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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
I'm reading the Fodor/Piatelli-Palmarini book now, but John Wilkins is not impressed. Jerry Fodor is a smart guy in his field, but if this is his argument, it is childish. This, which is called �referential opacity� in philosophy (�You know your father. You do not know the Masked Man. Therefore the masked man is not your father.�) is a comment or fact about us the theorisers, not about the way the world works. It is about (as I italicised above) what we can say. The masked man might very well be your father, and the disconnect is in your words, not the world. Likewise natural selection works on whatever class of properties happen to confer differential fitness on their bearers; that we may be unable to identify what those properties are is a fact about us not about the organisms. Labels: evolution 3 comments Monday, February 08, 2010
Steve Matheson pretty much nails the problem with Stephen Meyer (and the rest of the Discovery Institute fellows.) Now, if you're not a biologist, you might think the error is trivial, purely semantic, a typing glitch induced by the proximity of the word 'virulent.' And that last part is probably right. But this biologist finds the error more significant, and I suspect others would agree. The difference, I think, is that I can't imagine mistaking a virus for a bacterium; it's like mistaking a pencil for a sequoia. A person who would make that mistake � and leave it in his awesome, groundbreaking treatise on 21st-century biological science � is a person who doesn't think very much about viruses or bacteria. A person who would make that mistake is a non-specialist. A layperson. Labels: evolution, intelligent design 2 comments Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Zookeeper God Over at Jerry Coyne's blog a few weeks ago, a generally positive re-posting of Francisco Ayala's critical review of Stephen C. Meyer's book received this familiar comment from Russell Blackford: All good stuff, I guess, but Ayala is mistaken if he thinks that God is off the hook for the predictable evils of the evolutionary process merely because he doesn�t micromanage it. God supposedly set up that process, on Ayala�s account, but even a less-than-omnipotent being could foresee the kinds of evils that would inevitably arise. Why not just create a world without those evils in a blink of time, which is well within the capacities of an omnipotent being?Yes, why not? Well, the first problem with a world like the one Blackford asks for is that it would hardly be one in which anything remotely like science as we understand it could exist. How in such a zoo--for that is obviously the kind of world he's talking about, where the bloody process of natural selection doesn't happen and all critters are protected from harm--could investigation of natural causes come about? The first thing animals in a zoo come to terms with is the boundary, the physical constraint. Then feeding time. And of course help when inadvertent injury occurs. Identity of the Zookeeper (and assumed identity of the zoo designer) is trivial in this case. Can you imagine curiousity in such a world for the occupants of the zoo, however smart they might be? After all, we would assume they were "created" (in Blackford's simplistic sense of crafted) as humans like us in the blink of an eye. With the same intelligence one presumes. But can we assume in a world that did not (like the real one) unfold according to consistent physical laws that anyone would ever develop, say, a system of mechanics that can describe motion mathematically? If you've never been beaned by an apple falling from a tree. Or you've never seen the roof of a cave collapse on a hapless group of children or pups. Or a meteorite strike the earth. After all, you live in a zoo world where the Zookeeper doesn't allow that. Even assuming you had some community of individuals in the zoo that were interested in the nature of gravity, why would they bother investigating it when they can just ask the Zookeeper? The response usual as this point is that, well, okay, maybe it's not a zoo where nothing bad happens, but perhaps a world where the more egregious examples of natural evil--earthquakes etc--could have been been done without, thank you very much. This doesn't follow either. You can't slightly modify the laws that cause plate tectonics, shifts in the earth's mantle, etc without also modifying the laws of physics right down to the bottom. You can't have a "sort of" real world but with protections built in. It's like intelligent design proponents arguing with a straight face that they accept common descent but that evolution couldn't happen without design. It's not coherent. Oh. Wait a minute--that's exactly what they do argue. Sorry, wrong analogy. Seriously it's not the wrong analogy. If atheists mean to defend and cherish science, as they should, then impatient retorts like, "why couldn't there have been less suffering in the natural world?" boils down to the same refusal of IDers to accept evolution that atheists love to ridicule. Furthermore, not having come into being by natural selection etc, is it even reasonable to assume humans in this zoo would have the slightest interest in freedom? Is not our desire for freedom to be explained as much by our evolved nature as our skin color? Our eye color? Remember, there are no asteroid collisions in this Zoo. No black holes ripping galaxies apart and no supernovae blasting dust clouds to coalesce into new planetary systems. No traces of this kind of turning out to arouse our awe and curiousity. Everything. Just. Is. Science in such a world? I doubt it. The laws we have in this world cannot be arbitrarily constrained and still offer the source material for the study that undergirds the knowledge the human race has painfully accumulated over the past 2500 years. This hearkening after a never-never land--apparently the only one in which arguments for a benevolent God wouldn't be scorned by philosophers like Blackford-- seems to be quite prevalent among otherwise clear thinking skeptics. Many sciencebloggers repeatedly express their moral disgust with the bloody process of evolution and yet never pause to reflect for a moment whether any meaningful hard fought science could even be possible in the zoo where the Zookeeper never allows that stubbed toe or disastrous flood to happen. This of course leads to the age-old philosophical question, do we really learn anything lasting without suffering? Yet Blackford seems to think the only argument for God he could accept would require the creation of a world in which we can. Strange. 3 comments Friday, September 18, 2009
Fellow blogger and outstanding philosopher of biology John Wilkins' long-awaited book on the origin of the species concept is now out and Larry Arnhart has written the first review: When Darwin claimed that all species have evolved from ancestral species so that each species is adapted to a specific manner of life, he was closer to Aristotle than to those nominalists who would deny the natural reality of species.Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of evolution as an idea. 2 comments Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The Possibility of Impossible Cultures Imagine Finnegan's Wake written in an impossible language. I imagine many people who've tried to read it have already concluded that it was written in an impossible language. But in fact what makes the book so nerve-wracking is that it was written in syntactically recognizable English, but with a slew of invented names, places and verbs occupying the place of more familiar subjects, predicates and adjectives, and no punctuation anywhere in sight. No, what I mean is: imagine a language that, for example, mandates placing a particular word in a fixed position in the sentence, no matter when it is used. Or a language in which a statement of fact can be converted into a question by reversing the order of the words. (What kind of logic would follow from such a language?) Marc Hauser, professor in the Departments of Psychology, Human Evolutionary Biology and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard has a fascinating article (registration required) in the July 9th issue of Nature on the contraints placed on human cultural evolution. Or rather the possibility of getting around what have been observed to be the constraints on cultural evolution. The article is detailed and I don't want to just cut and paste chunks of it here. But I do want to look briefly at Hauser's discussion of the sharp differences between animals and humans when it comes to various reflections of intelligence, and how it has been assumed that these differences between animals and our own species amount to a matter of degree, and not kind. Brain science has a lot to say about this. The simple use of tools, for example, was long considered a significant distinction between us and other animals, until research of primates and other species showed that chimpanzees make use of natural items, like branches, for use as tools, as do some species of birds. But making use of tools for one thing, and making use of them for several different things...is something else. Although anthropologists disagree about the timing of the human cultural revolution... many researchers point to fundamental changes starting some 800,000 years ago in the Early Palaeolithic, with a crescendo of change at around 45,000�40,000 years ago in the Late Palaeolithic. This period is associated with the generation of symbols (mathematical, artistic and ritualistic), controlled fire for use in cooking and other forms of environmental transformation, and tools with multiple components and functions (for example, tools used for expressing both aggression and music). Given that this interval of several thousand years is barely noticeable on an evolutionary timescale, and that such cultural expressions emerged rapidly, the parallel with the Cambrian is striking: that is, something similar to a genetic revolution must have occurred during this period, providing humans with an unprecedented set of capacities for generating novel cultural expressions in language, morality, music and technology.The human brain, Hauser goes on, changed from a system with a high degree of modularity with few interfaces to one with 'numerous promiscuous and combinatorially creative interfaces.' These interfaces are what bestowed on humans a set of abilities to generate novel cultural expressions in language, morality, music and technology. At this point in the article, Hauser really brings the distinction into a fine relief (to borrow an art term) by pointing out the limits of other animals' intelligence. Although many vertebrates have evolved brains with reciprocal connections or loops between different cortical areas (for example, basal ganglia to the cortex and back), these loops are restricted to particular functions....At the most general level, it is clear that the motor systems of all animals must involve recursive operations to allow organisms to take a discrete set of motor options and generate a vast range of functionally meaningful motor acts or sequences in novel environments. For example, whether an organism flies or runs, its legs must repeatedly lift and fall or its wings must repeatedly beat. However, because an organism's habitat and climate is constantly changing, the iterative or recursive rule of cycling through leg lifts or beating the wings must be flexible so that the animal's response can vary in response to environmental change.I realize this may not be news exactly, but I like how Hauser has drawn such careful attention to these distinctions, which I think do tend to be overlooked in general science writing on evolution. It isn't just a matter of degree. His article goes on to discuss what kinds of research might more clearly map out, for lack of a better term, the blind spots in human cultural evolution, what kinds of cultural expressions have not become evident either because they are impossible for us to evolve, given the constraints on our evolution, or because they would be so complicated as to not survive and take root. Labels: brain science, evolution 1 comments Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Calling Jerry Coyne's Bluff Steve Matheson does a nice job explaining the problem with 'theistic evolution', and therein I think nicely shows why Coyne's attacks on accomodationism really amount to nothing more than attacks on fellow scientists who are religious. Labels: evolution, science education 0 comments Wednesday, April 29, 2009
The Evolution of Protein Folding: Is a Crisis Brewing for Darwin? Historically speaking, there is a distinction to bear in mind between puzzles that prove a challenge to a scientific theory and puzzles that turn into a crisis. The Michelson-Morley experiment in the late 19th century proved to be a crisis for classical physics. So did black-body radiation. The former led to Einstein's special theory of relativity. The latter to quantum mechanics. Both involved radically new ways of visualizing space and time that could not be avoided if --in the case of Einstein-- symmetry was to be reached between classical mechanics and Maxwell's electrodynamics, and--in the case of Planck-- sense was going to be made of all the observational data on radiation. On the other hand, up to the end of the 19th century, Newtonian physics had weathered many puzzles that required some refinement of the theory only. Darwin's theory has also faced its share of puzzles (and continues to). Before the advent of genetics in the early 20th century, for example, natural selection was looking like something far worse than a puzzle for evolution. Then population genetics grew as a field and the work of specialists such as Simpson, Dobzhansky (to name just a few) established firmer grounds for natural selection. Still, a crisis is what many skeptics of evolution thirst for, and as often happens what you'd like to see can blind you to what is actually there (or not there). Proponents of Intelligent Design think it's the complexity of the bacterial flagellum that cannot be explained in terms of genetic variation and natural selection. I was struck by a comment made a while back related to proteins. It all started with Francis Beckwith's post at What's Wrong with the World on the incompatibility between Aquinas and Intelligent Design. WWWTW blog is self-consciously modeled on Chesterton's classic essay collection of the same name (and in fact I have a first edition American, 1910, soon approaching it's 100th birthday and in very good condition). And while it is encouraging that Aquinas and Intelligent Design don't fit--it remains odd to me that the hostility many academics of Catholic, mainline protestant and Orthodox traditions have for evolution is subtler but not fundamentally different from that of, well, fundamentalists and the more overt intelligent design proponents. Which is to say: an always negative tendency to attack scientists for what they don't know yet. For all the adherence to Aquinas and his arguments from secondary causes, it seems many can't resist falling into the God of the Gaps reasoning implied by the natural theology of Protestant William Paley. (Whatever happened to checking in with Cardinal Newman?) For example, apropos of a quip by Lydia McGrew dismissing the use of computer models for evolution ("Just amazing what you can do when "seeing" computer programs "evolve" rather than dealing with actual biological entities. If that counts as "scientists have shown" I have several bridges to sell them."), fellow What's Wrong With the World blogger (and, I'm green with envy to say, instrument-rated private pilot) Zippy followed up: By this reasoning, evolution is apparently worse than an empty suit, prematurely being celebrated by scientists doing nothing. The assertion here seems to be that no actual progress is being made on what amounts to a major problem for evolutionary biology. Is a crisis in the offing? As we'll see, the answer is no. But it is a challenge, and a fascinating one that, to this layman's eye, looks bound to lead to more fruitful discoveries. "But," he adds, "this is a bit like saying you can never understand the architecture of a church without an atomic resolution model of all the materials and components that make it up. Or that because we cannot model every atom in the atmosphere, we have no understanding of the weather and cannot make useful weather forecasts. While we may not be able to predict the folded structure of a protein from its sequence, let alone of every 100 amino acid protein in protein sequence space, that does not mean we cannot perform experiments or make observations that inform our understanding of early protein evolution." According to Nick Matzke, a researcher at the Huelsenbeck Lab, Center for Evolutionary Genomics at U.C. Berkeley, "the processes that we think produce new genes/proteins etc. are not equivalent to random-assembly-all-at-once-from-scratch... We have duplication, modification, selection, rearrangement, etc. " "Even the very first polypeptides were pretty certainly not assembled all-at-once-from-scratch from a pool of 20+ kinds of amino acids in even proportions, in D- and L-form, as creationists and various beknighted physicists blithely assume. Probably the first time a proto-tRNA grabbed an amino acid and made a short chain, the chain was composed of glycine and few common hydrophobic amino acids and was quite short. Cavalier-Smith (2001) suggests that the original function may have just been a hydrophobic tail for association with a membrane. All of the improbability statistics are irrelevant in this sort of scenario, chirality isn't an issue, etc. " This is in line with the current research, for example, of Professor Andrei N. Lupas, director of the Department of Protein Evolution at the Max-Planck-Institute for Developmental Biology in T�bingen. Accrording to Prof. Lupas, "The problem arises from the fact that random polypeptide chains indeed essentially do not fold (I would estimate the proportion to about 1:1020 for polypeptides in the range between 70 to 120 residues). Clearly abiotic systems cannot produce the starting material for a random exploration of folding space (never mind the problem of passing on the information on anything useful you encountered) and it beggars belief that biotic systems could emerge that produce 99.99999999999999999% trash for an initially barely selectable benefit. " But this is hardly a reason to toss out the principles of evolutionary biology. According to Prof. Lupas: "The solution obviously is to propose that an initial RNA world used peptides for other purposes, in which folding was not an issue, but that it selected for peptides that could become structured upon encountering an RNA scaffold (there is ample evidence that there is a natural affinity between peptides and nucleic acids and that random peptides have a tendency to bind into the grooves, becoming structured through the exclusion of water). The issue then becomes to explain how a set of (non-folding) peptides could yield (folding) polypeptides under natural selection. "In my department at the MPI in T�bingen, we explore the hypothesis that folded proteins indeed arose from this preselected pool of peptides, through amplification, fusion and recombination. By being written into one chain, these peptides preselected for the ability to form secondary structures would have found that in many cases they could now exclude water between each other, without the need for an RNA scaffold. Folding would thus be an emergent property resulting from the increased length and complexity of peptides. If this is true, then we think we should be able to reconstruct this vocabulary of peptides in the same way in which ancient languages such as indo-European have been reconstructed through the comparison of modern languages." Two of Lupas' recent papers are here: On the evolution of protein folds: are similar motifs in different protein folds the result of convergence, insertion, or relics of an ancient peptide world? Lupas AN, Ponting CP, Russell RB.J Struct Biol. 2001 May-Jun;134(2-3):191-203. More than the sum of their parts: on the evolution of proteins from peptides. S�ding J, Lupas AN. Bioessays. 2003 Sep;25(9):837-46. Professor Lupas also contributed a chapter to Computational Structural Biology, published last September, which is devoted to the evolution of protein folds. Here's a snippet worth quoting at length from the end of the chapter: Proteins may have originated by the repetition of short peptides, a process that efficiently yields fibrous proteins such as coiled coils and ?-helices.39,40 Repetitive sequences appear to have a higher chance of folding and also more favorable structural properties than nonrepetitive sequences.41,42 The problem of passing on the sequence information, however, remains unsolved. Also, domains seen today do not have fibrous elements at their core; there is a discontinuity in fold complexity between fibers and all other folded domains and fibers are structural, not catalytic elements, whereas the primary role of proteins is catalysis.From the other side of the world, Ian Musgrave, professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia writes, "as others have already said, proteins probably didn't arise from random assembly of 100+ amino acids in one go in the first place. " But they didn't need to. He cites, among others, these two papers: Keefe AD, Szostak JW. Functional proteins from a random-sequence library. Nature. 2001 Apr 5;410(6829):715-8. Link here. J Mol Evol. 2003 Feb;56(2):162-8.Can an arbitrary sequence evolve towards acquiring a biological function? Hayashi Y, Sakata H, Makino Y, Urabe I, Yomo T. (Musgrave: "The answer is yes.") Keefe and Szostak are optimistic about their progress: Our isolation of new functional proteins shows that it should be possible to obtain an unbiased view of the inherent diversity of all possible protein structures, and to determine whether biological proteins represent only a small subset of this diversity. Comparing the sequences of our newly evolved ATP-binding proteins with biological ATP-binding proteins has not revealed any significant similarity; structural data will also be required to reveal whether these proteins, especially the Zn2+ metalloprotein, are similar to those of any biological proteins. According to Musgrave, "a modest fraction [of random polypeptides] (somewhere between 1 in 108 and 1 in 1012) have some sort of selectable function." These are just a few scientists with whom I raised the question. There are many more making the evolution of protein folding the center of their attention. Far from being a black box embarrassment to evolutionary biology, the evolution of protein folding turns out to be a challenge worthwhile to quite a few specialists. So where does that leave the assertion of crisis at the state of protein evolution? To me it seems no different than the discredited irreducible complexity arguments of the ID movement. Because protein folding cannot be fully explained now by the principles of evolutionary biology (i.e, descent with modification by the mechanisms of genetic variation and natural selection), the thinking goes, it must therefore call into question the entire theory. As I mentioned earlier, I understand why this kind of argument is irresistible to fundamentalist evangelicals. But it still surprises me that academics with a clear tradition of appreciation for Aquinas and secondary causes flirt with it. Labels: evolution, intelligent design 13 comments Thursday, April 02, 2009
Critical Thinking in the Classroom * I recently got acquainted with a young instructor who teaches science to seventh-graders at an evangelical school. He's a graduate of Wheaton College and a recent convert to Catholicism. This affords him an interesting perspective on how evangelicals handle science in the classroom, in particular how the whole 'teach the controversy' approach trumpeted by Bible science types plays out in practice. The text the school in question ordered for this young teacher's class is Exploring Creation with General Science. The author, Jay L. Wile, is a young earth Biblical literalist with a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry. In terms of suggested experiments for kids, my teacher friend tells me that generally the book has a lot to recommend it: great ideas for simple experiments and so forth, and apparently it's a favorite with homeschoolers. So far, so good. But...inevitably the age of the earth has to be discussed. That is, catastrophism: the view of literalists that the earth is only a few thousand years old and much of what geologists have uncovered suggesting otherwise can be explained as the result of a series of cataclysmic events that happened over a very short time, to fit with a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Modern geologists take a uniformitarian view of the earth, and see the layer upon layer of different strata in the Earth's mantle as evidence of the planet's changes being gradual over billions of years. According to my teacher friend, "Wile pushes catastrophism while 'teaching the controversy.'" He writes, "I talked to the principal about my annoyance with the whole thing and he, being the cool guy that he is, is fine with my particular take on it (Old Earth/Evolution), but still thinks the controversy ought to be taught. "So I've been doing research on uniformitarianism [and] catastrophism and realizing that the idea of putting these two theories in front of seventh graders and, A. expecting them to understand what is going on, much less B. make a real judgment between them, is just beyond absurd. "Until seventh graders have a grounding of basic knowledge about standard geology, there's no point in asking them to determine anything based on classroom presentations of 'evidence' culled from one simplistic textbook and a teacher who knows little about geology." [I'm trying to imagine a similar seventh grade class where the textbook gives an overview of A. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and B. Bohm's Non-local Hidden Variable Model --and expect seventh graders to be able to 'weigh the evidence' and make a judgment about it. Only Earth Science and evolution seem to bother literalists. But I digress.] My correspondent adds, "As soon as I start looking at the various arguments, I realize that creation science, flood geology, Intelligent Design - all of that - makes no real attempt to engage with mainstream science. But, if they're doing science at all, they need to be able to beat the scientists at their own game or there's no point. So in other words, they're not really arguing with scientists. They're arguing with other Christians and using 'science' to bolster their argument: that the Bible requires a particular theology and hermeneutic. Which just means that Christians on the other side, if we want this debate to not be completely won by the loudmouths, have to come up with a compelling hermeneutic and theology." Not surprisingly, the problem makes his approach to class challenging. "We're making a timeline of the ages of the earth in class. I've been looking for a comparable catastrophist timeline explaining the same evidence (as uniformitarianism) and ... not finding it." There are no shortage of Biblical videos to view for the kids as well. "The worst," he writes, "is watching ... and realizing that the guy could be arguing that 'Hitler was bad' and the non-sequiturs and equivocations would make you begin to question his case. "The biggest issue here is how Wile sets up his science book - and, by the way, his attitude strikes me as completely ingenuous the entire time - so as to make it seem like he is presenting a fair case to be judged on the evidence." For example, Wile does a unit in which he attempts to establish, scientifically, the material historical integrity of part of the Bible. "[He] assumes that that same integrity applies to all the different books and literature in the Bible," writes the instructor, "and thus treats Genesis 1-11 as a legitimate historical source with evidence to be weighed in the balance together with radiometric dating, stratigraphy, index fossils, contintental drift, etc. Then he presents uniformitarianism and catastrophism, followed by a list of potential 'problems' with either side. "At the end of which he concludes, 'both uniformitarianism and catastrophism have difficulties. Regardless of which view you take, you will run into what seem to be unsolvable problems' (Wile 209, emphasis author's)." "If I didn't tend to trust these people since I grew up among them and know their basic sincerity, I would swear they were being actively disingenuous." Not surprisingly, evolution is considered a weakness of the uniformitarian view: "So, which is it? Is there independent evidence for the process of evolution or not? Well, the short answer to this question is 'no.' You will learn more about evolution when you take biology. For right now, however, let's look at what should be the main line of data that relates to evolution." (Wile p. 210, emphasis author's).I did a little googling on the texbook author, Jay Wile, and it seems, like so many proponents of Biblical literalism, he peddles bad faith arguments against evolution. This, for example, comes from a sample lecture promo. In this seminar, Dr. Jay L. Wile, a nuclear chemist, explores the complicated Creation Versus Evolution debate. He discusses Christian attempts to make the Genesis account compatible with the theory of evolution and shows how these attempts fail. The conclusion is that a literal interpretation of Genesis is completely incompatible with the theory of evolution. He then proceeds to show that this is not at all a problem for someone who is both a Christian and a scientist. He presents strong scientific evidence that supports a literal interpretation of Genesis and equally strong scientific evidence that discounts the theory of evolution. He discusses evolutionists' attempts to explain away this data and how such attempts fail. Perhaps the most intriguing part of this seminar comes when Dr. Wile details some of the fantastic life forms on this planet whose existence can never be explained using the theory of evolution. Regardless of how science-oriented you are, this seminar will strengthen your faith and give you an even deeper appreciation for the marvelous Creation that God has given us. Those evil evolutionists... again. What's funny is this lecture is immediately preceded by one dedicated to 'Critical thinking'. One of the biggest failures of our public and private school systems is that they do not teach students how to think critically. In this seminar, Dr. Wile gives you specific suggestions as to how you can teach your child to think critically, regardless of the subject matter that the student is learning. You will learn how to help your student evaluate statements, look for hidden assumptions, find political/social agendas, and discover faulty logic. Although Dr. Wile's area of interest is science, he will show you how critical thinking applies to all academic areas, as well as all facets of your life.This narrow, defensive approach to science may seem fine at the grade school level and even high school level for home schoolers. But what happens when the kids who show a real aptitude for science and interest in pursuing a career... get to college-- and they have to confront not just professors with working labs but fellow students-- and the weak foundations of their Bible 'science' simply don't stand up to scrutiny? How many of these kids will then turn on their faith and consider it all a pack of lies (as Einstein did and others) because their particular branch of Christianity has a deeply faulty attitude to the natural order? * updated to reflect a couple of corrections. Labels: evolution, science education 6 comments Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Larry Moran weighs in with some thoughts on Steve Matheson's critique of Behe's assumptions. Labels: evolution 0 comments Wednesday, June 11, 2008
0 comments Thursday, June 05, 2008
Steve Matheson has an excellent two-part essay at 'An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution' concerning the teaching of biology at Calvin College. Part one is here. And the follow up was just posted. Not to be left out, Scott Carson has a good post on evolutionary theory as it relates (or rather doesn't) to Catholic theology. Labels: Christianity, evolution 0 comments Thursday, October 11, 2007
Sean Carroll on the cutting edge of evolution in action? A gene divided reveals the details of natural selection Labels: evolution, natural selection Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Hurrah for National Review A conservative magazine finally published an article on evolution that wasn't nonsense! Seriously, this is a nice piece by Jim Manzi (available online here), who runs his own software company and has a working appreciation for just how randomness works in Darwin's theory. Look for the usual nitwits to show up in the next issue's letters section to dispute him. One quibble, the free library web monkeys failed to format Jim's exponents properly...but hopefully they will fix. Labels: evolution Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Reconsidering Teilhard I've been reading John F. Haught's God After Darwin, and he has an interesting section on the life and work of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist. I must confess I've never looked deeply into his career. I knew that he envisaged a sort of progressive direction to evolution which, while understandable at the time he wrote, is no longer taken seriously. What I did not know, however, is how shabbily he's been treated by scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Daniel C. Dennett. Dennett's attitude doesn't surprise me (most militant atheists are reflexively anti-clerical). But Gould's attitude is surprising. Haught writes: The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, for example, was so certain that evolution is devoid of the directionality Teilhard discerned in it that he attempted to destroy completely the famous Jesuit's scientific reputation by making him appear to be an accomplice to the notorious Piltdown hoax. Gould's scurrilous attack, incidentally, has been thoroughly debunked; but, to my knowledge, he never publicly retracted his claims, in spite of clear evidence that Teilhard could not have been involved. (p.88)Certainly takes my regard for Gould down a notch. Copyright 2010 by Farrellmedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
The victory party is still very, very, very premature; but if the neo-Darwinists don't keep holding it, someone might get the idea that they've been doing nothing but blowing smoke for a century or two for reasons that don't have much to do with a dispassionate search for the truth. And we can't have that.