John Public:Discount Socrates?

Is Joe Blow “Anti-Intellectual”?

Michael Egnor

It’s a common claim among Darwinists that people who question “expert” scientific opinion on such topics as evolution, global warming, and the mind-brain relationship are “anti-intellectual” science deniers. Steven Novella, a Yale neurologist and credulous Darwinist and materialist makes the claim in a recent post:

As science-communicators and skeptics we are trying to understand the phenomenon of rejection of evidence, logic, and the consensus of expert scientific opinion. 

Ironically, Novella, who considers himself a skeptic, decries the skepticism of people who don’t agree with him.

Purity and Consensus

 
How can it be, scientific experts ask, that so many people doubt scientific experts? Novella:

 There is, of course, no one explanation — complex psychological phenomena are likely to be multifactorial. Decades ago the blame was placed mostly on scientific illiteracy, a knowledge deficit problem, and the prescription was science education. Many studies over the last 20 years or so have found a host of factors — including moral purity, religious identity, ideology, political identity, intuitive (as opposed to analytical) thinking style, and a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking. And yes, knowledge deficit also plays a role. These many factors contribute to varying degrees on different issues and with different groups. They are also not independent variables, as they interact with each other. Religious and political identity, for example, may be partially linked, and may contribute to a desire for moral purity.

 “Moral purity” plays a big role in Novella’s theory. A want of moral purity puts you in tune with the latest science consensus. Novella may have a point. He rambles about several scientific studies that cast aspersion on people who don’t sufficiently esteem scientific studies, and he concludes:

 [The] alternative [to science credulity] is populist rejection of not only experts, but the institutions of expertise and the concept of expertise itself. This leads to intellectual anarchy (often justified by portraying it as intellectual freedom, but that is not the issue and entirely misses the point). The populist view is mostly about believing what feels good, going along with an explanatory narrative that makes some kind of sense of a complex and scary world and organizes that understanding around vilifying an enemy, who is to blame for our problems. What’s scary is that our political and media institutions may favor such simplistic and appealing populist narratives, and disadvantage more nuanced approaches.

 To Novella’s chagrin, the rubes don’t fall in line with science experts nearly as often as scientific experts think they ought to. Why so?

Joe Knows a Few Things

 Consider Joe Blow. Joe has no scientific education. He’s a truck driver. He works a couple of jobs to support his family, he pays his taxes, coaches his son’s little league team, and goes to church on Sundays. He is anything but a scientific expert, but he does know a few things. 

Joe has been told since the 1980s that the world is going to end due to global warming. It sounds like those crazy guys with the placards who say the world is gonna end tomorrow. The earth’s sell-by-date keeps getting pushed forward — polar ice caps were supposed to melt, but didn’t, polar bears were supposed to go extinct, but didn’t, sea levels were supposed to inundate coastal cities, but didn’t, and tens of millions of climate refugees were supposed to perish fleeing the catastrophic heat. Joe’s still waiting. He is also still waiting for the apocalyptic global cooling he was told about in the 1970s (Joe ain’t no scientist, but he has a good memory). He remembers watching Paul Ehrlich on TV in the late 1960s warning that overpopulation was going to cause billions of people to die of starvation and cause nations to disintegrate over the next couple of decades. Joe wonders how a scientist could be so wrong and still keep his job and even get elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

The Rules Don’t Apply to Scientists

 Joe knows that if he screwed up his own job like that, he’d be fired before the day was out. But those rules don’t apply to scientists. Joe remembers hearing that DDT and other pesticides was going to kill all birds and give us all cancer. DDT was banned, and lots of people started (again) dying of malaria, and scientists were pretty proud of themselves for getting DDT banned and told people who didn’t want to get malaria to sleep with nets.  

Joe remembers being told by scientists in the 1990s that AIDS was going to spread to the heterosexual community and kill millions of Americans. He remembers the panic over Y2K, when nothing happened except that some scientists got big grants to study it. Joe has heard a lot about the science replication crisis — he doesn’t fully understand it, but he knows that it means that a whole lot of science is basically made up.

Joe remembers his father talking about when the U.S. government sterilized tens of thousands of innocent people against their will because scientific experts insisted that humanity was degenerating due to poor breeding. Joe isn’t exactly sure what eugenics was, but he knows that nearly all scientific institutions embraced it for nearly a century, and Joe suspects that it was just a way to make sure there weren’t too many people like Joe.

Thinking About Evolution

Joe doesn’t know what to think about evolution. He believes in God, and knows that it’s obvious that a Higher Power made this beautiful and vastly complex world. He doesn’t have a problem with the claim that animals change over time, but he doesn’t think that scientists should drag his son’s teachers into federal court to force them to teach his boy that there’s no purpose in life. He thinks we should be able to question science, especially in schools. And he wonders why Darwin’s theory is so certain, since it can’t even stand up to questions from schoolchildren. 

Joe wonders why scientists say that babies aren’t really human before they’re born, when it’s obvious that life starts at conception. Joe wonders why scientists say that there are lots of genders besides men and women, when it’s pretty obvious that men are men and women are women, and saying otherwise doesn’t make otherwise true. Joe thinks that if scientists don’t like fossil fuels, they’re free to stop using them. Why do scientists fly to global warming conferences in big jets, Joe wonders? Why do billionaires who preach about climate change own so many houses? And Joe wonders why no scientists objected to taking money from a known child molester like Jeffrey Epstein. Heck, if they didn’t speak up about that, why would anyone expect them to speak up for scientific truth?

Joe Is No Scientist

But he knows that time and time again scientists have lied and cheated and said stupid things and they’ve even sterilized and killed people, and they never seem to be held to account. Heck, they even seem to prosper when they’re wrong. 

And Joe knows that he’s an expert on one thing: his own money. He pays his taxes, and when scientists call him stupid, what they always mean is that he doesn’t want his own tax money spent on what scientists want just because scientists want it. Joe thinks that scientists should explain why they screwed up so much in the past before we believe everything they say today. 

In a democracy, Joe says, the ultimate expert is the people, and scientists have done little over the past century to earn people’s trust. Unaccountability is the name of the game in the scientific world. Again and again scientists screw up, and then they insult the people who pay their salaries and they insult the people who point out that they’ve screwed up. Joe thinks that employees should be polite to their employers.

Joe may be anti-intellectual, but he’s no fool.

 

 

The cell: Pandora's box for Darwin?

Coming on Darwin Day, a New Video Series — Secrets of the Cell with Michael Behe

Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

The cell is what biochemist Michael Behe has called evolution’s “black box,” its spectacularly complex, superbly designed contents unknown to Charles Darwin. When the box was opened by modern science, it was a turning-point moment for the articulation of the modern theory of intelligent design. A revolution followed, fundamentally challenging how scientists discuss the history of life.

Of course that revolution remains ongoing. To reach ever-wider audiences of the skeptical and the unconvinced, whether in academia or the general culture, is the central mission of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. What better occasion for that could there be than February 12, also known as Darwin Day? The birthday of the great man is an occasion each year for atheists and materialists to promote once again the theory of purposeless, unguided evolution.

Revolutionary Behe

With that in mind, this coming Darwin Day, Wednesday of next week, we will be launching an exciting new way to introduce your friends and family to the revolutionary work of Professor Behe. It’s Secrets of the Cell with Michael Behe, a five-part YouTube series that will provide a non-technical and beautifully produced introduction to Behe’s key ideas. Look for it here at Evolution News.

The series is the brainchild of filmmaker Cal Covert, President of Silver Ridge Productions, a media production company based in Virginia. Covert has more than 30 years of experience in television and video production. As a bonus, he graduated from Lehigh University, where Dr. Behe is a professor.

Cal approached us in 2019 with an idea for a series that could reach a broad viewership with Behe’s ideas, and things developed from there.

“I’m a big fan of Discovery Institute,” says Cal. “I’ve been a subscriber to Nota Bene for many years, and I read every edition. Dr. Behe and others have shown that good science points to intelligent design. I’d like to make videos that will go on the offensive and challenge people’s thinking with Behe’s findings in a way accessible to a broad audience.”

A Passion for Communication

Cal has a passion for communicating science to the general public. “For the last ten years much of my work has been in medical production,” he explains. “I work with surgeons, researchers, scientists, and patients as they tell their stories. These are widely viewed on Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms. The success of these videos has come through taking technical material and making it both understandable and compelling. That’s what I want to do with Behe’s ideas.”

Secrets of the Cell employs Behe himself as the onscreen host, showing him like you’ve never seen him before — out in the woods, in an auto shop, operating a drone, driving a jeep.

Each 4-6 minute episode investigates some intriguing discovery in science — micro-machines inside the cell, gears in insects, or the evolution of polar bears, and more. Behe uses the examples to explain his concepts of irreducible complexity, the “edge” of evolution, and Darwinian devolution. A new episode of Secrets of the Cell will be released each week from February to early March.

“We are grateful for Cal’s inspiration for this series, as well as how he donated his professional talents for the project and raised funds for new animation and on-location footage,” says John West, CSC Associate Director. “We are always looking for fresh ways to expand the impact of our scientists’ work.”

Among ID scientists, Mike Behe is a superstar. If you missed his thoroughly delightful Socrates in the City interview with Eric Metaxas, see it here now:

Uncommon descent?

A Forest, Not a Tree? Nelson Asks Why Universal Common Descent Needn’t “Pay” for Failures

David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson recalls the expectation, a scientific standard when he was an undergrad, that all living things would turn out to share a universal genetic code. How could they not if, as Darwin argued, there is only a single, universal tree of life? On a classic ID the Future podcast with host Brian Miller, Dr. Nelson discusses the implications of this failed prediction. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

The question is a weighty one since it has emerged that there is no universally shared code, but, instead, many variants. When evolutionists realized this, they performed a sidestep, supposing that since the prediction flopped, it must be the case that the code can itself evolve. But this deft move allows universal common ancestry a luxury that other scientific theories are not allowed: the freedom to fail without paying a price. Nelson suggests that this is a reason to revisit the options in the evolution debate. Maybe life is not a tree but, as biologists are finding to be increasingly likely, a forest or an orchard. But then what are the consequences for strict naturalism?

Broadly, Paul notes, there are four possibilities, each populated with scientific advocates, past and present: no design with common ancestry, no design with no common ancestry, design with no common ancestry, and design with common ancestry. In the last category, he mentions leading intelligent design proponents (Behe, Denton) but perhaps also, and this really intrigued me, the French paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, more typically thought of as a theistic evolutionist. That’s something I’d like to hear more about.

Paul Nelson is a great explainer, remarkably lucid in illuminating complex subjects. You will enjoy this conversation.

Why the origin of life remains the bane of design deniers.

Mystery of Life’s Origin Authors Reunite for Dallas Conference on Science & Faith
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

There was a wonderful turnout this past Saturday for the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, with more than 1,400 in attendance. A highlight was the reunion of the three scientists who sparked the modern intelligent design revolution. That was in 1984 with the publication of The Mystery of Life’s Origin. The pioneering authors, biochemist Charles Thaxton, materials scientist Walter Bradley, and geochemist Roger Olsen, are pictured above (from right to left, Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen), being interviewed by Stephen Meyer about the paradox-filled intellectual world of origin-of-life researchers.

To Carry On a Legacy

The audience, which had already nearly filled the parking lot 45 minutes before the event began, were rewarded with a very entertaining conversation celebrating a new book from Discovery Institute Press. Mystery of Life’s Origin was republished today in a very substantially expanded, updated version that brings the origin-of-life controversy up to date, with new contributions by Meyer, biologist Jonathan Wells, chemist James Tour, physicist Brian Miller, and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, and a historical introduction by Evolution News editor David Klinghoffer. The new book is graced by an updated title, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy.

Dr. Meyer is of course one of the foremost scholars and ID proponents who have carried on the intellectual legacy of Thaxton and his colleagues. A photo from a pre-conference barbecue, at the home of Pam Bailey who manages Discovery Institute Dallas, shows Thaxton (front), and Olsen, Bradley, and Meyer:A presentation by Dr. Bradley was introduced appropriately by the director of Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, Robert J. Marks. His comments included the observation that as a theist, Dr. Marks is grateful to have all possible scientific explanations of the natural world, including intelligent design, available to him whereas atheists and materialists have that option arbitrarily foreclosed to them.

A Tour of Intelligent Design

The Dallas Conference was thus a tour of the theory of intelligent design from its beginnings, to today, and looking forward to the next frontier, which Stephen Meyer discussed: his forthcoming book, The Return of the God Hypothesis. The book shows that theism is the one view of reality that is consistent with the relevant scientific evidence.Political scientist and Discovery Institute Vice President John West illuminated the cultural and worldview impact of Darwinism, with its explanations of life’s wonders all rooted in suffering and death. Try fashioning a life-affirming culture from that. Michael Behe (above) discussed irreducible complexity and the provocative argument of his new book, Darwin Devolves, showing that “adaptive” evolution favored by natural selection usually involves squandering genetic information for short-term gains. In a Q&A, Dr. Behe fielded a controversial question from an audience member. The gentleman demanded to know about Behe’s plans for his facial hair. Is he going to allow his beard to really grow out, or not!?

Finally, protein chemist Douglas Axe (above) demonstrated why any modestly sophisticated system showing functional coherence sets off our design intuitions, and rightfully so. These are indicators of extremely specified, low-probability events, which justify the inference to design.

In every way, this conference was an even bigger success than our 2019 Dallas Conference. We are building on many strengths, and looking forward to 2021!

And still yet even more on design all the way down.

Surprises in Cell Codes Reveal Information Goes Far Beyond DNA

Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

Information is the stuff of life. Not limited to DNA, information is found in most biomolecules in living cells. Here are some recent developments.

Sugar Code

Certain forms of sugars (polysaccharides called chitosans) trigger the immune system of plants. Biologists at the University of Münster are “deciphering the sugar code.” They describe the variables in chitosans that constitute a signaling system. 

Chitosans consist of chains of different lengths of a simple sugar called glucosamine. Some of these sugar molecules carry an acetic acid molecule, others do not. Chitosans therefore differ in three factors: the chain length and the number and distribution of acetic acid residues along the sugar chain. For about twenty years, chemists have been able to produce chitosans of different chain lengths and with different amounts of acetic acid residues, and biologists have then investigated their biological activities.

Condensed Code

DNA is becoming known as a more of a team member in a society of biomolecules. In some ways, it is more a patient than a doctor. It gets operated on by numerous machines that alter its message. One of the most important “doctors” that operates on RNA transcripts is the spliceosome, says a review article inThe Scientist about alternative splicing. This complex molecular machine can multiply the messages in the coding regions of DNA by cutting out introns and stitching coded parts called exons together in different ways.

The process of alternative splicing, which had first been observed 26 years before the Human Genome Project was finished, allows a cell to generate different RNAs, and ultimately different proteins, from the same gene. Since its discovery, it has become clear that alternative splicing is common and that the phenomenon helps explain how limited numbers of genes can encode organisms of staggering complexity. While fewer than 40 percent of the genes in a fruit fly undergo alternative splicing, more than 90 percent of genes are alternatively spliced in humans.

Astoundingly, some genes can be alternatively spliced to generate up to 38,000 different transcript isoforms, and each of the proteins they produce has a unique function.

The discovery of splicing seemed “bizarre” from an evolutionary perspective, the authors say, recalling obsolete ideas about “junk DNA.” It seemed weird and wasteful that introns were being cut out of transcripts by the spliceosome. Then, the ENCODE project found that the vast majority of non-coding DNA was transcribed, giving “these seemingly nonfunctional elements an essential role in gene expression, as evidence emerged over the next few years that there are sequences housed within introns that can help or hinder splicing activity.”

This article is a good reminder that evolutionary assumptions hinder science. Once biochemists ridded themselves of the evolutionary notion of leftover junk in the genetic code, a race was on to understand the role of alternative splicing. 

Understanding the story behind each protein in our bodies has turned out to be far more complex than reading our DNA. Although the basic splicing mechanism was uncovered more than 40 years ago, working out the interplay between splicing and physiology continues to fascinate us. We hope that advanced knowledge of how alternative splicing is regulated and the functional role of each protein isoform during development and disease will lay the groundwork for the success of future translational therapies.

Beyond Methylation

Another discovery that is opening doors to research opportunities comes from the University of Chicago. Darwin-free, they announce a “fundamental pathway” likely to “open up completely new directions of research and inquiry.” Biologists knew about how methyl tags on RNA transcripts regulate the ways they are translated. Now, Professor Chuan He and colleagues have found that some RNAs, dubbed carRNAs, don’t get translated at all. “Instead, they controlled how DNA itself was stored and transcribed.”

“This has major implications in basic biology,” He said. “It directly affects gene transcriptions, and not just a few of them. It could induce global chromatin change and affects transcription of 6,000 genes in the cell line we studied.”

Dr. He is excited about the breakthrough. The “conceptual change” in how RNA regulates DNA offers an “enormous opportunity” to guide medical treatments and promote health. Take a look at this design-friendly quote:

The human body is among the most complex pieces of machinery to exist. Every time you so much as scratch your nose, you’re using more intricate engineering than any rocket ship or supercomputer ever designed. It’s taken us centuries to deconstruct how this works, and each time someone discovers a new mechanism, a few more mysteries of human health make sense — and new treatments become available.

Genes Jumping for Joy

Remember the evolutionary myth that “jumping genes” were parasites from our evolutionary past that learned how to evade the immune system? A discovery at the Washington University School of Medicine changes that tune, saying, “‘Jumping genes’ help stabilize DNA folding patterns.” These long-misunderstood genes thought by some evolutionists to be sources of novel genetic traits actually function to provide genomic stability.

“Jumping genes” — bits of DNA that can move from one spot in the genome to another — are well-known for increasing genetic diversity over the long course of evolution. Now, new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis indicates that such genes, also called transposable elements, play another, more surprising role: stabilizing the 3D folding patterns of the DNA molecule inside the cell’s nucleus.

Lead author Ting Wang says this gives insight into why coding regions between different animals vary in structure.

“Our study changes how we interpret genetic variation in the noncoding regions of the DNA,” Wang said. “For example, large surveys of genomes from many people have identified a lot of variations in noncoding regions that don’t seem to have any effect on gene regulation, which has been puzzling. But it makes more sense in light of our new understanding of transposable elements — while the local sequence can change, but the function stays the same.

So while evolutionists had expected junk and simplicity, Wang says the opposite has occurred. “We have uncovered another layer of complexity in the genome sequence that was not known before.” Now, more discoveries are likely to flow from intelligent design’s expectation that a closer look reveals more complexity.

Mountains of Complexity

In another recent podcast at ID the Future honoring the late Phillip E. Johnson, Paul Nelson likened a graph of mounting discoveries about life to a sharply rising mountain range. Darwin proposed his theory on the flatlands, unaware of the peaks his theory would have to explain. In the last fifty years, scientists have encountered mountain after mountain of complexity in life that evolutionary theory never anticipated back out there on the flatlands. “We can’t see the top of the mountains yet, but we know that we’re still not there, and we won’t be for a long, long time,” Nelson says. As we witness scientists continuing up the mountains, we anticipate with awe more wonders of design that will likely come to light in the next decade.

Why the Origin of Life remains the main pressure point in the design debate.

On the myth of scientific objectivity.

Scientific “Decadence” and the Myth of Objectivity
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Writing here yesterday about the mischaracterization of 437-million-year-old scorpion fossils, paleontologist Günter Bechly used an apt but unexpected word to describe evolutionary thinking. It isn’t just mistaken. It reflects a state of “decadence”: 

In today’s science world it is no longer sufficient to objectively describe some nicely preserved ancient fossils. You must overinterpret the evidence and oversell their importance with a fancy evolutionary narrative. And you do not have to hesitate to be really bold with your claims, because neither the scientific reviewers nor the popular science media will care if your claims are actually supported by the evidence. This system is broken. It was broken by the pressure to publish or perish, by the pressure of public relation departments to generate lurid headlines, and by the pressure of the idiotic paradigm that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.

“By the Wayside”

Under these circumstances, “Good science falls by the wayside.” Now neuroscientist Michael Egnor comments over at Mind Matters on decadence in a completely different scientific field: medicine and medical ethics. Abortion advocates have long advanced the falsehood that babies in the womb feel less pain than we do or no pain at all. The truth is the exact opposite: “An unborn child with an immature brain probably experiences pain more intensely than an individual with a mature cortex.”

Perhaps the most disturbing damage that the abortion lobby has done to our society — aside from the systematic killing of tens of millions of innocent human beings — is the corruption of science in the name of ideology. Nowhere is this corruption more obvious than in the misrepresentation of the neuroscience of fetal pain perception.

A new article in the Journal of Medical Ethics titled Reconsidering Fetal Pain (open access) is a welcome correction to the abortion lobby’s systematic misrepresentation. The authors, one of whom is an abortion advocate, reviewed the literature on the perception of fetal pain and came to the conclusion that there is clear scientific evidence to support the view that unborn children feel pain as early as 13 weeks of gestation.

This should not have come as a surprise, since doctors who work with newborns and premature babies routinely observe that they respond with screams to a needle prick that an adult would barely register. 

Dr. Bechly calls it “decadence.” Dr. Egnor calls it “corruption.” It’s one and the same thing: whereas, according to widespread legend, scientists just objectively sift facts, in reality ideological ax-grinding is common and probably worse than it ever was. Remember, what Bechly and Egnor are describing isn’t limited to a stray scientist here or there. It is systematic. Hence the state of decadence.

Corrosive or Worse

As the new “Long Story Short” video from Discovery Institute on homology puts it, “Scientists are just like everyone else: people. And we can be uncritical of things that we want to believe.” 

That’s a charitable way of putting it. In one way, scientists aren’t like “everyone else”: that is, because of the enormous prestige they enjoy, the impact of their being “uncritical of things that [they] want to believe” is tremendous. And it can be quite corrosive, quite malign. It affects how the rest of us think about the origins of life, about the nature of reality — ultimate questions — and about how to treat the most vulnerable members of humankind, the unborn in the womb, whether with care or savage disregard.

These are reasons for applying special scrutiny and an extra degree of skepticism — they are reasons for thinking your own thoughts rather than be spoon-fed — when considering what “Scientists Say.”

For more on the culture of contemporary science, see Egnor’s post“Jeffrey Epstein and the Silence of the Scientists.”

Settled science v. Actual science.

Apocalypse Now — More Things Scientists Would Like You to Forget 

 Michael Egnor

 

 

Scientific consensus is in the news. Scientists agree (at least in public) on all sorts of things: evolution is Darwinian, global warming is real, taking money from patrons like Jeffrey Epstein is great but mustn’t be publicized, etc. The history of science is the history of shifting consensus, and of scientists who shifted it, for better or worse. 

Of late, scientific consensus has been apocalyptic. When you read this morning that we only have a few years left before we are incinerated by our over-heated planet, it’s worth recalling the science apocalypses of recent memory. 

Science Apocalypses Past

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has done for us what scientists won’t — that is, remind us of science apocalypses past. It’s amusing: 

• “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast” (1974)
• “Already too late to avert famine” (1975)
• “New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019” (1989)
• “Snowfalls Are Now Just a Thing of the Past” (2000)
• “Rising Seas Could Obliterate Nations by 2000” (1989)
• “Britain will be Siberian in less than 20 years” (2004)

Science apocalypses can only be understood in context. The context is that there have been a lot of them, there are a lot of them, there no doubt will be a lot of them, and they’re always wrong. And, obviously, there’s a scientific consensus that you shouldn’t pay attention to the last scientific consensus.

The Sales Pitch

The contemporary sales pitch for this stuff — that evolution is only by chance and necessity, that DDT will silence the spring, that overpopulation is reaching a Malthusian brink, that man is burning the planet to a cinder — needs to be distinguished from science, which is the work that challenges the consensus.

Scientific consensus is not science. Actually, scientific consensus has almost always been wrong. It was consensus that heavenly bodies move in epicycles, that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, that phlogiston is what burns in a furnace, that malaria is caused by bad air, and that light propagates in ether. This is not to condemn scientific consensus. Science is a business, so scientists have to agree as a corporate body to get things done. 

A Consensus at 30,000 Feet

Scientific consensus that isn’t true is consigned to oblivion, by scientific consensus. Scientific consensus that is true is engineering. Scientific consensus governs the construction of bridges and power plants and airplanes. On my commute and when I flip a light switch and when I look out the window at the clouds below I’m grateful for scientific consensus. I like engineering, especially when I’m at 30,000 feet.

Science is a search, and precludes consensus. Consensus is a means to act, whether wisely or foolishly. The scientific consensus that penicillin kills streptococcus has saved millions of lives. The scientific consensus that DDT causes cancer has cost millions of lives. 

But we must never confuse scientific consensus with science. Science is inquiry. Consensus is cloture of inquiry. What is consensus is not science. Yet consensus has its place — it makes it possible to act corporately. 

The purpose of consensus in science is to manipulate. It’s a political act. It permits scientists to act as a polity. The purpose of the scientific consensus in engineering is to manipulate nature. The purpose of scientific consensus in evolution, in global warming, and in discreet patronage is to manipulate you.

Darwinism's march toward state religion status hits a speed bump?

David Goldman on Gelernter’s Darwin Apostasy

David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

 

 

 

Yale computer scientist David Gelernter’s recent confession in the Claremont Review of Books, rejecting Darwinism, continues to pick up notices from the most interesting writers out there. The economist and philosopher David Goldman, aka Spengler, notes it in an essay, “Pseudo-science, the Bible and human freedom.” 

Goldman points out that even as the “popularity of scientific determinism has jumped,” the limits of scientific arguments for a purely material basis to reality have become ever clearer. Materialists assume that physics and biology make their case for them, yet “physics has lost its ability to make grand statements about the nature of reality,” and “biology hasn’t fared any better.”

Life’s “Great Leap”

The evidence for unguided evolution, a central pillar for any materialist ethos, doesn’t add up:

The new science of DNA proves mathematically that the odds of a random mutation leading to an improvement in the adaptability of a living organism are effectively zero, Gelernter shows. Even a small protein molecule has a chain of 150 amino acids. If we rearrange them at random we mostly obtain gibberish. In fact, “of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 10⁷⁴ will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 10⁷⁴ is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller,” Gelernter explains. That is Establishment science, not the murmurings of the Creationist fringe. 
In short, the evolutionary biologists can’t explain how animal life made the great leap from protozoans to arthropods in the Cambrian Explosion, let alone how natural selection through random mutation might have shaped the human mind. Biologists do brilliant and important research, to be sure, and the profession should not be blamed for the exaggerated claims made by a few publicists like [Yuval] Harari or Harvard’s Steven Pinker.

So then, against the backdrop of materialist science’s failure, what accounts for the rise of modern determinist mythologies, led by astrology and transhumanism, that have captured the imagination of Generation X and Silicon Valley? Read Goldman’s article, but I’ll try to summarize: Behind the phenomenon is a resurgent paganism, with its shamans like Yuval Harari, “this strange little vegan who spends two hours a day in meditation,” exciting the tech elite “because he visualizes them as a new class of demigods,” and with its repellant, narcissistic moral perspective: “The New Atheism turns out to be the old idolatry packaged into a smartphone app.”

Ancient and Modern Man

The choices before modern man are not so different from the choices that faced ancient man. In fact, underneath the wrappings of contemporary life, they’re almost exactly the same. Goldman dismisses naïve “proofs” for God. The theist today makes a bold commitment just as the atheist does in his own way: “the premise of biblical religion requires a leap of faith no greater than that of the atheists. Its consequence is the birth of human freedom, by making human beings free moral agents. The consequences of the old idolatry as well as the new paganism, by contrast, are repugnant.”

The book of Psalms advises, “taste and see that the Lord is good.” That the new paganism is not good, but twisted and terrible, is also a matter to be tasted and seen. See Michael Egnor’s powerful reflections from earlier today, “Jeffrey Epstein and the Silence of the Scientists.” Can anyone who experiences our world, and follows its news, really doubt this?

Trojan horse of the new Gods?

How Is Darwin’s Idea Dangerous? John West Counts the Ways

David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

 

 

 

It amazes me that people who are otherwise smart and sensitive can treat the impact of Darwinism on our culture as an afterthought, if that. One of the best book titles on evolution is atheist Daniel C. Dennett’s 1995 book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Of course Dennett meant that evolution was dangerous in good ways as he sees it, “eat[ing] through just about every traditional concept, and leav[ing] in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” 

You could hardly put it better. In an excellent new print and podcast interview with World Magazine, Discovery Institute vice president John West details the landscape of the cultural, moral, legal, even medical “landmarks” that have been worn away under the influence of evolutionary thinking.

First and foremost, the impact has been on faith: “Darwin’s theory wasn’t just about change over time — it was that we’re part of an accidental process.” How could this not have a corrosive affect? West also discusses the sexual revolution, racism, reductionism of the human being to a meat machine, and more. The last point brings an observation, deserving of more attention, about the rush to medicate young people. A purely material process of origins naturally means a purely material person as its product:

Psychoactive drugs are a great benefit to society — I’ve had family members who have benefited from them. But I think it should concern people that in some schools in America, 40 percent or more of the young boys are put on Ritalin for ADHD. Ritalin is pharmacologically related to cocaine, so it is going to affect your concentration whether you have ADHD or not. This idea that we’re just these material creatures leads to a psychoactive-drug-first mentality.

Advice for Parents

And Dr. West adds other helpful counsel for parents, who should be proactive in how they allow their kids to be educated. Don’t just farm it out to the schools, whether secular or religious:

Be responsible for those in their own circles of influence. Don’t fret if you don’t have 100,000 people listening to you on YouTube or Facebook. Pay attention to your own kids. Pay attention to the kids of your friends. Even in evangelical churches, parents often farm out the raising of their kids. You can’t cede your parenting to schools — public or Christian. And you certainly can’t cede it to the internet, social media, or video games. If you feel ill-equipped, there’s good news: Various groups have produced lots of great resources to help you talk about these things with your kids. You don’t need to be an expert. Just watch a video with your kids each week and engage them in discussion around the dinner table.

That is great practical advice. I would say, if parents do not take such an active role, then religious schools may be the most risky option. If those schools are spineless in surrendering to what the prestige voices in the culture say, then they have given your own faith’s imprimatur to the theory that humans arose by accident. If they are faithful yet unsophisticated in how they teach, then your children are in for a disturbing surprise when they get to college.

Why does it matter so much what your own family thinks about biological origins? To find out, read the rest of the interview here and listen to an excerpt here.

Seeking to explain away rather than to explain?

The Modern-Day Phlogiston: Darwinism Explains Everything and Nothing

 

Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

 On a new episode of ID the Future, host Andrew McDiarmid reads an excerpt from Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design, by Finnish bioengineer Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt. It makes the case that modern neo-Darwinism is today’s “phlogiston,” a theory that explains everything but nothing, faces mounting contrary evidence, and survives only with ever more ancillary hypotheses. 
In the excerpt Leisola and Witt also discuss the well-documented pattern of scientists defending an existing scientific paradigm even after fresh discoveries have turned against it, with the obsolete dominant paradigm dying only very slowly. An especially dramatic and tragic example gave the name to this all-too-human tendency — the Semmelweis reflex. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Ancient whale v. Darwin.

An Unbearable Rush -- Antarctic Whale Fossil Poses a Challenge to Evolution that Won't Go Away
Evolution News &Views


As many readers are aware, the standard whale evolution scheme suggests that a fully terrestrial land mammal evolved into a fully aquatic whale in less than 10 million years. Richard Sternberg (see  Part 1 and  Part 2), Casey Luskin (see here and  here), Jonathan M, and others have explained that this is not enough time for neo-Darwinian mechanisms to produce the many complex adaptations found in whales that allow for a fully aquatic lifestyle. (For another great discussion of this challenge to neo-Darwinism, see the film  Living Waters.)

The situation changed in 2011, making things worse for neo-Darwinism. Casey Luskin wrote about the discovery   that year of an Antarctic whale jawbone fossil that was dated to 49 million years ago (Ma).

Previously, the supposed transition was from fully terrestrial ancestors of whales at about 50 Ma to fully aquatic whales called "basilosaurids" at 40 Ma. That left about 10 million years for the transition. But the new jawbone find seemed to make whale evolution even more rapid than previously thought, compressing the time available to as little as a million years -- an unbearable rush.

That is "far too little time to allow the origin and fixation of all the multitude of traits necessary to convert a land-mammal into a whale," Luskin wrote. He observed, "The problem that Richard Sternberg has identified for whale evolution just got even worse."

But that was just based on a news report. We were curious to see what would happen when the discoverers published their find in a scientific journal. Earlier this year they did so, formally giving a date on these Antarctic whale fossils.

Well, in their paper, the authors assert a probable date for this fossil of 49 Ma. Instead of 10 million years for the transition from terrestrial to aquatic, this leaves only 1 million years.

The key question is where the whale fossil specimen MLP 11-II-21-3 was found, because it was stratigraphically lowest (i.e., oldest). Here's what they say in the paper (some internal references omitted):

Age control within the La Meseta Formation has been based primarily on biostratigraphy and suggests that its deposition spanned during much of the Eocene, but there is uncertainty about the precise age of particular units within this formation. In particular, the age of the lower part of the La Meseta Formation (TELMs 2-5), where MLP 11-II-21-3 was collected, is still disputed. Based on the low overall 87Sr/86Sr ratios derived from bivalve carbonate, Dutton et al. (2002) suggested the deposition of TELMs 2-5 took place during the early-middle Eocene (Ypresian and Lutetian in the chronostratigraphic scheme of Cohen et al., 2013). In contrast, Ivany et al. (2008) suggested an early Eocene age (54-48.8 Ma; Ypresian) for these units. TELM 4 includes a significant number of reworked shells, which could have biased the strontium-isotope data. The uncertainty is heightened by the small degree of variance in the global seawater curve for the early to the middle Eocene. However, overlying shells from TELM 5 produce ratios that suggest an age for the base of the unit of ca. 51 Ma. Finally, an early Eocene age of the lower part of the La Meseta Formation is consistent with estimates derived from dinoflagellate and diatom biostratigraphy.
A younger age for TELM 4 and TELM 5 has been discussed as a feasible alternative to an early Eocene age in a number of publications. The most recent comprehensive analysis of the La Meseta Formation is a magnetostratigraphically calibrated dinocyst biostratigraphic framework for the early Paleogene of the Southern Ocean, which support a middle Eocene age for TELM 4. Samples from La Meseta basal stratigraphic units are characterized by an abundance of Antarctic endemic dinocyst taxa (Enneadocysta diktyostila, Vozzhennikovia apertura, Spinidinium macmurdoense, Deflandrea antarctica, and Octodinium askiniae; Douglas et al., 2014). The first occurrence of Enneadocysta diktyostila (earlier assigned to Enneadocysta partridgei), which is dominant in these sediments, has been calibrated to Chron C20r (~45 Ma; Brinkhuis et al., 2003; Williams et al., 2004). Essentially, all dinocyst taxa present in these sediments (E. diktyostila, Vozzhennikovia aperture) belong to the so-called transantarctic fauna, whose dominance reflects an age near the early-middle Eocene boundary (49 Ma or younger; Bijl et al., 2011).

In summary, considering that 87Sr/86Sr ratios provided for TELM 4 might be biased (because of potential reworking and oscillation of the marine Sr isotope curve during the Eocene), we interpret the age of the horizon that produced MLP 11-II-21-3 (i.e., TELM 4) as early middle Eocene (~46- 40 Ma; middle Lutetian to early Bartonian based on ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart 2015; Cohen et al., 2013) and follow the most recent chronostratigraphic interpretation for the La Meseta Formation. This age is also more consistent with the published stratigraphic record of basilosaurids elsewhere.

Previous reports of basilosaurids in the Southern Hemisphere come from approximately coeval deposits from New Zealand (39.5-34 Ma, late Bartonian-Priabonian based on recent interpretation of the lower Greensand Member; Marx and Fordyce, 2015) and Peru (41-37 Ma, Bartonian; Uhen et al., 2011). With a middle Lutetian-early Bartonian age, MLP11-II-21-3 predates other basilosaurid records and provides the oldest Pelagiceti record known worldwide, documenting an early global dispersal of basilosaurids.

What did we just read?

The authors say there is "uncertainty" about the age, an observation they will exploit to justify going with the youngest age possible. (As we'll see below, they prefer an age of "~46-40 Ma".)

Dutton et al. (2002) found 87Sr/86Sr dating methods suggest the early-middle Eocene (Ypresian and Lutetian), which means between 56-41.3 Ma.

Ivany et al. (2008) suggested an early Eocene age (54-48.8 Ma; Ypresian), and found the base of the unit dates to 51 Ma.

Dinoflagellate and diatom biostratigraphy date it to early Eocene (54-48.8 Ma).

Based upon the above, there are good reasons to think this fossil of a fully aquatic whale is no younger than 48.8 Ma. We'll call it 49 Ma.

However, that is much too early for the standard whale evolution scheme. Fully aquatic whales should not have lived so early. So the authors say they want "a younger age" which they claim is "a feasible alternative to an early Eocene age" based upon dinocyst biostratigraphy. Yet even then they admit that under dinocyst biostratigraphy it could be as old as 49 Ma:

Essentially, all dinocyst taxa present in these sediments (E. diktyostila, Vozzhennikovia aperture) belong to the so-called transantarctic fauna, whose dominance reflects an age near the early-middle Eocene boundary (49 Ma or younger; Bijl et al., 2011).
Geological dating is all about using multiple methods that, together, constrain the age of a rock unit to something ever more precise. In this case, there is an age that fits all the different methods used: about 49 Ma.

That's the same age that was originally reported, and that age makes the most sense for this fossil. But the authors don't want that age, for the reasons already stated. In the end, they claim the age of the earliest basilosaurid fossil they found is "~46-40 Ma" because that is "more consistent with the published stratigraphic record of basilosaurids elsewhere." In other words, that age makes their evolutionary timeline a bit more bearable. Still, that contradicts a lot of the other data discussed.

Even then, having settled on a 46-40 Ma age range, they admit this still means that basilosaurids had a "rapid radiation":

In addition, one of these records is among the oldest occurrences of basilosaurids worldwide, indicating a rapid radiation and dispersal of this group since at least the early middle Eocene. ... These findings suggest a rapid radiation and dispersal of protocetids and basilosaurids into the Southern Hemisphere at least since the early middle Eocene (Lutetian).
Yet an age of about 49 Ma remains the most likely conclusion for these true whale fossils.

Obviously, the authors want to reject that age and prefer their basilosaurid fossils to be younger. Evolutionary considerations are plainly pushing the interpretation of data here. The story is not an unfamiliar one.