Lunacy re:lunar origins.

How the Moon Formed: 5 Wild Lunar Theories
By Mike Wall

Capture

Some researchers suggest that the moon may have originally formed elsewhere — perhaps even around another planet, such as Venus — before being grabbed by Earth's gravitational pull. Other worlds have gained moons in this manner. For example, Phobos and Deimos, the two tiny satellites of Mars, are thought to be captured asteroids. 

The capture idea isn't really an origin theory, of course; it just concerns how the moon came to orbit Earth. And it has some major problems, the most serious of which is the geochemical similarity of the Earth and moon. The two bodies have nearly identical oxygen isotope ratios, suggesting that they formed from the same pool of raw material.

Fission

Another idea — apparently thought up by Charles Darwin's son George in the 19th century — posits that the material that formed the moon was ejected into space by a molten, fast-spinning Earth in the very early days of the solar system. 

Most scientists discount the fission hypothesis, saying that Earth could not have been spinning fast enough to expel a huge blob of rock. But one 2010 study suggested that a natural nuclear explosion, set up by the superconcentration of radioactive elements, may have provided the kick to dislodge a moon-size piece of the early Earth into orbit. 

Co-formation

It's also possible that the moon formed alongside Earth 4.5 billion years ago, coalescing from gas and dust in the same part of our solar system's protoplanetary disk. 

While this hypothesis can account for the isotopic similarities between the Earth and moon, it falls short in other ways. It cannot explain the high angular momentum of the Earth-moon system, for example, or why the moon has such a small iron core compared to that of our planet. 

Colliding planetesimals

Some scientists have suggested that the moon condensed from the debris produced when planetesimals — the building blocks that grew into Earth, Mars and other full-fledged planets — slammed into each other shortly after the solar system formed. 

Little evidence supports this theory, which also cannot explain the geochemical similarities between the Earth and its natural satellite. 

Giant impact

The leading theory of the moon's formation posits that it coalesced from material blasted into space when a planet-size body slammed into the newly formed Earth about 4.4 billion years ago.

One variant of this idea holds that the impactor, dubbed "Theia," was about the size of Mars. Another version, introduced in 2012, suggests that both the impactor and the target — the proto-Earth — were about 50 percent as massive as Earth is today.

While the giant-impact hypothesis continues to be tweaked and refined, it does the best job of explaining the moon's composition and orbit, most scientists say. For example, the theory predicts a small iron core for the moon, since it would have formed primarily from the mantles of the impactor and early Earth (both of which lacked iron, which had already been concentrated deep in the core).

The danger of scientism to pure science.

What Would Really Be “Catastrophic” for Science?
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Wailing about the threat to science from “deniers” and “anti-science” skeptics is an inescapable feature of public discussions at the moment. Recently, Discovery Institute’s Wesley J. Smith, Jay Richards, Stephen C. Meyer were at the  Heritage Foundation  to discuss actual threats to science. They nailed a couple of those that deserve a lot more attention than they receive.

It’s a new podcast episode of ID the Future.  Listen to it here, or download it here.

First, insofar as the general public perceives, rightly, that viewpoints on science are subject to distorting social, political, and financial pressures, that really is “catastrophic” (Jay Richards’s word). Why would anyone trust the institutions of science, knowing that researchers are not free to follow the truth wherever it leads? Certainly, in the context of the evolution debate, pressures to conform are intense, as we know.

Second, the Discovery team was joined by Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute who also made a great point. Lewis highlights the problem of science’s dependence on government funding. In the conversation, there’s an interesting clash of opinions between Lewis and Wesley Smith on whether science realistically could be detached from the government. I think Wesely is right that it could not — not entirely.

Be that as it may, Lewis cites a telling passage from President Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address. Beside the prophetic warning about the power of the “military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower was concerned about what you might call the scientific-governmental complex.

Of scientific research, he worried, “A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.”

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

That prospect, science as the fief of a privileged caste seeking to direct the lives and values of others, pursuing a less-than-transparent ideological agenda, would also call the integrity of the scientific enterprise into question. That too, in Jay’s expression, would be catastrophic.

Yet more iconoclasm.

A Darwinian contr.. sorry non-controversy over natural selection.

No Controversies About Darwinism? Try This One
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

We are often told that the science on Darwinism is settled. Advocates of academic freedom urge that teachers be allowed to challenge students and encourage critical thinking skills by sharing scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory — “teach the controvery,” in other words. Darwin defenders respond with expressions of disbelief. The theory has no weaknesses, they say, and no controversy exists.

There might be minor disputes at the fringes, but no scientist doubts the certainty of Darwinian evolution. We can see them now, nodding in agreement: “Evolution itself has long since passed out of the field of scientific controversy,” as William Patten of Dartmouth opined in 1930. “There is no other subject on which scientific opinion is so completely unanimous. It is the one great truth we most surely know.”

How about the controversy over the central tenet of Darwinian evolution?

Nothing could be more central to Darwinian evolution than natural selection. It was in the title of Darwin’s Origin. It is the major “mechanism” along with random mutation that comprises neo-Darwinian theory. Natural selection and Darwinian evolution are inseparable. But what does natural selection mean? What entity does natural selection act on? It’s a controversy that has raged since 1859.

One current battle, showing no sign of abating, is between the kin selectionists and the group selectionists (see Casey Luskin’s play-by-play call in 2011  here  and Denyse O’Leary’s post-skirmish analysis in 2015  here). Kin selectionists think that natural selection favors genes of related individuals. The idea, also called inclusive fitness, purports to explain self-sacrifice in animals and humans — why worker ants serve the queen without reproducing themselves, and why humans put themselves in danger for their families. Some of their genes, presumably, will be passed on through their kin. Kin selection theory was given a mathematical formulation by W. H. Hamilton in 1964, to the relief of many Darwinians eager to find an explanation for altruism. It was promoted by E.O. Wilson, father of sociobiology (which led to evolutionary psychology), Richard Dawkins, father of Selfish Gene theory, Jerry Coyne, and many other Darwinians.

But when E.O. Wilson jumped ship in 2004, expressing doubts about the empirical evidence for kin selection, his former friends turned on him. Wilson had joined forces with mathematicians who cast doubt on “Hamilton’s Rule” undergirding the theory. When Wilson, with Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita criticized kin selection as empirically lacking in 2011 in Nature,, 150 other evolutionists banded together to defend it, attacking Wilson’s motivations and arguments. There’s been a standoff ever since.

Now, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Wilson, Nowak and two others have launched another attack, with a vengeance: kin selection is not just wrong, it’s not even scientific! Here’s the fightin’-words title of the new paper: “The general form of Hamilton’s rule makes no predictions and cannot be tested empirically.”

Hamilton’s rule is a well-known concept in evolutionary biology. It is usually perceived as a statement that makes predictions about natural selection in situations where interactions occur between genetic relatives. Here, we examine what has been called the “exact and general” formulation of Hamilton’s rule. We show that in this formulation, which is widely endorsed by proponents of inclusive fitness theory, Hamilton’s rule does not make any prediction and cannot be tested empirically. This formulation of Hamilton’s rule is not a consequence of natural selection and not even a statement specifically about biology. We give simple and transparent expressions for the quantities of benefit, cost, and relatedness that appear in Hamilton’s rule, which reveal that these quantities depend on the data that are to be predicted. [Emphasis added.]

Not even a statement about biology? Ouch! We can expect some fireworks over this paper. It gets worse:

Hamilton’s rule asserts that a trait is favored by natural selection if the benefit to others, B, multiplied by relatedness, R, exceeds the cost to self, C. Specifically, Hamilton’s rule states that the change in average trait value in a population is proportional to BR−C. This rule is commonly believed to be a natural law making important predictions in biology, and its influence has spread from evolutionary biology to other fields including the social sciences. Whereas many feel that Hamilton’s rule provides valuable intuition, there is disagreement even among experts as to how the quantities B, R, and C should be defined for a given system. Here, we investigate a widely endorsed formulation of Hamilton’s rule, which is said to be as general as natural selection itself. We show that, in this formulation, Hamilton’s rule does not make predictions and cannot be tested empirically. It turns out that the parameters B and C depend on the change in average trait value and therefore cannot predict that change. In this formulation, which has been called “exact and general” by its proponents, Hamilton’s rule can “predict” only the data that have already been given.

In short, Nowak, McAvoy, Allen, and Wilson are saying that proponents of kin selection are deluded. They think they have a natural law, when all they have is a tautology. It’s not just that evidence is lacking for their “intuition” about kin selection; the mathematical formulation it rests on is vacuous.

Is this just a minor dispute about particulars of Darwinism? Notice that the authors claim it is “commonly believed to be a natural law” about evolution, and “its influence has spread from evolutionary biology to other fields including the social sciences.” The whole apple barrel is rotten! Wilson’s friends have launched this salvo in an open-access paper, viewable by the public. Are school boards and teachers going to be allowed to quote this paper, seeing that it is by mainstream scientists for mainstream scientists? Can they teach this controversy that gets to the core of Darwinism?

Wilson’s colleagues note three “astonishing facts” about Hamilton’s Rule:

“First, HRG is logically incapable of making any prediction about any situation because the benefit, B, and the cost, C, cannot be known in advance. They depend on the data that are to be predicted.”

“The second astonishing fact of HRG [Hamilton’s Rule – general] is that the prediction, which exists only in retrospect, is not based on relatedness or any other aspect of population structure.”

“The third fact of HRG is that no conceivable experiment exists that could test (or invalidate) this rule.” I.e., it violates the falsifiability criterion.

From there, the mathematicians get to work, proving these assertions. In the ending discussion, they illustrate the problems with a joke:

The predictive power of HRG is equivalent to the following example: If you give me the shoe sizes and heights of a group of people, then I can predict the heights. My algorithm also works if you gave me the wrong shoe sizes.

They also say, “In short, there is a startling discrepancy between the common intuitive understanding of Hamilton’s rule and the derivation of this rule that has been described as exact and general.” Kin selection’s proponents have basically been trusting in fake science for over 50 years!

We can safely predict a powerful comeback by the proponents of inclusive fitness. Look for it in the pages of PNAS or elsewhere in the coming days and weeks. But it doesn’t matter, because they’re all wrong. Tom Bethell wrote in Darwin’s House of Cards that natural selection is unscientific no matter how it is formulated. After looking at the logic of it in Chapter 5, and the presumed evidence for it in Chapter 6, he concluded, “Natural selection functions in the realm of philosophy, not science.” For support, he quotes none other than staunch Darwinian Richard Lewontin of Harvard, who at least had the intellectual rigor to critically examine the meaning of natural selection:

For what good is a theory that is guaranteed by its internal logical structure to agree with all conceivable observations, irrespective of the real structure of the world? If scientists are going to use logically unbeatable theories about the world, they might as well give up natural science and take up religion. Yet is that not exactly the situation with Darwinism? (Lewontin, “Testing the Theory of Natural Selection,” Nature 236, no. 543 (1972): 181-182, cited by Bethell, p. 65).

We expect E.O. Wilson would be quick to defend natural selection. The dispute between the kin selectionists and group selectionists, he would probably respond, is about the target of selection, not the fact of selection. That would reduce the controversy to the deluded majority that believes kin selection is a law of nature or a valid target of natural selection. The problem runs deeper than that. How can any target of selection — from the gene to the group — be empirically or mathematically validated? Interestingly, Wilson does not attempt to offer a mathematical rule for his favorite alternative, group selection. We think that’s because his opponents could shoot his arrows back at him.

For an independent check, look at what Charles Lineweaver said about evolution in an interview in New Scientist back in November 2012. Asked about one proposed definition of life as “anything that undergoes Darwinian evolution,” he responded,

We pretend that makes sense, but if you look at it, it makes no sense at all. What is the unit of Darwinian evolution? Is it the gene? Is it the cell? Is it a multicellular organism? Is a city evolving? How about Gaia? Is that a life form?

To make matters worse (for the Darwinians), natural selection theory would still have deep problems even if all biologists could agree on the unit of selection. Bethell began his journey as a Darwin skeptic by pondering the circular reasoning inherent in selection theory. “Is there any way of deciding what is ‘fit’ other than seeing what survives?” he asks in the Introduction (p. 11). “If not, maybe Darwin was arguing in a self-confirming circle: the survival of the survivors.” Throughout his journey, as he documents in the book, he found leading Darwinists admitting to this core flaw in the logic of natural selection. In the end, he confirmed his hunch that “natural selection is not remotely law-like. All attempts to state it as a law collapse into the truism that I reviewed in earlier chapters” (p. 244).

Perhaps you’ve watched a magician tie a complex knot, rub it in his hands, and make the knot disappear before your eyes. The trick works because the ends never pass through any of the loops. Natural selection is like that; it can be complexified through jargon, mathematical tricks, and consensus. But when you tug on it, it unravels.

As the battle rages on between the kin selectionists and the group selectionists, or between the gene selectionists and the planet selectionists, keep in mind that the very idea of natural selection — the core principle of Darwinian evolution if there is one — is logically flawed. E.O. Wilson claims that kin selection is unscientific. His opponents will counter that group selection is unscientific. Perhaps it’s all unscientific. Its definitions are fuzzy, its units are unspecified, and it predicts opposite outcomes with equal ease. It cannot be falsified. Students, and thoughtful adults, deserve to know such things.

The Watchtower Society's commentary on the New Testament

CHRISTIAN GREEK SCRIPTURES

So designated to distinguish them from the pre-Christian Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is a common practice to call this latter portion of the Bible the New Testament.—See BIBLE.

There are 27 canonical books that make up the Christian Greek Scriptures. After the death of Jesus, these books were penned under inspiration by eight men: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James, Peter, and Jude. Not all these men followed Jesus during his ministry; in fact, as far as is known for a certainty, only the three apostles Matthew, John, and Peter did. Mark may have been the “certain young man” who followed Jesus at a distance after he was arrested. (Mr 14:51, 52) At Pentecost, James, Jude, and perhaps Mark were present along with them. (Ac 1:13-15; 2:1) Later the apostle Paul was converted. All these writers became closely associated with the governing body of the first-century congregation in Jerusalem.

In what language were these books originally written? With the exception of the book of Matthew, which was written originally in Hebrew and later translated into Greek, all the other 26 books were written in the common Greek, Koine, the international language of the day.—See MATTHEW, GOOD NEWS ACCORDING TO.

Nor was it a mere coincidence that these inspired Christian men, all of them natural-born Jews (Ro 3:1, 2), had their writings sent out in Greek. These were not private communications but were intended for wide circulation, to be read and studied by all the congregations. (Col 4:16; 1Th 5:27; 2Pe 3:15, 16) The writers were under divine command to spread this good news and teaching to the most distant part of the earth, to places where Hebrew and Latin were not read. (Mt 28:19; Ac 1:8) Even in territories closer to Palestine, there was an increasingly large number of non-Jews coming into the local congregations. Also, when quoting the Hebrew Scriptures, these writers frequently used the Greek Septuagint.

The books of the Christian Greek Scriptures, listed according to the approximate year (C.E.) written, are as follows: Matthew, 41; 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 50 and 51; Galatians, 50-52; 1 and 2 Corinthians, 55; Romans, 56; Luke, 56-58; Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, Philippians, 60-61; Hebrews, Acts, 61; James, before 62; Mark, 60-65; 1 Timothy, Titus, 61-64; 1 Peter, 62-64; 2 Peter, 64; 2 Timothy, Jude, 65; Revelation, 96; John and 1, 2, 3 John, 98. This period of less than 60 years is quite a contrast with the nearly 11 centuries taken to complete the Hebrew Scriptures.

When it came time to combine these books of the Christian Greek Scriptures into a single volume, they were not assembled in the order in which they were written. Rather, they were put in a logical arrangement according to subject matter, which can be classified as (1) the five historical books of the Gospels and Acts, (2) the 21 letters, and (3) the Revelation.

The four Gospels (the word “Gospel” meaning “good news”), written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, give us a fourfold historical account of the life and activity of Jesus, each account being an independent report. The first three of these are sometimes called synoptic (meaning “like view”) because they have a relatively similar approach to Jesus’ ministry in comparison with John’s Gospel, yet each reflects individualism on the part of the writer. John’s Gospel fills in certain details omitted by the other three. The Acts of Apostles then follows in logical sequence, carrying the history of the Christian congregation as established at Pentecost on down nearly 30 years after the death of Jesus.

The congregation’s inner workings, its problems, its public preaching, its other privileges, and its hopes are dealt with in the 21 letters that follow the historical section. Paul is named as the writer of 13 letters. The letter to the Hebrews is also generally ascribed to Paul. Following these writings is a group of letters, most of which were written to all the congregations in general, by James, Peter, John, and Jude. Lastly, as a delightful climax to the whole Bible, is the Revelation with its preview of profound events of the future.

To what extent did writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures quote from the Hebrew Scriptures?

The writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures quoted the Hebrew Scriptures hundreds of times. In the Christian Greek Scriptures, the New World Translation presents as direct quotations 320 passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. According to a listing published by Westcott and Hort, the combined total of quotations and references is some 890. (The New Testament in the Original Greek, Graz, 1974, Vol. I, pp. 581-595) Examples are drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures by all the inspired Christian writers. (1Co 10:11) These Christian writers undoubtedly employed the divine name Jehovah when they were quoting from the Hebrew Scriptures. These later writers acknowledge and include the Hebrew Scriptures as inspired of God and beneficial for completely equipping the man of God for every good work.—2Ti 3:16, 17; 2Pe 1:20, 21.

After the death of the apostles, uninspired writers quoted profusely from the Greek Scriptures, even as the inspired Christian Bible writers had quoted from what came before them.

There are available for comparative study more than 13,000 papyrus and vellum manuscripts containing the whole or a part of the Christian Greek Scriptures, dating from the 2nd to the 16th century. Of these, some 5,000 are in Greek, and the remainder in various other languages. More than 2,000 of the ancient copies contain the Gospels, and more than 700, the letters of Paul. While the original writings themselves are not currently extant, copies date back to the second century, which is very close to the time the originals were written. This vast number of manuscripts has enabled Greek scholars in the course of years to produce a highly refined Greek text of the Scriptures, confirming in many respects the dependability and integrity of our present-day translations of the Christian Greek Scriptures.—See MANUSCRIPTS OF THE BIBLE.

This vast mountain of manuscripts caused one scholar to remark: “The great bulk of the words of the New Testament stand out above all discriminative processes of criticism, because they are free from variation, and need only to be transcribed. . . . If comparative trivialities, such as changes of order, the insertion or omission of the article with proper names, and the like, are set aside, the words in our opinion still subject to doubt can hardly amount to more than a thousandth part of the whole New Testament.” (The New Testament in the Original Greek, Vol. I, p. 561) To this may be added the observation of Jack Finegan: “The close relationship in time between the oldest New Testament manuscripts and the original texts is also nothing less than amazing. . . . For our knowledge of the writings of most of the classical authors we are dependent upon manuscripts the oldest of which belong to a time between the ninth and eleventh centuries A.D. . . . Thus it is that the certainty with which the text of the New Testament is established exceeds that of any other ancient book. The words which the New Testament writers addressed to their world and time have crossed the further miles and centuries to us substantially unchanged in form and certainly undiminished in power.”—Light From the Ancient Past, 1959, pp. 449, 450.

As an integral part of the written Word of God, the Christian Greek Scriptures are of inestimable value. They contain four accounts of the ministry of God’s only-begotten Son, including his origin, his teaching, his example, his sacrificial death, and his resurrection. The historical record of the formation of the Christian congregation and the outpouring of the holy spirit, which enabled it to grow so successfully, as well as details concerning its problems and how they were resolved—all of this is so essential for the operation of the true Christian congregation today. The separate books that were independently written for particular persons or situations, or with a special view and purpose in mind, all merge to form a great unified complete entity with no details lacking. They complement and complete the Bible canon and are presently of universal importance, interest, and concern primarily to spiritual Israel, which is the congregation of God, but, additionally, to all persons who seek the approval of God.


For information on the contents of the 27 books, their writers, the time written, and proof of authenticity, see the individual books by name.

The Geneva study bible's commentary on Michael the great prince

Geneva Study Bible

Daniel 12

Verse 1
And at that ^a time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation [even] to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.

(a) The angel here notes two things: first that the Church will be in great affliction and trouble at Christ's coming, and next that God will send his angel to deliver it, whom he here calls Michael, meaning Christ, who is proclaimed by the preaching of the Gospel

Hawker's Poor Man's Commentary

Daniel 12

 

Verse 1CONTENTS
The prophecy o f Daniel closeth in this Chapter, with some most gracious assurances of Israel's deliverance; from all her troubles. Daniel's mind is exercised with thoughts concerning the same. The Lord's gracious consolation to the Prophet.
Daniel 12:1
Here is a most lovely account of Jesus, and of his office-character, as Mediator. I do not hesitate to believe, that the Michael here spoken of is Christ. In confirmation, turn to those scriptures. Revelation 12:7-11. How Christ then stood up for all eternity: how in time, and how forever; all his offices typify. Proverbs 8:22-23; Psalms 40:6-8; Hebrews 7:24-25; 2 Thessalonians 1:10. In every point of view, it must be a time of trouble. When Christ comes to make up his jewels, he comes also to take vengeance of them that know not God, nor obey the gospel of Jesus. Malachi 4:1; 2 Peter 3:10-11. But what a sweet close is this verse, of the safety of Jesus own! Isaiah 4:3; Luke 10:20; Revelation 20:12-15.

 

On science,pseudoscience and 21st century cosmology.

In Nature, Two Cosmologists Chide Other Cosmologists for Lack of Testable Evidence

Evolution News & Views December 22, 2014 3:10 AM

 

We have frequently criticized some of the crazy ideas emerging from modern cosmology: notions like the multiverse, inflation, Everett's "many-worlds" scenario, and other concoctions that try to escape the overwhelming evidence for design in the universe (namely, cosmic fine-tuning and the stringent requirements for habitability). Now, two leading big-bang cosmologists are joining us in the criticism, in a very high level venue, but for quite different reasons. Here's what George Ellis and Joe Silk say in Nature ("Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics"):

This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue -- explicitly -- that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific. (Emphasis added.)

In particular, they chide the string theorists, multiverse advocates, inflation theorists, and purveyors of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. Speaking of inflation, it's interesting that Science Magazine listed the downfall of the BICEP2 results on inflation as one of the leading "Breakdowns" (as opposed to "Breakthroughs") of the year.

Whether Ellis and Silk's definitions of science and the scientific method are adequate is beside the point (the definition of science is a vexed question, testability is vague, and falsifiability has its flaws). What worries them is something else:

The issue of testability has been lurking for a decade. String theory and multiverse theory have been criticized in popular books and articles, including some by one of us (G.E.). In March, theorist Paul Steinhardt wrote in this journal that the theory of inflationary cosmology is no longer scientific because it is so flexible that it can accommodate any observational result. Theorist and philosopher Richard Dawid and cosmologist Sean Carroll have countered those criticisms with a philosophical case to weaken the testability requirement for fundamental physics.

We applaud the fact that Dawid, Carroll and other physicists have brought the problem out into the open. But the drastic step that they are advocating needs careful debate. This battle for the heart and soul of physics is opening up at a time when scientific results -- in topics from climate change to the theory of evolution -- are being questioned by some politicians and religious fundamentalists. Potential damage to public confidence in science and to the nature of fundamental physics needs to be contained by deeper dialogue between scientists and philosophers.

Ah, it's those "religious fundamentalists" again. The label means, approximately, "anybody who is not a materialist." It's like what astronomers call metals: "anything that is not hydrogen or helium." If we let those "fundamentalists" use the same tactics Carroll and Dawid are advocating, people might come to question climate change or (God forbid!) the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Such a case must be made in formal philosophical terms. A conference should be convened next year to take the first steps. People from both sides of the testability debate must be involved....

The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable. Only then can we defend science from attack.

What's ironic is that their advice has all the trappings of a religious council. "Science" is under attack from heretics within and without. It needs to convene its college of cardinals. The council needs to apply more stringent guidelines for use of its imprimatur. It needs to stop issuing the imprimatur to lazy priests, or else the heretics will claim they deserve it, too.

Ellis and Silk do a great job of dismantling the pretensions of modern theoretical physicists and cosmologists who have loosened their grip on observational evidence. Readers will enjoy the critiques of string theory and multiverse notions, but may be surprised by their critique of Bayesian reasoning as a substitute for evidence:

Citing Bayesian analysis, a statistical method for inferring the likelihood that an explanation fits a set of facts, Dawid equates confirmation with the increase of the probability that a theory is true or viable. But that increase of probability can be purely theoretical. Because "no-one has found a good alternative" and "theories without alternatives tended to be viable in the past", he reasons that string theory should be taken to be valid.

In our opinion, this is moving the goalposts. Instead of belief in a scientific theory increasing when observational evidence arises to support it, he suggests that theoretical discoveries bolster belief. But conclusions arising logically from mathematics need not apply to the real world.... The idea that preconceived truths about the world can be inferred beyond established facts (inductivism) was overturned by Popper and other twentieth-century philosophers.

They don't name the "other twentieth-century philosophers," but to be sure, the world has moved beyond Popper, notable as his contributions were (some commenters at the end of the article point this out). We are even past Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Foucault, van Fraasen, and numerous other philosophers who arose from the ashes of logical positivism.

Currently, there exists a nebulous consensus called "scientific realism," wherein Big Science insiders help themselves to notions of unobservable reality and testability. In this new consensus, academia, like a church council, dictates what gets the "science" imprimatur. It's an internecine dispute within this consensus that Ellis and Silk are describing. Only those blessed by the cardinals (or mandarins, as Phillip Johnson calls them) are allowed to speak in the officially approved missives, the journals.

The current situation is not friendly to mavericks; thus the epithets "religious fundamentalists," "politicians" and "pseudoscientists" aimed at outsiders. It is, however, interesting to listen in. Look what they say about multiverse theory:

The multiverse is motivated by a puzzle: why fundamental constants of nature, such as the fine-structure constant that characterizes the strength of electromagnetic interactions between particles and the cosmological constant associated with the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, have values that lie in the small range that allows life to exist. Multiverse theory claims that there are billions of unobservable sister universes out there in which all possible values of these constants can occur. So somewhere there will be a bio-friendly universe like ours, however improbable that is.

That sounds like a lead-up to The Privileged Planet, or to Privileged Species. Ellis and Silk go on to describe how one of the constants, the cosmological constant, is 120 orders of magnitude off from the predicted theoretical value. So are they ready to consider scientific theories that embrace this evidence, like intelligent design? No, but one thing they do know: multiverse theory is not scientific.

Billions of universes -- and of galaxies and copies of each of us -- accumulate with no possibility of communication between them or of testing their reality. But if a duplicate self exists in every multiverse domain and there are infinitely many, which is the real 'me' that I experience now? Is any version of oneself preferred over any other? How could 'I' ever know what the 'true' nature of reality is if one self favours the multiverse and another does not?

That's a logical statement, not an observational one. By this, we see that they are not against using logical inference to eliminate unworthy theories. Isn't that what Meyer does in his books, using "inference to the best explanation"? Isn't that what Dembski does to eliminate the chance hypothesis?

In the end, Ellis and Silk never explain cosmic fine-tuning. They just preach that science needs to stick to the old-time religion: respect for observable, testable evidence.

The consequences of overclaiming the significance of certain theories are profound -- the scientific method is at stake (see go.nature.com/hh7mm6 [a link to Alan Sokal's critique of postmodernism]). To state that a theory is so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing in our opinion risks misleading students and the public as to how science should be done and could open the door for pseudoscientists to claim that their ideas meet similar requirements.

What to do about it? Physicists, philosophers and other scientists should hammer out a new narrative for the scientific method that can deal with the scope of modern physics. In our view, the issue boils down to clarifying one question: what potential observational or experimental evidence is there that would persuade you that the theory is wrong and lead you to abandoning it? If there is none, it is not a scientific theory.

But if peers with equal credentials but without the imprimatur (say, a Dembski, Meyer, or Berlinski) can ask that question of materialism, why shouldn't they get a hearing? Ask the materialists: "What potential observational or experimental evidence is there that would persuade you that the theory is wrong and lead you to abandoning it?"

ID advocates have proposed ways to falsify intelligent design (for example, see here and in Dembski's book The Design Revolution, p. 282). Now it's the materialists' turn. If they don't have an answer, then by Ellis and Silk's own standards, it is not a scientific position.

More hocus pocus from Darwinian spinsmiths

Darwinian Magic: Another Question-Begging Darwinian Explanation of the Cambrian Explosion

Evolution News & Views 

Why did 20 or more separate animal phyla suddenly appear in the geological blink of an eye? Because "Clades reach highest morphological disparity early in their evolution," answer Martin Hughes, Sylvain Gerber, and Matthew Albion Wills, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That's all, folks. The Cambrian animals exploded onto the scene because evolution works fast sometimes. It seems to be a pattern that high disparity occurs early on. Must be a law of nature. What, you've got a problem with that?

These three biologists from the University of Bath took a bath in their own assumptions. They don't deny that the animals appear suddenly. They just believe that when opportunity arises, evolution works fast to fill up the landscape with endless forms most beautiful. Under the section, "Why Do Clades Have Early High Disparity?" they say:

What might explain the prevailing pattern of early high disparity in clade evolution? Both ecological anddevelopmental explanations have been proposed, and our results remain consistent with both. The "empty ecospace" model predicts that clades will radiate and diversify more rapidly when colonizing a new environment. This colonizationmay occur because ecospace has been vacated by other occupants (e.g., in the wake of some other extinction, typically the result of external, physical factors) or because ahitherto inaccessible environment or other resource has been rendered viable by the acquisition of some novel, "key" adaptation or series of characters (an intrinsic, biological trigger). Morphological change under these circumstancesmay be rapid either because transitions are unusually largeor because rates of cladogenesis are unusually high (even with "normal" step sizes at each splitting event). (Emphasis added, reference numbers omitted.)

Jaws should drop at that "explanation." If Hughes, Gerber and Wills were simply describing what is found in the fossil record -- the sudden appearance of complex animals -- it would be one thing. But they attempted to explain how these complex animals appeared, so suddenly as Jonathan Wells described in the film Darwin's Dilemma, that it's comparable to less than two minutes on a twenty-four-hour clock.

Syntactic Miracles

Look carefully at the wording above. The authors are very careful to hide their faith in Darwinian evolution by using indirect language. What is "the acquisition of some novel, 'key' adaptation or series of characters" but a cover for some unexplained, one might say miraculously improbable innovation? Was it a trilobite eye? Was it a jointed appendage? Was it a digestive tract? And pray tell, what is "cladogenesis" if not a hand-waving dodge, magic word for the evolutionary "creation" of a whole new body plan, like a phylum? They provide an example of what they mean: birds --

...birds are defined in the manner they are because they acquired a distinctive suite of apomorphies pertaining to the evolution of flight; key innovations, in this case, that also enabled them to exploit a new environment.

Time to watch Flight: The Genius of Birds again.

Ecological Miracles

If evolution rushes in to fill an "ecospace [that] has been vacated" with "key innovations" that "enable them to exploit a new environment," then why don't we see Mars filled with life? Mars is a whole planet waiting to be filled. The "Vacancy" sign has been up for billions of years. What's evolution waiting for?

It's absurd to assume that opportunity necessarily leads to fulfillment. As humans we sometimes say, "If you build it, they will come," but Darwinian evolution has no motivation to come. It is aimless, blind and purposeless. You can wait till the cows come home and nothing will happen unless beneficial mutations arise out of sheer dumb luck (perhaps by cosmic rays), in the right order, each one contributing to survival with no supervising intention steering them to work together.

To see the absurdity of expecting evolution to fill an ecospace with cladogenesis, run the experiment Jonathan Wells proposed: rupture a living cell in a sealed test tube and wait. Rupture a million different kinds of cells, if you prefer. The tube has the perfect environment, because all the ingredients are present -- they were once part of living cells. Does anyone really believe "cladogenesis" will occur, to fill in the vacated ecospace? The late triple-PhD organic chemist A. E. Wilder-Smith use to give another pithy example: a sardine can. It's another perfect environment for the emergence of life, because the sardines were once alive, and all their parts are intact. There are millions of sardine cans around the world. If anyone thought for a minute that a new life form would emerge inside a sardine can (absent any living spores), the food industry would panic.

Hughes, Gerber and Wills might respond that they are not assuming the origin of life, but the adaptation of existing life. Natural selection is available with existing life where it is not in chemical evolution. That would be a weak defense. Available ecospace existed in the Precambrian seas, filled with life, for over a billion years. The authors do not mention any plausible trigger that made complex multicellular animals appear simultaneously when they did. They speculate about ocean chemistry, sea level and climate change, but those things presumably varied throughout Precambrian times.

As Stephen Meyer shows in Darwin's Doubt, prior to the Cambrian explosion there were only microbes, sponges and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna that most paleontologists do not consider related to the Cambrian animals. There were no jointed appendages, eyes, guts, nervous systems or any of the other organs, tissue types and body plans that characterize Cambrian phyla. What kind of Darwinian "miracle" would it take to get all those complex traits in blink of an eye? Calling it "cladogenesis" is like calling the simultaneous chance appearance of cars, boats, and airplanes "vehicle-o-genesis."

The model has striking similarities to the old notion of Punctuated Equilibrium discussed in Chapter 7 of Darwin's Doubt. In fact, the PNASpaper was edited by Steven Stanley, "an early advocate of the punctuated equilibrium model" according to Meyer (p. 137). As such, this new model is really a throwback to the old "punk eek," and suffers from the same drawbacks: it's an attempt to explain away the absence of evidence for evolution by claiming, without any mechanism better than old-fashioned neo-Darwinism, why the fossil record shows a discontinuous pattern, not a record of a gradually branching tree.

Developmental Miracles

In addition to cladogenesis, the authors entertain the idea that developmental changes (like mutations in Hox genes) can lead to innovations:

We stress that ecological and developmental explanations for early high disparity are not mutually exclusive; neither do our results allow us to distinguish between them. The hypothesisof increasing developmental constraint predicts that theincreasing complexity and interdependence of ontogenetic processes with evolutionary time effectively lock down the potential for subsequent morphological innovation. Such mechanisms purportedly explain why body plans become invariant and inflexible with time, although mechanisms by which these constraints may be lifted have been posited.

This is off topic for the Cambrian explosion. It's the origin of the body plans, not their subsequent invariance, that is the issue. Besides, the authors leave it off, saying, "Testing this hypothesis would require detailed ontogenetic data far beyond the scope of this study."

Explosion as a Law of Nature

Basically, the authors try to present "high disparity" not just as a pattern, but a rule -- a way that evolution works. For support of their evolutionary "rule" they point to other instances in the fossil record of rapid ecospace filling after mass extinctions, concluding:

Overall, there is no clear temporal trend in disparity profile shapes from the Cambrian to the Recent, and early high disparity is the predominant pattern throughout the Phanerozoic.

One appreciates the concession. Adding miracles to miracles doesn't help Darwinian evolution. Furthermore, assuming Darwinism was responsible is known as begging the question. Their statement also avoids the fact that nearly all animal phyla -- the highest taxonomic level of disparity -- appeared in the Cambrian, not in subsequent epochs of the fossil record.

Hughes, Gerber and Wills begin their paper with this damaging admission for a theory that still rules biology 154 years after it was proposed:

There are few putative macroevolutionary trends or rules that withstand scrutiny.

The authors of this paper did not want scrutiny. They were under the spell of seduction:

Evolution is usually characterized as an essentially contingent and unpredictable process. This makes it very difficult to identify general rules comparable to those that typify the other natural sciences. Nonetheless, the prospectof formulating and testing macroevolutionary generalities isextremely seductive, because they seem to offer fundamentalinsights into the manner in which evolutionary processes operate throughout Earth's history.

Critical Analysis

You want to be charitable to these authors, but it's challenging. They know full well that they were using Darwinian evolution as filler in the absence of data:

Early high patterns inevitably imply an unsampled period of cladogenesis (or the existence of ghost ranges) at the base of the clade, but this either occurs too fast for the available stratigraphic resolution or is not fossilized.

They also know full well what they were up against:

Among the first questions to be addressed using disparity indices was the perceived magnitude of the Cambrian "explosion." From Charles Darwin onward, evolutionary biologists have been perplexed by the apparently instantaneous first appearances of numerous phyla (a highly disparate sample of species) in the Cambrian fossil record. The subsequent discovery of hitherto unknown fossil groups from the Cambrian Burgess Shale and similar localitiesadded to the enigma, prompting the radical hypothesis that the disparity of metazoans peaked in the Cambrian and subsequent extinctions winnowed this down to much more modest levels soon thereafter. Surprisingly, a relatively small number of studies have tested this hypothesis directly in focal clades. These predominantly conclude that Cambrian animal groups had a disparity comparable to that of their modern counterparts. This nonetheless suggests that metazoans reached high levels of disparity relatively early in their history, the phenomenon of early high disparity. Unfortunately, such analyses are limited for two reasons. First, they discount the intervening trajectory of clade evolution. Second, the clade history is truncated both by the present and by a Precambrian fossil record that is enigmatic at best. As a result, the focus of disparity studies has increasingly turned to clades that both originate and go extinct within the Phanerozoic. Once again, there is a purported tendency for clades to evolve their most disparate forms relatively early in their histories. However, the validity of this early high disparity model has never been tested systematically.

So they tested it and could only come up with "cladogenesis" to fill "vacant ecospace" with "key innovations." That, it seems, is another way of saying Darwinian magic.