Off topic: The worth of my dead weight.

Alledgedly, if I sell my dead body to science, I could get no less than:

$3740.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth

Mingle² - Online Dating

Might as well keep on living...

Link found through Pharyngula.

Egnor and dualism. Again...

Michael Egnor is again talking about the sufficiency of matter to cause conciousness. This time around he doesn't actually come out looking completely silly. In his latest writings, he proposes a test how one could determine whether or not mere matter could be sufficient to cause mind. Egnor says that if a computer were to pass the Turing test, then he would accept the sufficiency of matter to cause mind. As Egnor writes:

Alan Turing, in 1950, suggested a test for consciousness in a machine. In the Turing test, an investigator would interact with a person and a machine, but would be blinded as to which was which. If the investigator couldn’t tell which one was the person, and which was the machine, it is reasonable to conclude that the machine had a mind like the person. It would be reasonable to conclude that the machine was conscious.

Unfortunately he seems to create a loop-hole for himself (if this should ever happen up to his standards) by invoking the Chinese Room thought experiment. Writes Egnor:

Imagine that P.Z. Myers went to China and got a job. His job is this: he sits in a room, and Chinese people pass questions, written on paper in Chinese, through a slot into the room. Myers, of course, doesn’t speak Chinese. Not a word. But he has a huge book, written entirely in Chinese, that contains every conceivable question, in Chinese, and a corresponding answer to each question, in Chinese. P.Z. just matches the characters in the submitted questions to the answers in the book, and passes the answers back through the slot.

In a very real sense, Myers would be just like a computer. He’s the processor, the Chinese book is the program, and questions and answers are the input and the output. And he’d pass the Turing test. A Chinese person outside of the room would conclude that Myers understood the questions, because he always gave appropriate answers. But Myers understands nothing of the questions or the answers. They’re in Chinese. Myers (the processor) merely had syntax, but he didn't have semantics. He didn't know the meaning of what he was doing. There’s no reason to think that syntax (a computer program) can give rise to semantics (meaning), and yet insight into meaning is a prerequisite for consciousness. The Chinese Room analogy is a serious problem for the view that A.I. is possible.

Egnor finishes with his piece-de-resistance:

But imagine that artificial intelligence could be created, and Searle is wrong. Imagine that teams of the best computer scientists, working day and night for decades, finally produced a computer that had an awareness of itself. A conscious computer, with a mind! So, finally, P.Z. Myers and I could agree on something. Myers would be right. If a computer had a mind, we could infer two things:

1) Matter is sufficient, as well as necessary, for the mind. The mind is an emergent property of matter.
2) The emergence of mind from matter requires intelligent design.

It’s not easy being a materialist.

Seems like a catch-22 for materialists, doesn't it? Either mere matter is not sufficient to cause mind OR mere matter is sufficient to cause mind but while showing this, it is also proved that ID is true. It is a convincing argument - if you don't think it through.

#1: Egnor's claim is entirely negative. As he says, "If we can’t create A.I., my viewpoint would seem more credible". His null hypothesis is, therefore, that matter is not enough to cause mind even though there is no evidence what-so-ever that there are any disembodied minds out there.

#2: ID proponents are very fond of claiming that experiments in general, since they are intelligently designed, point to intelligent causes. Each and every A.I. experiment would be intelligently designed, no matter how trivial the input from any researchers was (yes, IDists like to point out the the chips in the computer was intelligently designed, after all). All Egnor is saying is that it is impossible, according to his standards, to use computers to to elucidate whether or not mind could arise in the absense of intelligence. So, if a machine was to become conscious, Egnor's seconds point above would be true by definition. Egnor is playing a silly "damned if you do, damned if you don't" game. Do the experiment and I win. Don't do the experiment and I win. Heads I win, tails you loose.

So, all Egnor has done is to say that even if he is wrong about the sufficiency of matter being able to cause mind, he is still right about intelligent design. Reminds me of something my brother used to say: "I'm always right and even if I'm not right, at least I'm not wrong."

Teleology and ID in physics

scordova at uncommondescent comments that although teleology is rejected by evolutionary biologists, it is alive and well in physics. He supports this conclusion with a quote from a book about the history of physics that reads:

Fermat’s work led the German philosopher Leibniz to argue in a letter written in 1687 that in as much as the concept of purpose was basic to true science, the laws of physics should and could be expressed in terms of minimum principles
…….
The first such formulation was given by the French scientist Maupertuis who in 1744 presented a paper to the French Academy of Sciences showing that the behaviour of bodies in an impact could be predicted by assuming the product mvs, where m is mass, v is velocity, and s the distance, to be a minimum.

He also quotes Euler as writing:

All the greatest mathematicians have long since recognized that the [least action] method…is not only extremely useful in analysis, but that it also contributes greatly to the solution of physical problems…the fabric of the universe is most perfect, and the work of a most wise Creator

So, minimum principles point to a creator since they point to perfect design. Need I remind scordova that on uncommondescent's comment policy page appears this statement:

ID makes no claim that the source of complexity is a perfect God incapable of imperfection. Write that down.

The policy is right. ID says nothing about the designer. The alledged designer is free to design however many imperfect things it wants to. How, then, can scordova imply that the least action principles of physics are ID-inspired? The answer is, he can't. He can claim that the least action principles were "the-perfect-God-of-the-Bible-inspired", but in order to do that, one has to make something that ID doesn't - make an assumption about the designer. Why would scordova make such a mistake? The answer may lie in another quote he supplies:

Max Plank also felt the action formulation was a more fundamental view of natural phenomena than the mechanistic approach, primarily because he was partial to teleological explanations for religious reasons…..

Seems to me like scordova is implying that ID is a religious idea - or, perhaps, that the least action principles were religiously motivated rather than ID motivated. There is a difference, scordova just can't see it, though.

Eternal inflation solves all of biology's mysteries?

In a peer-reviewed article published in the online journal Biology Direct, Eugene Koonin argues that the emergence of life is an extremely unlikely event - virtually impossible - but that life emerged anyway. It was able to do this, Koonin hypothesises, because it is possible that there are an infinite number of universes that all are different; And with an infinite number of universes follows the possbility of essentially infinitely unlikely events occuring with certainty. Events, Koonin argues, such as the emergence of life. I originally found this paper because it was mentioned by someone pro-ID at arn and it was also mentioned at uncommondescent. Here, I want to comment on some of the flaws this paper contains as well as pointing out the relevance of all of this to ID.

The hypothesis is scientifically useless

The entire idea of the paper is philosophical rather than scientific. Koonin argues that his hypothesis is scientific since it is falsifiable. Two ways to falsify his claim, Koonin says, is to show how an RNA world could give rise to a translation system or by the demonstration of life having emerged independently on different worlds. He seems to reach this conclusion since he claims that the above scenarions would be too unlikely to occur more than once. Writes Koonin:

In other words, even in this toy model that assumes a deliberately inflated rate of RNA production, the probability that a coupled translation-replication emerges by chance in a single O-region is P <>-1018. Obviously, this version of the breakthrough stage can be considered only in the context of a universe with an infinite (or, in the very least, extremely vast) number of O-regions.

10^-1018 is admittedly virtually impossible and squaring this number would make the outcome even less likely. Unlikely it might be, but he himself is posulating the existence of an infinite number of universes. How can you possibly talk probabilites when you are given an infinite number of attempts to reach a certain outcome? It doesn't matter if the probability is 10^-1018 or 10^-9999 - applying any sort of probability calculation to Koonin's hypothesis is useless.

The hypothesis and intelligent design detection using the explanatory filter

To sum up the idea of William Dembski's explanatory filter (EF), it is, Dembski claims, a three step process for inferring design. The first two steps exclude the possiblity of natural processes alone (in the absense of intelligence) to explain an event. If no known law can account for an event and if the event is so unlikely as to be impossible, we are to proceed to step three. The third step, in turn, is a tautological question: could something intelligent have done it? The question is tautological since the intelligence in question could be anything - including an omnipotent god. The answer to question three is always yes.

The relevance of all of this to Koonin's paper is two-fold:
(1) There is no known law that would make life appear natually and as Koonin argues, it is an unlikely event. IDers would therefore apply the EF and state that something intelligent designed life. Koonin's paper would, however, render EF completely impotent since under his hypothesis, anything, no matter how improbable, is bound to happen. If one were to use both the EF in addition to Koonin's hypothesis, one would never get past step two of the EF; One would never be able to infer design.
(2) Although Koonin claims that his hypothesis leaves no room for intelligent design (for the above reason), this claim does not hold water. After all, with an infinite number of possibilites, it is not exactly impossibly that we should find ourselves in a universe where life was designed by something intelligent. We just wouldn't be able to infer it using the EF.

Final words

The paper is philosophical in nature and I can only really see it useful as the topic of discussion during a "mind-altering-substance-fest". Merely declaring the probabilites of extremely unlikely events as probable is as useful as claiming that something intelligent did it. These "techniques" are equivalent to merely throwing your hands in the air while exclaiming "we can't explain how this could have happened, so it must have been...".

Downhill from here...

GilDodgen at uncommondescent is making some complaints about mutations (June 20th, 2007). Writes he:

Mutations break things. However, on occasion, with huge probabilistic resources, a broken thing can promote survival in a specific environment (e.g., bacterial antibiotic resistance).

I would like to analyze this comment in the light of a paper entitled "The biological cost of antibiotic resistance" (downloadable for free). This paper sums up the experimental results of quite a few papers and gives quite a good picture of the fitness costs associated with antibiotic resistance. As the paper says:

In the majority of studies performed, resistance caused by target alterations has been found to engender some cost tofitness (Table 1),

This would seem to support GilDodgen's point that mutations break things, but

but mutants with no measurable costs have also been observed. One example of a ‘no cost’ resistance mutation is the 42nd codon AAA (Lys)®AGA (Arg) substitution of the rpsL gene, responsible for resistance to high concentrations of streptomycin in S. typhimurium and other enteric bacteria

flat out contradicts his argument. Mutations don't have to "break" things. Even if a mutation does "break" something to confer resistance, this will not necessarily mean that the antibiotic resistant bacterium will be less fit forever. Other mutations might restore fitness while maintaining resistance:

Although occasionally, in the absence of antibiotics, drugsensitive revertants have evolved in most cases, adaptation to the costs of chromosomal resistance in vitro and in vivo has been through compensatory mutations (Table 2). In the majority, but not all cases, the second site mutations compensating for the cost of resistance have been identified. These occur by additional (or alternative) mutations at the same locus as the resistance gene, intragenic suppression, or at other loci, extragenic suppression.

So, mutations don't always "break" things, even when they yield a selective advantage, and even if they do, they can "unbreak" them while still maintaining the advantage. GilDodgen is nothing short of wrong. Do these mutations "require huge probabilistc resources"? Well, typically 1 in 10^8 cells acquire the required mutations, so they are fairly unlikely. But why does that matter? With lots of cells mutating and there being long amounts of time for them to do so, this is not necessarily a problem (unless you are a young earth creationist).

GilDodgen continues:

But broken things represent a downhill process, informationally, and cannot account for an uphill, information-creating process, not to mention the machinery required to process that information.

Well, by his own definition he is right I suppose. But then mutations don't necessarily mean broken, so his point is moot. GilDodgen finishes:

Understanding this is not difficult, unless one has a nearly pathological commitment to the notion that design in the universe and living systems cannot possibly exist.

It is diffcult understanding because it is WRONG. And who, exactly, claims that design cannot possibly exist? ID is rejected because it is unscientific and useless.

Is it a hoax?

Dembski's sad attempt at showing that more and more non-religious people are turning to ID fell just a tad flat the other day. It was immediately noted by several anti-ID blogs, such as Stranger Fruit, that the web site Dembski linked to was less than underwhelming. Some commenters at Stranger Fruit openly suggested that perhaps Dembski had done a hoax to see just how much us anti-ID people are willing to believe about ID. I made a comment about that and thought that I might also reproduce it here. Although the comment was meant as a joke, it does present some valid points:

There actually exists a method for discerning whether or not a piece of text is a pro-ID hoax. It's a three-step process called the Imploratory Filter:

1. Does the text advocate a pro-ID stance?
2. Is it possible than someone could have written the text as a joke?
3. Does it look as if the writer is trying to hide the fact the the writing is a hoax?

Only if the answers to the first two questions are yes do we proceed to question three. This is important since we know that people do write pro-ID hoaxes. Pro-ID hoaxes just don't materialize from writings about Goethe or Homer. The third stage of the Imploratory Filter presents us with a binary choice: attribute the thing we are trying to examine to deliberate deception if it appears joke-like; otherwise, attribute it to self-deception. In the first case, the writing we are trying to examine is not only pro-ID, but also appears joke-like. In the other, it is pro-ID, but appears deluded. It is the category of joke-like writings having a pro-ID stance that reliably signals a hoax. "Non-funny" writings advocating ID, on the other hand, are properly attributed to self-deception.

The last thing we need to consider is the case of false positives and false negatives. This method can, unfortunately, yield false negatives. It is possible that some piece of writing might be labelled a non-hoax, when it in fact is a hoax. On the other hand, the method yields no false positives. I.e., when the filter claims that a writing really is a pro-ID hoax, it will will never turn out to be a non-hoax.

The Imploratory Filter faithfully represents our ordinary practice of sorting through things we alternately attribute to self-deception or hoaxes. In particular, the Filter describes:
* how Michael Egnor is still allowed to post for the DI.
* how Casey Luskin can keep repeating that ID can make predictions.
* how Dembski can claim that the explanatory filter yields no false positives even though it measures design via specified complexity of which irreducible complexity is a subclass. Irreducible complexity, in turn, allows for false positives.

Posted by: Hawks | June 17, 2007 11:10 PM

Commenter Hermagoras (has a blog at http://paralepsis.blogspot.com/) named it the best comment ever. It's official. It's got to be true then.

Dembski is a sore loser

June 20th, 2007. Site: uncommondescent. No link provided. This is my reply:

But ID is not about religion, is it?

We are constantly being told that ID has nothing what-so-ever to do with religion. How come then, that ID proponents such as Denyse O'Leary can say things like this at uncommondescent:

Mainstream media, covering the intelligent design (ID) controversy, warn you that most ID advocates are Christians or other theists. But how many have told you what I just did - that most of the people who strongly promote a no-design universe and no-design life forms are atheists?

This has been true, by the way, for the better part of a century, ever since James Leuba started his surveys in 1914. So now, do you understand at least one reason why there is an intelligent design controversy?

???

The obvious answer is that ID has something to do with religion. I freely admit that ID as such is not religious but rather that the motivation for pushing for it is.


For anyone intent on misinterpreting what I wrote above: I am not implying that since ID is not religious, it automatically means that it is scientific; it isn't.

Justifications

Michael Behe is an intelligent design proponent who is also known as accepting common descent - the idea that most, if not all, of life shares one single common ancestor. For example, in a Q&A regarding his new book "The Edge of Evolution" he wrote:

So, if one looks at the data in the way that I do, then one can say simultaneously that: 1) CD (common descent) is very well supported;...

A question that arises from this is: how can Michael Behe justify holding this position? The easy answer would seem to be that he accepts the scientific evidence (fossil record, DNA sequences etc) for it. But this does not really answer the question as much as it evades it; the new question that arises is: how does Behe justify holding the position that scientific explanations are vaild? Or, more properly: Given that one accepts ID, how can one justify the acceptance of anything science has to say?

The question might seem moronic, but remember that a central tenet of ID is that it says absolutely nothing about the designer; it does say that certain features of the universe can't be explained by law and chance and should be properly attributed to intelligence (a la Dembski's Explanatory Filter) but this does NOT mean that things than can be explained by law and chance were not designed - these could be false negatives according to the Explanatory Filter. According to ID proponents, it seems that one is free to pursue investigation into these potential false negatives in any way one wishes. Attribute seemingly random mutations to intelligence if you want or attribute the apparent relatedness of extant organisms to either common descent or common design depending on your preferences. But in order for you to do this, you have to do something that ID does not - you have to make some assumptions about the designer. Behe seems to be assuming that the designer has been making lots of small modifications to creatures through the ages rather than, for example, creating everything from scratch a few thousand years ago. But how can he justify this assumption? The simple answer is that he can't. It's quite simply a personal preference and in this sense, when it comes to making inferences about the potential false negatives (should they be attributed to intelligence, scientific explanation or anything else for that matter?), ID is hard to distinguish from postmodernism (no one world view is more correct than the other). According to ID, just about anything goes.

Because of this, when someone makes assumptions about the designer, as Behe has done, that someone has gone beyond simply advocating ID. Given that there is no justifiable reason to make one assumption rather than any other about the designer, Behe's view should not be called ID as much as "Beheism" just like those that interpret the biblical genesis literally should be called creationists.

IDists sometimes like to distance themselves from creationsists - they should also distance themselves from Beheists. If they were consistent, that is.

Egnor...

...is doing it again. This time around he is trying to set up a thought experiment to show why things like love and purpose can't be made from "material" stuff. I urge anyone to read the entire article, if nothing else, for the chuckle-value. Below is an excerpt which kind of sums up his argument:

“What if the cell phone is necessary for all of the noises, but only sufficient for some? What if some of the noises in the phone are actual voices of living people, and are merely transmitted through the phone, but not caused by it?”

1) The cell phone is necessary for all of the noises
2) The cell phone is sufficient to produce noises that only have properties — like frequency and amplitude — that are shared with the circuitry in the cell phone itself
3) The cell phone is insufficient to fully account for the noises (i.e., the voices) that have meaning, because meaning is not a property of matter. The only thing that can cause meaning is a person.

Funnily enough, voices are composed of changes in frequency and amplitude - properties that are shared with the circuitry of the cell phone itself. Also, substitute the cell phone for any of a number of other electrical appliances, such as an mp3 player, and it is quite obvious that things with material properties can certainly convey meaning, without merely transmitting it. So, Egnor's Verizon accepter would continue to be a Verzon denier. Supposedly, if it was not understood how the mp3 player made voices, Egnor's Verizon would conclude that the mp3 player was not sufficient to do it. Egnor wants the unknown to be ascribed to his own immaterial theories, by default - even in the total absense of evidence FOR his claim.

The Verizon accepter shows that there is a method of determining whether the mind can be caused entirely by matter. If the mind has a property, such as meaning, that is not a property of matter, then matter, while perhaps necessary to the mind, is insufficient to cause it.

Notice that while Egnor says that he has supplied "a method of determining whether the mind can be caused entirely by matter", in this paragraph, he totally sidesteps it in favor of merely defining it impossible. So, not only does he want unknown causes to be ascribed to immaterial causes by default, he is outright claiming that there CAN'T be any evidence to the contary. Heavy stuff!

I suppose that this is a good time to take some cheap shots at Egnor: where do you reckon the voices in Egnor's head come from?

Egnor. Hurrah!!!

Michael Egnor is at it again. I've actually come to look forward to his writing for the Discovery Institute. They are all so wonderfully bizarre. And lacking in logic. In his latest attempt, again talking about altruism and the brain, he yet again manages to support dualism while at the same time claiming that it is impossible. He also does one better. And this one is nothing short of insane. The article argues against P.Z. Myers' claim that altruism actually resides in the brain. Says Egnor:

If altruism is located in the brain, then some changes in location of the brain must, to use a mathematical term, 'map' to changes in altruism. That is, if you move your brain, you move your altruism in some discernable way. And 'moving' altruism means changing its properties. It won't do to say that moving altruism changes its property of 'location,' because 'location' of altruism is the issue. That begs the question.

No, really. He really wrote this. This is Egnor's argument. Moving something means changing it's properties. And not the properties of location. You move your altruism in some discernable way. Not from A to B.

Egnor continues:

But how does moving your brain change your altruism? ...If you walk around the room does your altruism change in a reproducible way? If you stand up, is your altruism different that when you're sitting?

For altruism to be located in the brain, changes in altruism must map, in some reproducible way, to changes in brain location. ... Altruism is completely independent of location, so it can't be located in the brain, or anywhere. It can't be 'located' at all.

:-o :-o :-o

Yes, his argument is that if altruism was located in the brain, then your altruism should change as your brain moves. :-o :-o :-o

Sorry, I can't really say anything more about this. It's pure insanity.

Added: P.Z Myers has also taken apart Egnor's claims at Pharyngula.

DDT-malaria

BarryA at uncommondescent has written a short post regarding the use of DDT to kill malaria (June 12th, 2007). He makes some valid points. For example, DDT use, which is very effective at killing the mosquitos that transmit the malaria-causing organism, has been banned resulting in untold suffering due to acquisition of this dreadful disease. However, he then goes as says something quite extraordinary:

I also learned that everything I thought I knew about DDT was flat wrong. Not only is DDT safe, scientists have known this for decades.

Eeeerrrmm. DDT is safe? Not quite. DDT belongs to a class of compounds known as xenoestrogens - also commonly referred to as gender benders. Although there has been no experimental work to show that this should affect humans (for obvious reasons), epidemiological studies and experimental work on other organisms do point to the fact that DDT is not safe (I am aware that there has been a lot of controversy in the scientific community over the extent to which xenoestrogens actually have been a problem for humans). The effect on wild-life such as birds is well documented. An important point to note here is that DDT belong to a class of compunds that act on similar biological pathways and have similar effects. So even though it might be safe for a human to be exposed to DDT up to a concentration of X, this might not be true when exposure to other xenoestrogens are added to the equation.

The questions that arise knowing this is whether you would rather be a bit gender bent or be suffering from malaria? Would you rather that some birds of prey failed to raise it's chicks compared to you suffering from malaria? Personally, I'd rather not suffer from malaria.

BarryA has brought up a valid point, but I wonder why he filed his post under "intelligent design". Perhaps he didn't mean to, but a commenter couldn't resist turning this into a Darwinian eugenics(?) issue.


Edited to add:seems like the main reason DDT use dropped was not because of any environmental concerns, but rather that the mosquitos were developing resistance to the pesticide. See, for example, The DDT ban myth and Putting myths to bed.

Explore evolution

A new anti-evolution book "Explore Evolution" has been released. Co-authored by ID proponenets Stephen Meyer, Scott Minnich and Paul Nelson, what is new about this book from an ID perspective is that it doesn't talk about intelligent design. That's right. The thinking is obviously that if there is no mention of god or ID, then schools should be free to use the book in science classes. They might even succeed. What I do want to do here, is examine this book in the light of William Dembski's concept of the "Explanatory Filter" (EF). Dembski claims that EF is a sure proof method for detecting intelligent design. Three criteria must be met in order for anyone using the EF before they can proclaim that something was intelligently designed:

1. Can scientific law explain the event?
2. Can chance explain the event?
3. Can intelligent intervention explain the event?

The object of the two first points is to exclude false positives. For example, we shouldn't explain the fact that a stone dropped from a height will fall down by invoking something intelligent. Law (gravity) will suffice to explain this. Neither should we invoke intelligence when something improbable occurs - unless it is too improbable (as in the writings in this post; the probability that the letters contained herein should occur in the order they do is virtually impossible). If law and chance can't explain an event, Dembski wants us to ask a third question: could something intelligent have done it? Given that ID doesn't say anything about the intelligent designer and that the potential designer could be an omnipotent god, the answer is ALWAYS yes - point 3 is, in essence, a truism. Previous books by ID proponents have always gone into some detail, not just about how evolution can't but, how intelligence can do this and that. As I've already stated, "Explore Evolution" has simply dropped the "but intelligence can do it" label - i.e. point 3 of the EF.

So what, you may ask. Well, previous attempts at getting creationism into science class rooms have failed because creationism was deemed to be religion. The creationists then tried to have stickers inserted into biology text books claiming that evolution was not a fact, but merely a theory with several gaps. The Explore Evolution book seems to be one of those stickers, albeit a rather big one. Also, I'm about to make a prediction: ID creationists will, if Explore Evolution becomes accepted course material, insert stickers proclaiming point 3 of EF - namely that intelligence can explain everything they perceive that evolution can't. That sticker will effectively sum all of ID theory: ID can explain anything and everything - hardly the measure of a scientific theory.

Edge of Evolution

Michael Behe's new book "Edge of Evolution" is out and a review in the journal Science has been written by Sean Carrol. DaveScot at uncommondescent has started a thread to fisk this review (making it a rebuttal of a rebuttal, in essence).

From the review:

Here’s one glaring mistake in the author’s review (my emphasis):

In Darwin’s Black Box, he posited that genes for modern complex biochemical systems, such as blood clotting, might have been “designed billions of years ago and have been passed down to the present but not ‘turned on’”. This is known to be genetically impossible because genes that aren’t used will degenerate, but there it was in print.

DaveScot fisks:

It’s easily possible. Error checking to insure data integrity to any arbitrary reliability standard is de rigueur in computer memory systems. In my experience most things that human designers have come up with in electronic information processing has antecedents in biological information systems. I therefore anticipate things we’ve invented on our own to have parallels in organic systems and mechanisms for insuring any required level of data integrity is no exception.

Neither DaveScot nor Carrol is really right here. While it is not easily possible, it is neither impossible. Carrol should really have said that there is no evidence that unused genetic information will be retained over long time spans . The interesting bit here is that Carrol has made made the sort of argument that IDers commonly (and usually excusively) make - a negative one. IDers tend to claim that evolution can't do this and that. Even though DaveScot thinks there is evidence lacking that natural processes can account for the diversity of life we see today, he has no problem appealing to processes that there is no evidence for. Interesting... His appeal to error checking the way humans do it is interesting as well, given that in living organisms, "the error checking mechanisms" could change as well. And if they do, then unused genetic information would presumably change with it.

Like DaveScot, I have an anticipation as well: whenever there is any sort of parallell between living beings and humanly designed things, IDers will claim that this is evidence for ID.

Our priviledged planet

Guillermo Gonzales, an as it seems descent researcher, who was recently denied tenure at a major university has written a book "The Priviledged Planet". In it, he argues, as Casey Luskin says:

But in reality, Dr. Gonzalez’s entire thesis argues for design based upon a convergence of the requirements for both habitability and scientific discovery.

The idea is that since Earth is habitable for advanced creatures such as ourselves compounded with the fact that Earth is great for making scientific discoveries*, Earth was actually created to have these characteristics. Gonzales argues (perhaps rightly so ) that there probably exists only relatively few planets that are habitable and even fewer of those would be suitable for advanced beings such as ourselves. Add to that the fact that our rare planet is most excellent for making really cool scientific discoveries and you should really draw the conclusion that the probability of these conditions to be met is incredibly small. So small, in fact, that it would be virtually impossible. The conclusion we should draw from this is that our planet was created the way it was - so that we can discover things. I might give a bit of a critique to this in a later post, but what I really want to do here is to critisize something else Gonzales claims in his book: that if complex life is found elsewhere in the universe, then the world on which it is found will also be great for scientific discoveries. Gonzales is, in other words, making a prediction.

As I've argued numerous times before, ID (and by extension any "theory" that postulates a designer without saying anything about the designer) cannot make predictions. Even William Dembski agrees with this as, "Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor.". The only way Gonzales would be justified in making that predictions (other than identifying his designer) would be if he assumed that his designer would make habitable worlds great for discoveries. But then his conclusion would be in his assumption, and circular reasoning is not how you want to justify anything. His prediction is, then, nothing but shoddy scholarship.

There are, of course, lots of books being printed and lots of these contain worse stuff than "The Priviledged Planet". The reason that Gonsalez's book is being singled out is because he is a bona fide astronomer. In this sense, the book carries a lot of authority - totally undeserved. I agree with one thing Gonzales says: our planet is a priviledged one. Too bad that an in other ways obviously clever man has come to some rather (from a scientific perspective) blatantly illogical conclusions.



* One of the reason Gonzales thinks that this is the case is because our planet sometimes experiences perfect solar eclipses (which, among other things, allowed us to test one of Einstein's more famous theories). As Gonzales say, there is no physical reason why the moon should be 400 times smaller than the Sun AND 400 times closer to us than the same Sun.

Egnor is at it. Again...

Michael Egnor has written yet another piece for the Discovery Institute. This time, he wants to discuss:

Is altruism merely a matter of brain physiology- just the happy result of eons of evolution?

His answer is a resounding no, since

For one process to cause another there must be a point of contact, in the sense that the processes linked in cause and effect must share properties in common.

The brain is a material substance. It has location, dimensions, weight, temperature, and energy.

Altruism, in contrast, has no matter or energy. It has no ‘location’, no weight, no dimension, no temperature. It has no properties of matter.

There is no shared property yet identified by science through which brain matter can cause mental acts like altruism.

A satisfactory explanation of altruism intrinsically requires a method open to immaterial causes.

Egnor asserts that traditional science CAN'T explain altruism, because immaterial things can't interact with material things and altruism, unlike your brain, is immaterial. In philosophy, this stance is known as Dualism. The thinking in dualism is that thoughts are separate from brain matter and exists more or less independently of it. Dualism does away with the problem of things like consciousness (by sweeping it under the carpet) that science has a hard time explaining. The biggest problem with dualism is that there is no way for the thoughts to communicate with brain matter. To reverse Egnor's argument from above: There is no shared property yet identified by science through which immaterial altruism can cause anything to happen in the brain. And if immaterial "things" can't communicate with the material, they can hardly have any effects either. So, it is rather peculiar that while Egnor critiques dualism, this is also what he is asserting is actually happening. He, not science, claims that there actually exists dualism.

Egnor complains regarding how science explains these things:

To evade this conundrum, materialist neuroscientists evoke ‘emergence’, which is a materialist way of asserting ‘It happens. Trust us’.

Considering that there are studies being done to try to solve these kinds of problems, this is an interesting assertion. And very hypocritical considering that we are supposed to take Egnor and his ilk's word that there actually is something "immaterial". Why should trust them and not any actual real research that can count as positive evidence for their claim (this doesn't exist, btw)?


Egnor continues:

Altruism is obviously something very real; many people’s lives depend on it. We don’t know exactly what it is, but we know, by its properties, what it’s not. It’s not material. It shares no properties in common with matter. It can’t be caused by a piece of the brain.

That's a funny thing to say, considering that even slime moulds display altruistic behaviour. And they don't even need brains. So perhaps Egnor is right to some extent (I'm being generous here).

‘My altruism is three inches from the edge of the table’ is, like Egnor says, a nonsensical statement. 'Michael Egnor's reasoning is three inches away from ignorance' might not be.

Mark Chu-Carroll at "Good Math, Bad Math" has posted a review of Michael Behe's new book "The Edge of Evolution" under the heading "Behe's Dreadful New Book: A Review of 'The Edge of Evolution'". Mark makes the claim that Behe's book is based on bad math - "a mathematical argument that I've specifically refuted on this blog numerous times", as he says. Personally, I'm not brilliant at math and I haven't read Behe's book, so I can't really comment on the mathematics on said book. What I would like to comment on, however, is the comments that have been put forth at uncommondescent (June 2nd, 2007) regarding Mark's critique/review. William Dembski starts it all, by posting:

Mark Chu-Carroll* goes after Behe’s new book here. Judge for yourself whether this deserves to be called a review (Chu-Carroll thinks it does). Nick Matzke endorses Chu-Carroll’s blog post against Behe here. Are there any anti-ID writings, no matter how ill-conceived or mean-spirited, that PT won’t endorse? It might be an interesting exercise to attempt a Sokal-style hoax to see what exactly PT is prepared to believe about ID. I herewith offer a prize, worth up to $200, to anyone who can pull this off and afterward reveal that it was all a hoax (the precise amount to be determined by how cleverly it is pulled off).

The last thing Dembski writes is:

Perhaps I’m missing something, but Chu-Carroll’s expertise is in computer programming, where he has a Ph.D. How much math does he actually know?

And this is actually the biggest (and almost only rebuttal) that is made to Mark's review by both Dembski and subsequent commenters. No one attempts to defend Behe's math and no one attempts to rebut Mark's rebuttal. Almost unanimously, people critique Mark's authority as a mathematician. Complaints that Mark's PhD was in Computer Science, not math; DaveScot feels it is important to point out that Mark only managed to get two patents in 10 years; various ad hominems; his review should not be called a review since Mark does not work as a book reviewer and the review was posted on a blog. All in all, nothing that matters.

I have no idea how much math Mark knows. I have no idea how much math Behe knows either. And no one at uncommondescent seems to know either. All we are given is mere rhetoric.