Does Creation science have any convincing arguments?

Oxford Skeptics in the Pub hosted Peter Harrison this week.  He is based at St Andrews University (of which I am a graduate) so it was fun to have a chat with him.  His talk was about creationism.  As it said on the SITP site:

It’s easy to make fun of many creationist claims, but what are their strongest arguments?

Creationism often takes a lot of flak for the kind of wild claims made by hoards of ALL-CAPS creationists on blogs and YouTube comments. But of all the claims and arguments made by creationists, which are the most impressive? Do they pose a threat to creationism-denying scientific fields? Forget the usual tired canards. Peter has spent a year collaborating with top creationist organisations and groups to collate and bring to you their most powerful arguments yet…

So, I hear you asking whether any of the arguments were convincing.  He had asked them about both their evidence for creationism and in four of the five cases for evidence that the world is young (6000 to 10,000 years old).  The fifth organisation promotes old-earth crationism so it was not relevant in their case.

The organisations that he had challenged included Answers in Genesis and The Discovery Institute.  It seems that they have now ceased to cooperate with him after he shared his conclusions with them.  They didn't even appear to have used their best lines of evidence even while they were talking, but then again who is the best judge of that?

One thing did surprise me.  In his discussions with the 'Discoveroids', he had used the term 'creationist'.  I happen to listen to their podcast, ID The Future (which I decline to link to, as I have no desire to increase their Google ranking) on a regular basis.  They usually make a point that The Discovery Institute is there to promote 'Intelligent Design', and not creationism.  They say that there is a difference, although I have some doubts about that.

All in all, it was an entertaining evening with a great speaker.  It was only the second time that he has given that talk.  I hope he will get chance to use it many more times.

Dennett's Tools for Thinking

I find it very interesting and informative and in fact generally pleasurable to listen to philosopher, 'horseman of the apocalypse', and grand-fatherly gentleman Daniel C Dennett. 

He has a new book to sell, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, so we might have the enjoyment of hearing a lot of interviews.  This week I heard a good one, on the podacst Point of Inquiry.

It is a wide ranging discussion with host, Indre Viskontas, (direct link here) they mull over a wide range of interesting topics, including consciousness, the 'intentional stance' (which others call 'theory of mind'), the role of philosophy in today's world, and that old favourite, free-will.  The book gets a few mentions, but not in any sense is the interview a hard-sell.

If you have 45 minutes to spare, or can load it onto your MP3 to enjoy while you are doing something that doesn't need concentration, I recommend it highly.

Will I buy the book?  That is a different question entirely.  I would love to have time to understand Dennett's writings and have read a couple of his earlier books.  However, I have also failed to reach the end of a couple of others due to my own ability to concentrate and my preference for being active.  

Maybe I should wait for the paperback - or maybe that is where I went wrong previously as the writing gets too small.

Does an intelligent designer solve the ID problem?

Having been reading about the Cambrian Explosion which I mentioned recently, it might be a good time to contemplate the creation of information.

Can information be created without intelligent intervention?

Intelligent Design (ID) proponents claim that the existence of their 'intelligent designer' (who has no link with theology - honestly!) is implied by the diversity of new information created during the Cambrian Explosion.  Something intelligent must have interfered to make life blossom over that short period of 50 million years.  They can't think of any better explanations, so this has got to be the best one.  This idea comes from the Law of Conservation of Information.  That sounds scientific doesn't it, but as Wikipedia explains, it is not really a scientific law at all.  It is an invention of William Dembski, founded on a vaguely related topic by (real scientist)  Peter Medawar in his book The Limits of Science (1984).  Perhaps in the public mind it is also backed up by cherry-picked terminology from some very esoteric quantum mechanics.

Aside from the fact that their 'law' is just made up and that it is mathematically falsifiable, is their argument about information even reasonable?

To the first approximation, the answer has got to be NO!  Snowflakes have structure.  They happen to be created in a random sort of way but their crystal structure is certainly not free of information.  Similarly if you dissolve a lot of salt in hot water and then let the solution cool down, the salt will crystallise.  Surely this is information too - and it was definitely self-created.

Neither of those examples give information that is then read back and used to make a future action happen though, so in a sense they might not count.

Taking the opposite extreme, the creation of different forms of life, the question gets a little more complex.  Let's make the assumption - for the time being - that this new information did come from an intelligent designer in just the way that this blog post is new information created by me.  How did I develop the concept that I want to present, formulate it and publish it?

Obviously some measure of intelligence might have been involved for the latter two stages and I leave it to my intelligent readers to decide how much of it is demonstrated, but just invoking intelligence is not enough is it?  Aside from the fact that intelligence is a quantity that is notoriously hard to define and measure, intelligence in itself does not create new ideas.  Somewhere in the mind of a designer there has to be a 'spark' that starts off a thought process, leading to a train of thought.

Where does that spark itself come from?  Since I am not a dualist I cannot use my soul as an explanation of the source of inspiration.  Therefore I am left with the problem of finding an explanation for the information that has been conveyed by my own intelligence.

In other words, invoking an intelligent designer does not move us forward at all.  I think this condemns Intelligent Design to the realms of pseudo-science, if indeed it had not already managed to do that for itself in other ways.

Or perhaps the idea for this post came from the great Intelligent Designer in the sky?

Perspectives on the Cambrian Explosion

I must have been listening to too much pro-ID propaganda!  (I have!)  The proponents of Intelligent Design put up a superb, almost-convincing, smoke-screen and one of their favourite topics is 'The Cambrian Explosion' and that Darwin himself had recognised this as a problem.  They claim that the increased rate of evolution in that period of a few tens of millions of years, about half a billion years ago, shows evidence of the presence of an intelligent designer.  This seems to be based on a claim that information cannot be created except by intelligence.  More on that topic soon! 

Of course sometimes they take that trouble to pretend that this is not a religious claim!  Honestly it isn't.  You can believe everything they say, including this claim.

Reading the Wikipdia article about The Cambrian Explosion this evening, I was reminded that conventional science is by no means short of ways to explain the phenomenon, including:

• 'Large' animals of diverse types did exist before, and the evidence for them is growing steadily (in spite of the claims of ID's proponents)
• There are some special layers called lagerstätten, which preserved soft body parts unusually well, and several of these were in the Cambrian period
• Evolution was faster than 'normal' but not by more than a factor of ten or so, and there were other periods when 'explosions' happened, including the Devonian and Cretaceous
• A sudden increase in the amount of calcium in the oceans might have been significant for the innovative production of bony body parts
• The end of a previous ice age might also have mattered a lot.

All in all, the presence of an intelligent designer is not the only plausible explanation, and not even the most probable, for various reasons:

• How long did this particular intelligent designer live, as the Cambrian explosion lasted for tens of millions of years? 
• If it lived for that long, does that imply that it was God after all, or was it a family of shorter lived designers?
• If it was God, why was he so busy for that short period before leaving things to themselves for 500 million years?  Only after that time did he complete his perfect world, where he created original sin and all the other bad things.
• If it was God, how did he evolve anyway?  If you can't explain this then the problem has only been deferred, not solved.

Case for God not proven! I also note that I and D are the first two letters of an uncomplimentary five letter word.

Small note:  Obviously when Meyer's new book 'Darwin's Doubt' is released (at an exorbitant price from here, but only delivered within USA) we will learn the answers to all our doubts.  In the meantime we still have the opportunity to listen to the whining voice of Casey Luskin on the Discovery Institute's podcast ID The Future telling us that he has read it and that it explains everything beautifully.

The bite of the honey bee

Yes - I meant bite, not flight, and honey bee, not bumble bee.  But having misused the name of a famous piece of music for rhetorical purposes, here is a surprising (and interesting) bit of information about the familiar insects that are so important for our crop pollination.

You would think that we know nearly everything that there is to know about bees, but it seems that this is not the case.  Now we discover that bees bite and that the bites have a surprising role in the evolutionary struggle between the bees and their parasites.

This interesting information about bees came to my attention in the newsletter of the British Beekeeper's Association (BBKA).  This is not a journal that I have ever read before, but I happened across a well-written article in the February 2013 edition of the magazine. 

Even though the bite phenomenon had been recognised previously, it was not known that it is used to inject a natural anaesthetic called 2-heptanone (2-H).  When bees bite their enemies the 2-H temporarily paralyses the victim and this gives the colony the chance to eject the creature from the hive.  Bees actively use this method to fight the larvae of moths and the parasite varroa which is often heralded as bringing certain death to colonies of bees.

So it seems that bees do have a natural defence against enemies that are too small to sting.

It has been suggested that 2-H might even have a use as a new natural anaesthetic for humans too. Isn't nature amazing?

The BBKA magazine also gets another plaudit from me.  Unlike the article in the Daily Telegraph, the BBKA takes the trouble to reference the scientific paper on the subject by Dr Alexandros Papachristoforou, of the University of Thessaloniki in Greece.  You can find it on the free online, peer-reviewed, PLOS ONE web site at this link.  It gets technical, as all scientific papers ought to do, but the introduction and many other parts are written very clearly and accessibly.  Everyone would get something from the introduction.

Small note:  In the news in recent weeks, people of Europe, particularly UK, have heard a lot about the banning of various pesticides that are alleged to affect bee colonies.  I say 'alleged' because it seems to be a slightly controversial example of science being misused in a public campaign to obtain signatures to promote the passage of legislation.  Unlike many of the campaigns of organisations of 38 degrees, Avaaz and other such bodies, this one about neo-nicotinoids perhaps demonstrates that good science cannot always be applied through democracy.

Creationist science . . . or is it?

Over lunch last week I found myself in an interesting debate with a gentle and progressive Muslim friend and a gentle and polite Christian friend.  I'm hoping both of them will continue to debate in such an open way, and that our full and frank debate did not offend them.

I must write about part of the discussion.

It was about the battle between supporters of Intelligent Design (ID) and the supporters of the Theory of Evolution.  My Christian friend put the point that both sides accuse each other of 'not being scientific' and that they should drop this argument and move to the evidence.  When I complained that this was a reasonable point of view from the point of view of evolution he asked me how I would define science.

In my own amateur way I said that science was the process whereby someone develops an idea into a hypothesis which can then be compared with the evidence from the world around us, and as confidence was developed that there was a good level of agreement the hypothesis might develop into the status of a Theory.  Ultimately when the evidence is overwhelming then the Theory might reach the coveted state of becoming a Law.  (I should have added the question of falsifiability.)

He agreed.

I added that ID specifically doesn't do this.  It looks for evidence and then tries to fit a hypothesis to it retrospectively.  He disagreed.

So I asked him where the hypothesis for ID might be, and I was amazed to hear that his answer was that the bible is the hypothesis.

I pointed out that the bible is not exactly self-consistent and offered the evidence of the two versions of the creation story in Genesis and was told that they were not very different in the grand scheme of things.   I disagree about that.  See for yourself that the whole thing is in a different order in the second version. The first is Genesis 1:1-2:3, and the second is Genesis 2:4-25.)

So which of us is correct?

• Can the bible be offered rationally as an hypothesis for Intelligent Design?
• Does ID truly follow the scientific method or does it just try to use convenient parts of scientific methods to pick selective holes in evolution without offering a complete counter-proposal?

Thinking about the topic further since our discussion I would also ask:

• Is ID falsifiable?  If the bible is its hypothesis then I would suggest that it is self-falsifying.
• Which point of view indulges in more ad hominem attacks?  Evolutionists rarely call their opponents names (although sometimes the word creotards has come up in discussion) whereas the ID lobby never fails to use terms like 'Darwinist' (which they consider pejorative), 'neo-Darwinist' (which is clearly more so) and worse?

I maintain that ID is not science in the real sense of the word.

Why are there no dragons?

For Darwin Day, it seems appropriate to write a post about evolutiion.

Evolution seems to have produced a wide range of surprising abilities.  In many cases the same ability has come about separately in different species at different times.

Sight seems to have evolved in tens of separate ways.  Many creatures share the optical band that humans are able to sense (around the part of the spectrum where the atmosphere has the lowest absorption), but other creatures have developed to use infra-red and ultra-violet.  Some are very sensitive to the polarisation of light and others like us are almost completely unaware of it.

Sonar seems also to have evolved in about four separate ways.  Even in mammals like whales and bats there is nothing in common between their organs to suggest common evolution.

More surprisingly, electricity has been co-opted by completely unrelated species of fish, and Bombardier beetles have even evolved ways of creating explosions by secreting fluids which are unstable together.

But what of things that seem never to have evolved?

No animal has naturally evolved radar.  Perhaps the other options are good enough for short distances but much cheaper in terms of energy.

But fire is another property that is noticeably and more surprisingly absent from the animal kingdom.  This is the stuff of legend, with fire-breathing dragons being common in folk-lore.  Nobody serious suggests that these creatures really lived, even though there are creatures that create fuel (as cattle create methane in large quantities) and as we have already seen, electricity is generated at the voltages needed to make sparks to ignite the fuel.  The potential was there.  So why are there no dragons?

Determinism and chaos

I have been listening to a talk recorded at Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub, and published via the Skepticule podcast.  It was Jonathan Pearce talking about free will and determinism.  He counted how many of the audience might be convinced that we do not have free will at the beginning and the answer was around two thirds.  This had changed by the end.  I'm not going to recount his talk, but just talk about the things that have always bothered me about determinism.

Determinists argue that the whole of the future is determined - albeit not necessary pre-determined by a specific entity.  As such they try to convince us that we don't really have free will.  They often use masses of 'evidence' to convince us - and it doesn't convince me.

The evidence comes from the interpretation of results of experiments which seem to show that (for example) our muscles prepare for movement before our minds decide to make the movement.  At first sight these ideas seem compelling, but then you realise that the results are open to interpretation in more ways than one.

Seemingly 'unconscious' actions only suggest that there is no central 'me' who acts like a CPU in a computer.  However, when you consider that our inner awareness is clearly highly distributed through the brain, and that the brain functions fast enough for delays not to be noticeable in everyday life, you realise that evolution did rather a good job.

Worse still, I can't believe that determinists have such a naive view about the predictability of the future state of the universe.  I see this on several levels:

• Even on the basis of a truly complete knowledge of the state of every particle and of all the energy in the universe, they miss an important point - namely chaos.  Chaos theory acknowledges that even the tiniest deviations from what can (in principle) be measured, will lead to a fundamental unpredictability.  It is unavoidable.  Increasing the power of your computer only delays the moment of unpredictability.
• Moving into the quantum physics regime (and in this case I am not using the quantum physics metaphor to prove anything, but to question something) they neglect (or deliberately misunderstand and ignore) Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.  You just can't know everything about the universe as it is just now.  Whether we really understand quantum mechanics or not, it has shown itself to be much better in the predictions business than the philosophy of determinism.  I know where I would put my money on this argument.
• This is not even to mention quantum fluctuations . . . particles and their anti-particles being created spontaneously from a quantum vacuum.

So let's face it.  The future is not actually determined by the present state of the universe except that it is like weather forecasting.  We can fairly reasonably predict trends for the near future, and we can see a final end to the universe as a huge expanse of cold darkness.  But the details get more hazy as the future unfolds.

My free will to publish this post - or not - can't seriously be questioned.

. . . and Pearce's talk was very interesting, even if (Note: IF) his own views are entirely fallacious! For a philosopher that is not an insult but a challenge.

Small note:  Listen to the podcast to see how the opinions had changed by the end of his talk.  I suspect that he was not expecting the reaction of an audience of skeptics!

Discoveroids best effort last month

A friend of mine received the following solicitation (for cash), presumably on the basis that he is sometimes an outspoken critic of so called Intelligent Design and creationism.  I include comments [in dark green, in these square brackets] for those who know what eukaryotes are, and to be ignored by those who don't care because their particular religious cleric tells them that they don't need to know more than the 'clerics' do.

I humbly suggest that you laugh at their claims and read the note at the end.

Dear ************:

Textbooks and teachers stop teaching myths about evolution when the mainstream media admit textbooks are wrong ... don't they?
 
Not if the data challenges Darwinian evolution. 

"'Junk DNA' concept debunked by new analysis of human genome" hollered the Washington Post on September 5th [proof by media??] just as many kids were sitting down to science textbooks that claimed otherwise. And yet, one popular high school biology textbook claims “In eukaryotes, the vast majority of DNA has no apparent function.”  (Douglas J. Futuyma, Evolution, Sinauer)  [and does it, and if so, does it help your creationist cause in any way anyway?]

In other words most of your DNA is just worthless junk.  Junk DNA has long been trumpeted as a major piece of evidence proving Darwin's theory of unguided evolution.
 
What other false evidence claiming to prove evolution are your kids being exposed to? [. . . as opposed to the false evidence that Jesus existed I presume?]

• Inclusion of Haeckel's long-refuted embryo drawings, which overstate the similarities among vertebrate embryos in the early stages of vertebrate development. [I never remember claiming anything about Haeckel's embryos and don't remember it being used by anyone else - this argument passed its sell-by date a few decades ago!  It only gets dragged back up by creationists.]


• Retelling outdated myths about the Miller-Urey experiment and the origin of life and wrongly telling students the experiment correctly simulated gases present on the early earth. [That experiment was the best guess at the time. Now it isn't. So what?  How do negative results prove anything for creationism anyway?]


• Overstating the evidence for biochemical evolution by claiming biologists have evolutionary explanations, when they don't. [How to generate a claim from nothing - if this is the third best you can do you should give up now!]

The evidence challenging evolution is beginning to outweigh the evidence that supports it.  But will your kids learn about that in their science classes?  Unfortunately, probably not.

To help parents understand all the aspects of the debate over Darwinian evolution and intelligent design we created a free 28 page e-booklet A Parent’s Guide to Intelligent Design: Resources to help you and your children understand the debate between Darwinian evolution and intelligent design.

Will you help us distribute this digital booklet to as many parents as possible around the country?  

We need your help to raise $10,000 for a web advertising campaign letting parents know about this important free resource, and to print hardcopy booklets to hand out at events we conduct at schools, universities and churches.  With your help we can get this digital booklet into the hands of thousands of parents around the country.  Please donate now to support our campaign to help educate students, and parents.

Thank you for your support.

Sincerely,

Janine Dixon
Educational Outreach Coordinator
Center for Science & Culture
Discovery Institute
PS: Donations of $25 or more will receive a printed copy of the "Parent's Guide to Intelligent Design" and $100 or more will get you a free book or DVD from a wide selection of science related products.  Please donate today and help us reach our goal.

 
This is my donation! 

For those who might be confused by this post, the term Discoveroids refers to the people who staff the Discovery Institute, which heralds the alleged 'theory' (but really not even a good hypothesis) of 'Intelligent Design'.  Yes, the term Discoveroids is indeed intended to be pejorative.  

If you woud like to know more about the amazing revelations of The Discovery Institute, and the source of the terminology, I can only recommend this blog, The Sensuous Curmudgeon.  Happy reading Casey Luskin!

Incidentally, you can get the booklet here if you like.  I have deliberately not made it a hyperlink.  http://support.discovery.org/site/R?i=UPG1flsDMwJa-6GBZij4iw

More Darwin Fish

One of the most popular posts here at Something Surprising was a silly tale about the Darwin Fish symbols that you sometimes see on people's cars.  A School of Darwin Fish has been visited surprisingly often.

Since that time I have gradually collected other versions of the symbol and although I'm not going to weave a story around them again, here are some for your enjoyment.

T Rex eats fish symbol

Darwin fish - reality bites

Dissecting Darwin Fish

A shoal of Darwin Fish ideas

Evidence eats faith fish

I'm not sure I dare put one on my own car!

ID - not even a theory

Creationists dress up their wacky beliefs in a variety of ways.  'Intelligent Design' (ID) is one that has been quite popular in recent years, but in USA it was clearly recognised in the Kitzmiller vs Dover trial that is not a legitimate science.  In the findings of the court you can read:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.

Nevertheless, ID is still heralded by supposedly 'respected' organisations like the Discovery Institute, (deliberately not linked from here as it might make them feel more important).  But even they are going to have to change terminology just as they changed the name of their Center for Science and Culture from its original name of Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).  The word 'renewal' in that context must have give the game away!

Just listen to their podcast, 'ID The Future', a few times to hear what I mean.  You will find it a good way to exercise your skills at spotting logical fallacies in seemingly reasonable arguments and exorcise any credibility that you might lend to their point of view.

Intelligent Design. Not even a theory!

ID is not a theory.  It is not even worthy of the name hypothesis!  It is not science, but merely another form of religious dogma dressed up as some sort of science to confuse the gullible.  It is a blanket non-explanation which only leads to regression to the further question of 'who designed the designer?'

Watch out for the next incarnation of creationism and be ready to treat it in the same way.  There are already signs of the way it might go.   We hear whining about how ID is ignored by the scientific press, and claims of discrimination against their pet ideas. We hear them asking for the teaching of the (non-existent) controversy.  I think we can tell that they are developing a new approach to replace the tired idea of Intelligent Design - although they will continue to promote the ID smokescreen in parallel.

Another blog, The Sensuous Curmudgeon, seems to share my amusement and my desire to ridicule the work of the Discovery Institute.  Have a look at this entertaining article for the New Theory of Improvident Design.

Is Evolution Predictable? Richard Dawkins speaks.

You may like to view this newly published video of the talk given by Professor Richard Dawkins at Culham Science Centre in February 2012.  The narrative is quite close to that in his book, Climbing Mount Improbable, but it was a pleasure to hear him speak on the subject.  If you like it too, buy the book.

Small reminder to self:  I promised to write an article about fusion for his web site! Perhaps next week while I'm on holiday I'll do it.

Creationist makes nearly ALL the common mistakes

If you would like to practise spotting almost all the common mistakes that creationists make when the are speaking about evolution, I recommend you to listen skeptically to an episode of the Discovery Institute's podcast, ID The Future.  On 11th June 2012** there was an interview interview with Dr Ben Carson who kindly provided a lesson in the recitation of persistently regurgitated and easily answered bunkum.

The show notes give some background:


On this episode of ID the Future, host David Boze speaks with Dr. Ben Carson, renowned paediatric neurosurgeon and Darwin doubter. Dr. Carson was recently invited to deliver the commencement speech at Emory University. Unfortunately, upon uncovering his non-allegiance to Darwinian ideology, 500 faculty members and students alike signed a letter in protest of his welcome. Listen in to hear Dr. Carson discuss this ill treatment and why his acute knowledge of the brain has led him to reject Darwinism. Dr. Ben Carson is the Director of the Division of Paediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. An internationally renowned physician, Dr. Carson has authored over 100 neurosurgical publications, along with three best-selling books, and has been awarded 38 honorary doctorate degrees and dozens of national merit citations. 


Dr Carson might indeed be a renowned neurosurgeon and in that capacity he has my admiration.  However, I think he should also now become renowned for his misunderstanding of the Theory of Evolution, which he pejoratively refers to as 'Darwinism'.

To take a few of them with my comments in small text:

• Darwinians are so closed minded.  Yes that's always an argument that convinces people.
• In the history of science, people have come up with some 'pretty outlandish things' that have turned out to be wrong.  True but only the evidence will tell us whether evolution is one of them.  I wouldn't put money on it myself.
• Evolution does not explain the origin of life.  That's true, and well spotted!  his is classic error number one.  It is just as relevant to say that the Theory of Gravitation does not explain the origin of life either.  Evolution doesn't claim to be able to do that.
• How does anything come out of nothing and how does life evolve from non-life.  Just saying that we don't yet know makes the existence of a designer no more likely.  For example - we do know about self-replicating proteins, called prions, that are not alive themselves but they do replicate.
• Although 'fully accepting the concept of natural selection' he thinks that it is taking it a little bit too far to claim that it is the foundational pillar of proof that evolution occurs.  Yes - and what does that mean?  This is not an unusual claim.  I think it means that they don't think natural selection goes as far as speciation, so one wonders what use it is after all..
• Evolutionists [not Darwinists in this case] look at similarities between life forms and infer that they are related, but wouldn't a designer use the same designs if they were successful?  He then uses an analogy - and all analogies are wrong - different models of cars from the same manufacturer share common components.  He says that they have not evolved from each other - which is clearly not true anyway.
• The human genome is a complex sophisticated coding mechanism.   He then makes an analogy to computer programming with 4 digits instead of 2, which he claims is twice as complex.  In fact it is 4!/2! = 12 times more complex - but hey!  What is a factor of six between friends?  It still explains nothing about the need for a designer - this is the argument from personal incredulity.  [The 4! symbology indicates a factorial = 4x3x2x1]
• Complexity of the brain is amazing.  To say that it came about randomly doesn't make sense.  Shades of Michael Behe's 747 from a junkyard here - often rebutted.  Randomness is involved, but it is absolutely not the key to natural selection.  Survival is the key.
• Apparently there are no intermediate species.  No-one has ever found them.  Actually ALL species are intermediate, including our own.  See this Dawkins video for a lovely explanation.
• A single neuron in the human brain can process 50K interactions per second.  If true, that's a very impressive thing that evolution has developed isn't it.
• His message to the young scientists in his field is to 'be wise'.  [i.e. don't tell them until you get tenure?]  Is this just 'lying for Jesus'? He was rather careful not to go as far as actually recommending this though.

All in all this interview is remarkable, even compared with the Discovery Institute's usual fair.  The God of the Gaps argument/fallacy is thinly disguised, but visible to anyone who looks at it.

** Beware that the Discovery Institute tends to recycle its podcasts, so you might have heard this a few times before if you enjoy the masochistic experience of listening to ID The future.  It is good practise!

Two Horsemen - without horses

On Wednesday evening I was one of the people lucky enough to get a ticket to see two of the three remaining 'horsemen of the apocalypse'.  (Well in fact I got four tickets and was accompanied by three friends.)  In front of a packed hall in the Oxford University Exam schools, with a similar sized overflow room filled to near capacity, we witnessed Richard Dawkins in discussion with Daniel Dennett.

The event was videoed and hopefully when I find it online I will add a link from here so that you can watch it yourself.  Update 2nd June:  here is the link.

Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in Oxford, May 2012

The most surprising thing for me was that a large proportion of the discussion revolved around the concept of 'the meme'.  The meme of the meme was introduced in Chapter 11 of Richard's first book, 'The Selfish Gene' like this:

"Examples of memes including tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches.  Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."

I have had the impression from my recent reading that Richard was moving away from using memetics as a direct analogy for genetics but it seems that I would be wrong to believe that.  Exploring the topic a little more, I think he had been surprised that 'memetics' emerged as a new science in the 1990s and had originally proposed the idea as a metaphor rather than a true cultural counterpart to the gene.  (However, I might be wrong.)

In fact, in their discussion, they made analogies to both evolution and 'Intelligent Design', and made a comparison between religion and a parasitic infection - another common meme.  Scientology is clearly an example of Intelligent Design (and we even know who designed it).  Mormonism might fall into the same category, but many other religions could be said to have evolved.  The rest of Christianity (for example) could be said to exist for its own sake, with believers ensnared by (or willingly submitting themselves to) another power.  In much in the same way, ants infected with a parasite (Dicrocelium dendriticum) are observed to go to the top of blades of grass where they are more likely to be eaten by ruminants.  The parasite life cycle is thus continued in the guts of mammals.  This is depicted on the cover of Dennett's book, 'Breaking the Spell'.

They suggested that the test for a good meme is to make a recording every so often and to see whether, on playing back the recordings, it is possible to rank their chronological order.  They also mentioned that memes probably survive in groups, (memplexes) in much the same way as genes.  No single gene can generally propagate itself without cooperation from the others that go around together.  For example, Roman Catholicism's mysterious memes tend to be inseparable and clearly they have thrived for centuries, whereas individually they tend not to survive.  (Do you really believe that the wine turns into blood?)  Dennett pointed out that this particular collection is now beginning to break down, surprisingly quickly.  The Catholic church has gone from the position where it had three priest per parish to three parishes per priest.  He believes that this is largely due to the way that information can now be transferred around the world so easily.  Religions have survived by presupposing the relative ignorance of the parts that make them up.  They were not designed this way but evolved.

There was more to the discussion, much of it revolving around 'The Clergy Project'.  That was followed by a good number of questions from the audience.  As usual some of them made me wonder whether I couldn't understand them or they simply didn't make much sense.  However, I find that to be one of the hazards of attending events in a city which is home to one of the world's top universities. 

The whole event was free, subsidised by the RDFRS.  It is clearly part of the educational outreach to the young people in the city, but I think it also demonstrates that altruism does not require gods.

The gorilla's genome says . . .

The full genome of the last of the great ape species has been sequenced at last, and the results have been the cause of great excitement among the 'Intelligent Design' community. The gorilla genome is about the 50th to be completed, and it turns out that it has taken quite a while, partly because it is a great deal larger than our own.

The surprise is the finding that about 15% of the genes of gorillas are shared with humans and a different 15% with chimpanzees.  On the face of it, ID's proponents would appear to have a good point when they claim that this calls the family tree of the great apes/hominids into question.   They claim (e.g. here if you can read the words of Casey Luskin without imagining his whining voice) that 'neo-Darwinian evolution' has now been shown to have failed - yet again!

Just a few observations about Luskin's technique before attempting any analysis of the science.  In only the second paragraph he had to launch into an 'ad hominem' attack on Eugenie Scott.  Given that his argument might have had some face-value scientific merit, I think I can be forgiven for finding this approach to be unnecessarily confrontational and defensive.  But evidently he thought that it strengthened his argument.  I don't agree but I'm interested (and proud) to see that Eugenie has got him on the run like that.

I am much more interested in his 'reasoning'.  He says:

"The standard evolutionary phylogeny of primates holds that humans and chimps are more closely related to one-another than to other great apes like gorillas. In practice, all that really means is that when we sequence human, chimp, and gorilla genes, human and chimp genes have a DNA sequence that is more similar to one-another's genes than to the gorilla's genes."

Indeed that is what we might have expected, but the fact that the data seem to show something different is interesting isn't it?  I would also have expected Luskin to 'muddy the waters' for a non-specialist audience by using words like 'phylogeny'.  Why use a small word when a big one can be used instead.

I like to hone my arguments by listening to this sort of rhetorical tosh and trying to spot the logical fallacies.  My first thought on the topic was that the process of speciation must have been slow enough to allow a degree of gene transfer between the sub-species that later divided into the current completely separate species. We know that Neanderthals interbred with our ancestors to some degree.

Indeed, it turns out that this has been offered as an argument, but being a relatively weak one, this was the one that Luskin proceeded to attack.

"Called incomplete lineage sorting, it provides a convenient after-the-fact explanation for why different genes carry different phylogenetic signals. Of course, this is merely an ad hoc hypothesis invoked to explain away inconvenient data which contradicts the standard phylogeny."

That sounds reasonable until you discover that 'incomplete lineage sorting' is not quite what he describes.  Fortunately, proper specialists in genetics have come to the rescue.

In his slightly technical but manageable post Chimps are our closest relatives… but not for all of our genes, David Winter describes much more clearly how different variants of genes (called alleles) can be spread exactly as has been observed.  It turns out that it is perfectly understandable how the gene tree can be different from the species tree.

The gene tree can be different from the species tree. 
From an excellent article by David Winter

As David Winter says:

"For recent or repeated and rapid speciation processes there might not be time for the genetic lineages to sort. The gene tree can be different from the species tree"

and he then goes on to explain that this very observation can probably tell science something useful:

"Although we’ve always known this problem existed, we’ve only recently been able to extend population genetics theory to actually infer the history of species for gene trees even when those gene trees are unsorted."

So now you can decide for yourself who to side with - since we are 'teaching the controversy' as the ID community likes to say.  Do we believe a real geneticist who has a real explanation (or was it only an ad hoc hypothesis that we have always known about?).  Or do we believe someone who goes for ad hominem attacks on respectable and rational scientists, then uses 2 dimensional analogies that fail to prove anything because of their simplistic nature and merely rhetorical value?

I would still go for a strong adherence to the belief that chimps are our nearest cousins (speaking as a species of course).

ID might still be one of the strongest lines of evidence for the existence of a god, but let's face it, it doesn't have much competition!  Nor does it imply which of the current catalogue of 3000+ gods might have been responsible for the design, or why he did such a poor job of it.

Small note: Of course this very post could be said to be an 'ad hominem' attack but I trust you to judge that for yourself.

Trilobites in 3D

We've all seen pictures of fossilised trilobites, from the Early Cambrian period.

The classic view of a trilobite

But in the Madrid Museo Geominero there was a small but fascinating exhibit.  A fossil had been carefully excavated from the surrounding rock to show the animal in 3D.  I don't mind spiders in the bath, but something like this would be much more disturbing.  This creature, the size of your hand, is viewed from the underside, with its legs and curly antennae revealed.

Trilobite from underneath, in amazing 3D

Exhibits like this bring the fossil world back to life in a way that I found surprising.

Things Christians Say, Part 3 - Dogs give birth to cats?

A weekly series of responses to the things christians say to atheists, based on the video reproduced here on 30th January 2012.  The aim is to tackle one every weekend, to give both a moderate, polite response to each question ('Piano'), followed by a more forceful rebuttal of the same question ('Forte'). 

If evolution were true, we'd see dogs giving birth to cats

Piano

Lots of people misunderstand evolution for understandable reasons.  Darwin's beautiful idea is so good at explaining things, and yet it is so badly taught in many schools – and indeed in many countries. If you open your mind to the possibility that it is true and look at the evidence, you will see how gradual small changes, from generation to generation, are inevitable due to errors in copying the genetic code. Many – perhaps even most – of these errors are not beneficial.  But once in a while the change makes the offspring better able to thrive or even just to survive in its environment and that change is most likely to be perpetuated. It is not truly random. Yes – the errors are random but the survival is most definitely not.

One of the best books on the topic is The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins, (known to fans as TGSOE). At over 450 pages long, you would find it hard to select a more interesting read.

My own well-read copy of TGSOE

If you are religious and feel that it threatens your faith, you might even consider checking the surprising revelation that for a large proportion of christianity (including the Catholics and Anglicans) evolution is accepted into doctrine. Not all churches are officially anti-evolution and if yours is, then you are probably not ever going to change your mind, whatever the evidence might be. Even as recently as a couple of weeks ago a Roman Catholic friend told me that she hadn't realised this.

A few other people deliberately spread lies about evolution because they feel threatened by it. When it comes to specific points like the statement that we would see dogs giving birth to cats, it is almost certainly a case of mischievous lying because nobody believes that to be a sensible conclusion from the Theory of Evolution.

***

Forte

Not that ridiculous and ignorant argument again! No!  We wouldn't. Whatever theory you are describing it is NOT evolution.

Try to remember who told you that we would 'see dogs giving birth to cats', and be VERY suspicious of them.  I certainly wouldn't trust them with my eternal soul - even if I believed that I had one!



Last week:  You're a What?
Next week: These so-called atheists are just rebelling against god.

St Valentine's massacre in religion wars

A somewhat desperate article entitled "St Valentine's massacre in religion wars as Dawkins forgets full name of seminal Darwin book" can be found at this link.  Just glance at the original to get the context before you read this parody.

Originally written by someone called Tim Edwards, it was full of irrelevant claims.  A new corrected version is featured here on Something Surprising.

..............

In a typical act of clutching at straws, Christian apologists today claimed that RICHARD DAWKINS suffered 'a rare skewering' at the hands of the clergy after taking to the airwaves to argue that people who call themselves Christians are often using the term in an unexpected way.  At one point the so-called 'high priest of atheism' even cursed under his breath as he struggled to remember the exact title of Charles Darwin's monumental treatise on evolution.

Dawkins - the facts of the UK census, 2011

Dawkins went on BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday morning to explain a survey he had published, showing that half of the people who described themselves as Christian on the 2011 census do not consider themselves religious.

The object of the poll, carried out by Ipsos Mori for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, was to show that census data could not, in all honesty, be used to justify the UK's habitual favoritism for Christian practices such as government funding for faith schools and bishops having seats in the House of Lords.

Struggling to get a word in edgeways, against a 'gish gallop' from Rev Giles Fraser, the former canon of St Paul's Cathedral who was forced to resign last year, Dawkins was  able to squeeze in the fact that 64 per cent of people who said they were Christians in the census were not able to identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament.

For some surprising reason Fraser asked him if he could tell him the full title of On the Origin of Species, the book by Charles Darwin.  Why this might be relevant to the actual facts of the survey were not exactly clear.  Perhaps Fraser was indulging in the common Christian tactic of rhetorical distraction to avoid admitting the unpleasant facts.  Dawkins, was able to provide "On the Origin of Species, er, with... oh god [N.B - small g!] ... On the Origin of Species, um... There is a subtitle... er, um, with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."

Not bad, under pressure, with an audience numbered in the millions, to give almost exactly the full title of a text book written a century and a half ago.  On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life is of course the proper answer, as I'm sure you know.

It has to be said that it is a bit easier to recite the complete title of "The Holy Bible".  It was not revealed whether Fraser was able to remember the sub-title.

A jubilant Fraser then claimed - as if it actually mattered: "You are the High Pope of Darwinism. If you asked people who believe in evolution that question and only two per cent got it right it would be terribly easy for me to say they don't really believe it after all."

I suppose that shows the difference between discredited clerics and respected scientists.  Clerics think that everything comes down to belief and scientists think that the evidence is more important.  Someone should remind Fraser that the official doctrines of both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches accept evolution.

Meanwhile evolutionary biologists tend not to refer to themselves as Darwinists, as the term is often used pejoratively.  They rarely find any need for a pope - neither ordinary nor high.

Darwin's Heretic - an exercise in logical fallacy

The Intelligent Design (ID) community has pushed the boat out and made an entertaining little movie which they think will help to promote their cause.  In actual fact it simply demonstrates rather well why their claims have been largely ignored by the real scientific community.  Some of the descriptions of evolution are presented by Michael Flannery, who might be a professor of something from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, but not the sort of professor who understands the very basics of evolution. (see below)**  He says (at 07:50):

" . . . and quite frankly the origin of life isn't explained by it . . ."

This is true. But as Luciferadi so nicely put it in the comments on one of my posts a few days ago:

"I put some water in the freezer and it turned into ice. Can evolution explain that? I threw my copy of Existentialism For Dummies into the air and it fell back to earth. Can evolution explain that?"

Darwin's Heretic can be seen below or via Youtube.  It is a strange little tale about Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of the Theory of Evolution.  Their claim that he was a 'Victorian Indiana Jones' seems to be intended to support their assertion that it matters that he didn't believe that evolution applied to humans.

Alfred Russel Wallace - 'Darwin's Heretic?'

Without acknowledging that the term 'Intelligent Design' has only been in common use for less than two decades, they claim that Wallace 'believed in Intelligent Design'.  Apparently he claimed that the origin of conscious life could never be explained by natural selection.  The fact that even he believed this is supposed to prove something. 

Have a look at their efforts and spot any logical fallacies.  It should be child's play.  Proof by analogy is one of them!

There you are.  We draw an analogy to something. prove something about the analogous situation, and then assert that this proves something

Darwin was apparently aghast. An emphatic 'NO' was written in the margin of his copy of Wallace's paper.  I'm fairly aghast that the Discovery Institute puts out a video like this one.

Of course, Darwin was quite right to react like that, and Darwin Day is as good a day as any other to ridicule pseudo-scientific stuff about ID.

Small note:  Even the argument from authority that they use to justify the conclusions of the movie cannot be applied to Michael Flannery! 
** A little research suggests that Flannery's specialist area is/was pharmacy, that he is now director of a library, and that his three most recent publications as first author were not exactly in relevant topics for him to be considered an expert in evolution:
'That Which is Above is Like That Which is Below': the Persistence of the Hermetic Tradition in Science and the Case of Alfred Russel Wallace
The English Physician 
Well Satisfied With My Position: The Civil War Journal of Spencer Bonsall  

Poe's Law in action!

This is the best example yet of Poe's Law in action on Something Surprising. I honestly can't tell whether the barely literate ramblings left yesterday on an earlier post, "Evolution video - Jack Szostak", are meant seriously or not. However I thought it was worth posting them here for your amusement.

micro evolution exists macro evolution not so as different species can not mate to produce new spices such as Ligons(lion and tigers)which are already from a closely realated species) it is very hard for them to reproduce but when they have they are sterile and cannot reprduce and create a new species if macro evolution is correct there would be new species being constantly created but it is the exact opposite slowly more and more spiecs are being extint & lowering in numbers.

evolution leads to death. do u not think that there is more to our existance than that?

As for the homolgous structures that just shows that thier are similarites between species which for he show that they have been created by the same creater, you see this in the was electrons revolve around in atoms and teh way the world revolves around the sun.

with stratography and rock layers they date them by using circular reasoning: the rocks are dated by the fossil layers in the rock and the fossils are dated by the rock layers and they do find fossil in "incorrect layers" they have also found human hand and footprints in these layers. they are also tree remains that stand upright that go through these "billions" of years old rock layers which fill in for noahs flood as when you have different types of dirt in a jar with water and you shake it it settles down in layers.

A for dating methods scientists have dated new objects and have been given absolutley reductious dates and did you know it doesnt take hundreds of years for objects to become pertriefied sneakers have been pertrified as well as a buch of other objects.

just think a couple of hundred years ago australia was not even discoverd and this back a nother couple of hundred and another humas history does not really go back very far at all.

Thats just some food for thought. I recomend that you do some research on the other side of the argument aswell :)

and are you going to deny my uncle being healed of cancer when he was 60 on his death bead looking as pale and sickly riddled with tumours all through his body. We all prayed for him and God healed him and he passed the tumours and now he looks heathy as anything and doctors are amazed at his medical records. can evolution explain that.

My un-named critic has actually suggested that I should do some reading about the 'other side of the argument', as if it actually appears that I have not done that already.  Its not worth refuting the creationist babble that they have accepted uncritically, asking them when Australia was discovered, nor pointing out in more detail that they haven't understood the difference between petrification (which is worthy of another post soon) and fossilisation.

As for the fortunate uncle, how could I possibly deny that he has been healed?   Spontaneous remissions occur about 1 time in 10,000 cases, and this must have been one of them.  I won't try to explain it with evolution, nor do I need to, but I certainly wouldn't explain it with prayer either.

By coincidence or not, another post soon after the above pointed to this image.

Interestingly one of the examples used in that parody of evolution, Nebraska Man, was more of a creationist hoax.  Read about it on Rosa Rubicondior's blog.