in the present-day combat against H1N1 and H5N1. In fact so critical to human health are the medicinal properties of this remarkable organism that Stamets has embarked on his own mini-crusade to create the largest Agarikon genomic DNA library in the world.

On a more serious note, many environmentalists claim that today we are fully engaged in the biggest mass extinction event that our planet has ever known. Stamets is not one to shy away from sounding alarm bells and boldly adheres to the claim that 50% of all known species on our planet could become extinct over the next 100 years if swift action is not taken. His use of oyster mushroom mycelia to remove oil pollution is an outstanding example of how we might avert such a bleak endpoint. These saprophytic fungi are gateway species that break down toxic waste through the action of specialized enzymes and thereby allow damaged ecosystems to flourish and rebound. Oyster mushrooms have also been shown to have a dramatic effect on bacterial titers destroying coliform bacteria and Staphylococcus in contaminated waters.

The environmental resiliency of fungi has long fascinated mycologists, and future mycotechnologies might build on this salient property. While Prototaxites- a 30-foot long, 3-foot high mushroom that lived 350-420 million years ago stands as the archetypal giant fungus, the twenty two-hundred acre, one cell thick mycelium mat of Armillaria ostoyae (honey mushroom) now holds the record for the largest organism in the world. Thermo-resilient symbionts such as Curvularia confer a viral-dependent heat tolerance on many grasses allowing them to grow at elevated temperatures, as high as 104 F in some cases.

Fungi can be described as being parasitic, saprophytic, micorrhizal or endophytic in their modes of deriving nourishment. This so-called 'mycological guild' of complementary fungi is what gives rise to a healthy ecosystem. The interactivity of these fungi and other organisms is clearly visible in ant cultivars of the Lepiota mushroom which are used by thatch ants to stop a particularly aggressive parasitic fungus called Escovopsis from invading their nests. In a converse strategy, Metarhizium is a parasitic fungus that kills carpenter ants and is therefore finding application in the protection of buildings from these would-be aggressors. By using the non-sporulating stage of Metarhizium, Stamets has surpassed the carpenter ants' own ability to keep the fungus at bay thereby providing him with an effective treatment against carpenter ant infestations.

Despite such mycotechnological advances, Stamets describes the current state of the field as being under-respected, underappreciated and underfunded. Most importantly he remains steadfastly focused on restoring ecosystems for the enjoyment of generations to come. For those of us actively involved in the evolution/ID debate, Stamets' findings are likewise poignantly relevant. In fact he makes a stunning claim regarding computer and fungal networks noting how "we were destined to create the computer Internet at a time when the earth is in crisis".

That our understanding of network theory and its importance in fungal bioremediation should coincide with our earth's need for ecological intervention introduces a teleological, purposeful perspective to life that contradicts the contingency of orthodox Darwinism. After all a cosmos that is fashioned towards such an endpoint is incompatible with the random, directionless tenet of natural selection. As for the Christian faithful there is one proclamation that makes sense in our current predicament: Thank God that the forests are where mycologists choose to go to church on Sundays!

For further details on Stamets' work see How Mushrooms Can Save The World at http://tiny.cc/iecmw, (Login: Promega; Password: mushroom)

Darwinius masillae is the magnificently preserved Ida, the "eighth wonder of the world" unveiled earlier this year: "our Mona Lisa" and an evolutionary "Rosetta Stone". Afradapis is a newly discovered adapoid from Egypt, known from fossilised jaws and teeth. The controversies surrounding Ida have been the subject of comment here and here. A newly published cladistic analysis of 360 morphological features found in 117 living and extinct primates comes down on the side of Ida being more closely related to lemurs and lorises rather than ancestral to anthropoids.

Darwinius was proposed to be on the right branch - an ancestor of apes and humans - but the new study puts it as a dead end on the left branch (Source here)

One of the criticisms of the original report of Darwinius is that the authors did not provide a comprehensive cladistic analysis, but only referred to anthropoid-like characters. That analysis is still not forthcoming, but a new paper by Seiffert and colleagues considers dentition and jaw morphological features for a comprehensive set of primates, including Darwinius. The claim for anthropoid-like characters is put in a new light, because so many adapiform animals (ancestors of lemurs and lorises) have them.

"It has long been known that some adapiform lineages evolved derived morphological features that are also seen in living and extinct anthropoids (for example, fused mandibular symphyses, upper canines with mesial grooves, enlarged and spatulate upper and lower incisors, short and tall rostra). The phylogenetic significance of these features has been a source of ongoing debate for decades."

Their significant finding is that Afradapis (their newly reported fossil species - an undisputed adapiform) has numerous anthropoid-like characters. This leads the authors to conclude that evolutionary convergences are in plentiful supply.

"Of all known fossil prosimians (including Darwinius), Afradapis provides perhaps the most detailed examples of derived anthropoidlike adaptations in its dental and mandibular morphology. As is the case for many of the morphological features that some have argued link adapiforms to anthropoids, however, the anthropoid-like features of Afradapis (fused mandibular symphysis with transverse torus, deep mandibular corpus, deep masseteric fossa, large upper molar hypocones, absence of P2/2 and presence of an enlarged P3 with a honing facet for the upper canine) are not present in the most primitive undoubted fossil anthropoids, such as Biretia and Proteopithecus, indicating that the features are likely to have been acquired through convergent evolution."

The implication, then is that the Darwinius team have been misled by characters that have turned out not to be diagnostic of anthropoid affinities. This conclusion has been picked up and discussed by many commentators, such as Gibbons:

"When they scored Ida and Afradapis against those other primates, Seiffert and colleagues found that adapids do share some traits with anthropoids, such as the loss of a third upper and lower premolar. But these traits evolved more than once among primates, the team reports tomorrow in Nature. They are the result of convergent evolution, which is the acquisition of the same biological trait in unrelated lineages - and, thus, do not indicate inheritance of the trait from a shared ancestor."

Several significant consequences follow from this research. Not least is the reminder that tracking human ancestors by identifying missing links is an exercise fraught with methodological difficulties. As has been previously noted, human evolution data can be likened to a pointillist painting. Like a pointillist painting, evolution is only apparent from a distant vantage point. Close up, we see masses of data, but no coherent picture.

Another issue to address concerns convergent evolution and the problems this phenomenon creates for cladistic analyses. How do we know what characters are primitive and what are derived? Here is an opportunity for human interpretation to be concealed behind a scientific analysis. The extent to which convergences can be invoked raises suspicion in the minds of some:

"One of the researchers who studied Ida, however, responds that Ida and Afradapis look more like the group that gave rise to anthropoids than the group that gave rise to lemurs and lorises - and that there are too many traits to dismiss as convergent evolution. "The complete convergence postulated for Afradapis seems implausible to me," says paleontologist Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor."

The best outcome of all this is for scientists to demonstrate more humility in handling data. So many seem to grasp at some data and brandish 'evidence' as though it provides a definitive answer to controversy. But this is not how data should be handled in research. Data needs to be interpreted and history shows that there is always more than one way of interpreting it. If we can all adopt a 'multiple working hypotheses' approach when using the scientific method, it will be progress indeed.

Convergent evolution of anthropoid-like adaptations in Eocene adapiform primates
Erik R. Seiffert, Jonathan M. G. Perry, Elwyn L. Simons & Doug M. Boyer
Nature 461, 1118-1121 (22 October 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature08429

Adapiform or 'adapoid' primates first appear in the fossil record in the earliest Eocene epoch (~55 million years (Myr) ago), and were common components of Palaeogene primate communities in Europe, Asia and North America1. Adapiforms are commonly referred to as the 'lemur-like' primates of the Eocene epoch, and recent phylogenetic analyses have placed adapiforms as stem members of Strepsirrhini, a primate suborder whose crown clade includes lemurs, lorises and galagos. An alternative view is that adapiforms are stem anthropoids. This debate has recently been rekindled by the description of a largely complete skeleton of the adapiform Darwinius, from the middle Eocene of Europe, which has been widely publicised as an important 'link' in the early evolution of Anthropoidea. Here we describe the complete dentition and jaw of a large-bodied adapiform (Afradapis gen. nov.) from the earliest late Eocene of Egypt (~37 Myr ago) that exhibits a striking series of derived dental and gnathic features that also occur in younger anthropoid primates [. . .] The specialized morphological features that these adapiforms share with anthropoids are therefore most parsimoniously interpreted as evolutionary convergences. [. . .]

See also:

Gibbons, A., New Primate Fossil Poses Further Challenge to Ida, ScienceNOW Daily News (21 October 2009)

Dalton, R., Fossil primate challenges Ida's place, (21 October 2009), 461, 1040 | doi:10.1038/4611040a

ARN launched its Darwin or Design Radio Broadcast today The Bridge FM family of stations in the New York and New Jersey area. The show airs each Saturday morning at 10 A.M Eastern time and ARN shares hosting duties with Dr. Tom Woodward with the C.S. Lewis Society. Those outside the broadcast area can listen in on the streaming web broadcast available at www.BridgeFM.org.

For the most recent broadcast with Dennis Wagner (October 24th), we've put together two extraordinary offers. Keep in mind that we can only promise to keep these offers posted through Thursday, October 29th!

OFFER #1:

(V070SK): This is the Phillip Johnson DVD Collection. Ten of the best of Phillip Johnson videos produced by ARN, including interviews, lectures, debates and a special tribute to Phil from his friends and foes. Normally these videos sell for $25 each, but you can save 50% when you purchase the entire collection of ten DVDs for only $125 U.S ($175 Foreign). To purchase this special offer, go to the following link: http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/videos/v070sk.htm. And remember - you can't get these videos anywhere else because they were produced by ARN.

The Phillip Johnson DVD collection includes:

V001 - Focus on Darwinism: An Interview with Phillip Johnson
V002 - Darwinism on Trial, Lecture at UC Irvine
V004 - Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy: Debate with William Provine at Stanford University
V008 - Can Science Know the Mind of God? Lecture at Princeton University
V009 - Blind Watchmaker: Lecture at the University of Wales
V028 - How Darwinists Think: Lecture at Northern Michigan University
V029 - Raising Questions about Evolution in the Schools: Lecture at Northern Michigan University
V036 - The Right Questions: An Interview with Phillip Johnson
V040 - An Evening with Phillip Johnson: A Tribute to Phil from his Friends and Foes
V057 - One Nation Under Darwin: Lecture by Phillip Johnson

OFFER #2:

(B037) ARN is offering 45% discount off Phil Johnson's The Wedge of Truth hardback book. Dr. Phillip Johnson is one of the founding fathers of the intelligent design movement and there is no better place to start learning about ID than this book. Normal price is $18 US $28 Foreign. Sale price for this hardback edition is only $10 U.S which includes FREE shipping! ($20 Foreign). To view this offer, please visit the following link: http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/php/book_show_item.php?id=38

Shallow water light ranges from the ultraviolet to red (wavelengths 360 nm - 650 nm). Going deeper, the extremes disappear and the spectrum narrows to a blue (approx 480 nm). Of the fish species whose colour vision has been tested to date, all except one can see in the ultraviolet (UV). The exception is the scabbardfish, which is the subject of a new research paper. The authors find that the fish that are sensitive to UV have a pigment that absorbs UV light, but the scabbardfish lacks this pigment and has, instead, a pigment that is violet-sensitive.

The scabbardfish (Lepidopus fitchi) is now the only fish known to have switched from ultraviolet to violet vision, or the ability to see blue light. (Credit: Carol Clark, Emory University) (Source ScienceDaily)

The researchers have looked at the molecular structure of the relevant pigments and their absorption spectra.

"[T]hey used genetic engineering, quantum chemistry and theoretical computation to compare vision proteins and pigments from scabbardfish and another species, lampfish. The results indicated that scabbardfish shifted from UV to violet vision by deleting the molecule at site 86 in the chain of amino acids in the opsin protein.
"Normally, amino acid changes cause small structure changes, but in this case, a critical amino acid was deleted," Yokoyama says."

The hypothesis is that the shift from UV to violet vision was adaptive. Since the lampfish is also a benthopelagic marine fish, the adaptation explanation must also address why the lampfish has retained UV vision.

"Scabbardfish spend much of their life at depths of 25 to 100 meters, where UV light is less intense than violet light, which could explain why they made the vision shift, Yokoyama theorizes. Lampfish also spend much of their time in deep water. But they may have retained UV vision because they feed near the surface at twilight on tiny, translucent crustaceans that are easier to see in UV light."

The researchers found several other amino acid sequence variants that could not be linked to any change in function. This stimulated some salutary comments from the authors:

"It is very common that evolutionary biologists infer the possibility of adaptive evolution of various genes by using computer programs, which compare the nonsynonymous and synonymous nucleotide substitutions per site. However, these analyses not only predict a significant number of false-positives but also fail to predict many positively selected sites; consequently, the positively selected amino acid changes inferred by the statistical methods must be tested by using experimental methods."

In the Press Release, Yokoyama is quoted as saying: "Evolutionary biology is filled with arguments that are misleading, at best". The research team is to be commended for connecting changes in amino acid sequences with changes in phenotypes and then relating all to the living environments. This is good science and a big contrast from the story-telling approach. Adaptation can be studied in a rigorous way, and analyses like this are a demonstration of what is possible.

The words "evolutionary" and "evolution" are used by the authors in their paper. It is strange that evolutionary biology has a fixation of the e-word when there are so many different meanings given to it. In this case, we have a study of adaptive change involving the change of a single amino acid in the opsin protein. This can be understood as a means of the organism becoming fine-tuned to its environment. Darwinian mechanisms appear to be adequate for understanding the data. It should not be necessary to point out that 'fine-tuning' is qualitatively different from 'constructing' the visual apparatus of the organism. Fine-tuning is only possible when the eye is functioning. This point can be better appreciated when the change involves the deletion of existing biological information - as it is in this case. Adaptation is not the route to create biological novelties: microevolution is not macroevolution.

There is a design-orientated way of approaching these data. What if organisms are designed to vary so that they can adapt to changes in their environment? In such cases, mechanisms for fine-tuning can be understood as designed mechanisms, thereby shifting the focus away from the biological world being the product of chance + necessity and towards a world resulting from purposeful intelligent agency.

Evolutionary replacement of UV vision by violet vision in fish
Takashi Tada, Ahmet Altun and Shozo Yokoyama
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 13, 2009, 106(41), 17457-17462 | DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0903839106

Abstract: The vertebrate ancestor possessed ultraviolet (UV) vision and many species have retained it during evolution. Many other species switched to violet vision and, then again, some avian species switched back to UV vision. These UV and violet vision are mediated by short wavelength-sensitive (SWS1) pigments that absorb light maximally ([lamda]max) at approximately 360 and 390-440 nm, respectively. It is not well understood why and how these functional changes have occurred. Here, we cloned the pigment of scabbardfish (Lepidopus fitchi) with a [lamda]max of 423 nm, an example of violet-sensitive SWS1 pigment in fish. Mutagenesis experiments and quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) computations show that the violet-sensitivity was achieved by the deletion of Phe-86 that converted the unprotonated Schiff base-linked 11-cis-retinal to a protonated form. The finding of a violet-sensitive SWS1 pigment in scabbardfish suggests that many other fish also have orthologous violet pigments. The isolation and comparison of such violet and UV pigments in fish living in different ecological habitats will open an unprecedented opportunity to elucidate not only the molecular basis of phenotypic adaptations, but also the genetics of UV and violet vision.

See also:

Seeing Blue: Fish Vision Discovery Makes Waves In Evolutionary Biology, ScienceDaily (17 October 2009)

Tyler, D. Adaptations affecting dim-light vision in vertebrates, ARN Literature blog (10 September 2008)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Even though I am not a creationist by any reasonable definition, I sometimes get pegged as the local gap tooth creationist moron. (But then I don't have gaps in my teeth either. Check the unretouched photos.)

As the best gap tooth they could come up with, a local TV station interviewed me about "superstition" the other day.

The issue turned out to be superstition related to numbers. Were they hoping I'd fall in?

The skinny: Some local people want their house numbers changed because they feel the current number assignment is "unlucky."

Look, guys, numbers here are assigned on a strict directional rota. If the number bugs you so much, move.

Don't mess up the street directory for everyone else. Paramedics, fire chiefs, police chiefs, et cetera, might need a directory they can make sense of. You might be glad for that yourself one day.

Anyway, I didn't get a chance to say this on the program so I will now: No numbers are evil or unlucky. All numbers are - in my view - created by God to march in a strict series or else a discoverable* series, and that is what makes mathematics possible. And mathematics is evidence for design, not superstition.

The interview may never have aired. I tend to flub the gap-tooth creationist moron role, so interviews with me are often not aired.

* I am thinking here of numbers like pi, that just go on and on and never shut up, but you can work with them anyway. (You just decide where you want to cut the mike.)

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and academic culture: ID film banned

Darwinism and academic culture: Darwinists blither on in the face of the gathering storm

Biotechnology: The quest to bring back extinct animals

Fun with Mark Steyn, but when isn't Mark Steyn fun?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

When I took a course leading to the Certificate of Higher Education, we had some lecture inputs on psychology. The rationale was to show how educational strategies can be informed by the findings of psychologists. My abiding memory of these lectures concern the way the thinking of Sigmund Freud was presented: I was astounded that the lecturer was so uncritical of Freundianism. It was as though the great man was an oracle and we were expected to absorb his words rather than appraise them. At the time of taking the course, I was aware that Freud was no scientist. He did not test out his ideas using an experimental approach. Rather, he used his ideology-based theory as a filter through which to interpret the data. It was a useful experience for me - reinforcing the distinction between ideology and empirically based science.

In view of this, I welcomed reading the concerns expressed in an editorial in the current Nature. The opening paragraph reads:

"Anyone reading Sigmund Freud's original works might well be seduced by the beauty of his prose, the elegance of his arguments and the acuity of his intuition. But those with a grounding in science will also be shocked by the abandon with which he elaborated his theories on the basis of essentially no empirical evidence. This is one of the main reasons why Freudian-style psychoanalysis has long since fallen out of fashion: its huge expense - treatment can stretch over years - is not balanced by evidence of efficacy."

Disillusionment with Freud has not led to a better understanding of humanity (source here)

The stimulus for the editorial was a report issued by a report into the current status and future prospects of clinical psychology in the US. This found that a very high proportion of practitioners put more emphasis on their personal experience than on scientific evidence. This leads to a situation where craft practices prevail and interest in science is low. The US is not alone with these problems: go here and here.

"[M]any psychologists continue to use unproven therapies that have no clear outcome measures - including, in extreme cases, such highly suspect regimens as 'dolphin-assisted therapy'."

Questions are raised in the Editorial about the educational programmes leading to professional qualifications. The American Psychological Association is the accrediting body for the United States and Canada. However:

"The APA requires that such courses have a scientific component, but it does not require that science be as central as some members would like. In frustration, representatives of some two-dozen top research-focused graduate-training programmes grouped together in 1994 to form the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science (APCS), with a mission to promote scientific psychology."

The Editorial points out the scientific advances that could support clinical psychology: neuroimaging, molecular and behavioural genetics, and cognitive neuroscience. However, the link between the science and clinical practice is not explained, and it is worth asking whether the lukewarmness of practitioners towards science is because they have not been able to translate the science into therapeutic interventions. These practitioners are pragmatists: they are looking for therapies that they can use. They will not need to be brow-beaten into using scientific psychology if the findings are relevant to their profession.

Without wishing to denigrate in any way the empirical work being done in science laboratories, there is a problem with the theoretical framework adopted by most researchers. Here is one psychologist writing about free-will and his perception of science:

"[T]here can be no such thing as free will for the committed scientist, in his or her professional life. Thus, science itself presupposes that every phenomenon has a cause. We may speak of "spontaneous combustion" or a "spontaneous abortion" or even "spontaneous applause", but in each of these cases, some cause is more than likely . . . it is essential to a sober, naturalistic worldview." (Source here)

In this quote, the writer says that "science itself presupposes that every phenomenon has a cause", but he means that every phenomenon has a natural cause. He refers to a naturalistic worldview. Now this is a real problem. Instead of science being a search for truth, the writer is using science to pre-empt discussion about causation. But what if there are intelligent causes as well as natural ones? How would naturalistic science ever know? The author quotes Daniel Dennett approvingly:

"By trying to answer the questions, by sketching out the non-miraculous paths that can take us all the way from senseless atoms to freely chosen actions, we open up handholds for the imagination. The compatibility of free will and science . . . is not as inconceivable as it once seemed."

The issue is not one of introducing the miraculous to science (which is an impossible scenario) but insisting that there is continuity from senseless atoms to conscious humanity. By excluding intelligent causation, naturalistic science is making a statement about the nature of reality. The assertion does not emerge by the use of the scientific method, but is a dogmatic imposition. Unfortunately, this materialistic mindset is widespread among behavioural geneticists and neuroscientists. If their philosophical stance is wrong, and there are no checks and balances in their science, then they will never understand the human condition. This does not give confidence that their work will lead to therapeutic interventions that will help patients.

This is not to defend "unproven therapies" but to flag up a problem not mentioned in the Editorial. Freud imposed theory onto data, but so also does naturalistic science. We need to be encouraging a science that is free to explore the evidence wherever it leads and which builds into its methodologies the means to challenge its most cherished presuppositions.

Current Status and Future Prospects of Clinical Psychology
Timothy B. Baker, Richard M. McFall, and Varda Shoham.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(2), November 2008, 67-103.

Excerpt from Summary: Clinical psychologists' failure to achieve a more significant impact on clinical and public health may be traced to their deep ambivalence about the role of science and their lack of adequate science training, which leads them to value personal clinical experience over research evidence, use assessment practices that have dubious psychometric support, and not use the interventions for which there is the strongest evidence of efficacy. Clinical psychology resembles medicine at a point in its history when practitioners were operating in a largely prescientific manner.

Psychology: a reality check
Editorial
Nature 461, 847 (15 October 2009) | doi:10.1038/461847a

Abstract: If clinical psychology in the United States wants to remain viable and relevant in today's health systems, it needs to publicly embrace science.

For more blogs on the nature of humanity, go here, here and here.

Those who live in the Los Angeles area are invited to attend a gala premiere screening of Illustra Media's new documentary, Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record next Sunday, October 25th at 7:00 pm at the University of Southern California. The event is sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance.

This premiere was originally scheduled for the California Science Center, but the Center canceled the event just a few days ago, leaving the organizers virtually no time to find a new location. If you live in the Los Angeles area, you can show your support for free speech to debate the evidence for intelligent design by attending this important event!

More...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Provide the Code: for Dawkins' WEASEL Program, we have declared a winner - 377 responses later - and it is Oxfordensis:

It seems that Dawkins used two programs, one in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, and one for a video that he did for the BBC (here's the video-run of the program; fast forward to 6:15). After much beating the bushes, we finally heard from someone named "Oxfordensis," who provided the two PASCAL programs below, which we refer to as WEASEL1 (corresponding to Dawkins's book) and WEASEL2 (corresponding to Dawkins's BBC video). These are by far the best candidates we have received to date.

Go here for more.

Note: Apparently, Bill Dembski is taking care of the award.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Review Of The Eighth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 9780061894206; Imprint: Harper One

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

In the middle ages, Moses Maimonides debated heavily with Islamic philosophers over the Aristotlean interpretation of the universe. By looking at the stars and seeing their irregular pattern in the heavens, he concluded that only design could have generated the star arrangements he observed (1). In the process he ruled out necessity and the Epicurean ideology of chance. Centuries later Isaac Newton similarly opted for design as the best explanation for the origins of our solar system. Writing in his General Scholium for example Newton left us with no doubt over where his focus lay:

"This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being" (2).

Still, with the revolutions in thought brought forth by the likes of Pierre Simon Laplace and of course later Charles Darwin, the stage was set for chance and necessity to become the only players permissible in scientific discourse (1). Today science operates under the conviction that the material world "is all there is, and that chance and impersonal natural law alone explain, indeed must explain, its existence" (3).

So, what of chance? When statisticians refer to chance events what they really mean is that the exact combination of physical factors that cause these events are so complex that their occurrence cannot be reasonably predicted. Implicit in an appeal to chance is the negation of any sort of law-like necessity or Maimonidean-style recourse to design. On the flip side, Stephen Meyer reminds us in Signature In The Cell that that chance hypotheses can be eliminated when "a series of events occurs that deviates too greatly from an expected statistical distribution" (p.180).

A casino player winning 100 bets consecutively while spinning a roulette wheel is an obvious example of such a deviation. But low probability in itself is not enough for detecting design. Indeed fundamental to this particular non-chance alternative is the recognition of some sort of discernible pattern- 100 wins on a roulette wheel for example- that compels us to suspect that an intelligence somewhere is directing the outcome.

For Meyer such insights were seeded through conversations he held with philosopher William Dembski in the hallways of academia as he grappled with questions relating to life's origins. Much to the chagrin of the Darwin-faithful, today Dembski not only contends that design, "is a legitimate and fundamental mode of scientific explanation on a par with chance and necessity" but also argues that there exists a set of criteria for reliably detecting design in biology (1).

Pattern discernment, Dembski asseverates, can be retrospectively applied; that is, to events that have already occurred. Indeed as any spy buff will attest, cryptoanalysts routinely decode signals only after these signals have been generated and transmitted. Intelligent involvement in such cases can either be ruled in or out through a thorough examination of the available probabilistic resources (4).

In Signature In The Cell Meyer builds on Dembski's cornerstone case and uses a seemingly non-ending supply of illustrations to firm up his own supportive arguments. But the reader is nevertheless left pondering over what relevance such illustrations have to the matter at hand, namely demonstrating that the origin of life requires more than just chance. Meyer meticulously alleviates such concerns with a component-by-component breakdown of the probabilistic resources of our cosmic landscape. He writes:

"There are a limited number of opportunities for any given event to occur in the entire history of the universe. Dembski was able to calculate this number by simply multiplying the three relevant factors together: the number or elementary particles (10⁸⁰) times the number of seconds since the big bang (10¹⁶) times the number of possible interactions per second (10⁴³). His calculation fixed the total number of events that could have taken place in the observable universe since the origin of the universe at 10¹³⁰" (pp.216-217).

Applying his calculations on limits to biology Meyer notes:

"the probability of producing a single 150 amino acid protein by chance stands at about 1 in 10¹⁶⁴. Thus for each functional sequence of 150 amino acids there are at least 10¹⁶⁴ other possible non-functional sequences of the same length...Unfortunately that number vastly exceeds the most optimistic estimate of the probabilistic resources of the entire universe- that is the number of events that have occurred since the beginning of its existence" (p.217).

While such a rationale has already been advanced in the peer-reviewed literature (5), it is as profoundly relevant today as it was in its original context. Those design heisters who acrimoniously steal intelligent design away from the realm of biology do so at a tremendous cost to us all. Intelligent design is after all not 'pie in the sky' story telling. It is rigorous science.

Literature Cited
1.William Dembski (2002), No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, Lanham, Maryland, pp.1-3

2. Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton (1994), The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy; Crossway Books; Wheaton, Illinois, p.91

3. Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards (2004), The Privileged Planet, How Our Place In The Cosmos Is Designed For Discovery, Regnery Publishing Inc, Washington D.C, New York, p.224

4. For a review of probability as relates to the biological context see Robert Deyes and John Calvert (2009), We Have No Excuse: A Scientific Case for Relating Life to Mind, Intelligent Design Network, See http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/We_have_no_excuse.pdf

5. Stephen C. Meyer (2004), The Origin Of Biological Information And The Higher Taxonomic Categories, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Volume 117, pp. 213-239

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In the Huffington Post, Rick Smith (October 9, 2009) notes

In a 2005 article for the United Kingdom's Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, physicist Henry Stapp and psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz showed that sustained concentrated attention on any particular mental experience-a thought, an insight, an image, even a fear-not only kept the brain circuitry involved open and alive but also eventually produced physical changes in the brain's structure. In effect, by increasing attention, you are creating brain architecture specifically suited to the challenges before you. Little wonder, then, that performance should grow dramatically.

Schwartz is the lead author of The Mind and the Brain, which sets forth this thesis in more detail. Basically, our minds become what we focus attention on, and this can be good or bad for us, depending on what that is.

Meanwhile, this Dark Age blog post (October 11 2009) mentions both Mario Beauregard, the third author of the 2005 paper and yours truly as well.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack

Neurolaw: Mind readers bustle into the court room

Mind and society: Why you can trust the people, when they have a chance

Neuroscience: Stuff I didn't need to hear about what people care about, but pass along anyway

Atheism and pop culture: Religious commitment as mild dementia?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of