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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March 5, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

Mark,
I will try again, and keep it within biology.
The surest advancement of science is the null hypothesis. Since nothing can be proven absolutely in the philosophy of science, the strongest evidence is to fail in the sincerest effort to disprove a theory; that is to propose and test an hypothesis that, if it tests positive, would contradict the theory that it tests. I admire Charles Darwin as a scientist, for more reasons than one, but on this point in particular he was right on: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organism exists, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” It’s in Chapter 6, first sentence under the section “Modes of Transition,” page171, in my copy of Origin of the Species.
We need only one hypothesis where the sequence from inorganic to “complex organism” is not reasonable by slight modification from one viable, sustainable generation to the next for intelligent design to be the more plausible explanation. I offer one: Life and food are reciprocally interdependent, and therefore could not have originated sequentially.
The most fundamental requirement for evolution is reproduction. All organisms reproduce or life ends.
To reproduce, all organisms need energy.
No organism receives energy from its environment and redirects it directly into its own application; therefore, as we observe, all organisms require a food source for their energy. To my knowledge we have discovered three energy sources for the synthesis of food within organisms, but we have found no organisms that either utilize energy directly from an inorganic source or burn a non-synthesized food to generate their energy.
This leads to the conclusion that all forms of food are synthesized by organisms. Organisms either produce the food within themselves for their own consumption (for example plants), or their food originates from an organism that is a food-producer. (They eat a food-producer, eat some organism that eats a food producer, eat a byproduct of a food-producer, or eat the byproduct of an organism that eats a food-producer.)
This leads to the conclusion that the very first organism must have been capable of producing food, or it would not have survived to reproduce.
This leads to the conclusion that the very first organism must have been capable of collecting energy from some inorganic source, for example the sun, and using it to combine, for example through photosynthesis, carbon-dioxide and water to produce glucose or some other form of sugar, which is the simplest kind of food. Again, the first organism had to be capable of causing within its own walls something like 6CO2+6H2O=>6O2+C6H12O6 to occur prior to its first reproduction. Otherwise there would have been no energy for any life functions, much less reproduction.
There is no sequence of events, even theoretically conceivable, that could generate, accumulate, and arrange enough of the right molecules to account for the genesis of a walled environment within which the synthesis of sugar would be precipitated, contained, and specifically directed toward any function prior to the reproduction process required for the slight modifications of evolution to even begin. This is not a matter of “we haven’t discovered enough.” It isn’t even theoretically conceivable.
This is not a challenge to Darwin’s theory. I took his endorsement of the null hypothesis and challenged the environment of randomness, but because the breakdown I isolated occurs before reproduction, Darwin’s theory is neither challenged nor supported; it is irrelevant. This is not true for design theory.
Don Mc

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