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Saturday 3 September 2022

David Berlinski on being an intellectually fulfilled Darwin sceptic:the conclusion.

 Darwin Without Darwinism 

BIOLOGISTS OFTEN affirm that as members of the scientific community they positively welcome criticism. Nonsense. Like everyone else, biologists loathe criticism and arrange their lives so as to avoid it. Criticism has nonetheless seeped into their souls, the process of doubt a curiously Darwinian one in which individual biologists entertain minor reservations about their theory without ever recognizing the degree to which these doubts mount up to a substantial deficit. Creationism, so often the target of their indignation, is the least of their worries.


For many years, biologists have succeeded in keeping skepticism on the circumference of evolutionary thought, where paleontologists, taxonomists, and philosophers linger. But the burning fringe of criticism is now contracting, coming ever closer to the heart of Darwin’s doctrine. In a paper of historic importance, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin expressed their dissatisfaction with what they termed “just-so” stories in biology.(8) 

It is by means of a just-so story, for example, that the pop biologist Elaine Morgan explains the presence in human beings of an aquatic diving reflex. An obscure primate ancestral to man, Morgan argues, was actually aquatic, having returned to the sea like the dolphin. Some time later, that primate, having tired of the water, clambered back to land, his aquatic adaptations intact. Just so.


If stories of this sort are intellectually inadequate–preposterous, in fact–some biologists are prepared to argue that they are unnecessary as well, another matter entirely. “How seriously,” H. Allen Orr asked in a superb if savage review of Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, should we take these endless adaptive explanations of features whose alleged Design may be illusory? Isn’t there a difference between those cases where we recognize Design before we understand its precise significance and those cases where we try to make Design manifest concocting a story? And isn’t it especially worrisome that we can make up arbitrary traits faster than adaptive stories, and adaptive stories faster than experimental tests?


The camel’s lowly hump and the elephant’s nose–these, Orr suggests, may well be adaptive and so designed by natural selection. But beyond the old familiar cases, life may not be designed at all, the weight of evolution borne by neutral mutations, with genes undergoing a slow but pointless drifting in time’s soft currents. 

Like Orr, many biologists see an acknowledgment of their doubts as a cagey, a calculated, concession; but cagey or not, it is a concession devastating to the larger project of Darwinian biology. Unable to say what evolution has accomplished, biologists now find themselves unable to say whether evolution has accomplished it. This leaves evolutionary theory in the doubly damned position of having compromised the concepts needed to make sense of life–complexity, adaptation, design – while simultaneously conceding that the theory does little to explain them.


NO DOUBT, the theory of evolution will continue to play the singular role in the life of our secular culture that it has always played. The theory is unique among scientific instruments in being cherished not for what it contains, but for what it lacks. There are in Darwin’s scheme no biotic laws, no Bauplan as in German natural philosophy, no special creation, no elan vital, no divine guidance or transcendental forces. The theory functions simply as a description of matter in one of its modes, and living creatures are said to be something that the gods of law indifferently sanction and allow. 

“Darwin,” Richard Dawkins has remarked with evident gratitude, “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” This is an exaggeration, of course, but one containing a portion of the truth. That Darwin’s theory of evolution and biblical accounts of creation play similar roles in the human economy of belief is an irony appreciated by altogether too few biologists. 

Notes 

A.S. Romer’s Vertebrate Paleontology (University of Chicago Press, third edition, 1966) may be consulted with profit.

The details have been reported in the New York Times and in Science: evidence that at least some entomologists have a good deal of time on their hands.

Schutzenberger’s comments were made at a symposium held in 1966. The proceedings were edited by Paul S. Moorhead and Martin Kaplan and published as Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press,1967). Schutzenberger’s remarks, together with those of the physicist Murray Eden at the same symposium, constituted the first significant criticism of evolutionary doctrine in recent decades.

Murray Eden is, as usual, perceptive: “It is as if,” he writes “some pre-Newtonian cosmologist had proposed a theory of planetary motion which supposed that a natural force of unknown origin held the planets in their courses. The supposition is right enough and the idea of a force between two celestial bodies is a very useful one, but it is hardly a theory.”

Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck (1986).

The same pattern of intellectual displacement is especially vivid in Daniel Dennett’s description of natural selection as a force subordinate to what he calls “the principle of the accumulation of design.” Sifting through the debris of chance, natural selection, he writes, occupies itself by “thriftily conserving the design work . . . accomplished at each stage.” But there is no such principle. Dennett has simply assumed that a sequence of conserved advantages will converge to an improvement in design; the assumption expresses a non sequitur. 

It is absurdly easy to set up a sentence-searching algorithm obeying purely Darwinian constraints. The result, however, is always the same–gibberish.

“The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society. Volume B 205 (1979). 

The brain of the talking ape.

 More Ways that Human and Ape Brains Differ. 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 


Yale University researchers have identified more specific ways the human brain differs from the brains of all other primates. Using “hundreds of thousands of cells collected from the dlPFC of adult humans, chimpanzees, macaque, and marmoset monkeys,” they found 

After grouping cells with similar expression profiles they revealed 109 shared primate cell types but also five that were not common to all species. These included a type of microglia, or brain-specific immune cell, that was present only in humans and a second type shared by only humans and chimpanzees.


The human-specific microglia type exists throughout development and adulthood, the researchers found, suggesting the cells play a role in maintenance of the brain upkeep rather than combatting disease… An analysis of gene expression in the microglia revealed another human-specific surprise — the presence of the gene FOXP2. This discovery raised great interest because variants of FOXP2 have been linked to verbal dyspraxia, a condition in which patients have difficulty producing language or speech.


YALE UNIVERSITY, “WHAT MAKES THE HUMAN BRAIN DIFFERENT? STUDY REVEALS CLUES” AT SCIENCEDAILY (AUGUST 25, 2022) THE PAPERREQUIRES A FEE OR SUBSCRIPTION. 

More Differences 

Some other differences between human brains and other primate brains:


➤ Human brains are heavier. “For starters, our brains weigh an average of three pounds, which is enormous for an animal of our body size. By comparison, chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, have brains that are one-third the size of our own, although they are very similar to us in body size. Most of this brain-size difference reflects the evolutionary expansion of the association cortex, a group of regions that supports such sophisticated cognitive functions as language, self-awareness, and problem solving.” — Todd M. Press, BrainFacts (July 23, 2014). However, the relationship between brain size/type and intelligence is not straightforward.


➤ Human brains are especially asymmetric. “Researchers compared geometric differences between brain scans of humans and chimpanzees. They observed structural asymmetries in both human and chimpanzee brains, but human brains were especially asymmetric.” — Tanya Lewis, LiveScience (April 23, 2013). It’s suggested that asymmetry might be related to brain adaptability. 

The human brain allocates more cells to thinking skills. “… a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex – which plays a key role in memory, attention, awareness and thought — contains twice as many cells in humans as the same region in chimpanzees.” — eLife (September 26, 2016).


➤ Our brains have many more language connections. “Especially the fasciculus arcuatus, a bundle of connective nerve fibres important for the processing of language, is connected to many more areas in humans than in macaques, and even in chimpanzees.” — Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (May 12, 2020). The paper is open access.


➤ There are distinct differences at the molecular and genetic level. “Specifically, the researchers’ results showed that interneurons expressing genes that code for dopamine synthesis are present in humans’ striata but not in non-humans’. This, they say, is part of what makes human brains uniquely human. Neuromodulatory transmitters, in particular dopamine, are involved in distinctly human aspects of cognition and behavior, such as working memory, reasoning, reflective exploratory behavior, and overall intelligence” …” — Peter Hess, Inverse (November 27, 2017)

Friday 2 September 2022

The design Inference = pareidolia?

 Rosenhouse’s Whoppers: Seeing Patterns in Biology Is Like Seeing Dragons in the Clouds. 

William A. Dembski 

I am responding again to Jason Rosenhouse about his book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. See my earlier posts here, here, and here.


Having clarified certain points, let’s now turn to Rosenhouse’s whoppers. Whopper number one is this: According to Rosenhouse, to see the bacterial flagellum as a bidirectional motor-driven propeller is to see a pattern that in no essential way differs from seeing clouds shaped like a dragon. I’m not making this up. Thus in his reply he writes: “How can we be confident that in using function as a specification we are not doing the equivalent of looking at a fluffy, cumulus cloud and seeing a dragon?” As if to leave no doubt, he repeats the point: “Saying of a flagellum that it resembles an outboard motor is comparable to saying of a cloud that it resembles a dragon.” Seriously?! 

Not a Metaphor. 

Since the flagellum gets so overused in the debate between ID and Darwinism, let’s change the system. Consider the leaf hopper, Issus coleoptratus (above), which uses toothed mechanical gears to achieve its amazing jumping ability. Here’s a brief video about its gear-based jumping system. Note that these really are mechanical gears. They are not merely like gears. They are not a metaphor for gears. They don’t meekly aspire to be gears. They’re gears. 

Yet, according to Rosenhouse, all such systems, despite exhibiting clear engineering patterns, require no fundamentally different type of explanation from clouds that resemble dragons. Natural selection produces the one, natural weather the other. Click here to see one example of a dragon in the clouds (a fire-breathing dragon, no less). The Internet is filled with such examples.


If you can’t appreciate the difference between these two types of patterns, and if you take seriously that they don’t require completely different orders of explanation, then the real world may not be your home. My notion of specification grapples with the difference. You may not like my formulation of it. Fine. But if you can’t form and take seriously some such distinction, then you inhabit an alternate reality. And even though Darwinian group think, powerful as it is, can keep you imagining that you are in your right mind, you really need to do a sanity check. 

Digression: The Shermer Delusion 

How can some Darwinists, like Rosenhouse, dismiss engineering-like patterns in biological systems as having no more force than seeing human and animal images in clouds? It seems that what’s behind this is the addling effect of evolutionary theorizing on human psychology. As already indicated, I’ve debated professional skeptic Michael Shermer before various college audiences. Shermer dismisses the use of patterns to eliminate chance by appealing to evolution, claiming that evolution has hardwired us to see patterns that convince us of design even when design is in fact absent. In other words, evolution biases us to err on the side of false positives, seeing design in patterns where design is not actually present. Here is how he makes such an argument (in his 2006 book Why Darwin Matters, pp. 38–39) 

Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer … may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. We are pattern-seeking as well as pattern-finding animals… Finding patterns in nature may have an evolutionary explanation: There is a survival payoff for finding order instead of chaos in the world, and being able to separate threats (to fight or flee) from comforts (to embrace or eat, among other things), which enabled our ancestors to survive and reproduce. We are the descendants of the most successful pattern-seeking members of our species. In other words, we were designed by evolution to perceive design. 

Shermer is here suggesting that the patterns we find in nature (as opposed to artifacts created by humans or aliens) are simply imposed by us on nature on account of our evolutionary conditioning, and thus signify nothing about any real underlying design of the world. But that can’t be right. Clearly, nature could present us with patterns that reliably point to the activity of an intelligent agent outside of nature. Take, for instance, a pulsating star that acts as an oracle, communicating messages, in English, about matters of great consequence to the inhabitants of the earth. Assume the star is millions of light years away, and yet is communicating in real time, responsive to questions as they are posed by humans on earth. 

No Doubt About It 

Clearly, signals like this coming from outer space would exhibit patterns that leave no doubt about their intelligent origin. But the intelligence in these signals would also be beyond this world, given that physics limits communication by the speed of light, precluding communication taking place, as here, instantaneously. Such signals would provide decisive confirmation of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But it would not be an intelligence localized in space and time that’s sending signals with the help of advanced technology. In this example, the intelligence doing the communicating makes itself evident in nature (via a design inference) but operates beyond the constraints of nature.  


In any case, to refuse to attribute patterns to design on the grounds that our brains are hardwired by evolution to overinterpret design merely begs the question. That’s because some patterns are indeed rightly interpreted as signaling design. We all recognize a valid distinction between patterns that convincingly demonstrate design and patterns that result from unreliable psychological factors, such as an overactive imagination: seeing human faces in the clouds, burnt toast, or soap films, examples of the sort that Shermer — and Rosenhouse — use to discredit intelligent design. Shermer’s claim that we are hardwired by evolution to be pattern-seeking, pattern-finding animals does nothing to draw this distinction. 


The edge of Darwinism.

Behe Debates the Limits of Darwinian Evolution. 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

A new ID the Future episode wraps up a debate over evolution and intelligent design between Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe and Benedictine College theologian Michael Ramage. Both Behe and Ramage are Catholic, and they carry on their conversation in the context of Catholic thinking about nature and creation, in particular the work of Thomas Aquinas and contemporary Thomist philosophers. Ramage seeks to integrate his Thomistic/personalist framework with modern evolutionary theory’s commitment to macroevolution and common descent. Behe doesn’t discount the possibility of common descent but he lays out a case that any evolution beyond the level of genus — for instance, the separate families containing cats and dogs — cannot be achieved through mindless Darwinian mechanisms and, instead, would require the contributions of a designing intelligence. Behe summarizes both the negative evidence against the Darwinian mechanism of change and the positive evidence in nature for intelligent design. This debate was hosted by Pat Flynn on his Philosophy for the People podcast. Download the episode or listen to it here. 


 

Thursday 1 September 2022

John Horse :a brief history.

 John Horse 

John Horse (c. 1812–1882),[1] also known as Juan Caballo, Juan Cavallo, John Cowaya (with spelling variations) and Gopher John,[2] was of mixed ancestry (African and Seminole Indian) who fought alongside the Seminoles in the Second Seminole War in Florida. He rose to prominence in the third year of what was to become a seven-year war when the first generation of Black Seminole leaders was largely decimated and the primary Seminole war chief, Osceola (Asi Yahola), fell into the hands of the American military commander, General Thomas Sydney Jesup 

John Horse, called Juan as a child, was born around 1812 in Florida. He was a Seminole slave of Spanish, Seminole, and African descent.[1] He lived initially in the region that came to be called Micanopy after the last head chief of the Florida Seminole[3] in north central Florida. John assumed the surname of his father and nominal owner, the Seminole trader Charley Cavallo,[4] his surname "Horse" being believed to have been a translation of Cavallo (or Caballo, the Spanish word for horse).[5] His mother was likely of pure African descent, a slave acquired by Charley Cavallo in his travels. Charley was, himself, of possibly mixed descent (Indian-Spanish parentage.[4]). The young John also had a sister, Juana (sometimes spelled "Wannah" or "Warner" in some sources). Not much is known about Charley Cavallo although it does not appear that he treated either of his two mixed-race children as slaves.[6]


The War of 1812 broke out between the United States and Great Britain in the year John Horse is thought to have been born. At that time he and Juana were probably living with their mother in one of the black settlements affiliated with, and under the jurisdiction of, the Alachua band of Oconee Seminole along the Suwannee River. When the American General Andrew Jackson invaded the area,[7] he scattered the tribal peoples and their black allies in the region,[8] destroying settlements[9] and seizing blacks from among the Seminole for removal to the north to be returned to plantation slavery.[10] John was probably displaced with his family by these actions since he first enters the historical record some years later as a young adolescent in the Tampa area.[11 

John Horse spent his formative years among the Oconee Seminole,[12] living like other Indian boys, learning to hunt and fish and developing tracking skills. He also became proficient with bow and arrow and with a rifle, developing a reputation in later life as a keen marksman[13] with a steady hand in combat. Unlike many of his fellows, however, he also learned to read and write and acquired linguistic skills in English, Spanish and the Hitchiti tongue spoken by the Oconee and many other Seminole bands. We can presume that he was also conversant with Muscogee, the tongue of the Upper Creek Indians from whom the great Seminole war chief, Osceola hailed because, in his adult years, he would be one of Osceola's main translators when dealing with the Americans (though Osceola, himself, spoke some English[14]). 

The First Seminole War (1817–1818) occurred during Horse's childhood and the youngster, along with his sister and mother, was probably among those displaced blacks who fled south of the Suwannee River toward Tampa Bay.[15] There young John grew into adolescence and came into contact with American soldiers who had established an outpost, Fort Brooke, in the region[16] with the formal annexation of Florida after the success of Jackson's incursions. John Horse first enters the written record in a short narrative by the officer in charge, Major George M. Brooke, who discovered the young Seminole black had been swindling his personal cook by selling him the same land turtle, or tortoise (a so-called "gopher"), multiple times for the major's personal mess. Discovering the young boy's fraud, Brooke opted for leniency and let John go on condition he make good on the missing turtles which he apparently did.[17] This began a lifelong relationship between John Horse and the American military and vouchsafed him his nickname in later life, Gopher John.[18]


He would go on to fight against the American army, on the side of his fellow Seminole, and, eventually, to work with the Americans.[19] During the Second Seminole War of 1835 to 1842, which began when American settlers pressured for Indian removal to free up their lands for white settlement, John Horse served as what would be called, today, a field officer on the Indian side. At first a translator for the Indian leaders[20] (since few of them spoke English while their black allies did), he also became a lower level war chief.[21][22] Because of his facility with languages and quickness of mind, John Horse eventually found himself in the midst of the Seminoles' negotiations with the U. S. Army[1][23] as the war dragged on and open battles in the field gave way to guerrilla tactics and a long war of attrition.[24][25]


In the spring of 1838, after several pitched battles, Horse finally decided the fight against the Americans was unwinnable and surrendered to US troops.[26] This may have been prompted by the loss of his first wife, a Seminole woman said to have been a daughter of Chief Holatoochee, a brother or nephew of the chief Micanopy. The blacks in the war received promises of freedom if they would cease fighting as Indian allies and accept resettlement in the newly established Indian Territory west of the Mississippi.


Horse was later granted papers freeing him a second time by General William J. Worth for the services he subsequently rendered to the U.S. Army in the latter days of the Second Seminole War in Florida, as both translator and scout.[27] But his initial decision to give up fighting had been in response to the offer of a prior general, Thomas Sydney Jesup, who had made the first promise of general freedom to all escaped slaves and their children willing to surrender and accept removal. Thus John Horse's claim to freedom from slavery would rest on at least two legal claims, via decisions by two different American military officers. This would eventually be important as events unfolded a few years later in the west. Unfortunately, Horse's second wife and their children, who were removed to Indian Territory with him, did not gain freedom through his later service and had only the earlier declaration by Jesup to fall back on, thus remaining at risk from the increasingly aggressive activities of slave catchers in the new Indian Territory.


With other Seminole, Horse was shipped across the Gulf of Mexico from Tampa Bay to New Orleans and north from there by way of the Mississippi to Indian Territory. There he and his family joined with the other Seminole and Black Seminole who had accepted removal to take up residence at one of two locations assigned to the Seminole inside the Creek area.[28] Horse quickly rose as a leader among the Black Seminole[13] because of his friendly relations with the Americans, his 

In the new territory, John Horse worked sporadically for the army as an interpreter and, sometimes, as an intermediary for the officers and the Indian leaders.[29] Asked to help persuade the remaining Indian fighters in Florida to surrender and relocate to Indian Territory as he and others had done, he returned to Florida in 1839 to act as go-between with one of the last Seminole war chiefs, Coacoochee (Wild Cat), eventually convincing his old friend to accept the inevitable and come in, too.[22] John Horse was sent back to Indian Territory in 1842, as part of a group of about 120 other exiles, once the army felt he had done what they needed.


In Indian Territory again, the exiled Seminole leadership finally voted freedom for John Horse, too, around the year 1843 in light of his services to the Seminole during their lengthy war. At the time the main chief, Micanopy (Mico Nuppa),[30] had nominal ownership over him. It was Micanopy, in concert with his council, who finally granted the black warrior his freedom from any claims of enslavement against him which the tribe still had. Thus John Horse had been freed three times: by Jesup's original declaration,[31] by General Worth who was Jesup's last successor (for services rendered), and by the Seminole leadership. Only the first of these actions applied to John Horse's second wife, Susan (daughter of the black leader July)[32] and their children, however, and that action would soon come into serious question.


Conflict arose in the Territory because the transplanted Seminole had been placed on land allocated to the Creek Indians[33] since the U.S. government had failed to recognize the tribal distinctions between the two peoples (the Seminole were a loose amalgam of Creek bands which had detached themselves from the Creek Indian federation a century earlier and relocated to then Spanish Florida, although they had continued to maintain ethnic and some kinship ties with their northern Creek brethren in Georgia, Alabama and part of the Carolinas). Because the Creek had adopted the American institution of chattel slavery[34] while the Seminole had not done the same[35] (they lived in very different ways), the presence of free blacks among the Seminole on Creek land and under the nominal sovereignty of the Creek tribal council, caused friction between the two groups. The free blacks threatened the Creek slave-holding status quo, because their very existence tempted the Creeks' own slaves to challenge their status, and provided a tempting target for Creek and affiliated groups seeking to acquire more slaves.


Creek slavers and those from other Indian groups, and some whites, soon began raiding the Black Seminole settlements[36] to kidnap and enslave anyone they could get their hands on, and John Horse quickly became a focal point for organizing resistance to these encroachments as well as lead spokesman for his fellow Black Seminoles. In one case, when some slavers succeeded in capturing Dembo Factor,[37][38] a veteran of the Seminole War, John Horse and his on-again, off-again ally, Coacoochee (Wild Cat), who had hopes of succeeding Micanopy as leader of all the Seminole and who opposed living under the Creek, protested. The Army, responding to their concerns, demanded and got Factor's release but neither they nor the Creek tribal council pursued charges of kidnapping against the suspected slavers. The slave raids continued as tensions mounted.[39] 

In 1844 John Horse traveled to Washington, D.C.[40] with a delegation of Seminole[41] including Coacoochee to argue for a separate land grant for the Seminole on the grounds that they were and had been a separate people[42] for at least a hundred years. Failing to secure the backing they needed, they returned to Indian Territory, but Horse traveled once more to Washington, this time on his own (acting as servant to an officer's brother) to lobby General Jesup to live up to his earlier promises. Jesup was sympathetic and probably felt a little guilty for having been instrumental in the treachery that took Osceola off the field and led to that chief's death. However he could not overcome political resistance in Washington where pressure was growing to reverse his grant of freedom to the blacks who came in voluntarily. Perhaps in response to John's advocacy, Jesup traveled to Indian Territory himself (he was now Quartermaster General for the entire U.S. Army) to arrange for the construction of new facilities at Fort Gibson, the army's headquarters in the Territory.[43] While there he compiled a list of all those who had surrendered under his order and validated it. He also offered them work on the grounds of Fort Gibson on a construction project he had initiated.


As a result, large numbers of Seminole blacks left the two Seminole settlements, Deep Fork and Little River, to re-settle outside the fort's walls under army protection. Once the work was done, however, the blacks chose to remain because of the ongoing predations of Creek, Cherokee and so-called half breed slave catchers, creating yet another flash point of contention with the army and the slaver gangs. John Horse, himself, was attacked by unknown assailants at one point, thought to have been members of the pro-Creek Seminole faction and came close to death from the bullet he took, but the would-be assassins were never located. After the incident, the officer in charge at Fort Gibson invited John and his family to take up residence inside the fort,[44] which he did, giving up the claim he had staked out in the Indian area. The tensions extended to the Seminole Indian sub-agent, Marcellus Duval,[45][46] an Alabamian[47] with land holdings back east and connections in Washington. His brother, William Duval, was also a connected attorney at nearby Fort Smith in Arkansas. The Seminole sub-agent hoped to profit with the restoration of the Seminole blacks' slave status and angled incessantly to bring it about.[48] He also began objecting to what he deemed the army's unauthorized protection of the Seminole blacks,[49] including allowing them to remain in their makeshift settlement under Fort Gibson's walls. 

Some time after John Horse's return from his second mission to Washington, and Jesup's own visit and subsequent return east, John Y. Mason, US Attorney-General at the time, was designated by President James K. Polk to rule on the legitimacy of Jesup's emancipation of the former Seminole slaves. The demand for such a ruling was being pushed by Duval and his allies and urged by his brother, the attorney William Duval, who had been retained by the Seminole tribal council, at the sub-agent's urging, to reclaim their rights to their former slaves.[50] John Mason, a southerner, ruled that, since most of the Black Seminoles were descendants of fugitive slaves and thus legally still considered born into slavery, Jesup's decree had illegally deprived their Seminole owners of their legal property and could not be endorsed by the government. Thus the very reason many of the blacks had agreed to come in peacefully, and which had so seriously undermined the Seminoles' fight to remain in Florida, was suddenly and retroactively revoked.[51][52]


Seminole practice in Florida had acknowledged slavery, though not on the chattel slavery model then common in the American south. It was, in fact, more like feudal dependency since slaves of the Seminole generally lived in their own communities,[53] carried weapons and hunted and fought beside the Seminole they were nominally owned by. In fact, except for the obligation of the blacks to join in hunting and war parties, and to supply an annual tribute of crops to the tribal chief for the general welfare of the tribe,[54] there was little effective difference between how the Seminole lived and the lives of their nominal slaves. This changed in the course of the Second Seminole War when the old tribal system broke down under the pressure of the fighting and the Seminole resolved themselves into loose war bands living off the land with no distinction between tribal members and their so-called slaves. But this changed yet again in the new territory when the Seminole were obliged to settle on fixed lots of land and take up settled agriculture.[55]


At that point the chattel slave model adopted by their Creek cousins and other displaced tribes in the region took on more attraction for many of the Seminole. Their increasing poverty, due to the poor land they had been given and their own farming inexperience also made regaining a source of slave labor attractive to them (since the blacks were generally better farmers and craftsmen than their "owners"). The Seminole sub-agent, Marcellus Duval, became a tireless advocate for restoration of alleged Seminole property rights over their former allies in the field, a restoration he apparently hoped to turn to his own benefit as much as to the Indians'.[56]


With Mason's reversal of Jesup's wartime decree, those who had been freed by Jesup now suddenly found their status reversed, as Duval and the pro-Creek Seminole demanded their return to Seminole service, only now as chattel slaves. A new open season by the raiders from nearby groups and towns was about to commence as more than 280 Black Seminoles, including John Horse's own family, were now at risk again.


Duval, who had slave interests of his own, then effectively procured a decision from Washington that would force the blacks living under the army's protection at Fort Gibson to return to the settlements of those Indians who were now deemed their legal owners. The Indian sub-agent had, in fact, already worked out an agreement with the pro-Creek faction within the Seminole tribal council to provide a large number of the re-enslaved blacks to his lawyer brother in payment for legal services rendered on their behalf in Washington in pursuit of their property rights over the Seminole blacks.[57][58] He and his brother apparently hoped to turn a profit by claiming so many of the new slaves, either to work on their family holdings back in Alabama or for sale on the open market.as the army received orders to evict the blacks then sheltering under Fort Gibson's walls and force their return to enslavement under the Seminole, now headed up by the pro-Creek faction who supported the institution of chattel slavery as practiced back east. John Horse, with all his options exhausted and even the government and its army turned against him, faced a decision. 

Although the army generals were friendly to John Horse and his interests, they were bound by their duty. The War Department, from whom the army took its direction, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs were now arrayed against the interests of the Seminole blacks. John Horse soon found himself allied with Coacoochee again as the two fought a rear guard action to halt the rise of the pro-Creek leadership among the Seminole and the loss of freedom for the Seminole blacks. The two men wrangled with the various generals who quickly succeeded one another while the generals, themselves, played a delaying game with their Washington superiors. Eventually, however, Micaonopy's death ended the stalemate and the army could no longer delay evicting the ad hoc black settlement around the fort and sending its people back to certain enslavement. John Horse took charge of the exodus from Fort Gibson but, instead of taking his people to the site Duval the Indian agent had selected for them close by his agency, Horse and another ally, the black scout Toney Barnet, settled them at a place on the Little River[59] he named Wewoka[60][61] farther from the Creek and the Seminole agency than Duval had counted on.[62] Settling in, they set up defenses against the gangs of slavers who quickly flocked around the black settlement. John Horse and Barnet settled on a plan which involved getting Marcellus Duval out of the way by inducing him to head off to Florida on a temporary mission which he thought would redound to his interest.[63] To facilitate his agreement to make the trip, Barnet, also affiliated with the Seminole, offered to serve as scout and translator. (Barnet had reasons of his own for remaining behind since he was working to free his son who had been enslaved by two Cherokee brothers on Cherokee land within Indian Territory.)


While Duval was gone with Barnet, John Horse speedily concluded a pact with his old friend Coacoochee (disaffected because of his failure to be selected to replace Micanopy) and the two of them led an exodus from Wewoka, and Indian Territory in general, in the dead of night. They led over a hundred blacks including men, women and children, and at least as many fleeing Seminole, out of the lands they had been placed on by the government, heading south across the Red River into Texas. There they began a dash across that vast state which would take them nearly a year, eventually incurring pursuit by Duval's slavers (dispatched after he had returned and discovered their flight) and the Texas Rangers who had been authorized by the Texas governor to recapture and return them to their Seminole owners (and to Duval who had placed a bounty on each man, woman and child). From October 1849 until the summer of 1850, Horse and Coacoochee led the migration south, picking up a troop of disgruntled Kickapoo Indians along the way,[64] and facing the war arrows of the Comanche who considered Coacoochee's presence in their territory an affront. The Comanche may have known of an agreement Coacoochee had concluded with representatives of the Mexican government to gain land on which to live once in Mexico in exchange for his service on the border repelling Texan and Comanche raiders.[65] 

After a pitched battle with the Comanche, the fleeing party had to cross a desert region, meeting up with an old adversary, Major John T. Sprague, at the springs of Las Moras just north of the Mexican border.[67] That encounter is described in Sprague's own journals which he compiled to document an expedition of supply wagons he led across southern Texas to resupply the outpost at today's El Paso (then the town of Franklin). Sprague had been a young captain back in Florida and had known both John Horse and Wild Cat there, having been involved in the latter's initial[68] and then his final surrender. The three men sat into the night reminiscing and drinking from a bottle of liquor Sprague had supplied. But some time in the early morning hours the Indians learned that someone from the army camp had secretly gone to a nearby town to alert the Texas Rangers of their presence. Whether Sprague, himself, was implicated remains unknown.


In the pre-dawn hours John Horse and Coacoochee woke their people and secretly departed the camp at Las Moras to make a last desperate dash to the Rio Grande. There they built makeshift rafts to ferry their people across. They were still hard at it, only midway across the river, when the Rangers and their allies abruptly arrived. But it was too late and the Seminole and their black allies, with the Kickapoo who had joined them, got across and made contact with officials in the Mexican state of Coahuila.[69] There, in return for a pledge to fight all invaders and raiding parties from Texas, they were given land for their people and captaincies in the Mexican army on or about July 12, 1850. 


John Horse liked to drink and at one point after crossing back into Texas he allowed himself to get too drunk and was taken captive by some local whites who may have known him or had a grudge against him. They offered to ransom him back to his people and Coacoochee collected the gold they demanded and sent it to them for John's life. When they opened the bag they found the gold soaked with blood. It was Coacoochee's message to them and they fled. For several years John Horse and Coacoochee rode side by side in fulfillment of their contract with the Mexican government but Coacoochee soon died from smallpox[70] and most of the Seminole and Kickapoo who had followed him drifted away. John Horse remained with his people and became the settlement's de facto leader.


After the American Civil War and United States emancipation of slaves, the US Army recruited many of the Black Seminoles from Mexico to serve in the border states as scouts.[71][72] John Horse was getting too old for that kind of active service although he remained titular leader of his people, still captaining their fights against the various raiding parties which descended on Mexico from the north.


In one famous incident he returned with his men to find that a large Indian raiding party had attacked his settlement and captured many of his people in retaliation for his actions against them in his capacity of providing border security. Leading all the able bodied men he could find (about forty, including teenage boys) he took off after the Indians. The raiders tried to draw the Seminole blacks into a canyon but John Horse, sensing the trick, ordered a halt and dismounted his men. He had been a wily commander back in Florida and still possessed a well-developed perceptive faculty for this sort of thing. When the Indians lying in wait within the canyon saw that the blacks were not deceived by their ruse, they made a head-on frontal assault against the black force. John Horse's men had only single load rifles, mostly of vintage type, and when they had discharged their first volley it failed to turn the Indians who just kept coming at them. As the men scrambled to reload their weapons, John Horse stepped out in front of his men and leveled his own empty weapon at the oncoming chief, taking deliberate and careful aim. He had always been a crack shot and the Indians knew it. When the chief saw John's rifle directed straight at him he lost his nerve and swerved his horse, all those behind following him, thus breaking the charge and giving John Horse's men and boys time to complete their reload. In the end, the Indians fled and John Horse's Seminole blacks retrieved their people.


As John Horse aged, though, many of his people migrated back across the Texas border to work for the U.S. Army as scouts. These men and their families settled near Fort Clarke in what is now Brackettville.[73] 

In his seventies, John Horse faced another crisis when local land owners tried to take the land the Mexican government had originally given to the Seminole settlers.[74] John Horse rode out once more, to Mexico City, to obtain reaffirmation from the government of their land grant and to put a stop to the local land grab. He was never heard from again and it is commonly thought that he died on this trip to the capital (in 1882).[1][75] Several hundred descendants of Black Seminoles, known as Mascogos, still reside in Coahuila today.[76] 


Fernando III:A brief history.

Ferdinand III of Castile. 

Ferdinand III (Spanish: Fernando; 1199/1201 – 30 May 1252), called the Saint (el Santo), was King of Castile from 1217 and King of León from 1230 as well as King of Galicia from 1231.[1] He was the son of Alfonso IX of León and Berenguela of Castile. Through his second marriage he was also Count of Aumale. Ferdinand III was one of the most successful kings of Castile, securing not only the permanent union of the crowns of Castile and León, but also masterminding the most expansive southward territorial expansion campaign yet in the Guadalquivir Valley, in which Islamic rule was in disarray in the wake of the decline of the Almohad presence in the Iberian Peninsula. 

King of Castile and Toledo

Reign

31 August 1217 – 30 May 1252

Predecessor

Berengaria

Successor

Alfonso X

King of León and Galicia

Reign

24 September 1230 (de facto) or 11 December 1230 (de jure) – 30 May 1252

Predecessor

Sancha and Dulce

Successor

Alfonso X

Born

1199/1201

Monastery of Valparaíso, Peleas de Arriba, Kingdom of León

Died

30 May 1252 (aged 50-53)

Seville, Crown of Castile

Burial

Seville Cathedral, Seville, Spain

Consort

Elisabeth of Hohenstaufen

​(m. 1219; died 1235)​

Joan, Countess of Ponthieu

​(m. 1237)​

Issue

among others...

Alfonso X of Castile

Frederick

Henry the Senator

Philip, Lord of Valdecorneja

Sancho, Archbishop of Seville

Manuel, Lord of Villena

Ferdinand II, Count of Aumale

Eleanor, Queen of England

House

Castilian House of Ivrea

Father

Alfonso IX of León

Mother

Berengaria of Castile

Religion

Roman Catholicism 

By military and diplomatic efforts, Ferdinand greatly expanded the dominions of Castile by annexing the Guadalquivir river valley in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, establishing the boundaries of the Castilian state for the next two centuries. New territories included important cities such as Baeza, Úbeda, Jaén, Córdoba or Seville, that were subject of Repartimiento, given a new general charter and repopulated in the following years.


Ferdinand was canonized in 1671 by Pope Clement X. Places such as the cities of San Fernando, Pampanga and San Fernando, La Union; the Diocese of Ilagan and the San Fernando de Dilao Church in Paco, Manila in the Philippines; and in the United States, in California the City of San Fernando, the San Fernando Valley, and in Texas the Cathedral of San Fernando in San Antonio were all named after him.

Wednesday 31 August 2022

I think therefore I am? It depends who you ask.

 Philosopher: I’m Neither Me, Myself, Nor I…Yet I Give Interviews! 

Michael Egnor 

It’s remarkable that given the abysmal logical state of modern neuroscience, modern philosophy of mind seems to be in a heated contest to be even more absurd. Secular meditation teacher Michael W. Taft interviewed leading theoretical philosopher Thomas Metzinger. Here is one set of Taft’s and Metzinger’s questions and answers, and my observations:

Michael W. Taft: You’ve written at great length about the experience of selfhood in human beings. So let’s start off by asking, What is the self?


Thomas Metzinger: The first thing to understand, I believe, is that there is no thing like “the self.” Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of reality. Selves are not something that endures over time. The first person pronoun “I” doesn’t refer to an object like a football or a bicycle, it just points to the speaker of the current sentence. There is no thing in the brain or outside in the world, which is us. We are processes… the self is not a thing but a process. 

What could Metzinger possibly mean by “there is no thing like ‘the self’”? Myself is the term I use to refer to me. I (and my self) are very much a part of reality, and I most certainly endure over time. I am an object like a football — in a sense — in that I exist in the world, I have mass and shape, and I have come into existence and will someday go out of existence in this world. Obviously, I have many abilities that a football doesn’t have — I have a sum of powers (physiological, sensory, motor, emotional, mnemonic, and rational) that comprise my soul. I am a composite of matter and soul, just as all things in the world are composites of matter and form. 

An Unintelligible Claim 

And Metzinger’s claim that we are not selves (“things”) but processes is unintelligible. A process is a state of change, and change presupposes a being that exists continuously through the process of changing.


This was Aristotle’s seminal insight into the nature of change: Change presupposes the continuity of an underlying substrate. A process requires a real persisting object that undergoes it.


I certainly change over time, but it is I that change. I am a substantial real thing that persists through the change. After all, if I didn’t persist, it would be nonsensical to say I changed. If I didn’t persist, that would mean that I went into and out of existence at every moment. That would be the creation and destruction of an infinite series of human beings, not the change of a human being. 

A Hilarious Irony 

There’s a hilarious irony in Metzinger’s absurd claim that there is no self and that we are merely processes. Here’s what Taft says about him by way of introduction in the article: 

Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher. As of 2011 he holds the position of director of the theoretical philosophy group at the department of philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation. From 2008 to 2009 he served as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; from 2014 to 2019 he is a Fellow at the Gutenberg Research College. 

How could Metzinger “hold” any position (academic or otherwise) if he is an evanescent process without substantial enduring reality? 

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.



The environment as informant.

 Rosenhouse’s Whoppers: The Environment as a Source of Information. 

William A. Dembski 


I am responding again to Jason Rosenhouse about his book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. See my earlier posts here and here.


In Rosenhouse’s book, he claims that “natural selection serves as a conduit for transmitting environmental information into the genomes of organisms.” (p. 215) I addressed this claim briefly in my review, indicating that conservation of information shows it to be incomplete and inadequate, but essentially I referred him to technical work by me and colleagues on the topic. In his reply, he remains, as always, unpersuaded. So let me here give another go at explaining the role of the environment as a source of information for Darwinian evolution. As throughout this response, I’m addressing the unwashed middle. 

Darwinian evolution depends on selection, variation, and replication working within an environment. How selection, variation, and replication play out, however, depends on the particulars of the environment. Take a simple example, one that Rosenhouse finds deeply convincing and emblematic for biological evolution, namely, Richard Dawkins’s famous METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL simulation (pp. 192–194 of Rosenhouse’s book). Dawkins imagines an environment consisting of sequences of 28 letters and spaces, random variations of those letters, and a fitness function that rewards sequences to the degree that they are close to (i.e., share letters with) the target sequence METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.  

So What’s the Problem? 

The problem is not with the letter sequences, their randomization, or even the activity of a fitness function in guiding such an evolutionary process, but the very choice of fitness function. Why did the environment happen to fixate on METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL and make evolution drive toward that sequence? Why not a totally random sequence? The whole point of this example is to suggest that evolution can produce something design-like (a meaningful phrase, in this case, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet) without the need for actual design. But most fitness functions would evolve toward random sequences of letters and spaces. So what’s the difference maker in the choice of fitness? If you will, what selects the fitness function that then selects for fitness in the evolutionary process? Well, leaving aside some sort of interventional design (and not all design needs to be interventional), it’s got to be the environment. 


But that’s the problem. What renders one environment an interesting source of evolutionary change given selection, variation, and replication but others uninteresting? Most environments, in fact, don’t lead to any interesting form of evolution. Consider Sol Spiegelman’s work on the evolution of polynucleotides in a replicase environment. One thing that makes real world biological evolution interesting, assuming it actually happens, is that it increases information in the items that are undergoing evolution. Yet Spiegelman demonstrated that even with selection, variation, and replication in play, information steadily decreased over the course of his experiment. Brian Goodwin, in his summary of Spiegelman’s work, highlights this point (How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, pp. 35–36): 

In a classic experiment, Spiegelman in 1967 showed what happens to a molecular replicating system in a test tube, without any cellular organization around it. The replicating molecules (the nucleic acid templates) require an energy source, building blocks (i.e., nucleotide bases), and an enzyme to help the polymerization process that is involved in self-copying of the templates. Then away it goes, making more copies of the specific nucleotide sequences that define the initial templates. But the interesting result was that these initial templates did not stay the same; they were not accurately copied. They got shorter and shorter until they reached the minimal size compatible with the sequence retaining self-copying properties. And as they got shorter, the copying process went faster. So what happened with natural selection in a test tube: the shorter templates that copied themselves faster became more numerous, while the larger ones were gradually eliminated. This looks like Darwinian evolution in a test tube. But the interesting result was that this evolution went one way: toward greater simplicity. 

Simple and Yet Profound 

At issue here is a simple and yet profound point of logic that continually seems to elude Darwinists as they are urged to come to terms with how it can be that the environment is able to bring about the information that leads to any interesting form of evolution. And just to be clear, what makes evolution interesting is that it purports to build all the nifty biological systems that we see around us. But most forms of evolution, whether in a biology lab or on a computer mainframe, build nothing interesting. 


The logical point at issue here is one the philosopher John Stuart Mill described back in the 19th century. He called it the “method of difference” and laid it out in his System of Logic. According to this method, to discover which of a set of circumstances is responsible for an observed difference in outcomes requires identifying a circumstance that is present when the outcome occurs and absent when it doesn’t occur. An immediate corollary of this method is that common circumstances cannot explain a difference in outcomes


So if selection, variation, and replication operating within an environment can produce wildly different types of evolution (information increasing, information decreasing, interesting, uninteresting, engineering like, organismic like, etc.), then something else besides these factors needs to be in play. Conservation of information says that the difference maker is information built into the environment. 

In any case, the method of difference shows that such information cannot be reducible to Darwinian processes, which is to say, to selection, variation, and replication (because these are common to all forms of Darwinian evolution). Darwinists, needless to say, don’t like that conclusion. But they are nonetheless stuck with it. The logic is airtight and it means that their theory is fundamentally incomplete. For more on this, see my article with Bob Marks titled “Life’s Conservation Law” (especially section 8).  

Pope urban II: a brief history.

 Pope Urban II 

Pope Urban II (Latin: Urbanus II; c. 1035 – 29 July 1099), otherwise known as Odo of Châtillon or Otho de Lagery,[2][A] was the head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 12 March 1088 to his death. He is best known for initiating the Crusades.[3][4] 

Church

Catholic Church

Papacy began

12 March 1088

Papacy ended

29 July 1099

Predecessor

Victor III

Successor

Paschal II

Orders

Ordination

c. 1068

Consecration

20 July 1085

Created cardinal

1073

by Gregory VII

Personal details

Born

Odo

c. 1035[1]

Lagery, County of Champagne, Kingdom of France

Died

29 July 1099 (aged 63–64)

Rome, Papal States, Holy Roman Empire

Previous post(s)

Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia (1078–88)

Cardinal-Bishop of Velletri (1080–88)

Legate in Germany (1084–85)

Sainthood

Feast day

29 July

Venerated in

Catholic Church

Beatified

14 July 1881

Rome

by Pope Leo XII

Attributes

Papal vestments

Papal tiara 

Pope Urban was a native of France, and was a descendant of a noble family from the French commune of Châtillon-sur-Marne.[5][6] Reims was the nearby cathedral school where he began his studies in 1050.[7]


Before his papacy, Urban was the grand prior of Cluny and bishop of Ostia.[8] As pope, he dealt with Antipope Clement III, infighting of various Christian nations, and the Muslim incursions into Europe. In 1095 he started preaching the First Crusade (1096–99). He promised forgiveness and pardon for all of the past sins of those who would fight to reclaim the holy land from Muslims and free the eastern churches.[9] This pardon would also apply to those that would fight the Muslims in Spain. While the First Crusade resulted in the liberation of Jerusalem from the Fatimids, Pope Urban II died before he could receive this news.


He also set up the modern-day Roman Curia in the manner of a royal ecclesiastical court to help run the Church.[10]


He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on 14 July 1881.

Staff

Other popes named Urban

Tuesday 30 August 2022

And still yet more on why the skilled trades remain to the smart choice.

 Trade Schools Vs. Traditional College: What You Should Know 

Robert Farrington


We all know that a college education is usually worth the financial cost, but what about attending trade school instead? Unfortunately, many adults with influence over high schoolers never take the time to ask this important question.  

I'm not only talking about school guidance counselors and other educators, but I'm also talking about parents themselves. For far too many parents with kids in their junior or senior years of school, the stigma surrounding having a child skip four-year college would just be too much to bear. 

But, it's time to change the narrative, and for more reasons than one. Not only does trade school help students land a job faster, it also costs significantly less than traditional college. Plus, jobs in the trades are booming in general, whereas many other industries are oversaturated with new graduates looking for work. 

Have you tried to hire a contractor lately? How about an electrician? If you have, you probably already know these jobs are in high demand.


These are just some of the reasons to consider trade school, but there are others. And if you have your child's best interest in mind, you will at least hear me out. 

How Much Does Trade School Cost? 

The initial cost of attending trade school is one of the biggest benefits this type of education has to offer. Where the average cost of attending a public, four year school worked out to $10,740 for in-state students during the 2021-22 school year per CollegeBoard figures, you can attend trade school for as little as $5,000 per year. Not only that, but you can often learn a trade and enter a related profession in 18 months to 24 months vs. the four years or longer it takes to earn a bachelor's degree. 

As an example, you could attend a public two-year in-district community college for an average of $3,800 per year, finish a vocational degree within two years, then go on to work as a dental hygienist or even a registered nurse in states that only require an associate degree. Conversely, you could attend trade school to learn a skill like carpentry, or to become an electrician, a welder or a boilermaker.


With many trades, you can also take part in a paid apprenticeship that lets you earn money while you learn on the job. According to statistics from the U.S. government, 92% of apprentices who complete their program retain employment and go on to earn an average annual salary of $72,000. 

Trade School Education Pays Off (Literally) 

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Trade Schools Vs. Traditional College: What You Should Know

Robert Farrington

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I write about personal finance, college and student loan debt.

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We all know that a college education is usually worth the financial cost, but what about attending trade school instead? Unfortunately, many adults with influence over high schoolers never take the time to ask this important question. 


I'm not only talking about school guidance counselors and other educators, but I'm also talking about parents themselves. For far too many parents with kids in their junior or senior years of school, the stigma surrounding having a child skip four-year college would just be too much to bear.



But, it's time to change the narrative, and for more reasons than one. Not only does trade school help students land a job faster, it also costs significantly less than traditional college. Plus, jobs in the trades are booming in general, whereas many other industries are oversaturated with new graduates looking for work.


Have you tried to hire a contractor lately? How about an electrician? If you have, you probably already know these jobs are in high demand.


These are just some of the reasons to consider trade school, but there are others. And if you have your child's best interest in mind, you will at least hear me out.



young apprentice in vocational training working on a turning machine in the industry

young apprentice in vocational training working on[+]GETTY

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How Much Does Trade School Cost?

The initial cost of attending trade school is one of the biggest benefits this type of education has to offer. Where the average cost of attending a public, four year school worked out to $10,740 for in-state students during the 2021-22 school year per CollegeBoard figures, you can attend trade school for as little as $5,000 per year. Not only that, but you can often learn a trade and enter a related profession in 18 months to 24 months vs. the four years or longer it takes to earn a bachelor's degree.



As an example, you could attend a public two-year in-district community college for an average of $3,800 per year, finish a vocational degree within two years, then go on to work as a dental hygienist or even a registered nurse in states that only require an associate degree. Conversely, you could attend trade school to learn a skill like carpentry, or to become an electrician, a welder or a boilermaker.


With many trades, you can also take part in a paid apprenticeship that lets you earn money while you learn on the job. According to statistics from the U.S. government, 92% of apprentices who complete their program retain employment and go on to earn an average annual salary of $72,000.


Trade School Education Pays Off (Literally)

While trade school costs less in general, and while trades typically require less than four years of higher education, jobs in various trades also pay more, too. Yes, you read that right. Sending your kid to trade school can result in benefits like lower student debt or no student debt plus higher earnings later on.


A quick look at May 2020 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates from BLS.gov makes this readily apparent. While there are many different trades and educational paths to consider, here are some of the highest paying trades students could enter plus how many years of higher education they require.

While these trade school and community college jobs definitely pay well, also keep in mind that these salaries apply to employees. If a student is especially business-minded, all kinds of trades work well for all kinds of small business ideas. 


For example, someone who learns the art of plumbing can easily go on to open their own plumbing business, and the same is true for carpenters, electricians, and other skilled tradespeople who are good with their hands. I also know that, all over the country right now, we're facing a dramatic shortage of skilled workers who can remodel kitchens or bathrooms, install flooring, or take on any number of small remodeling jobs. 

The bottom line: The work is there for students who pursue the trades, and the jobs pay handsomely for the most part. If your trade school student is prepared to break out on their own and start their own company, that's even better. 

I.D is not merely mainstream it's indispensable.

 The Silence of the Space Aliens 

David Coppedge 

National Geographic jokes about the silence of the space aliens.


For more than 50 years, we’ve been eavesdropping on the cosmos, searching for transmissions that would reveal the existence of intelligent, extraterrestrial life.


To date, nobody’s bothered to call.


Is it something we said?


As the silence keeps up, the alternatives get narrow. (1) We are alone in the universe as intelligent beings or (2) “the morbid alternative: Intelligent life periodically emerges on other worlds, but has an unfortunate tendency to self-destruct.” (3) A third possibility is that aliens know about us but cloak their presence for some reason.


Possibility #2, that alien civilizations have a tendency to self-destruct, has been seriously considered by some who look at humans’ bad example of creating devastation “during our relatively brief span as the dominant species on this planet.” 

"That’s why a trio of scientists recently published a guide to help astronomers detect alien apocalypses — whether it’s the chemical signature of a world filled with rotting corpses, the radioactive aftermath of nuclear warfare, or the debris left over from a Death Star scenario where an entire planet gets blown to bits. [Emphasis added.]" 

Extinct Aliens and the Design Inference 

We see here the makings of a design inference. It might be called Cosmic Forensics. Since forensics is a type of intelligent design science (e.g., determining whether a death was natural or intentional), why not apply the same principles to alien beings? It is, after all, a search for extinct extraterrestrial intelligence (SEETI). That’s a goal far beyond astrobiology, the search for biomarkers that could indicate life down to the microbial level. SETI and SEETI are looking for beings “at least as clever as we are,” as Seth Shostak likes to say.


The clues for SEETI could be very indirect and faint: 

"SEETI research, however, is not looking for biosignatures — signs of life. Instead, scientists have to hunt down necrosignatures — signs of death — that would indicate destruction on a colossal scale.


Consider a scenario in which biological warfare rapidly wiped out a planet’s population. Microorganisms that cause decomposition would gorge themselves on alien corpses. In doing so, they would excrete chemical compounds, dramatically increasing the levels of methane and ethane in the atmosphere.


If the population size of the alien world were comparable to that of Earth, the methane and ethane gases would dissipate in about a year, so there would be only a short window of opportunity to detect the cataclysm.


However, if the biological arsenal included a genetically modified virus capable of jumping species, then the planet’s casualties might also include its animal life. In that case, the telltale signs of catastrophic biowarfare could be visible for several years." 

The leftover glow of a nuclear holocaust could be another clue. Planets don’t typically nuke themselves. Some intelligent cause would have had to push the button 

Evidence of Intention 

It’s repulsive to think about global destruction, but intelligent design doesn’t distinguish moral purposes from immoral ones. ID merely looks for evidence of something intentional. Like SETI, SEETI depends on the researcher being able to tell the difference between a purposeful act and a natural act.


SEETI thinkers even consider “speculative technologies” of aliens. If advanced civilizations create self-replicating nanobots that run haywire, they could reduce a planet to a “grey goo” of dust where once an intelligent society thrived.  

"But, what sort of evidence would exist for this heinous act? One remote possibility is the detection of artificial compounds in the debris disc, indicating that the planet was once home to a technologically-advanced civilization." 

A “heinous act” is an intentional act, implying moral and intellectual responsiblity. We don’t call a lion taking down a wildebeest “heinous.” Something unnatural has happened. 

More of the Same? 

Perhaps, as evolutionists, the trio of scientists contemplating SEETI as a research program view human planetary destruction on a continuum with animal death — just a particularly egregious advanced form of ecological collapse. Why, then, call it SEETI with emphasis on the “I”? Animals like birds and dolphins have intelligence. Is human intelligence just more of the same? 


Their language betrays something unique about human intelligence that carries over to alien intelligence. They talk about warfare. Animals have predator-prey relationships, but they don’t engage in warfare. Animals don’t “genetically modify” other organisms for the purpose of wiping them out. Animals don’t create “artificial compounds” that can be distinguished from natural compounds. 


The SEETI thinkers are looking for signs of intention. Even in global death, they believe they could separate natural causes from intelligent causes. That’s the design inference. 


And still yet more on mathematics antiDarwinian bias.

 Rosenhouse’s Whoppers: Appealing to the Unwashed Middle 

William A. Dembski 


I am responding again to Jason Rosenhouse about his book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. See my earlier post here.


Before leaving academia for business, I used to lecture on intelligent design at colleges and universities, and often debate people on the Darwinian side. Michael Shermer and Michael Ruse were my most frequent debate partners. My philosophy at these debates was not to try to convince Darwinists that my views were correct. Nor was I particularly concerned about the intelligent design proponents — if they were proponents of ID, they had presumably put their necks on the chopping block and knew what was at stake, academically and culturally, in taking the side of ID. My challenge, rather, in these debates, was to win the unwashed middle — those who had not made up their minds — those who didn’t reside in the cloud cuckoo land of Darwinism. So this response is mainly directed at them. 

Rosenhouse’s book is objectively bad. It purports to be a critique of mathematics as used by ID proponents and of my mathematical work in particular. Yet it betrays a lack of comprehension throughout. It makes a virtue of misrepresentation. It’s aim is not to understand but to kill. In my review, I called Rosenhouse on his many failures in the book. It’s clear in his reply that he simply ignored the points I was able to score — points he made it easy for me to score because he did such a hack job. Read his book and read my review, and decide for yourself.  

A New Dimension of Bad 

His reply, however, adds a new dimension to the debate. The reply, too, is objectively bad in the same sense as his book. But it adds a level of delusion that in reading it made my jaw drop. I’m not writing this for rhetorical effect. In the reply, he lets loose with two whoppers that make me question what planet he’s been living on. Indeed, I have to seriously wonder about the degree to which Darwinists are in their right minds if they find in Rosenhouse a voice that speaks for them.


But before getting to the two whoppers, buried in his reply are two substantive points worth addressing. They came up in my review, received comment in the reply, and deserve some additional comment here. They concern (1) the connection between irreducible and specified complexity and (2) the role of the environment in supplying information to the Darwinian process 

Irreducible versus Specified Complexity 



I addressed this point in my review, but let’s have another go at it. Consider Sisyphus. As long as you can remember, he’s been rolling a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down before it gets to the very top, which, let’s assume, is a stable equilibrium, so if he gets it to the very top, it will stay there (though he never does). What is the probability that Sisyphus will get the rock up to the very top? As a historical or inductive probability, it is quite low. All your life, you have been seeing him try to get the rock up there and somehow it never quite gets there That historical probability for Sisyphus is the same type of probability as inherent in Mike Behe’s assessment of Darwinian processes being unable to build irreducibly complex molecular machines. All the attempts by biologists to trace a detailed Darwinian pathway of how an irreducibly complex system might emerge from an evolutionary precursor performing a different function have failed. 


Richard Lenski, for instance, has run tens of thousands of generations of E. coli, and produced no novel irreducibly complex system. The record of failure of evolutionary biologists in their inability to provide detailed Darwinian pathways for irreducibly complex systems is as complete as Sisyphus’s efforts to get the rock to the top of the hill. If you disagree, please provide an irreducibly complex system, its precursor system performing a different primary function, and then the step-by-step path of how to get from one to the other. Silence? Crickets? 

The Nuts and Bolts 

By contrast, specified complexity gets at the nuts and bolts of the probabilistic hurdles that render an evolutionary transition intractable. To continue with the Sisyphus analogy, specified complexity would look not at Sisyphus’s record of failure so much as the types of obstacles he faces in getting to the top and how those might render getting to the top improbable. 


For instance, perhaps in rolling the rock up the hill, most of the path is clear and unproblematic, but at one point there’s a bump so that given his strength he just can’t get over the bump. Or perhaps, there are multiple bumps, where he’s got a positive probability of getting over each bump, but when all these probabilities get combined, he’s bound not to get over all the bumps. Or perhaps he gets tired, running out of steam as he moves up the hill, so that bumps lower on the hill would be no problem, but by the time he gets up the hill, they do become a problem, and his probability of getting over all of them approaches zero.


The point to appreciate is that such a probability analysis of Sisyphus adds to our understanding of his failure. His record of failure is enough to justify assigning a low historical probability to his being able to roll the rock to the very top of the hill. But an empirically based probability of his failure needs to look at the particularities of the probabilistic hurdles that he’s facing. The same holds for irreducible complexity. There’s a long record of failure by biologists to explain how these systems might evolve. Specified complexity attempts to understand the probabilistic particulars that could explain the record of failure. 


But specified complexity is not merely a supplement to irreducible complexity. Not all biological systems are irreducibly complex. In consequence, specified complexity can assess the evolvability of biological systems that are not irreducibly complex. For instance, the beta-lactamase enzymatic system that Doug Axe examined (described at greater length in my review) is not in any clear sense irreducibly complex, but it is analyzable probabilistically and exhibits specified complexity.  

Consider a Bridge 

One more analogy to try to nail all this down. Again, I write for the unwashed middle and have no expectation of assuaging Rosenhouse. Consider a bridge. It’s stood for 100 years, faced all kinds of weather and hardship, and has remained imperturbable. And yet one day it suddenly collapses. Before its collapse, we might think that its probability of continuing to stand was quite high, and so the probability of collapse was quite low. Given its collapse, is it therefore safe to say that a highly improbable event happened? 


Those versed in the use specified complexity as a tool for disentangling the probabilities underlying various systems would say that such historical probabilities are of little interest now that the bridge has collapsed. Rather, we need engineers to examine the wreckage to see if there were any tell-tale signs of weaknesses in the bridge that would increase its probability of collapse. The probabilities in this case would be empirical and structural rather than historical. Specified complexity substitutes actionable empirically and structurally based probabilities for historical probabilities