Toward a theory devolution? IV

Listen: Behe, McDiarmid Continue a Discussion of the Lents Review
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

On a new episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid continues his conversation with biochemist Michael Behe about the response to Behe’s just released book, Darwin Devolves. Their focus is the review in Science by lead author Nathan Lents, with Joshua Swamidass and Richard Lenski.

Mike and Andrew have a good time considering the range of ways in which the preemptive, prepublication review fell short. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

As I’ve noted, the  extensive discussion of the review, by Behe himself and others at Evolution News, is simply due to the fact that Science is such a major and respected venue. It is the New York Times of the science community here in the United States. On ID the Future, Behe has some further, sharp words for the Lents document. I will add that after Professor Lents lashed out rather wildly this week, writing at the website Peaceful Science, I agreed with Joshua Swamidass, who administers the site, that it was time to cool things off a bit.

In that spirit, I offer no commentary other than to say, it’s very much worth your time to listen to this podcast, the second in a series. (See here for the first part.) Behe summarizes well where the review goes wrong, and what that indicates about the future of the evolution debate.

Long dead,human exceptionalism is gradually being buried unlamented.

Peter Singer Thinks Intellectually Disabled Less Valuable than Pigs

Wesley J. Smith

In his apologetics for infanticide, Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has used a baby with Down syndrome as an example of a killable infant based on utilitarian measurements. (He actually supports infanticide because babies -- whether disabled or not -- are, in his view, not "persons.")

To Singer, moral value primarily comes from intellectual capacities, and that means developmentally and cognitively disabled human beings (also, the unborn and infants) have less value than other human beings, and indeed, a lower worth than some animals.

Were society ever to adopt Singer's bigoted anti-human exceptionalism views, it would mark the end of universal human rights, opening the door to tyrannical campaigns against the most weak and vulnerable -- you know, the kind of people that the Singers of the world deem resource wasters.

It would also break the spine of unconditional love, as our children would have to earn their place by possessing requisite capacities.

Consider the recent statements by Singer, published in the Journal of Practical Ethics, in which he explains why he would adopt out a child with Down syndrome. He then expresses a profound bigotry against people with cognitive and developmental disabilities (emphasis added):

For me, the knowledge that my [hypothetical Down] child would not be likely to develop into a person whom I could treat as an equal, in every sense of the word, who would never be able to have children of his or her own, who I could not expect to grow up to be a fully independent adult, and with whom I could expect to have conversations about only a limited range of topics would greatly reduce my joy in raising my child and watching him or her develop.

"Disability" is a very broad term, and I would not say that, in general, "a life with disability" is of less value than one without disability. Much will depend on the nature of the disability.

But let's turn the question around, and ask why someone would deny that the life of a profoundly intellectually disabled human being is of less value than the life of a normal human being. Most people think that the life of a dog or a pig is of less value than the life of a normal human being.

On what basis, then, could they hold that the life of a profoundly intellectually disabled human being with intellectual capacities inferior to those of a dog or a pig is of equal value to the life of a normal human being? This sounds like speciesism to me, and as I said earlier, I have yet to see a plausible defence of speciesism. After looking for more than forty years, I doubt that there is one.

Invidious discrimination exists when equals -- e.g., all human beings -- are denigrated as unequal based on some category that the bigot believes reduces the status of the discriminated against human, e.g., racism, sexism, and Singer-style discrimination against people with cognitive or developmental disabilities.

But human beings and animals do not inhabit the same moral realm. It is not wrong or discrimination to view and treat us differently than we do them.

Moreover, the very concept of "speciesism" -- used liberally in animal rights activism and bioethics -- is inherently and invidiously anti-human because it reduces us to so many carbon molecules with no inherent value beyond our cognitive capabilities at the moment of measurement. To repeat myself, the idea of speciesism, like utilitarianism, makes universal human rights impossible to sustain intellectually.

Assuming such utilitarian values would destroy the principles of Western civilization. And never mind the real capacities of many people with Down, whom Singer mischaracterizes, or their extraordinary loving natures -- which I have yet to see Singer opine much about. To Singer, intellect trumps all.

That's bigotry any way you look at it, no different from racism, except that his victims are less able to defend themselves.

I have always found it odd that Singer faces little of the opprobrium society metes out to other bigots. Indeed, he was brought to Princeton from Australia and given one of the world's most prestigious chairs in bioethics precisely because of these attitudes.

Despite supporting the propriety of killing babies, I have no doubt that Singer will continue to be the New York Times' favorite philosopher.

Yet more parody defying absurdity From OOL science.

Here We Go Again: For Complex Life, Just Add Fertilizer
Evolution News & Views

It's such an easy point. A child can grasp it. You may have all the ingredients you want, in the right quantities, but without a builder, nothing functionally complex will emerge. Here, we'll bring you tons of lumber, nails, and pipe. Need wire? Have all you want. Anything else? Just ask, and we'll throw it in at no extra charge: screws, paint, glass. Why, we will even lay a bunch of tools on the ground beside the pile.

Now, let it sit there, exposed to the sun and rain for as long as you like. Billions of years even. How many expect a house or a skyscraper to emerge by natural causes alone?

Evolutionists seem strangely immune to the obviousness of the logic here. They want to explain life's origin and complexity by reference to the availability of building blocks alone. Remember those who tried to account for the  Cambrian explosion by the rise of oxygen? And  origin of life by "a pinch of thickener" in a jumble of common molecules? Look, we can make it much, much easier for evolution. We will even arrange all the atoms into amino acids, sugars, fats and complex organic compounds and dump them into the oceans. Have some polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, citric acid, purines and pyrimidines, all brought special delivery by comets and asteroids. Plop! Into the primordial soup they go. Here, have some energy! Have all the UV light, lightning, and volcanoes you want.

The only rule is: no chemists, no mind, and no intelligence.

In  Illustra's film Origin, Discovery Institute biologist Ann Gauger has a pithy way of explaining the hopelessness of natural processes acting on building blocks. "If I put amino acids in a test tube in my lab, even if I added heat and shook it up real well, and kept doing that for a hundred years, or a thousand years, or ten thousand years, or a million years, nothing would happen."

Evolutionists must play by the rules they agreed to. Discovery Institute's Paul Nelson explains the rules in the film:

When you come to the origin of life, the rules -- and this isn't the science itself, this is the underlying philosophy -- the rules say, to solve the problem, you can use matter and energy, and natural law, natural regularities and chance processes, but that exhausts your toolkit. What you're not allowed to use, fundamentally by the rules, so-called rules of science, is mind or intelligence. If you had to attach a name to this position, you can't do better than scientific materialism: a philosophy that tells you "the only acceptable explanation has to be rendered in terms of matter and energy." And if you can't solve the problem using those tools, you're not allowed to change the rules. So from that perspective, how did life come to be via matter and energy alone? Now: try to solve the problem. [Emphasis added.]
To go from microbes to animals presents the same problem, because the same rules apply. Put building blocks into the hand of natural selection, add energy, and once again, nothing will happen. Natural selection is natural, not intelligent. It is matter and energy in motion. It has no foresight. It has no direction. It has no goal. Mindless entities do not compete. They do not try to outdo each other in the struggle for life. Without a mind or plan, natural selection cannot select. In a real sense, natural selection is a restatement of, "Whatever will be, will be." If everything goes extinct in the next meteor strike, so be it. Nobody cares in Darwin's world.

Yet paper after paper appears that fudges on the established rules. A recent example is found in Nature, where Reinhard et al. try to account for the rise of complex life by linking it to the rise of available phosphorus after billions of years. The news from Georgia Tech reads like a myth:

For three billion years or more, the evolution of the first animal life on Earth was ready to happen, practically waiting in the wings. But the breathable oxygen it likely required wasn't there, and a lack of simple nutrients may have been to blame.
Then came a fierce planetary metamorphosis. Roughly 800 million years ago, in the late Proterozoic Eon, phosphorus, a chemical element essential to all life, began to accumulate in shallow ocean zones near coastlines widely considered to be the birthplace of animals and other complex organisms, according to a new study by geoscientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Yale University.

Here we go again. Poor animals; they were trying to evolve, but they couldn't breathe. They needed fertilizer.

Picture again our lumber pile, now with bags of fertilizer next to everything. Picture Ann Gauger's test tube. Add some phosphorus. Bubble in some oxygen. Any help? How will simply adding more building blocks build a building?

But, the scientists object, we're talking about living cells before the first animals. Right. Saturate the oceans with bacteria, toss in the phosphorus, and watch the oxygen levels rise. Do they really expect trilobites, worms, and crustaceans to appear?

We place our phosphorus record in a quantitative biogeochemical model framework and find that a combination of enhanced phosphorus scavenging in anoxic, iron-rich oceans and a nutrient-based bistability in atmospheric oxygen levels could have resulted in a stable low-oxygen world. The combination of these factors may explain the protracted oxygenation of Earth's surface over the last 3.5 billion years of Earth history. However, our analysis also suggests that a fundamental shift in the phosphorus cycle may have occurred during the late Proterozoic eon (between 800 and 635 million years ago), coincident with a previously inferred shift in marine redox states, severe perturbations to Earth's climate system, and the emergence of animals.
The "emergence of animals." Evidently, those animals were waiting for their phosphorus order to arrive.

Let's review what's required for animal body plans that appeared abruptly at the Cambrian explosion: (1) new cell types, (2) new tissues, (3) new organs, (4) new genes, (5) new gene regulatory networks (GRNs), (6) new systems (digestive, muscular, skeletal, reproductive, central nervous systems, brains, etc.), (7) new levels of hierarchical integration of these systems, (8) new behaviors, (9) new defenses, (10) the ability to grow all these things from a single zygote.

The authors of the paper collected thousands of samples of shallow ocean sediment deposits, and carefully measured their phosphorus levels.

Theoretical predictions and observations from the geochemical record provide strong evidence that the first 80%-90% of Earth's 4.5-billion-year history was characterized by limited P burial in near-shore sediments, a pattern that we link to high C/P ratios in primary producers resulting from an Fe-based nutrient P trap. The shale record we present here, when coupled with our ocean-sediment biogeochemical model, illuminates an Earth system state in which dynamically coupled P- and N-limitation stabilized surface oxygen levels on billion-year timescales. However, there is evidence for at least periodic shifts away from pervasive Fe-rich waters in the late Tonian, or Ediacaran periods, coincident with our observed increase in sedimentary P enrichments. We propose that models seeking to explain the transition to an oxygen-rich ocean-atmosphere system in which early animals thrived and complex ecosystems developed should focus on mechanisms for overcoming enhanced P scavenging and transiting the N-fixation barrier that would act to prevent P-driven increases in ocean-atmosphere O2 levels during nascent global oxygenation events.
Minus the jargon:

The elevated availability of nutrients and bolstered oxygen also likely fueled evolution's greatest lunge forward.
They backpedal a little, saying, "The researchers are careful not to imply that phosphorous necessarily caused the chain reaction, but in sedimentary rock taken from coastal areas, the nutrient has marked the spot where that burst of life and climate change took off." So instead, they explain, "That first signal of phosphorus in Earth's coast shallows pops up in the shale record like a shot from a starting pistol in the race for abundant life."

Ah, now it all makes sense. Someone go over to our pile of lumber and fire a pistol.

The daily mail is Britain's blight?:Pros and cons.