On the three body problem.

 

Serendipity did it?

Exploring inner space?

 

On time at the speed of light

 

All book smarts no street smarts?

 

Isaac Newton scientific revolutionary among other things

 

The ministry of truth is on the march?

 Slouching Toward Totalitarianism — How to Fight Science Censorship

Andrew McDiarmid

Scientific censorship is on the rise. Governments are colluding with Big Tech to suppress unfavorable ideas. De-platforming and dismissal campaigns are all the rage. How do we prevent our society from slouching towards totalitarianism? On a new episode of ID the Future, host Casey Luskin welcomes science journalist Denyse O’Leary to discuss today’s forms of censorship, how they affect the intelligent design community, and most importantly, what we can do about it.

The Internet was supposed to represent a great democratization of ideas where everyone could have a voice and access the world’s information, says Dr. Luskin. Today it is becoming a battleground of open and hidden censorship. O’Leary explains why. She also analyzes the latest form of censorship — the idea of “disinformation.” In simplest terms, disinformation is any information the government doesn’t want you to have. Luskin and O’Leary give examples of how this is playing out in science. The intelligent design community is no stranger to the impact of censorship, of course. But this refresher on the latest forms of censorship should inspire all supporters of free science to continue defending and advocating for a diversity of opinions to exist on the Internet and in our society. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

On resisting settled science's ministry of truth.

 

It's 2024 and the onward march of science continues apace.

 

Quantum technology?

 

Even Darwinists are admitting that junk DNA is junk no more?

 

On separating the hype from the reality in science news.

 From Scientists and Science Media, a Flood of Disinformation

Eric Hedin

Spending time perusing popular science media outlets can give one the impression that much of science is on the verge of being overturned. Within the last month, samples of sensationalized science reporting, reported below, suggest that major questions on naturalistic abiogenesis have been solved, stellar astrophysics is misunderstood, the Big Bang model is being refuted, and that the cosmological and astronomical conclusion of dark matter is unwarranted.

Big Claims, Little Evidence

Here’s a sampling of science reporting that makes bigger claims than the evidence supports. 

At Science Daily, “A new study shows how the chemical properties of RNA molecules could have facilitated the emergence of complex life.” This one focuses on how an RNA strand could grow in a water-covered early-Earth environment, but it ignores the deeper problem of how information coding for functional, life-essential biochemistry could arise naturally.

“Why Is Life Left-Handed? We Might Finally Know.” Sabine Hossenfelder reviews recent research suggestions that the unique “handedness” of bio-relevant molecules, such as the amino acids that comprise proteins, arose from a preferential interaction of the Earth’s magnetic field and molecules of a certain chirality. Remnant magnetization of some rocks perhaps complemented the effect. Suggestions such as these, or others involving the rotation of the Earth, come nowhere near to answering the question of how to explain the strict homochirality of biomolecules. And again, the issue is a distraction from the deeper problem of how the instruction set for building all of the thousands of different life-essential proteins out of homochiral amino acids could have come about by natural processes.

At Physics Magazine, “Heavy Element Quandary in Stars Worsened by New Nuclear Data.” Researchers conclude that their results on cerium nucleosyntheses mean “there is something we don’t understand about how nucleosynthesis happens.” This has been the state of affairs ever since the dawn of nuclear physics. Particle physics experiments, in conjunction with stellar astrophysics, has advanced our understanding of nucleosynthesis, but admitting some uncertainty in the formation process of a rare element is not to be equated with a breakdown in astrophysics and cosmological models. Further research will undoubtedly refine our understanding of this particular issue of stellar elemental abundance.

At Closer to Truth, “Roger Penrose — Did the Universe Begin?” Without any evidence, Penrose postulates an infinite sequence of expanding universes, arguing that after infinite time, an infinitely expanded universe would become spatially equivalent to the singularity representing the big bang of a subsequent universe. In a conversation with Brian Keating and Justin Brierley, Stephen Meyer critiques the Penrose proposal, citing other cosmologists to conclude that “Penrose is just speculating,” invoking a physical field with “god-like properties.” At 10:11, Penrose tips his hand with a statement that reveals his personal motivation to avoid a true beginning to the universe: “There’s something within us all that would like an eternal universe.”

From EurekAlert!, “Did the first cells evolve in soda lakes?” Lake water with dissolved sodium and carbonate species is shown to allow a very slight nucleotide extension of RNA as well as the formation of fatty-acid membranes, once researchers added fatty acids to the water. The researchers’ conclusion trumpets unwarranted enthusiasm for solving the problem of abiogenesis: “Taken together, our results suggest that natural soda lakes…could have supported the formation of the earliest cellular life.” Again, pronouncements such as these reveal a willful blindness, ignoring major issues that must be overcome for any origin-of-life scenario to approach feasibility. James Tour’s challenge to researchers still stands.

At Science Daily, “New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter.” In this audacious study, researchers dismiss two well-established conclusions of physics, namely the constancy of the forces of nature and the constant value of the speed of light in vacuum, in order to find room for their theory suggesting that the universe has no room for dark matter. Aside from the problem of their unsupported assumptions, their conclusion fails to account for multiple other lines of evidence that point to the existence of dark matter. 

An Unfortunate Practice

These exaggerated reports exemplify an unfortunate practice often employed by those who seek to make a case for a novel scientific conclusion: glamorize one thread of evidence while ignoring the entire tapestry of evidence that stands against a favored conclusion.

I’ll venture to suggest that this flood of disinformation represents a strategy to prop up the faltering worldview of materialism. The effect of the deluge is twofold — one is to mislead the uninformed into thinking that established science doesn’t really support the conclusions of intelligent design. The other is to attempt to wear out those who defend ID with an incessant barrage of news soundbites insinuating that recent discoveries or theoretical speculations stand to throw established science into the trash bin.

What’s an appropriate response to this trend of disinformation? The work of Discovery Institute has long served effectively to counter the negative influence of materialism. Emphasizing established scientific principles that broadly eliminate whole classes of speculations is an approach that will eventually shift the consensus towards the truth of reality. For example, using the conclusions of information theory will negate any speculation implying natural processes alone can form the information-rich biomolecules within living cells. Soda lakes (pictured above), magnetized rock substrates, RNA chemistry, or any other natural scheme will always fail to account for the organization of the complex biochemical processes necessary for any living organism. 

Discover to Uncover

Likewise, while various details about stellar formation and nucleosynthesis, or exactly when the first galaxies formed, may be refined by new observations, the lines of observational evidence and theoretical conclusions pointing to a singularity event at the beginning of our universe are well established. Dark matter and dark energy are more than mere placeholders for ignorance but are rather postulates reached by considerations of multiple lines of observational evidence, coupled with well-established physical theories. We can anticipate that ongoing efforts to characterize these phenomena will lead to fascinating illuminations of what we now call “dark.” Furthermore, if the historical trend of advancing scientific knowledge continues, the more we discover, the more evidence for fine-tuning and design will be uncovered.

Cloud wars are coming?

 

Nuclear fusion to the rescue?

 

On chirality and life.

 

The search for a third way rolls on.

 

The myth of the hegemony of the gene?

 

The butterfly effect is a thing?

 

Following the politics?

 What’s in a Name? Debating the Anthropocene Epoch

Denyse O Leary

Earlier this month, geologists voted down a proposal to give the years since 1950 a geological name, the Anthropocene Epoch. The vote at the subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) was 12 to 4, with 2 abstentions. Thus, the period in which we now live — which started with the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 11,700 years ago — will continue to be called the Holocene Epoch.

Why Does It Matter?

Assigning names to eras is a way of teaching history. That often includes imparting a message or a value judgment. Think “Dark Ages,” for example, or “Golden Age of Jazz.” Such terms are not mere names.

The geologists were asked by peers to rule that the human impact on Earth in the past 75 years has been so great that it should be an epoch all its own. But committee members pointed to the growth of agriculture over the entire Holocene and the Industrial Revolution that began centuries ago. At least one mentioned the impact of colonization over recent centuries.

Humans are accused of hastening the extinction of the mammoth, last noted about 4,000 years ago, and the mastodon, last noted about 10,000 years ago. We are also accused of extinguishing the giant versions of cave bears, sloths, and armadillos as we spread over the globe, which must have had an environmental effect. So why the sudden focus on the last 75 years?

Nuclear Weapons Drove the Demand for Name Change

From New Scientist, we learn that, for some scientists, the spread of nuclear weapons justifies naming a new epoch. Still, for most committee members, the brevity of the period was a deciding factor:

“The time span of the proposed Anthropocene is no more than 75 years — a single human lifetime,” says [Mike] Walker. “This does not fit comfortably into the geological time scale, where units typically span thousands, tens of thousands or millions of years.”

[Simon] Turner and [Colin] Waters disagree with the decision, arguing that there is ample evidence for the Anthropocene: “All these lines of evidence indicate that the Anthropocene, though currently brief, is — we emphasise — of sufficient scale and importance to be represented on the Geological Time Scale.” 

CHEN LY, “SURPRISE DECISION NOT TO DEFINE THE ANTHROPOCENE SHOCKS SCIENTISTS, NEW SCIENTIST, MARCH 5, 2024

Of course, if impact rather than duration is the deciding criterion, surely the period of the total extinction of the dinosaurs — which may have taken a similar amount of time — should also have its own epoch name. Currently, the extinction simply marks the end of the Cretaceous Era (145–66 mya), though it is sometimes called the K–T event, to emphasize the role of the asteroid hit.

In any event, a number of scientists were vocal about their disappointment and efforts are underway to get the vote canceled due to “procedural irregularities.”

Some Underlying Issues

The current impetus for the name change stems from the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG),which, last July, found radioactive isotopes dating from the 1950s preserved in the bed of Crawford Lake (pictured above) in a wilderness in southern Ontario, Canada.

But University of Alberta geologist John Weissenberger thinks that the driving force is current angst over the environment:

The concept of the “Anthropocene” is saturated with society’s current angst about the environment and the belief that we are doing irreparable harm to the planet. If this is true, one might argue, then surely we humans have launched a new geological epoch that will forever stain the earth’s geological record. As with many other parts of these debates, however, this one says as much or more about us and our collective psyche than it does about the planet and its natural history.

JOHN WEISSENBERGER, TINKERING WITH TIME: THE CAMPAIGN TO CONJURE UP AN “ANTHROPOCENE” EPOCH, C2C JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 16, 2024

He contends that, far from our profoundly changing the planet, if human civilization were wiped out, it’s not clear how much would even be left to find after a few million years. True, there are lots of humans — but there were lots of dinosaurs too. The fossils we discover are a depressingly small sample.

Thus, he worries, “Some earth scientists on the Anthropocene bandwagon are surely well-intentioned, but others are likely to be chasing potential research dollars that come from supporting ‘societally relevant’ science and have thus been drawn into this politicized enterprise.”

Getting Off the Bandwagon

University of Maryland geographer Erle C. Ellis, a founding member (2009) of the group pushing the new epoch, agrees that the name change is unwarranted but offers a quite different perspective from Weissberger’s. He resigned in 2023 because he thinks that creating a new epoch for every key development understates the effect of human actions:

I resigned because I was convinced that this proposal defined the Anthropocene so narrowly that it would damage broader scientific and public understanding.

By tying the start of the human age to such a recent and devastating event — nuclear fallout — this proposal risked sowing confusion about the deep history of how humans are transforming the Earth, from climate change and biodiversity losses to pollution by plastics and tropical deforestation.

ERLE C. ELLIS, “THE ANTHROPOCENE IS NOT AN EPOCH — BUT THE AGE OF HUMANS IS MOST DEFINITELY UNDERWAY,” THE CONVERSATION, MARCH 5, 2024

Whether Weissenberger or Ellis proves more correct in the long run, today’s reality is that the Anthropocene bandwagon, broadcasting so much cultural vibe, may not run out of gas any time soon. As in some other disciplines today, science had just better not get in the way.

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