Bloggers Over 40

 
According to rezom.com there are some good blogs written by men and women over 40 years old [40 Bloggers Over 40].

The portrait of a blogger is a young man, or woman. And often, that portrait is wrong. Despite the fact that the Internet was created by baby boomers, it's too often viewed as a teenager's playground. Every junior high kid has a blog now ... but are they any good? Only if you sit next to the author in homeroom. Many of the best blogs, the ones with the smartest observations, clearest writing, most dazzling photos and most compelling stories are maintained by people in their 40s, 60s ... even 80s. It's time to put to rest that myth about grandpa and his computer phobia. The grandpas we found online know how to use technology to say their piece. And bloggers in their 40s and 50s are documenting the workplace, the news of the day, and their interests in fascinating detail. So we're spotlighting great reads and thought-provoking posts from people who have been around long enough to have something to say. We hope you enjoy them.

There are some interesting sites listed. Phil Plait of The Bad Astronomer is there in the "Science and Environment" category. Richard Dawkins, John Wilkins, PZ Myers and a host of others are not. I'm not listed either but that's probably because I look much younger that I really am.

Many of my students are surprised that I know how to use a computer. I tell them that I've been working with computers for 39 years so it shouldn't come as a big surprise that I can post articles on the internet. They don't believe me. From their perspective computers are only used by young people.

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IDiots Don't Bash Evolutionary Biologists

 
How many times have you heard that line? The IDiots are fond of saying that they have positive evidence for Intelligent Design Creationism. According to them, it's not about bashing "Darwinists."^*

So how do you explain the Darwin Daze Sock-Hop on the Expelled site? [The Playground for Expelled] This is nothing less than a blatant attempt to mock the leading figures in evolutonary biology and atheism.

It makes me feel good about calling them IDiots.

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^* It will be interesting to see if any Intelligent Design Creationists object in public to that video. Several of them are on record as saying that they don't bash "Darwinists" (e.g., Kirk Durston, "I never bash Darwinists.")

IDiot Logic

 
Bill Dembski gives us some insight into the "logic" of Intelligent Design Creationism [E. O. Wilson on ID].

ID does not argue from “Shucks, I can’t imagine how material mechanisms could have brought about a biological structure” to “Gee, therefore God must have done it.” This is a strawman. Here is the argument ID proponents actually make:

Premise 1: Certain biological systems have some diagnostic feature, be it IC (irreducible complexity) or SC (specified complexity) or OC (organized complexity) etc.

Premise 2: Materialistic explanations have been spectacularly unsuccessful in explaining such systems — we have no positive evidence for thinking that material mechanisms can generate them.

Premise 3: Intelligent agency is known to have the causal power to produce systems that display IC/SC/OC.

Conclusion: Therefore, biological systems that exhibit IC/SC/OC are likely to be designed.

The are plenty of complex systems that have perfectly reasonable evolutionary explanations. There are even irreducibly complex systems that can easily be explained by evolution. Bill might think about coming to my lecture on Wednesday where I will explain how the irreducibly complex citric acid cycle evolved.

Thus premise #2 is false. Dembski has been told this on numerous occasions so I have to conclude that he is lying. Premise #2 is logically equivalent to "Shucks, I can’t imagine how material mechanisms could have brought about a biological structure."

Premise #3 is not science. You can't just throw up your hands and say God did it because you lack the intelligence to come up with a naturalistic explanation. Premise #3 is indistinguishable from "Gee, therefore God must have done it."

The conclusion is invalid.

This really isn't much of a challenge. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. I guess that's why we call them IDiots.

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Monday's Molecule #53

 
This is a simple one. All you have to do is give the correct name of the residue in the middle of the picture.

There's a direct connection between this molecule and Wednesday's Nobel Laureate(s). Your task is to figure out the significance of today's molecule and identify the Nobel Laureate(s) who are responsible for that significance. (Hint: There's also a connection to last week's lecture in biochemisty.)

The reward goes to the person who correctly identifies the molecule and the Nobel Laureate(s). Previous winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first collected the prize. There are three ineligible candidates for this week's reward. The prize is a free lunch at the Faculty Club.

Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk(at)bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly identifies the molecule and the Nobel Laureate(s). Correct responses will be posted tomorrow along with the time that the message was received on my server. I may select multiple winners if several people get it right.

Comments will be blocked for 24 hours. Comments are now open.

UPDATE: There is no winner this week. Nobody got the residue and nobody guessed the name of the Nobel Laureate(s).

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Creationists as Victims

 
There's a new movie coming out in January. It's called Expelled and the star, Ben Stein^*, is going to reveal the secret evilutionist conspiracy. Apparently, the evilutionists have been persecuting creationists but not because they're idiots. No, apparently it's only because they dare to question the authority of Darwinism.

I'm sure you can't wait to see the movie. Here's a lengthy preview [expelledthemovie.com].

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^*I'm not sure why Ben Stein is an authority on this subject. Perhaps it's because he was a speech writer for Richard Nixon?

By Jove, I Think She's Got it!!!

 
Denyse O'Leary muses about the lecture I attended last Tuesday where Kirk Durston presented the case for Intelligent Design Creationism [Kirk Durston's Proof of God].

Here's what she says on her blog Uncommon Descent [We have the hat, but where’s that rabbit? High levels of information in “simple” life forms]. I'll go through it slowly but the bottom line is that Denyse O'Leary is finally beginning to understand mechanistic naturalism and what science is all about. It's only taken her, what ... ten years? Sheesh.

In Tuesday night, a guest speaker spoke to my adult night school class in why there is an intelligent design controversy. He talked about the central problem of evolution: The fact that high levels of information are present in life forms that are supposed to be early and simple.

We've discussed this on other posting. Kirk Durston did, indeed, say that ancient bacteria were complex and modern ones have become more simple. But his most important point was that the existence of protein folds cannot be explained by evolution, therefore they must have been intelligently designed (i.e., God did it).

Some guests attended the talk, and one of them announced that if intelligent design is correct, scientists would not see the need to do any research because Goddunit. Or something like that.

Actually, it wasn't one of the "guests"—it was one of the regular students. It happened to be the one who invited me as a "guest."

The question referred to the fact that "God did it" is a science-stopper. As soon as Kirk Durston concludes that protein folds are designed by God, that's the end of doing science. What else can be done? Does he plan to design experiments to prove that God did it? Does he plan to investigate how God might have done it, or when? Of course not. It's a science-stopper.

The more I thought about what he was saying, the more it puzzled me. Finally, I realized:

For the materialist, the PURPOSE of science is to show that high levels of information can be created without intelligence.

Therefore, in looking for causes of events, the materialist accepts ONLY a solution that shows that high levels of information can come from random assembly (= without intelligence).

I'm delighted to hear that Denyse O'Leary is capable of serious thought. (Who knew?) She's pretty much got it right.

In science you cannot invoke the supernatural. You are committed to finding naturalistic explanations of the natural world. The procedure is called methodological naturalism or methodological materialism [see Theistic Evolution: The Fallacy of the Middle Ground].

The debate over the conflict between science and religion has been going on for hundreds of years. In the past 50 years the debate has focused on the methodology of science and how it must exclude the supernatural if it's supposed to work properly. I'm shocked (not really) that Denyse has never heard of this before. It's one of the main themes in the writings of Phillip Johnson [see Are You as Smart as a Second Year University Student? Q1 and comments].

He has not shown that high levels of information can be created without intelligence. He assumes that his assertion is true and looks for evidence to support it.

Discoveries that disconfirm his initial belief are not treated as evidence.

Keep looking, he says, keep looking … that magic information mill has GOT to be somewhere!

"Disoveries" that claim to disconfirm the assumption of naturalism are tested against reality. If a hypothesis appears to conflict with a naturalistic explanation then it's back to the drawing board. Scientists will re-examine their assumptions to see where they went wrong. They will devise new approaches and do experiments to collect more data. In other words, the apparent conflict stimulates research, it does not shut it down.

Keep looking, keep looking. This is an approach that has been enormously successful in science over the past several thousand years. Without that attitude we would still believe that all of humanity was wiped out in a flood and that the sun went around the Earth.

Contrast this scientific approach with the typical Young Earth Creationist approach to learning. How many of them are looking for evidence of how God made the Universe 6000 years ago? Where did he get all the atoms, for example? Did he make any mistakes? Belief in the Bible is a science-stopper.

Here's another example. Kirk Durston stops doing science once he's decided that God made proteins. There's nothing else he can do. On the other hand, scientists look at his data and try to explain where he went wrong and why there could be naturalistic explanations. In this case, it's not too hard to discover where Kirk made most of his errors. This is what science is all about and this is why Intelligent Design Creationism isn't science. It's a science-stopper.

Look at bacterial flagella. Michael Behe pronounced that flagella were created by God when he published Darwin's Black Box in 1996. How much research into the origin of flagella did this stimulate among Intelligent Design Creationists? None at all. What's the point?

Scientists did not accept the conclusion that God did it. They continued to work on the problem and now we have a pretty good explanation for the origin of bacterial flagella. Pretty soon the creationists will have to abandon this example but it sure won't be because of any scientific work they did. No scientific advances come for assuming that God did it.

What if random assembly is not in fact the answer? Then either

1. No solution is found (because there never was any solution in the direction in which he is looking)

or

2. An inadequate solution is patched together and defended as the best available solution - usually that means that claims for the solution are overstated wildly to the public.

But it is the materialist scientist’s duty to keep looking for the magic mill even if the fact that random assembly did not occur is overwhelmingly obvious.

Actually the two scientific possibilities are:

1. We found a naturalistic explanation for the claims of religion. Historically, this is what happens most of the time and it's why the claims of religion have repeatedly been shown to be false.


2. We don't know the answer but we'll keep working on the problem. This is what's happening with the most recent claims of the creationists. It takes a few years to demonstrate their nonsense and during that time the correct scientific position is that the questions hasn't been decided. (Sometimes we can say we have a tentative solutions that needs refinement.)

So far, in several thousand years of testing creationist claims there isn't a single one that hasn't fallen to the onslaught of rationalism.

And he displays his virtue to his peers by never questioning the system and by showing hostility and contempt for anyone who does question it.

Given his initial convictions, the materialist cannot believe that a non-materialist is actually doing science. He cannot envision any approach to the fact base that does not have as its base an effort to show that the information was created randomly.

There are many religious scientists who do a pretty good job of being scientific most of the time. They know that methodolgical naturalism is a powerful assumption with a proven track record and that resort to the supernatural has never led to further understanding. As I said above, I'm shocked that Denyse is only now coming to the realization that her understanding of science was seriously flawed. Apparently, in spite of the fact that she has written two books, she never understood the scientific method.

As for "hostilty," yes, it's true. Some of us get very frustrated with so-called scientists who don't understand the fundamental concepts of the scientific methd and what it means to be a scientist.

As a matter of fact, the fact base could easily be approached otherwise, and often more fruitfully, too. If we assume that an object in nature is designed, we do not waste time trying to imagine how it could have come about randomly. We study its characteristics and make predictions about its behaviour, function, and so forth.

That's just a bunch of bull manure. Part of the statement is true—creationists stop trying to find an evolutionary explanation as soon as they conclude that God did it. But the second part is completely false. Creationists stop all investigations once they've concluded that supernatural beings are involved. They don't try to figure out how God's mind worked.

I hope Denyse does some reading in order to catch up. She should look at Philip Johnson's proposal for a God-based (non-materialistic) science. It ain't gonna happen. Why in the world would scientists shop using a method that has bee so successful?

The idea that invoking the supernatural could be a more "fruitful" approach to science, as Denyse says above, is outlandish to the point of idiocy. There are no scientific advances that have come from assuming God did it. That's always a science-stopper.

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Taking Science on Faith

 
Paul Davies is a Professor of Physics at Arizona State University. In 1995 he received the Templeton Prize, which is awarded "for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities." As you might have guessed, this prize goes to people who make up stories about the compatibility of science and religion.

Davies has written a number of books about science and religion, including Cosmic Jackpot.

His latest foray into the world of Christian apologetics is an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times [Taking Science on Faith]. Quite a few bloggers have pointed out the major (and I do mean major) logical flaws in this piece. Here's PZ Myers' take on it [Faith is not a prerequisite for science]. PZ has links to the other sites.

Paul Davies is a scientist. I don't understand where he gets such stupid ideas about science. Maybe it's in church.

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Another Proof of God

 

You should probably watch this video to get some idea about how the creationist mind works.

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[Hat Tip: Effect Measure]

Bacterial Genomes and Evolution

 
I recently became aware of the fact that Intelligent Design creationists are promoting a strange idea. They bacteria were very complex when life first formed and their genomes have been degrading over time. Kirk Durston, a graduate student at the university of Guelph, pushed this idea in a course on intelligent design. Durston used a number of scientific references to prove his point. The main one was a paper by Miraa et al (200) from Nancy Moran's lab [Bacteria Genomes Are Degrading].

Ryan Gregory is one of the world's leading experts on genomes and their evolution. He's also a Professor at the University of Guelph. Ryan has published an excellent description of what the Mira et al. (2000) paper shows and what it does not show. You should all read it [Bacterial genomes and evolution].

For Kirk Durston's sake, I hope Ryan Gregory isn't on his Ph.D. oral committee.

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148 Years Ago Today

 
John Wilkins tells us what happened 148 years ago today. Unfortunately, he doesn't tell us what happened today in Australia.

Check out The Corpus Callosum to see how much the historical event cost back then [Happy Birthday].

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Frightened YEC's

 
Shaliniat at Scientia Natura: Evolution and Rationality found this cartoon [It must be hard living in fear of science]. It's cute so I'm stealing it from her. It's originally from cectic.

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Excellence at the

 
Monado at Science Notes points us to a Visual Library set up by Access Excellence at the National Health Museum [Graphics Library resources online]. Here's a description of Access Excellence.

Access Excellence, launched in 1993, is a national educational program that provides health, biology and life science teachers access to their colleagues, scientists, and critical sources of new scientific information via the World Wide Web. The program was originally developed and launched by Genentech Inc., and in 1999 joined the National Health Museum, a non-profit organization founded by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop as a national center for health education. Access Excellence will form the core of the educational component of the National Health Museum Website that is currently under development.

This is an admirable goal. The web is full of garbage and it would be nice to collect all the good stuff in one site so that teachers and students could use it. I thought I'd check it out to see how "excellent" it is.

Of course they get The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology wrong but I can't really blame them for that since lots of scientists get it wrong as well [see Basic Concepts: The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology].

One of the next images I checked was the one shown below. It's labeled RNA Ribonucleic Acid - A More Detailed Description. Now, it seems to me that one of the major distinguishing features of RNA is missing. Can you tell what it is?


The graphic shown below is called Nucleotide - A More Detailed Description. It claims to show the structure of a nucleotide in more detail. The boxed region of the DNA molecule does depict a nucleotide but the structures on the right (i.e., more detail) do not. Instead, these are the bases that make up a nucleotide. It may seem nitpicky but why can't they get it right?


Here's a suggestion to the people who run the Access Excellence website: why not ask a few biochemists to check out the science before you post information on the site? Would that be asking too much?

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Harper Blocks Greenhouse Gas Emission Targets

 
Prime Minister Harper is attending the Commonwealth Summit in Kampala, Uganda. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Commonwealth of Nations, it represents 53 nations that were formerly part of the British Empire [Commonwealth of Nations].

These nations have just voted to suspend Pakistan from the Commonwealth until it holds free elections [Pakistan suspended from Commonwealth]. Stephen Harper lead the way here by calling for Pakistan's suspension.

The current debate is over establishing binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions as part of a strategy to reduce global warming. Canada and Australia are the only nations who oppose this resolution. Ironically, with the change in government in Australia today, it's likely that Canada is now the only nation to oppose binding targets.

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[Hat Tip: Brian Larnder at Primordial Blog (Stephen Harper Embarrasses Canada Again)]

[Photo Credit: cbcnews]

Goodbye John Howard

 
The latest results from today's election in Australia point to a defeat for the current Prime Minister, John Howard [Labor sweeps to victory in Australia election]. Not only will the Liberal-National Party coalition lose the election but it looks like Howard will lose his own seat in Parliament.

I don't know enough about Australian politics to know what this means. Howard is a staunch ally of the United States and he sent Australian troops to Iraq. I believe that Australia is one of the few industrialized countries, other than the USA, to refuse to sign the Kyoto agreements.

Does this mean that Australia will withdraw its remaining troops from Iraq and sign on to Kyoto now that Kevin Rudd and the Australian Labor party are in power?

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[Photo Credit: Australian flag - Job Search: John Howard - Wikipedia]

Kirk Durston Interview

 
Here's an online interview with Kirk Durston on canadianchristianity.com for those who want to know more about his views on Intelligent Design Creationism [Evolution under fire? -- Part 1]. By all accounts Kirk seems to be a Young Earth Creationist in the sense that he prefers the literal interpretation of the Bible until it has been proven wrong.

Here's a part of the interview that seems unblievable.

I have been doing a great deal of work in ID over the past few years -- and have given presentations of my work in universities, both in Canada and the USA, that are well attended by both students and faculty. I have been very surprised by the fact that no significant objections to the evidence I present are being raised in these venues. I never bash Darwinism, I simply show them the positive evidence for ID -- and it goes over very well indeed.

I am currently working on a paper dealing with functional information, under the guidance of a professor in bioinformatics who wants to see my work published. It will be very low-key, mentioning nothing about ID, yet laying the groundwork for some major advances in this field -- if it is, by some miracle, accepted for publication.

I'm surprised that he has never heard any significant objections to the evidence he presents in his talk. I didn't have any trouble recognizing several lies and distortions and I wasn't the only one on Tuesday night.

Maybe he gives a different talk in other venues? In any case, we'll see whether the experts on protein folding hear at the University of Toronto will be as gullible when they hear the "positive evidence for ID" next Spring [A Scientific Test for the Intelligent Designer].

Oh, I almost forgot, in his Tuesday evening presentation he did bash "Darwinism." I guess that's one more difference between what I heard and his normal talks to students and faculty. Either that or .....

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