On Dobzhansky and Darwinism's echo chamber.

Evolution Confirmed? The Philosophy of Naturalism
Cornelius Hunter 

Earlier,  we saw that by wholeheartedly embracing and promoting Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous phrase, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,” evolutionists have backed themselves into a corner from which they cannot escape. There is much to say about this evolutionary rallying cry, but at the top of the list is that it is false. Unequivocally false.

This is not an opinion or a pushback. I’m not trying to pick a debate — because there is no debate. We may as well debate whether bachelors are male. Dobzhansky’s phrase, with all due respect, is “not even wrong,” as physicists like to say. It is silly, and yet there it is — all over the literature.

The phrase is approvingly recited even in peer-reviewed technical journal papers. It is the mantra that evolutionists will not stop repeating, all the while revealing that this isn’t about science. Evolutionists will never repeal and recant, because there simply is too much at stake here. As we discussed, this isn’t like admitting that a particular prediction went wrong. Dobzhansky’s phrase was not merely a prediction, it was meta-prediction — the aphorism of an entire world view — and walking it back would be to reveal the man behind the curtain. Suddenly all those epistemological claims, such as that evolution is as much a fact as is gravity, heliocentrism, and the round shape of the earth, would be left hanging, open to scrutiny and with a long, long way to fall.

But Dobzhansky’s famous phrase is not the only way evolutionists have self-destructed. They have made other nonnegotiable and important claims that are equally corrosive. One is that evolution is both confirmed and required.

The National Association of Biology Teachers’ official position statement on the teaching of evolution states that evolution is (i) confirmed by the scientific evidence and (ii) a necessary going-in position in order for science to function properly. Here is what the NABT says about the confirmation of evolution:

Scientists who have carefully evaluated the evidence overwhelmingly support the conclusion that both the principle of evolution itself and its mechanisms best explain what has caused the variety of organisms alive now and in the past. … The patterns of similarity and diversity in extant and fossil organisms, combined with evidence and explanations provided by molecular biology, developmental biology, systematics, and geology provide extensive examples of and powerful support for evolution.

And here is what the NABT says about the necessity of evolution:

Evolutionary biology rests on the same scientific methodologies the rest of science uses, appealing only to natural events and processes to describe and explain phenomena in the natural world. Science teachers must reject calls to account for the diversity of life or describe the mechanisms of evolution by invoking non-naturalistic or supernatural notions … Ideas such as these are outside the scope of science and should not be presented as part of the science curriculum. These notions do not adhere to the shared scientific standards of evidence gathering and interpretation.

There you have it, evolutionary theory is both confirmed and required. And the National Association of Biology Teachers is by no means alone here. The dual epistemological and philosophical claims, respectively, are broadly held by evolutionists and go back centuries.

Do you see the problem? This philosophical position that evolutionists have staked themselves to is circular. To understand why, imagine for a moment that you witness a miracle, involving “non-naturalistic or supernatural” causes. According to evolutionists, such an event is “outside the scope of science.”

Does that imply the event was necessarily not real? No, the fact that something falls outside of one’s definition of science does not rule it out of existence. The event does not automatically become necessarily impossible. Something can be not amenable to scientific investigation yet real.

The standard claim of evolutionists that evolution is necessary for proper science reflects a particular philosophy of science called naturalism. They present it as though it were a fact, but that is false. There are many philosophies of science, and none are facts. They are rules of the road for those who declare them to follow.

That’s it. So evolutionists have committed themselves to yet another false statement. But that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that if one insists on and is committed to naturalism, then naturalistic, evolutionary, explanations are what you will find.

So of course evolution is confirmed by the science. It has to be. For evolutionists, the question is not whether evolution is confirmed by the science, the only question is what are the particulars.

This explains why evolutionists interpret the evidence the way they do. It explains how contradictory evidence can be sustained over and over and over. It also explains why, so long as you stick to naturalism, anything and everything is allowed. Natural selection, gradualism, mutations, common descent, drift, saltationism, and all the rest are up for grabs. They all may be forfeited. Any kind of theory, no matter how at odds with the empirical data, can be contemplated.

Evidence will be interpreted, filtered, analyzed, and processed according to the rules. Non-cooperative evidence will be set aside and viewed as “grounds for further research.” Or it will be ground up and recast until it can be made to work right. Cooperative evidence, on the other hand, will be viewed as normative, and ready for incorporation into proper scientific theories.

When evolutionists insist that science must be strictly naturalistic they show their hand. The flip side of their claim, that evolution is confirmed, is not a theory-neutral, objective finding. It is driven by the philosophy. It is circular — the conclusion was assumed in the first place. If your going-in position is that naturalism is required, then your results will adhere to naturalism.

Evolution is not a scientific finding. It is a philosophical mandate.

The Ribosome v. Dobzansky.

National Association of Biology Teachers Versus the Ribosome
Cornelius Hunter  

Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote in 1973 that “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” The phrase has since become a staple amongst evolutionists. It appears throughout the literature, from popular works to journal papers, and it motivates the view that evolution is fundamental. Students must learn biology through the lens of evolution. Researchers must formulate experiments from a Darwinian perspective. Medical students must understand the human body as the result of evolution, and so forth. As the National Association of Biology Teachers  explains:

The frequently-quoted declaration of Theodosius Dobzhansky that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” accurately reflects the central, unifying role of evolution in the science of biology. … Just as nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, nothing in biology education makes sense without reference to and thorough coverage of the principle and mechanisms provided by the science of evolution. Therefore, teaching biology in an effective, detailed, and scientifically and pedagogically honest manner requires that evolution be a major theme throughout the life science curriculum both in classroom discussions and in laboratory investigations. … Biology educators at all levels must work to encourage the development of and support for standards, curricula, textbooks, and other instructional frameworks that prominently include evolution and its mechanisms

Clearly the NABT thinks highly of Dobzhansky’s phrase and it draws some fairly important conclusions from it. But there is one slight problem: Dobzhansky’s phrase is unequivocally false.

Is it really true that nothing in biology makes sense except with evolution? No it is not, as I have discussed many times (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). Dobzhansky’s phrase is equivalent to: “Everything in biology only makes sense in light of evolution,” or “If-and-only-if evolution is true, then will we find what we find in biology.” In its logical form, Dobzhansky’s phrase is clearly not even scientific. Indeed, the phrase comes from the title of a paper which appeared in the American Biology Teacher, the official journal of the National Association of Biology Teachers, and in that paper Dobzhansky gave a litany of theological arguments that mandated evolution.

But it gets worse. Not only is this famous phrase a theological claim, it also fails the test of comparative anatomy. For example, consider the various types of echolocation found in different species of bats. As I have discussed  (here, here, and here), the echolocation designs do not fit the expected evolutionary pattern. In other words, here we have something in biology that does not make sense with evolution. Evolution does not help to explain what we observe. Instead, with evolution we must resort to ad hoc stories. As one paper  concluded:

[T]he animal’s habitat is often more important in shaping its [echolocation] call design than is its evolutionary history.

If you want to understand a bat’s echolocation design, look to its habitat, not its supposed evolutionary history. The scientific evidence makes no sense on the theory of evolution.

Or again, consider how glycan molecules compare across the different species. Again, it isn’t according to the evolutionary model (see here). As one paper explained, glycans show “remarkably discontinuous distribution across evolutionary lineages,” for they “occur in a discontinuous and puzzling distribution across evolutionary lineages.” This dizzying array of glycans can be (i) specific to a particular lineage, (i) similar in very distant lineages, (iii) and conspicuously absent from very restricted taxa only. The patterns contradict what evolution expected. As another  paper  admitted:

There is also no clear explanation for the extreme complexity and diversity of glycans that can be found on a given glycoconjugate or cell type. Based on the limited information available about the scope and distribution of this diversity among taxonomic groups, it is difficult to see clear trends or patterns consistent with different evolutionary lineages.

In other words, the glycans make no sense on evolution.

Echolocation and the glycans are but two examples. There are many, many more examples where they came from. The biological world is full of patterns of comparative anatomy across different species that make no sense on evolution.

But it gets worse.

It is not just comparative anatomy where the evidence fails to make sense in light of evolution. In design after design, what we observe in biology does not reflect contingency, as Darwin and later evolutionists predicted, but functional need. In fact, the designs we find are highly efficient and optimal in various ways. To cite just one example of a great many,  consider the work of William Bialek.

Bialek discusses compound eyes of insects such as the fly. These compound eyes have a large number of small lenses packed into an array. A large number of small lenses gives high resolution, just as does a digital camera with a large number of pixels.

But when the lens gets to be too small, its optics become distorted due to diffraction. So in determining the best lens size, there is a tradeoff between resolution and diffraction. In the optimum solution the lens size is roughly proportional to the square root of the radius of the head. And indeed, Bialek shows an old paper surveying the compound eye designs in more than two dozen different insects. That paper shows that for the different size insects, the lens size is proportional, as predicted, to the square root of the head size.

This is one of Bialek’s half a dozen or so examples showing the optimization of biological designs and, as Bialek assures us, there are many, many more. Here is how one science writer explained it:

Yet for all these apparent flaws, the basic building blocks of human eyesight turn out to be practically perfect. Scientists have learned that the fundamental units of vision, the photoreceptor cells that carpet the retinal tissue of the eye and respond to light, are not just good or great or fabulous at their job. They are not merely exceptionally impressive by the standards of biology, with whatever slop and wiggle room the animate category implies. Photoreceptors operate at the outermost boundary allowed by the laws of physics, which means they are as good as they can be, period. Each one is designed to detect and respond to single photons of light — the smallest possible packages in which light comes wrapped.

And where did those “apparent flaws” come from? Evolutionists of course. From an evolutionary perspective, vision systems were full of “flaws.” But in fact those systems were optimized — we just had to stop looking at biology in terms of evolution.

This brings us to the protein synthesis machine — the ribosome. A  paper from last month out of Johan Paulsson’s laboratory elaborates on several of the ribosome’s highly efficient, or optimal, design features. Ribosomes are comprised of both protein and RNA molecules, and their proteins make up a sizable fraction of the total protein content of many cells. Cells contain many ribosomes, and naturally in order for the cell to duplicate, the ribosomes must be duplicated. This means a lot of protein synthesis must take place, in order to create all the proteins in all the ribosomes.

One way to help alleviate this production problem would be to have yet more ribosomes in the cell. But that would, in turn, create an even greater protein synthesis burden, since even more proteins would be needed for those additional ribosomes. One way to solve this conundrum is to use RNAs in ribosomes rather than proteins, where possible.

It is a fascinating problem, and the paper concludes that we can understand the solution not as the result of evolutionary contingencies, but as a solution to a functional need:

Rather than being relics of an evolutionary past, the unusual features of ribosomes may reflect an additional layer of functional optimization that acts on the collective properties of their parts.

These are but a few examples and there are many more showing that evolution is by no means required to understand biology. Indeed, evolution is usually redundant — a “multiplied entity” in the language of Ockam’s Razor.

There is no question that Dobzhansky’s famous phrase has failed. It simply is not true that “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a perspective more at odds with the science of biology. But while a few rare voices, such as Massimo Pigliucci, admit that the phrase is “patently wrong,” evolutionists for the most part continue to rehearse it in robotic fashion, revealing an underlying agenda that has strayed badly from the science.

Evolutionists are so heavily invested in Dobzhansky’s phrase they will never admit it has failed. Even Pigliucci soft-pedaled the problem, explaining that “Dobzhansky was writing for an audience of science high school teachers,” as though it is OK to misrepresent science to high school teachers. Also, Pigliucci’s admission was limited to the fact that spectacular progress has occurred in the life sciences while ignoring evolutionary theory. True enough, and that certainly demolishes Dobzhansky’s phrase, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. It is a safe criticism that avoids the more damning problems.

There simply is too much at stake here. It isn’t like admitting that a particular prediction went wrong. Dobzhansky’s phrase was not merely a prediction, it was meta-prediction — the rallying cry for an entire world view — and walking it back in any genuine way would be to reveal the man behind the curtain. Suddenly all those epistemological claims, such as that evolution is as much a fact as is gravity, heliocentrism, and the round shape of the earth, are left hanging, open to scrutiny, and with a long, long way to fall.

The National Association of Biology Teachers’ feverishly holding up of Dobzhansky’s phrase reveals the underlying, nonscientific dogma at work. We are seeing a fascinating dissonance and hypocrisy, for the phrase is unequivocally false and yet it cannot be abandoned.

Are Darwinian "ethics" threatening to transform MDs from healers to hitmen?

Evolutionary Biologist Now Wants Doctors to Kill Suicidal Depressed People
Michael Egnor     

Darwinist Jerry Coyne, who has recently advocated the medical killing of handicapped babies so they won’t “suffer,” has added another class of people to his kill list:people who are depressed.

In response to a doctor’s suggestion in an article that a patient who was not physically suffering but who was depressed should be offered euthanasia, Coyne writes:

My answer, as was that of another expert discussed in the piece, is “yes”, but I’d offer them antidepressants first…

Goodness gracious. Coyne is now advocating euthanasia for depressed people, and make no mistake about it: euthanasia for depression is gaining wider acceptance — the Netherlands is already euthanizing people for depression 

and other mental health issues. Of course he gives a passing nod to offering anti-depressants first. But if they don’t work or the patient doesn’t want them, Coyne recommends that the doctor kill the patient, if the patient wants to die.

And what if the doctor doesn’t want to kill his patient? Coyne asks:

What about doctors who are uncomfortable…helping carry out such a procedure?… My view is that if they are, they must refer the patient to a doctor who can help…

Coyne demands that doctors who do not want to kill their patients be forced to refer the suicidal patient to another doctor who is willing to do the killing.

The primary goal of psychiatric care for depression in modern times has been to prevent suicide. Doctors are trained to be alert for signs that a depressed person is planning to take his own life, and are required professionally to intervene — against the patient’s wishes if necessary — to protect the patient’s life. Now Coyne and other euthanasia advocates are demanding that doctors help depressed patients to kill themselves.

Note the chain of events: First, we normalize abortion. Then we legalize physician-assisted suicide. Then euthanasia proponents advocate medical killing of handicapped newborns. Now there is serious advocacy (it is actually practiced in some countries) to euthanize depressed people. This is what we have come to. Instead of protecting depressed people from suicide, doctors are now being asked to kill them.

If you’re not aghast, you’re not paying attention. The death cult is moving fast and gaining a lot of ground. This is not a slippery slope. This is an ice cliff.

Reviewing peer review.

Fleming's discovery of penicillin couldn't get published today. That's a huge problem

Updated by Julia Belluz on December 14, 2015, 7:00 a.m. ET

After toiling away for months on revisions for a single academic paper, Columbia University economist Chris Blattman started wondering about the direction of his work.

He had submitted the paper in question to one of the top economics journals earlier this year. In return, he had gotten back nearly 30 pages of single-space comments from peer reviewers (experts in the field who provide feedback on a scientific manuscript). It had taken two or three days a week over three months to address them all.

So Blattman asked himself some simple but profound questions: Was all this work on a single study really worth it? Was it best to spend months revising one study — or could that time have been better spent on publishing multiple smaller studies? He wrote about the conundrum on his blog:

Some days my field feels like an arms race to make each experiment more thorough and technically impressive, with more and more attention to formal theories, structural models, pre-analysis plans, and (most recently) multiple hypothesis testing. The list goes on. In part we push because want to do better work. Plus, how else to get published in the best places and earn the respect of your peers?

It seems to me that all of this is pushing social scientists to produce better quality experiments and more accurate answers. But it’s also raising the size and cost and time of any one experiment.

Over the phone, Blattman explained to me that in the age of "big data," high-quality scientific journals are increasingly pushing for large-scale, comprehensive studies, usually involving hundreds or thousands of participants. And he's now questioning whether a course correction is needed.

Though he can't prove it yet, he suspects social science has made a trade-off: Big, time-consuming studies are coming at the cost of smaller and cheaper studies that, taken together, may be just as valuable and perhaps more applicable (or what researchers call "generalizable") to more people and places.

Do we need more "small" science?

Over in Switzerland, Alzheimer's researcher Lawrence Rajendran has been asking himself a similar question: Should science be smaller again? Rajendran, who heads a laboratory at the University of Zurich, recently founded a journal called Matters. Set to launch in early 2016, the journal aims to publish "the true unit of science" — the observation.

Rajendran notes that Alexander Fleming’s simple observation that penicillin mold seemed to kill off bacteria in his petri dish could never be published today, even though it led to the discovery of lifesaving antibiotics. That's because today's journals want lots of data and positive results that fit into an overarching narrative (what Rajendran calls "storytelling") before they'll publish a given study.

"You would have to solve the structure of penicillin or find the mechanism of action," he added.

But research is complex, and scientific findings may not fit into a neat story — at least not right away. So Rajendran and the staff at Matters hope scientists will be able to share insights in this journal that they may not been able to publish otherwise. He also thinks that if researchers have a place to explore preliminary observations, they may not feel as much pressure to exaggerate their findings in order to add all-important publications to their CVs.

Smaller isn't always better

Science has many structural problems to grapple with right now: The peer review system doesn't function all that well, many studies are poorly designed so their answers are unreliable, and replications of experiments are difficult to execute and very often fail. Researchers have estimated that about $200 billion — or about 85 percent of global spending on research — is routinely wasted on poorly designed and redundant studies.

A big part of the reason science funders started emphasizing large-scale studies is because they were trying to avoid common problems with smaller studies: The results aren't statistically significant, and the sample sizes may be too tiny and therefore unrepresentative.

It's not clear that emphasizing smaller-scale studies and observations will solve these problems. In fact, publishing more observations may just add to the noise. But as Rajendran says, it's very possible that important insights are being lost in the push toward large-scale science. "Science can be small, big, cure diseases," he said. "It can just be curiosity-driven. Academic journals shouldn't block the communication of small scientific observations."

Why no 'brave new world'

The truth about technology’s greatest myth

 Tom Chatfield

Many optimists believe that technology can transform society, whether it’s the internet or the latest phone. But as Tom Chatfield argues in his final column for BBC Future, the truth about our relationship with technology is far more interesting.

Lecturing in late 1968, the American sociologist Harvey Sacks addressed one of the central failures of technocratic dreams. We have always hoped, Sacks argued, that “if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.” Instead, though, even our best and brightest devices must be accommodated within existing practices and assumptions in a “world that has whatever organisation it already has.”

As an example, Sacks considered the telephone. Introduced into American homes during the last quarter of the 19th Century, instantaneous conversation across hundreds or even thousands of miles seemed close to a miracle. For Scientific American, editorializing in 1880, this heralded “nothing less than a new organization of society – a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to the saving of no end of social and business complications…”

Yet the story that unfolded was not so much “a new organization of society” as the pouring of existing human behaviour into fresh moulds: our goodness, hope and charity; our greed, pride and lust. New technology didn’t bring an overnight revolution. Instead, there was strenuous effort to fit novelty into existing norms.

The most ferocious early debates around the telephone, for example, concerned not social revolution, but decency and deception. What did access to unseen interlocutors imply for the sanctity of the home – or for gullible or corruptible members of the household, such as women or servants? Was it disgraceful to chat while improperly dressed? Such were the daily concerns of 19th-century telephonics, matched by phone companies’ attempts to assure subscribers of their propriety.

As Sacks also put it, each new object is above all “the occasion for seeing again what we can see anywhere” – and perhaps the best aim for any writing about technology is to treat novelty as not as an end, but as an opportunity to re-scrutinize ourselves.

I’ve been writing this fortnightly column since the start of 2012, and in the last two years have watched new devices and services become part of similar negotiations. By any measure, ours is an age preoccupied with novelty. Too often, though, it offers a road not to insight, but to a startling blindness about our own norms and assumptions.

Take the litany of numbers within which every commentary on modern tech is couched. Come the end of 2014, there will be more mobile phonesin the world than people. We have moved from the launch of modern tablet computing in mid-2011 to tablets likely accounting for over half the global market in personal computers in 2014. Ninety per cent of the world’s data was created in the last two years. Today’s phones are more powerful than yesterday’s supercomputers. Today’s software is better than us at everything from chess to quiz shows. And so on.

Singularity myth

It’s a story in which both machines and their capabilities increase for ever, dragging us along for the exponential ride. Perhaps the defining geek myth of our age, The Singularity, anticipates a future in which machines cross an event horizon beyond which their intellects exceed our own. And while most people remain untouched by such faith, the apocalyptic eagerness it embodies is all too familiar. Surely it’s only a matter of time – the theory goes – before we finally escape, augment or otherwise overcome our natures and emerge into some new phase of the human story.

Or not. Because – while technological and scientific progress is indeed an astonishing thing – its relationship with human progress is more aspiration than established fact. Whether we like it or not, acceleration cannot continue indefinitely. We may long to escape flesh and history, but the selves we are busy reinventing come equipped with the same old gamut of beauties, perversities and all-too-human failings. In time, our dreams of technology departing mere actuality – and taking us along for the ride – will come to seem as quaint as Victorian gentlemen donning evening dress to make a phonecall.

This is one reason why, over the last two years, I’ve devoted a fair share of columns to the friction between the stories we tell about tech and its actual unfolding in our lives. From the surreptitious erosion of digital history to the dumbness of “smart” tech, via email’s dirty secrets and theimportance of forgetfulness, I love exploring the tensions between digital tools and analogue selves – not because technology is to be dismissed or deplored, but because it remains as mired in history, politics and human frailty as everything else we touch.

This will be the last regular Life:Connected column I write for BBC Future. Instead, I’ll be writing a book about one of my obsessions: attention, and how its quantification and sale have become a battleground for 21st Century selves. I will, however, continue examining technology’s impact here and elsewhere – and asking what it means to watch ancient preoccupations poured into fresh, astounding moulds.

On which note: what do you think is most ripe for abandonment around technology today? Which habit will come to be seen by future generations as quaint – our equivalent of putting on bow ties for telephones? If you want to stay in touch, tweet me at @TomChatfield and let me know what you think.

How loudly should money be allowed to talk?

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Were the ancients right(in a sense) re:the centrality of our planet?

Solar Eclipses Still Inspire Science
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

The film and book  The Privileged Planet introduced a class of phenomena about the earth that show a curious linkage between the requirements for habitability and opportunities for scientific discovery. The first example involved total solar eclipses. The close match between the sun and moon’s apparent diameters that permit total eclipses also have allowed scientists to discover helium, learn the chemical composition of the sun, and confirm Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Materialists must believe this linkage is mere coincidence. For example, Tom Metcalfe titles his  Live Science article, “Why Total Eclipses Are Total Coincidences.” Nowhere does Metcalfe specifically dismiss the Privileged Planet hypothesis, but he seems to work overtime to pre-empt design by repetition, using the word coincidence nine times, occasionally with strong adjectives for emphasis: sheer coincidence, total coincidence, celestial coincidence. If we add accident of geometry, that’s ten.

“It’s a beautiful coincidence — life has been on Earth for about 400 million years, and we’re living in this little window of time where this is happening, which is pretty amazing,” [Mark] Gallaway told Live Science. 

One of Metcalfe’s arguments for sheer dumb luck is that scientific discoveries made during eclipses are old news. Calling on Mark Gallaway, a U.K. astronomer, for support, he says:

Although some solar eclipses have played an important role in science, such as the 1919 eclipse that helped verify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, these celestial events don’t always hold much scientific interest today, he said.

“Eclipses are one of the most well-examined things in science. We know how they work, and to be honest, we’re just going out there because we like to see eclipses,” Gallaway said.

Metcalfe allows for a couple of little mysteries that remain to be studied, but relegates the big discoveries to long-past historical anecdotes. Is this correct? Are today’s total eclipses just lucky breaks for our entertainment? Is the Privileged Planet argument outdated? The news about the upcoming August 21 eclipse shows otherwise.

An indication of the ongoing scientific value of eclipses can be seen in NASA’s attempt to recruit thousands of “citizen scientists” in the event. The Great American Eclipse will likely be the most-studied total solar eclipse in history. Some 12 million viewers live within the path of totality, and over half the U.S. population lives within 400 miles of the path, according to  GreatAmericanEclipse.org. Having so many observers makes this eclipse a bonanza for scientific observation, and NASA is taking advantage of it with a  special website giving people instructions for how they can get involved. Here are just three of the six research projects planned:

GLOBE Observer: What happens in the atmosphere and on Earth’s surface when the Sun’s light is blocked, even temporarily?

Ham/Sci: This project by Virginia Tech and New Jersey Institute of Technology will employ amateur radio enthusiasts to study the ionosphere during the eclipse.

Life Responds (California Academy of Sciences): Many have reported unusual changes in animal behavior during eclipses. This project “will make scientifically-valuable observations of many aspects of this behavior.”

One project involving the public is NASA’s “Eclipse Ballooning Project.” An infographic shows how students at universities and high schools, from Oregon to South Carolina, will participate in launching 57 high-altitude balloons that will rise 100,000 before, during and after the eclipse. The balloons, to be monitored by the Iridium and GPS satellites for location, are equipped to collect multi-spectrum data and transmit it to earth, where it will be live-streamed to scientists and to anyone with Internet access.

Farther up, astronauts on the International Space Station will be able to witness the eclipse three times from orbit.  NASA’s eclipse website  shows the orbital path. The astronauts will beam down what they see from their high platform. Their vantage point also allows them to monitor the shadow of the moon on the ground.

The NASA eclipse site also lists numerous research projects it is undertaking in  “Science from the Ground.” Research teams will take advantage of the eclipse to study the solar corona, the earth’s atmosphere, earth’s outgoing radiation, and more. Here’s a taste of the valuable science that can only be studied during an eclipse:

During the eclipse, a team of scientists led by Paul Bryans at the National Corporation for Atmospheric Research will sit inside a trailer in Camp Wyoba atop Casper Mountain in Wyoming, and point a specialized instrument at the sun. The instrument is a spectrometer, which collects light from the sun and separates each wavelength of light, measuring their intensity. This particular spectrometer, called the NCAR Airborne Interferometer, will for the first time survey infrared light emitted by the sun’s atmosphere, or corona. Such an experiment can only be conducted from the ground during an eclipse, when the sun’s bright face is blocked, revealing the much fainter corona.

This novel data will help scientists characterize the corona’s complex magnetic field — crucial information for understanding and eventually helping forecast space weather events. The scientists will augment their study by analyzing their results alongside corresponding space-based observations from other instruments aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and the joint NASA/JAXA Hinode.

NASA lists nine  smartphone apps  the public can download to learn about the eclipse. Eclipse2017.org created another app of its own. Search for “eclipse” in your iPhone or Android app store and you will get dozens of hits.

In addition to NASA, universities are planning eclipse research projects, some recruiting citizen scientists. Here’s an interesting one at the National Solar Observatory, learning something brand new for 2017:

Citizen/CATE (National Solar Observatory): The Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse (CATE) Experiment will use more than 60 identical telescopes equipped with digital cameras positioned from Oregon to South Carolina to image the solar corona. The project will then splice these images together to show the corona during a 90-minute period, revealing for the first time the plasma dynamics of the inner solar corona.

See also this article from the Seattle Times about CATE. Sandi Doughton features some of the participants in the project, beginning with a story of a father-and-son team from Corvallis stationed atop a peak in the coast range, describing how pumped they are to do well.

A group of scientists will board two WB-57F jets during the eclipse, specially outfitted with high-tech telescopes, to image the corona at much higher resolution than possible from the ground, according to Space.com. During the observations, they also plan to learn about the soil of the planet Mercury, because that planet is difficult to observe except during an eclipse. Here is another research opportunity made possible only during a solar eclipse:

The researchers could also potentially search for vulcanoids — a family of hypothetical asteroids that may lie between Mercury and the sun. The total solar eclipse also provides the perfect opportunity to search for vulcanoids, which are believed to be remnants of the early solar system. Vulcanoids have likely evaded detection due to their small size and the unforgiving glare of the sun. During the eclipse, however, the sun’s bright light will disappear, allowing scientists to look for these elusive objects.

A team in Boulder, Colorado will use a special radiometer to learn more about earth’s energy system, to provide better data for climate models (Phys.org).This article lists a variety of other research projects taking advantage of the eclipse.

The American Astronomical Society’s Eclipse Task Force is going to use the occasion to figure out how big the sun is. That’s right; the size of our own star is not known as precisely as that of the earth and moon, Sarah Levin reports in  Live Science. “The 2017 Solar Eclipse May Prove the Sun Is Bigger Than We Think,” her surprising headline announces.

In summary, the  National Science Foundation says that the 2017 eclipse “offers unique research opportunities” — emphasis on unique. Let this quote respond to Metcalfe’s dismissive claim that scientific research during total eclipses is old news:

“This total solar eclipse across the United States is a unique opportunity in modern times, enabling the entire country to be engaged through modern technology and social media,” said Carrie Black, a program director in NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences. “Images and data from as many as millions of people will be collected and analyzed by scientists for years to come.”

“This is a generational event,” agreed Madhulika Guhathakurta, NASA lead scientist for the 2017 Eclipse. “This is going to be the most documented, the most appreciated, eclipse ever.“

We’ve just seen a few of the research opportunities in stellar physics, planetary geophysics, atmospheric science, geomagnetic science, climate science, plasma physics, ecology, animal behavior, space weather, and more — all made possible by the unique “coincidence” of total solar eclipses. The geometry of a total eclipse is also tightly linked to the requirements for habitability, as Privileged Planet argues, because we have to orbit the right kind of star, at the right distance from the star, with a moon as large as our moon, to exist.

Because these requirements are met here, earth is habitable, and simultaneously meets the requirements for solar eclipses. And since earth is inhabited by sentient beings (not necessarily a logical consequence of habitability alone), we can appreciate solar eclipses and use them to study the nature of everything from plants and animals to the far reaches of the cosmos. “The same narrow circumstances that allow us to exist,” according to the Privileged Planet hypothesis, “also provide us with the best overall setting for making scientific discoveries.”

If eclipses provided the only linkage between habitability and scientific observation, one might allow for the conclusion that they are coincidental. But the authors amass an impressive list of other coincidences, from the solar system to our galaxy to the properties of physics, that all point in the same direction, suggesting “conspiracy” rather than coincidence. That is why co-author Jay Richards begged to differ with the “coincidence” view of all these fortuitous linkages. In The Privileged Planet film, he concludes:

Our argument suggests something completely different. It suggests that the universe was intended, that the universe exists for a purpose, and that purpose isn’t simply for beings like us to exist, but for us to extend ourselves beyond our small and parochial home: to view the universe at large, to discover the universe, and to consider whether, perhaps, that universe points beyond itself.

Where the slippery slope ends and the slippery cliff begins?

Why Does This Evolutionary Biologist Want to Euthanize Handicapped Babies?
Michael Egnor

Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has written a controversial series of posts in which he advocates medical killing for severely handicapped babies. We have replied (here, here, here, here, here, here). Why would anyone advocate such a thing? What would justify deliberately killing a baby — actually using hospitals and doctors and nurses and medical science to kill children?

Coyne gives his rationale:

If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect, microcephaly, spina bifida, or so on, then why aren’t you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it’s born?

Of course, the ethics of aborting handicapped babies in the womb is a matter of considerable controversy, and there is by no means a consensus on it. Furthermore, one of the arguments used to support the pro-life position is that abortion, in addition to being intrinsically immoral, devalues all human life, and endangers handicapped children after birth as well. Coyne’s rationale for the medical killing of babies, which is that we allow abortion of these same children in the womb, gives credence to the pro-life argument. Coyne shows very clearly that there is a slippery slope.

Coyne offers another rationale:

After all, newborn babies aren’t aware of death, aren’t nearly as sentient as an older child or adult, and have no rational faculties to make judgments (and if there’s severe mental disability, would never develop such faculties).

Coyne argues, astonishingly, that the vulnerability of handicapped children justifies killing them. He isn’t (yet) advocating killing handicapped adults. His criterion (for now) for killing severely handicapped people is that they are unaware and can’t make decisions for themselves. In Coyne’s moral world, people who lack “rational faculties to make judgements” have less right to life than rational people do. You have a right to life, unless you are handicapped and don’t know what is happening to you. I have to respect Coyne’s candor, if nothing else.

It makes little sense to keep alive a suffering child who is doomed to die or suffer life in a vegetative or horribly painful state. After all, doctors and parents face no legal penalty for simply withdrawing care from such newborns, like turning off a respirator, but… we should be allowed, with the parents’ and doctors’ consent, to painlessly end their life with an injection.

Coyne doesn’t understand what “vegetative” means. Vegetative means that the child is unable to experience anything. A “vegetative” child can’t “suffer life in a vegetative or horribly painful state.” The child can’t “suffer” anything.

Furthermore, pain (for people who aren’t “vegetative”) is a common medical situation: the treatment for it is to treat the pain, not to kill the child. The fact is that handicapped children don’t ordinarily suffer intractable pain. Handicaps such as spina bifida, anencephaly, cerebral palsy, etc., are not intrinsically painful (such children often have an inability to feel pain in parts of their body). Coyne makes no mention whatsoever of medically treating the pain of the babies he proposes to kill. There are many highly effective methods of treating pain — thousands of different medications, devices, and operations that are used every day in hospitals and clinics and in homes around the world to alleviate pain. Much of medical practice is devoted to alleviating pain and suffering. Yet Coyne makes no mention of medically treating the (occasional) pain and suffering of handicapped children. His solution is to kill them.

Coyne sees the trend toward killing patients who suffer, rather than toward alleviating their pain, as a moral advance:

This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide are the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world…

Killing handicapped babies is not a moral advance. Devoting extra effort to their medical care, alleviating the (occasional) pain they do suffer, providing them and their families with medical and social and financial help to make their lives as happy and fulfilled as possible would be a moral advance. Respecting the lives of handicapped people is a moral advance. Killing them is moral regress, of a particularly horrendous sort.

Coyne explains the rationale of the euthanasia movement with shocking candor:

It’s time to add to the discussion the euthanasia of newborns, who have no ability or faculties to decide whether to end their lives. Although discussing the topic seems verboten now, I believe some day the practice will be widespread, and it will be for the better. After all, we euthanize our dogs and cats when to prolong their lives would be torture, so why not extend that to humans? Dogs and cats, like newborns, can’t make such a decision, and so their caregivers take the responsibility. (I have done this myself to a pet, as have many of you, and firmly believe it’s the right thing to do. Our pain at making such a decision is lessened knowing that dogs and cats, like newborns, don’t know about death and thus don’t fear it.)

The clarity is bracing. Coyne admits — he seems to celebrate it — that the slippery slope is real. Now that we have normalized abortion and assisted suicide, it’s time to normalize killing of newborns who don’t meet our definition of “fitness.” Let’s treat them, Coyne argues, like we treat our dogs. Love our babies when they’re healthy. Kill them when they are handicapped or a burden. And our babies’ vulnerability — the fact that they don’t understand — is, in the moral universe of euthanasia advocates, all the more reason to kill them. Life, it seems, is a right for the strong and the rational, but expendable for the weak and unaware.

What is particularly chilling about Coyne’s advocacy of infant euthanasia is not merely that he proposes killing handicapped babies. It is chilling that he makes no endorsement of the proper medical care of these children — where is his advocacy for the medical treatment of their (occasional) pain or of their handicap? Furthermore, it is chilling that he uses their vulnerability — the fact that as babies they are unaware and defenseless — as a reason, not to protect them, but to kill them.

So, why does Jerry Coyne want to kill handicapped babies? He has lots of reasons. But they all seem to boil down to one reason: He wants to kill them because they’re handicapped babies. Such honesty is rare from an advocate of euthanasia.

Euthanasia, fundamentally, is about killing vulnerable people. It should be resisted with every bit of our strength.