June 9, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

Sarah Palin has been cleared of all 13 ethics charges brought against her during her bid for the vice-presidency. Many will never hear this fact. Many who do, because of their news sources, will laugh and say, “See! I knew she was innocent!” But I hear and I’m saddened. I would that she were guilty than that this trend were becoming the norm in my country.
It is obvious that the accusations were made to defame during the election. It’s OK with the accusers that she is vindicated after it no longer affects the outcome desired.
It is also obvious that the charges were made to sway a public that cares about ethics. What an irony! Those who made each of the original accusations must have known, surely they must have at least suspected, that the charges they were bringing were untrue. This is not the same as two parties debating an idea for its truth. That should be encouraged. There is something ironic, however, about a group having the power to attack someone’s ethics in an unethical way. At the very least, they simply didn’t care about the truth more than they cared about their cause. This is not a condemnation of a party. It is a condemnation of a people. Oh, God, what is to become of a people who care more about their cause than about the truth?

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May 7, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

Recently you have probably heard the swine flu described in terms of deaths in Mexico, followed closely by words like “pandemic” and “quarantine.” Last time I heard, those deaths were in two digits. Any deaths are of course tragic, but for years the average lives lost to flu in the United States alone exceed 36,000. The world’s experience with swine flu hardly qualifies as a “pandemic.” As a matter of fact, people do not normally get swine flu. What people do normally get, however, is hype from the media. They got to keep you watching!

The part that amazes me is that it works. We do not get our medical information from science; we get it from popular media. Unfortunately we don’t even get most of what we call science from science. We believe and make our judgments based on a kind of “politically correct” science. By “politically correct,” I mean facts filtered and presented to the masses based on some group’s agenda. It is emotionally charged for some predetermined conclusion or action. I’m not even sure there is such thing as unbiased science, but I am sure we can do better. Does it matter? How about spending billions on finding a cure for a disease that is behaviorally correctable, while the number one killer, heart disease, receives about one eighth the funding?

Is there an agenda behind most of what we hear on global warming? I’ve seen the markers in Alaska where the glaciers once reached. No one doubts that the world is warmer than it was 200 years ago, but that was during what is now known as the “little ice age.” The earth’s temperature has fluctuated warmer and cooler as far as we can tell for all of recorded history–long before industrial pollution was invented. The cause of climate change is, to say the least, controversial. The leap that man is responsible is vanity. That we are thus able to fix it is arrogance. “You really can’t settle the issue by more heated debate…You need experimental data.”

But it sells newspapers, and it justifies research grants. It doesn’t boost either to point out that 95% of greenhouse gas is water vapor, or that CO2 is harmless to animals and essential for plants.

All my ranting so far is really about one thing: Our lives are so filled with other things, and we are so dependent on the digestion of ideas by other people, that we are suckers for someone else’s agenda. Could it be true of other “science”? Are the masses buying evolution because the evidence is so irrefutable, or could it be that the fit with secularism and research grants is not coincidental? After all, we must discover our self-made roots and whether other life has evolved out there. It’s too coincidental not to be questioned.

Posted in Culture & society, Politics, History, Science and faith | 4 Comments »

April 26, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

[Don,]
I guess I missed your “evidence” for the creationist/Id explanation of the Cambrian explosion.

I guess I missed the part where I denied evidence, simply because you have not presented any evidence.

I guess I missed the fact that I denied any cracks in the dike. On the contrary, I fully understand that evolutionary theory has plenty of unresolved issues. I understand that it probably will, like all theories, be discarded someday in favor of a better one. Unlike you, I also understand that cracks in this theory are absolutely not the same thing as evidence for your theory. Evidence for your theory will require hypotheses (of which you have none), predictions (again, none), and new observations (again, none)

I guess you missed the part where the folks in those papers I cited had hypotheses, stated those hypotheses, tested those hypotheses, and found new evidence that supported the theory of evolution. Too bad.

You have a very different view of evidence from me. You have an idiosyncratic definition of information. I have pointed those facts out to you, but I see no evidence that you wish to recognize those problems with your positions.

From another form, discussing ID/creationists, here is a statement that resonates for me:

they just can’t accept that their core organizing belief does not and cannot contribute to a scientific understanding of the world - and take that to mean that science is an enemy of that belief.

Think about it. Just because your worldview is incapable of doing what science can do (you know, generate testable hypotheses and get new observations and accept or refute the hypothesis), that is not a good reason to rail against science.

cheers

Mark*
- - - - -
Mark,
You have the last word.
Don Mc
- - - - -
[Don]
I have no delusions that is true
cheers
Mark

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April 19, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

Mark,
You have given me examples of phenotypical changes that are useful to the organism and seem to be traceable back to random mutations. I appreciate that, and will enjoy looking into them over the next weeks. Still, I find you have stated no hypotheses, and I do not see any construct validity for how randomness can produce increased information. Information is fundamental, not only for simple change or even usefulness, but also as the whole basis of DNA.
I’m afraid I don’t see how white noise contains more information than a Beethoven sonata. There may be more data, depending on the length, but the difference between data and information is some discernable meaning in some identifiable context. By meaning I mean a consistent, logical interpretation into an application, as is the case with a sonata or DNA.
I also consider logic to be fundamental behind an hypothesis. Examples of change are nice, but the absence of construct validity is where “no hypothesis can stand.” After the logic behind the construct comes examples, or the examples themselves have no meaning–application to theory.
I see no reason to present further arguments. The ones I have presented you have disqualified, ignored, or pooh-poohed, but you have offered no logical rebuttals for any of them.
To date I am not convinced that evolution occurs beyond natural selection of pre-existing information or rearrangements of pre-existing information. That said, I believe, scientifically speaking, there is no reason why Darwinian (tree of life) evolution and design could not occur in the same universe. Said another way, everything need not be explained by one over the other. This apparently is not your position.
There is evidence for evolution, for gradual decent. I find it neither compelling nor up to the level of evidence for design, but I do not find it difficult to admit. It is there, and I can understand how a person could buy it, especially in the absence of any alternative presentation of fact, theory or hypothesis. After all, I was there once.
What I find more difficult to understand is complete denial of any evidence for alternative interpretations. I have attempted, with some effort at logic, to make the alternatives clear, pushed by curiosity to find what it might take to gain consideration. In this I have utterly failed.
Your reasons for rejecting my evidence include it’s too old (older than Darwin), it’s not my field (and no one should look outside their field), it’s too negative (viewing it for how it DOESN’T support evolution instead of how it DOES support design), and the most lame of all, it’s not about the Cambrian Explosion (as if the Cambrian were the real issue).
You are offended at the idea that evolutionary scientists might be wearing blinders, while illustrating the point perfectly. The fact that you are so intelligent, so well educated, and so highly positioned in your field make the point even stronger, that people can’t get that way by themselves. It takes a total culture of total denial to make it possible. The fact that any crack in the dike is intolerable says to me that denial itself is the last stronghold.
If you cannot admit that there is evidence on both sides of any argument, then you will never find the truth. I could have never written a scenario like the one you and I have constructed. I would not have considered the prose plausible. Thank you for an education in this area.
We can both stop here and consider ourselves to have won. My perceived victory is in being able to weigh evidence that alludes a very intelligent and educated mind. It looks to me like your perceived victory is in winning an argument over an “uncluttered” mind that “lacks understanding.”
Don Mc

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April 13, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

[Don,]
We may be getting toward the end of our discussion.
Yes, it would appear to be the case, since you have not managed to propose a single scientific hypothesis based on what you hope/wish is a powerful scientific approach. But I’m willing to be patient.
If I responded to your request for an hypothesis at any time with a list of topics, books, and referred articles, you would have rejected it.
I’m not sure I would have rejected it, since I haven’t seen them. I can tell you that I have yet to see a scientific hypothesis based on ID that would lead to a testable prediction unexplainable by current evolutionary theory. That was true before we started this conversation, and I have read additional ID and creationist materials since then, yet it remains true. I merely thought that since you broached the subject of the Cambrian explosion, you would have a ready explanation for it, based on your perspective. I guess that was a premature expectation.

Your example of nylonase in bacteria was better.
This is such a remarkably incorrect perversion of what we know that I don’t know where to start. But rather than get sidetracked on those issues (and further away from hearing a single hypothesis from you), I’ll merely point out that if you had read anything in Carroll’s book, or any of a number of other primary sources, you would not say that “loss of complexity” or “a degenerated mechanism” is the explanation. As pointed out before, you will need a significantly deeper understanding of genetic control mechanisms to proceed toward an understanding of why the entire paragraph above is simply wrong. Clearly you don’t have that understanding.

I think complexity is a legitimate term in biology,
I was asking simply because I had no idea what YOU meant by the word “complexity”. And now that I have that information, I have to point out to you (again) that your understanding is quite superficial. Increases in information are not the same thing as increases in complexity. Some well-accepted definitions of information would posit that there is more information in white noise than in a Beethoven sonata of the same length. Is white noise more “complex” than a Beethoven sonata? Most folks would say no. Others would posit that mere duplication of information is an increase in complexity; two copies of War and Peace is more complex than one. Yet there is no more information in two copies compared to one. At the biological level this conflation is also obvious. A duplicated gene has no more information content than the original gene, yet it can lead to increases in the “complexity” of the organism’s metabolism, structure, etc. See methotrexate resistance in human cancers, for one non-trivial example. A genetic control element moved to a novel chromosomal environment has no new information, but it can (as you would know if you read Carroll and others) lead to new structures which most people would describe as an increase in “complexity”.
So until you understand the fact that information and complexity are different things, we can’t really get much further.

I need nothing about natural selection.
Yet you deny those mechanisms. Gene duplication gives rise to new possibilities for selection to act upon. There are innumerable examples (antifreeze proteins in Antarctic icefish, for one) of duplicated genes giving rise to proteins with novel structure. Is an icefish with antifreeze proteins more “complex” than a related fish without those proteins? I happen to think so, but I can’t really figure out where you would stand on that question. Mutations that result in novel protein-protein interactions, for example in the Vpu gene in human immunodeficiency virus I (the virus that causes AIDS), can give “more complex alternatives” from which nature selects more lethal viruses (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=8794357&ordinalpos=5&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum%E2%80%9D). The literature is replete with the examples that you seek. Read about them, please. But don’t let it distract you from formulating your hypothesis about the Cambrian explosion, please.
So, more important than examples of change or defense of natural selection, I would like to see a logical argument supporting an hypothesis pertaining to increased complexity by random mutation.
Let me just say, then, that “where you come from” is a place that is remarkably uncluttered by the results of scientific research of the past 60 years. In addition, that place supports a definition of “complexity” (information = complexity, NOT) that fails to conform to standard usage. See http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/06/more-on-the-ori.html for a discussion of new genes in fruit flies, or http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/06/de-novo-origina.html for a discussion of the origin of a new gene in yeast. It is simply not true that “no hypothesis can stand” in this arena.

I believe I can give an example of an hypothesis supporting design
Let’s just hear the hypothesis, please.
Thanks

Mark

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April 1, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

Mark,
We may be getting toward the end of our discussion.
If I responded to your request for an hypothesis at any time with a list of topics, books, and referred articles, you would have rejected it. I could list for you example referred publications defending ID, communism or any number of topics, but I will respond:
Your example of nylonase in bacteria was better. At least it still holds more mystery in its cause. The research I have read on duplication of organs seems pretty straightforward. All organic processes begin and end with a molecular “command.” Simply looking at the chemical reactions, something starts to reproduce and grow because a molecular signal is given to begin. Likewise, other than by simply running out of raw materials, the process stops because a molecular command is given to stop. The same is true in my Excel programs. The program loops while it continually checks for some condition. When that certain level of computation is reached in a “compute” loop, the loop is sidetracked by an alternative “stop” command. If the beginning command does not occur in an organism, there is no continuation of life. If the ending command does not kick in at all, well we usually call that cancer. Sometimes the stop command looses function only partially, so that replication continues to abnormal size in an organ, or an organ is produced where it did not occur at all in previous generations. It is not new information; it is replication of old information by a degenerated mechanism. This explains fruit flies with extra wings, sticklebacks with extra fins, and freak shows where animals have too many legs. In any case, it can be explained by the loss of complexity, not the gain.
I think complexity is a legitimate term in biology, since one of your example answers was Carroll’s book, The Making and Evolution of Complexity. Modern technology has taken us to the molecular level, and demonstrated that information is stored there, something Darwin could not have imagined. Therefore, by increased complexity I mean there occurs (for whatever reason) more information at the molecular level than was present in the predecessor molecules. What I’d like to see is something pertaining to an increase in complexity.
I need nothing about natural selection. No one argues against natural selection’s power to eliminate the less competitive organisms, and thus the molecules that gave them rise. That is logical, and it is demonstrated daily. The part I need help with is the power of chance to mutate more complex alternatives from which nature is then to select.
So, more important than examples of change or defense of natural selection, I would like to see a logical argument supporting an hypothesis pertaining to increased complexity by random mutation. Where I come from, no hypothesis can stand, regardless of what it predicts or what is observed, without a logical, step-by-step explanation for why the observation supports the conclusion, and only that conclusion. I’m guessing you call that construct validity, just as I do.
I believe I can give an example of an hypothesis supporting design and based on the probable cause of the stickleback condition (and thus pertaining to the Cambrian issue), but I should wait for your example of validity and hypothesis on some aspect of increased complexity. Otherwise, I’m confident it will not meet your standard.
Don

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March 22, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

Last week an official letter was sent by the ACLU and others to leaders in the Obama administration protesting the denial of academic freedom for certain persons seeking admission into the United States. The apparent reason for denial of these persons’ visas was outspoken ideological differences with our government. I am not here concerned with whether these people should be allowed into the United States nor do I necessarily take issue with the missions and approaches of all the organizations that signed the letter. I would however, like to recommend that the ACLU read again this letter that they have posted on their website the next time they wish to object to a teacher who simply presents ideological or scientific criticisms to Darwinian evolution theory. To make it easier for them, I have copied the entire text below, highlighting phrases and whole sentences that could as easily fit the
mistreatment of Darwin critics; whom apparently the ACLU finds more threatening to our civil liberties than political dissidents.

March 18, 2009

Dear Attorney General Holder and Secretaries Clinton and Napolitano:

Over the last eight years, the Departments of State and Homeland Security revivedthe practice of “ideological exclusion,” refusing visas to foreign scholars, writers, artists, and activistsnot on the basis of their actions but on the basis of their ideas, political views, and associations. As a result of this practice, dozens of prominent intellectuals were barred from assuming teaching posts at U.S. universities, fulfilling

speaking engagements with U.S. audiences, and attending academic conferences. Many of those barred from the United States were vocal critics of U.S. foreign policy.

We are writing to urge you to end this practice. While the government plainly has an interest in excluding
foreign nationals who present a threat to national security,no legitimate interest is served by the exclusion
of foreign nationalson ideological grounds.

To the contrary,ideological exclusion impoverishes academic and political debate inside the United States. It sends the message to the world that our country is more interested in silencing than engaging its critics.It undermines our ability to support political dissidents in other countries. And it deprives Americans of a right protected by the First

Amendment.See Kleindienst v. Mandel, 408 U.S. 753 (1972).No legitimate interest is served by the government’s use of the immigrationlaws as instruments of censorship.

In fact, ideological exclusion is a practice that history had discredited long before the Bush administration. During the Cold War, the United States used the ideological exclusion provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act to bar, among others, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Italian playwright Dario Fo, British novelist Doris Lessing, and Canadian

writer and environmentalist Farley Mowat. Those exclusions came to be seen as an embarrassment to the country, and virtually no one proposes now that those exclusions served the national interest. History will judge the ideological exclusions of the last eight years in the same way. Such exclusions are ineffective as a matter of security policy and they are inconsistent with the ideals that make this country worth defending.

The undersigned organizations are eager to see the new administration commit itself to these ideals. Accordingly, we respectfully ask (1)
that you evaluate applicants for admission to the United States on the basis of their actions rather than their political beliefs and associations; (2) that, as to foreign scholars, writers, artists, and activists who are deemed inadmissible under the Immigration and Nationality Act, you exercise your discretion to waive inadmissibility except where articulable national security interests unrelated to the applicant’s political beliefs or associations make waiver inappropriate; and (3) that you immediately revisit the specific cases listed below:

• Iñaki Egaña. Mr. Egaña is a respected historian and writer from the Basque region of Spain. In March 2006, Mr. Egaña traveled to the United States to conduct research for a book about Basque author Mario Salegi, who was a target of McCarthyism during the 1950s. Upon disembarking the plane, however, Mr. Egaña and his children were interrogated, detained for 24 hours, and forced to return to Madrid. The government has provided no explanation for Mr. Egaña’s exclusion.

• Haluk Gerger. Professor Gerger is a Turkish sociologist and journalist. He was jailed by Turkey in the 1990s for his writing about Turkey’s Kurds. Twice during that time, in its 1994 and 1995 Country Reports on Human Rights, the U.S. State Department cited Professor Gerger’s treatment as an example of the misuse of antiterrorism legislation to stifle freedom of expression. In 1999, when Professor Gerger was on trial again for his writings, the U.S. issued Professor Gerger and his wife 10-year, multiple entry visas. In October 2002, however, when Professor

Gerger and his wife arrived at Newark airport, border officials informed them that the State Department had cancelled their visas. The governmenthas provided no explanation for Professor Gerger’s exclusion.

• Adam Habib. Professor Habib, a South African national, is a prominent human rights activist and public intellectual. Although he earned his PhD in the United States, when he attempted to visit the United States in October 2006 for professional meetings, he was interrogated for seven hours at the border and then told that his visa had been revoked. After U.S. organizations filed suit to challenge his exclusion, the government notified Professor Habib that he had been denied entry on terrorism-related grounds. It still has not has not informed him, however, of the specific legal or factual basis for its decision. The evidence strongly suggests that Professor Habib has been excluded not because of any

connection to terrorism but because of his political activism.

• Riyadh Lafta. Dr. Lafta, an Iraqi national, is Professor of Medicine at Baghdad’s Mustansiriyah University. In the fall of 2006, Dr. Lafta applied for a U.S. visa in order to attend a speaking engagement at the University of Washington that was to take place in April 2007. His visa application was denied. Although the government stated that the denial was the result of a “miscommunication,” the circumstances strongly suggest that Dr. Lafta was refused a visa because f conclusions he had drawn in a 2006 article regarding the number of civilian casualties in Iraq.

• Tariq Ramadan. Professor Ramadan, a Swiss national, is a professor at the University of Oxford and, in the words of Time magazine, “the leading Islamic thinker among Europe’s second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants.” In 2004, he was offered a teaching position at the University of Notre Dame; only days before he was to begin teaching, however, he was told that his visa had been revoked under a provision that renders inadmissible anyone who has “endorse[d] or espouse[d]” terrorism. After U.S. groups filed suit, the government abandoned the accusation that Professor Ramadan had endorsed terrorism. It continues to exclude him now, however, under the INA’s “material support” provisions. We believe that the material support provisions do not apply to Professor Ramadan, and the evidence strongly suggests that he has been excluded not because of his donations but because of his vocal criticism of U.S. foreign policy.

• Rafael de Jesus Gallego Romero. Father Gallego is a parish priest from the village of Tiquisio in North-Central Colombia, where he ministers to miners and peasants, facilitates community support initiatives, and runs a local radio station. Father Gallego is also a vocal critic of government-supported paramilitary units acting on behalf of multinational mining corporations. In the fall of 2008, Father Gallego received invitations to travel to the United States to address universities, activist organizations, community radio stations, and churches. The U.S. government simply failed to adjudicate the visa. Father Gallego eventually learned from the Provincial Jesuit, who has ties to the American Embassy, that his visa was going to be denied “for national security reasons,” buthe has never received a formal notification that his visa was adjudicated, let alone an

explanation of the grounds on which it was denied.

• Dora María Téllez. Professor Téllez was a leading figure in Nicaragua’s revolution against the brutal Somoza regime, and has served in her country as a government minister, political activist, and professor. She has also been a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy. In 2004, she was appointed Robert F. Kennedy visiting professor in Latin American Studies at Harvard’s Divinity School and Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. When Professor Téllez attempted to enroll at a language class in California in preparation for that post, however,< class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace: none; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">her student visa was denied on the ground that she had previously engaged in terrorist acts, despite the fact that she had been granted visas to enter the United States in the past.

Ideological exclusion compromises the vitality of academic and political debate in the United States at a time when that debate is exceptionally important. The practice was misguided during the Cold War and it is misguided now. We strongly urge you to end the practice and to immediately revisit the cases noted above.

Sincerely,

(Among others)

American Civil Liberties Union

American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California

American Federation of Teachers

Posted in Culture & society, Politics, Notable Quotes, Science and faith | 2 Comments »

March 19, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

Don

Let’s keep the goalposts where they were. Here is the original question

Re the Cambrian “explosion”, please tell me* one testable scientific hypothesis*, derived from whatever “design” paradigm you prefer, that would lead to **an outcome unique to your position**. By that I mean that the experiment, if it supports the hypothesis, would generate new observations that are explained by the framework of your paradigm, but cannot be explained within the framework of evolutionary theory.
This is based on your previous comment - “You know that every major body plan known today, plus many we don’t have today, are found in the Burgess shale and Chengjiang Deposits. We can’t just say the fossil record is not complete, because these fossils are in great detail, including soft body parts and organisms with no hard parts, and though there are many duplications across these deposits, there is no ancestral fossil record of transitional forms across most body plans. I am not here arguing that this is conclusive of instant creation, but I do suggest it is sufficient evidence to investigate further, which is all that science should require.”

Note that my question does not mention “organism complexity”, because I understand that to be an undefined concept. Does a new nylonase enzyme mean that a bacteria with that enzyme is now more “complex” than the progenitor strain, in your perspective? I merely asked you for a scientific *hypothesis *(testable) explaining the *observations *that you think are unresolved in evolutionary explanations of Cambrian body plans, *based* on your preferred “design theory”, that would lead to an outcome *unique *to that position (i.e., outside the predictions made by evolutionary theory). One scientific hypothesis based on your theory is a pretty meager requirement for a theory that you think should be considered alongside evolutionary theory in research and/or educational contexts.

In that regard it might be important to know that even though evolutionary theory fails to provide you with an incredibly detailed explanation for the proliferation of animal body plans in the time frame of interest, it actually does have a *mechanism* that can account for the observations in general. In fact, you can find many hypotheses which fit your requirements in many published papers in recent years. But you are going to have to learn a bit of genetics and developmental biology, so I won’t go into it here, since I don’t know your background in those critical areas. But here are some hypotheses, and some resources.

Mutations in regulatory sequences for homeotic genes (genes involved in development and determination of repeated body segments in many animals) can result in changes in body plan quite rapidly. One good example is pelvic fin development in stickleback fish (see Shapiro, et al. /Nature* */428 (2004), pp. 717-723.). Other examples can be found in chapter 8 (”The Making and Evolution of Complexity”) in Sean Carroll’s 2006 book (available in paperback), ./*The Making of the Fittest*/. If you read that you might have a better idea of how, exactly, the mechanisms uncovered by geneticists and developmental biologists in recent years have gotten us a lot closer to understanding HOW mutation and natural selection could explain the Cambrian “explosion” (which actually occurred over a period of at least 40 million years…)

hope this helps

Mark

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March 15, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

Don

Thanks, but this reply is

1) not an explanation for the Cambrian explosion, which is what I have specifically asked for, twice

and

2) merely a negative argument against another explanation (”It isn’t even theoretically conceivable.”), not a positive argument for design.

Going back to our first exchange, and throughout all of our exchanges, I think I have consistently told you that if you want ID/creationism to be considered as a scientific explanation, you (or someone) must be able to provide predictive hypotheses based on an ID/creationism framework, and positive arguments, not just the old negative arguments that science can’t currently explain X or Y or Z.

To date, you haven’t done either of those things. Why not? I submit that it is impossible. Supernatural causation is consistent with any and all observations, and thus obliviates any chance of making a specific predictive hypothesis. I’d be happy to be wrong about this, but it is up to you to make that case before this scientist, or any scientist, climbs back on a wagon whose wheels seemingly fell off about 100 years ago.

Nothing new here, so science moves on without you.

regards

Mark

- - - - -

Mark,
I would like to comment on your objections, but first I must ask for your help in understanding what you are looking for. Please give me an example of a testable hypothesis that predicts advances in organism complexity based on random mutation plus natural selection. I will note carefully how it meets the parameters you have explained for me.
Don Mc

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March 9, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

In the February 4th issue of New Scientist Michael Brook puts forth an article entitled, “Born believers: How your brain creates God.” The article presents numerous evidences that belief in the supernatural is innate for humans. Examples of research with children and adults indicate that we are not taught this view; it’s just there. It’s the way our minds work, and without the “default” capacity to picture and relate to a supernatural we would also cease to have most other capacities that make us uniquely human.
Various theories are set forth to explain why this occurs, but there is a definite bias among all theories presented. Though the author makes the effort in a later paragraph to wash his hands with, “All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods: as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.” This statement gives it away: If whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it, then the true or untrue thing is presumed to have no impact on the belief. Stated as less of a mind twister, even though the author boasts a variety of viewpoints, the one never considered is that the capacity to believe in a god just might be put there by a god. If “why people believe” is because a god put the capacity there, then obviously it DOES make a difference “whether or not [the] belief is true.” If that possibility were allowed, then the whole “problem,” as he calls it, makes perfect sense. Barratt only considers whether what we believe affects what is true. It doesn’t. What he doesn’t consider is whether what is true can affect what we believe. If what is true is God, and He chooses to cause humankind to believe, then yes, there IS a cause-and-affect relation between what is true and what is believed.
I find it most interesting that the author and some scientists confess that “disbelief requires effort.” Elsewhere he states it requires “education and experience.” Even those who profess to be agnostics or atheists never “completely exorcise the ghost of god—they just muzzle it.” The author is a case in point. Even though the author uses such phrases as “how does the brain conjure up gods?” he tips his hand by summarizing one scientist with, “religion is an inescapable artifact of the wiring in our brain.” The word “artifact” has the same root as art and artificial, and means “made,” not randomly occurring.
All in all there is a huge irony in the article: Early on the article bemoans that people have a capacity to conceptualize distinctly between mind and matter. These two “autonomous” systems allow us to distinguish between physical processes, such as eating, and mind processes, such as conceptualizing what is not seen. Alas, the latter is what leads us astray into conceptualizing and attributing to an unseen Something. Here is the irony: The author and all the scientists alluded to must utilize their “minds” in order to conceptualize that what the mind conceptualizes isn’t there. If they reject what they agree is the most fundamental and innate conceptualization of the mind, then how can they trust their minds to reject it?

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