Darwinian apologists attempt to spin straw into gold again.

Wishful Thinking: Chimps Know Right from Wrong

Wesley J. Smith June 29, 2015 4:54 AM 

Here is another yearning attempt by the scientific community to elevate the capacities of animals to approach those of human beings. Last time, it waschimps can cook, but don't. This time, it is chimps that supposedly have now been shown to know the difference between right and wrong!

Except, they don't. Here's what the experiment on 17 zoo animals discovered. From the story in the Daily Mail:

The clips showed chimps either performing a neutral activity such as walking or cracking nuts, aggressive adult chimps, a small colobus monkey being hunted and killed by chimps and an infant chimpanzee being killed by its own kind.

How did they react?

The chimpanzees looked far longer at infanticide scenes than at control videos showing nut cracking, hunting a colobus monkey, or displays and aggression among adult males.'

Did you get that, they looked longer! But how did the chimps respond otherwise?

However, the researchers also found while the chimps watched the infanticide scenes for longer, there was only limited evidence they became agitated or reacted to them.

Well, whatever.

From this, an ephemeral web of moral agency is weaved.

Dr Rudolf von Rohr said this perhaps suggest while chimpanzees can distinguish between right and wrong they will only respond emotionally to digressions within their own social group. She said: 'We propose that chimpanzees as uninvolved bystanders may detect norm violations but may restrict emotional reactions to such situations to in-group contexts.'

Please. Infanticide is a common thing in the animal world. It isn't right or wrong, as animals haven't a clue about the concept.

In fact, the researchers are superimposing their own anti-infanticide moral views on the morally clueless chimps.

Morality -- views that are determined through rational, emotional, philosophical, or religious analysis and societal or cultural persuasion -- is a strictly human concept in the known universe. Moreover, to state the obvious, not all societies share the same concepts of right and wrong. Rome permitted infanticide, as did Nazi Germany, and today, the Dutch, while ISIS murders babies.

Unlike animals, we craft mores -- not as a matter of instinct -- but rather, as a natural function of our human natures.

So let's recap: Chimps looked longer at a screaming infant being killed than they did at other images -- and weren't even upset. And from that we are to infer moral agency.

More like wishful thinking, I would say.

Also out of Africa(but not in a good way)

General News of Sunday, 28 June 2015

Africa lost $1 trillion in 28 years

Africa has lost $1 trillion through Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) over a 28-year period. The loss was recorded between 1980 and 2008.

The continent is reported to be losing $50 billion annually through the illegal activities of rich individuals and multinational companies in the extractive sector mostly in oil, gas and mining.

According to the African Union/Economic Commission for Africa High Level Panel (HLP) on IFFs from Africa report, the multiplier effect of these challenges were loss of jobs, income, decent education, healthcare facilities, infrastructure and other basic needs of Africans.

“Some of the effects of illicit financial outflows are the draining of foreign exchange reserves, reduced tax collection, cancelling out of investment inflows and a worsening of poverty. Such outflows which also undermine the rule of law, stifle trade and worsen macroeconomic conditions are facilitated by some 60 international tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions that enable the creating and operating of millions of disguised corporations, anonymous trust accounts, and fake charitable foundations. Other techniques used include money laundering and transfer pricing,” the report noted.

It is at the backdrop of these glitches that a campaign to battle illicit financial flows from Africa has been launched in Nairobi with a call on African governments to collaborate to stop the annual $50 billion financial loss.

Stop the Bleeding

An interim working group (IWG) of Africa IFF Campaign platform comprising - six pan-African organisations namely Tax Justice Network-Africa (TJN-A), Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Af), Africa Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD), the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), the African Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC-Africa) and Trust Africa supported and joined by the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ), met at the Uhuru Park in Nairobi, Kenya to launch the campaign.

Dubbed “Stop the Bleeding” Africa IFF Campaign, individuals from all walks of life joined in the movement, which is aimed at preventing IFFs from Africa in order to promote development.

Speakers at the launch voiced their frustrations and urged Africans and African governments to collaborate to bring an end to the plundering of Africa’s wealth. The Chairperson of the Pan-African MPs Network on IFFs and Tax, Ms Khanyisile Litchfield Tshabalala; the Chairperson of the International Trade Union Confederation Africa, Mr Joel Odigie, and the Head of US-Africa Network, Dr Anyango Reggy, gave brief speeches calling for an end to IFFs.

They were unanimous in stating that Africa was not a poor continent and, therefore, deserved better.

Dr Reggy disclosed that the United States of America (USA) was also a victim of IFFs with a loss of $100 billion annually.

The March

A five-kilometre walk through major streets in Nairobi was organised after the launch.

More than 80 individuals joined the coalition in the march aimed at drumming home the need for concerted efforts to protect the African purse and resources. The procession attracted Kenyan citizens who came out of their offices to catch a glimpse of the march.

Motorists had to give way to the procession, which was under tight security. The procession began at the Uhuru Park and was rounded off at the same park. The organisers said the march would be replicated in other African countries. They also disclosed that the campaign would be sustained until Africa got what it truly deserved.

Meanwhile, a training programme on tax and IFFs organised by the Tax Justice Network – Africa (TJNA) for selected African journalists has ended in Nairobi, Kenya.

Background

Illicit financial flows out of Africa have become a matter of major concern because of the scale and negative impact of such flows on Africa’s development and governance agenda.

The amount lost by Africa through IFFs is approximately double the official development assistance (ODA) that Africa receives and, indeed, the estimate may well be short of reality as accurate data does not exist for all transactions and for all African countries, the HLP report has noted.

Preliminary evidence showed that taking prompt action to curtail illicit financial outflows from Africa would go a long way to provide a major source of funds for development programmes on the continent.

“One of the keys to achieving success is the adoption of laws, regulations and policies that encourage transparent financial transactions,” said the report.

The thinking planet?

Earth's Biosphere Is Awash in Information

Evolution News & Views 

Visualize an exoplanet far away: dynamic, comfortable, yet lifeless. It has water, plate tectonics, volcanoes, an atmosphere and all the ingredients for life -- but no life. What would be the primary factor distinguishing it from Earth? A new paper in PLOS Biology suggests that its chief drawback, all things being equal, would be a lack of complex specified information.

In this remarkable paper, Landenmark, Forgan, and Cockell of the United Kingdom Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh attempt "An Estimate of the Total DNA of the Biosphere." The results are staggering:

Modern whole-organism genome analysis, in combination with biomass estimates, allows us to estimate a lower bound on the total information content in the biosphere: 5.3 × 10³¹ (±3.6 × 10³¹) megabases (Mb) of DNA. Given conservative estimates regarding DNA transcription rates, this information content suggestsbiosphere processing speeds exceeding yottaNOPS values (10²⁴Nucleotide Operations Per Second). Although prokaryotes evolved at least 3 billion years before plants and animals, we find that the information content of prokaryotes is similar to plants and animals at the present day. This information-based approachoffers a new way to quantify anthropogenic and natural processesin the biosphere and its information diversity over time.

As a side note, they never explain their odd distinction between "natural" and "anthropomorphic" (are humans not natural?). Their last sentence just says, "This approach may help us understand the changing complexity of the biosphere over time and to predict in new ways, both anthropogenic and natural, future changes in the biosphere." Apparently even typical astrobiologists have an intuitive sense of human exceptionalism.

But returning to the topic of interest, let's ponder the scale of this information content and processing speed. A yottaNOPS is a lotta ops! Each prefix multiplies the prior one by a thousand: kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta. A "yottabase" doesn't even come close to the raw information content of DNA they estimate: 10³¹ megabases. That's the same as 10³⁷ bases, but a yottabase is only 10²⁴ bases (a trillion trillion bases). This means that the information content of the biosphere is 50 x 10¹³ yottabases (500 trillion yottabases). They estimate that living computers perform a yottaNOPS, or 10²⁴ nucleotide operations per second, on this information.

You can pick yourself off the floor now.

This is a profound indication of the priority of information to life. It's not just the rocks, water, and elements that characterize Earth, but the astonishing amount of information and information processing that goes on all around us. That's why we have fish, birds, insects, bacteria, mammals, and people.

But how does a scientific materialist account for this incredible computing power? Let's see what the three astrobiologists do with it. First, they keenly recognize the similarity of DNA processing to computer processing:

Biodiversity and habitat loss is recognised as a global issue. In response, substantial research effort has been invested in genome sequencing and the preservation of vulnerable species and habitats. However, despite these remarkable advances, to our knowledge, there is still no estimate of the total information content of the biosphere. Using available DNA sequencing and genome data, combined with large-scale surveys of biomass, we present an alternative way of quantifying and understanding biodiversity. This is accomplished by adopting an information view of biodiversity, in which the total amount of information in the biosphere is represented by the available amount of DNA (Fig 1). In this way, the biosphere can be visualised as a large, parallel supercomputer, with the information storage represented by the total amount of DNA and the processing power symbolised by transcription rates. In analogy with the Internet, all organisms on Earth are individual containers of information connected through interactions and biogeochemical cycles in a large, global, bottom-up network. By combining data on genome size, spatial diversity, and mass from different prokaryotes, eukaryotes, and the viruses, we estimate the total biomass for each group and then derive a first-order, lower-bound approximation for the total DNA content of each group.

Figure 1 in their paper, reproduced above, illustrates their main point, summarized by the caption: "Storing the total amount of information encoded in DNA in the biosphere, 5.3 × 10³¹ megabases (Mb), would require approximately 10²¹ supercomputers with the average storage capacity of the world's four most powerful supercomputers."

How much land surface would be required for 10²¹ supercomputers (a "zetta-computer")? The Titan supercomputer takes up 404 m² of space. If we assume just 100 m² for each supercomputer, we would still need 10²³ square meters to hold them all. Universe Today estimates the total surface of Earth (including the oceans) at 510 million km², which equates to 5.1 x 10¹⁴ m². That's 9 orders of magnitude short of the zetta-computer footprint, meaning we would need a billion Earths to have enough space for all the computers needed to match the equivalent computing power life performs on DNA!

That calculation included the ocean surface for comparison, since much life is in the ocean. Although life occupies multiple levels in the ocean, land, and air, the biosphere represents a very thin veneer of the Earth's overall volume. It's certainly unreasonable to expect every square meter of a planet's surface to contain computers; where would the power come from? It only requires one planet -- not a billion -- to hold all the DNA processors, because life is so miniaturized and efficient, using energy from the sun.

The implications of this "information-based view of the biosphere" are not lost on the astrobiologists. They dismiss Gaia but leave a door open for intelligent design:

We note that the approach that we propose here (and the analogy of supercomputers) does not necessarily imply a global, Gaia-like superorganism. We merely observe that ultimately all organisms interact with each other and the environment. Thus, theinformation being processed in the biosphere is interlinked in a large mass of organisms, however one chooses to conceptualise this. It does not have to be considered as a single, self-regulating organism. The manner in which the total information in the biosphere is processed, and the degree to which it is coordinated and interlinked in feedback processes, is another matter, but one that could be investigated using an information-based approach.

The rest of the paper discusses how the researchers arrived at their numbers and how the values might have varied over time. (They estimated that the information content in prokaryotes, the simplest organisms, is similar to that of higher organisms -- within two orders of magnitude, which they found surprising.) They also include caveats about assumptions and uncertainties in their measurements and offer suggestions for answering future questions. The whole paper is very interesting.

But the damage is done. Even if their estimates need to be revised by a terabase or two some day, they have made it clear that our biosphere is awash in information. Though clearly evolutionists, they have presented a significant challenge to scientific materialism to account for all this processing power. Simultaneously, they demonstrate the fruitfulness of an information-based approach to the investigation of life.

Might we suggest they take a look at Being as Communion by William Dembski in their spare time.