Thursday 23 February 2023

The art of conversation is on its deathbed?

A case study in Darwinism's contribution to the rise of the master race.

John West Introduces Darwin Comes to Africa

On a new episode of ID the Future, political scientist John West introduces Darwin Comes to Africa, the new book by Nigerian pastor, theologian, journalist, scholar, and human rights activist Olufemi Oluniyi. The work explores the poisonous influence of Social Darwinism on British rule in Nigeria in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an influence felt in Oluniyi’s home country down to the present, he argues. The book project grew out of Oluniyi’s intimate knowledge of Nigerian culture as well as his attendance at the 2017 Center for Science & Culture Summer Seminar program in Seattle. By the end of that nine-day gathering, he had resolved to write a book about the impact of Social Darwinism on his home country and announced that intention to his fellow attendees. He died of Covid-19 four years later, but not before completing in-depth research on the subject of the book and sending Discovery Institute Press his manuscript. Learn more about what Oluniyi discovered. Download the podcast or listen to it here

The case for empire?

Superheroes by design?

Meet the Ghostly Organisms that Rescue the Planet

David Coppedge

A man was paddleboarding last month when he came across a mysterious creature three miles off the shoreline of California. He was startled by the sight, and then filled with wonder. What was this “see-through floating spine” in front of his paddleboard? If it could talk, it might have said, “Fear not. I am here to rescue your world from global warming.”

The story is told on Phys.org by Amanda Lee Myers. On the other side of the world, another man had a similar revelation. David Malmquist, writing for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, tells about a swimmer who was snorkeling through waters off the coast of New Zealand when he found himself enveloped in a fog of translucent beings. If these angelic creatures could talk, they might have said, “We mean you no harm. We are your servants. Our work is to remove the gases with which your species has polluted the atmosphere and send them to the bottom of the sea.”

We should get to know these friendly servants. Who are they? What are they? They are called sea salps. They look a bit like jellyfish with their transparent bodies, but they are not jellyfish. Scientists classify them as tunicates: animals with see-through “shirts” of gelatin. Sea squirts are more familiar examples of tunicates. A tunicate is an odd kind of invertebrate because, though it looks like jellyfish, it has the key characteristic of phylum chordata: a notochord. A notochord is believed by evolutionists to be a precursor to a spinal cord, then a backbone. This gives Darwin-loving reporters the chance to amuse their readers with claims that sea salps are our “distant relatives” — closer to us than they are to jellyfish, which outwardly they more closely resemble. Phylogeny acquaints a species with strange bedfellows.

How Salps Sequester Carbon

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science reports on a study led by Dr. Deborah Steinberg of William and Mary. Her team found that “salps play [an] outsize role in damping global warming.” How? The salps, also called jelly plankton, are good at absorbing carbon dioxide and “pumping” it down to the ocean bottom. Their numbers, furthermore, can multiply into huge “blooms” when CO2 is plentiful.

Jelly plankton blooms can offset as much CO2 as emitted by millions of cars. Humans continue to amplify global warming by emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. A new study reveals that a distant human relative plays an outsize role in damping the impacts of this greenhouse gas by pumping large amounts of carbon from the ocean surface to the deep sea, where it contributes nothing to current warming.

A NASA-funded multidisciplinary project called EXPORTS is combining satellite data with shipboard measurements to understand a global phenomenon: the “biological pump.”

The goal of EXPORTS, for EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing, is to combine shipboard and satellite observations to more accurately quantify the global impact of the “biological pump.” This is a suite of biological processes that transport carbon and other organic matter from sunlit surface waters to the deep sea, effectively removing carbon dioxide from the surface ocean and atmosphere. Tiny drifting animals called zooplankton play a key role in the pump by eating phytoplankton — which incorporate carbon from carbon dioxide into their tissues during photosynthesis — then exporting that carbon to depth.

These “jelly barrels” with their notochords are like “transparent whales,” Malmquist writes, taking in the carbon dioxide from their meals and pumping it down to the ocean floor in their fast-sinking fecal pellets. But wait, there’s more: the salps, like Salpa aspera, also take the stored carbon down in person. Sea salps take part in the “diel vertical migration” habit of many plankton: a daily ritual of swimming to the surface during the night to feed, then swimming to the depths during the day to avoid predators. Since these asexual organisms can multiply rapidly, the combined influence of their biological pumping can be huge. Do the math:

To put things in perspective, the observed salp bloom covered more than 4,000 square miles (~11,000 km2), about the size of Connecticut. With onboard experiments showing salps capable of exporting a daily average of 9 milligrams of carbon through each square meter at 100 meters below the bloom, the amount of carbon exported to the deep sea was about 100 metric tons per day. For comparison, a typical passenger car emits 4.6 metric tons per year. Comparing these values shows the carbon removed from the climate system each day of the bloom is equal to taking 7,500 cars off the road. Adjusting these values using the team’s highest measured rate of salp-mediated export (34 mg of C per day) increases the carbon offset to more than 28,000 vehicles.

There’s still more. Steinberg says that many salp blooms go undetected. A global model that estimates their effects leads to a startling conclusion: these tunicates transport a whopping “700 million metric tons of carbon to the deep sea each year, equal to emissions from more than 150 million cars.” Thank you, sea salps!

Steinberg’s research was published open access in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Global Biological Pump

Another study was published in Nature’s open-access journal Nature Communications by Decima et al., “Salp blooms drive strong increases in passive carbon export in the Southern Ocean.” A 14-member team from New Zealand and from Southern California’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography studied another salp species in the Southern Ocean, Salpa thompsoni. Like its cousin, this species takes part in the diel migration and drops its solidified carbon load in fast-sinking fecal pellets.

zooplankton grazers, and their changing abundance and distribution patterns as a consequence of global warming, have the potential to not only alter marine food webs, but also biogeochemistry. if the increasing trend in salp abundance in the southern ocean persists at comparable rates, we can expect important changes in areas where salp blooms are recurrent: in the dynamics of phytoplankton bloom formation and termination, in the absorption and sequestration of carbon dioxide by the ocean, and in the composition of exported plankton affecting both organic and inorganic carbon flux to the deep ocean.

More Ways to Appreciate Jelly Plankton

Myers’s article at Phys.org includes “six wild facts about sea salps” to increase our appreciation of our global servants. Some of those have been mentioned above. The first two are newsworthy:

They move by pumping water through their bodies in what’s considered one of the most efficient examples of jet propulsion among animals, according to the Journal of Zoology.

Sea salps also eat using jet propulsion, consuming microscopic plants known as phytoplankton as they pump water through their bodies, the journal says.

They are also among the fastest-growing animals known, Myers continues, able to increase their body length by as much as 10 percent per hour. So while salps share jet propulsion finesse with jellyfish, they are more closely related to humans, evolutionists say.

Now for Something Completely Different: A Geological Carbon Pump

Adding to salps’ outsized role in carbon sequestration, a non-biological process also participates in saving the planet. Brantley et al., writing in Science, relate “How temperature-dependent silicate weathering acts as Earth’s geological thermostat.” Silicate weathering “is an important way that carbon dioxide is regulated over geological time scales.” News from Penn State says that it must have been in operation throughout the history of life:

“Life has been on this planet for billions of years, so we know Earth’s temperature has remained consistent enough for there to be liquid water and to support life,” said Susan Brantley, Evan Pugh University Professor and Barnes Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. “The idea is that silicate rock weathering is this thermostat, but no one has ever really agreed on its temperature sensitivity.”

Measurements in the paper indicate that, indeed, chemical weathering responds to earth temperature automatically: hotter temperatures increase carbon sequestration by weathering, and lower temperatures reduce it. The paper says this explicitly:

Over multimillion-year time scales, the balance between weathering of silicate rocks and volcanic degassing may control the atmospheric concentration of CO2, one of the most important greenhouse gases that regulate Earth’s climate. Silicate weathering accelerates with temperature, acting as a negative feedback that buffers Earth’s climate and maintains its habitability.

The earth, therefore, seems to come with built-in regulators for climate and temperature. Are climate modelers who warn us of impending catastrophe incorporating these “poorly understood” processes into their dire predictions?

Evidence of Providence?

We have learned about another class of amazing little animals — sea salps — that many of us probably never heard of but depend on. These studies add to growing knowledge about the roles of plankton, including polychaetes, diatoms, and other small ocean creatures, whose benefits to the planet are as elegant as their well-engineered designs.

Are sea salps living only for their own fitness, or do we see evidence of providence here? Their outsized role gives the earth a biological feedback mechanism, somewhat like a thermostat, to regulate carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Maybe the planet needs biology as much as biology needs the planet. And to discover that biological and geological processes work together automatically to regulate greenhouse gases and keep global temperatures optimized for habitability seems uncanny. That would seem to require foresight and wisdom on a grander scale than Darwin’s theory can handle.

All primates are not created equal?

Chimp and Human Genomes: An Evolution Myth Unravels

Evolution news

On a new episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin rebuts the oft-repeated claim that the human and chimp genomes are 98-99 percent similar as surely resulted from Darwinian common descent. Luskin cites an article in the journal Science which describes the 98-99 percent claim as a myth. The original figure was derived from a single protein-to-protein comparison, but once you compare the entire genomes, and use more rigorous methods, the similarity drops several percentage points, and on one account, down into the mid 80s. Additionally, the chimp genomes used in the original comparison studies borrowed the human genome for scaffolding, thus artificially boosting the degree of similarity. Download the podcast or listen to it Here

Wednesday 22 February 2023

Evolution by design(again)?

Between Narcos and Thanos?

Catching the wind?

More of James Tour deconstructing the would be deconstructors of teleology re: OoL

James Tour holds court(again) re: OoL science's failure to falsify teleology.

The dismal science on income inequality.

Tuesday 21 February 2023

On the story of project HARP.

On Darwin and the rise of the uberman.

The Cruel Legacy of Social Darwinism in Nigeria

Olufemi Oluniyi

Editor’s note: The following article by the late Dr. Olufemi Oluniyi is adapted from his preface to his recently released book, Darwin comes to Africa: Social Darwinism and British Imperialism in Northern Nigeria (Discovery Institute Press, 2023).

Social Darwinism is a rickety notion, rich in assumptions but destitute of facts. It reminds me of a Mandinka proverb widely recognized in Africa which says, “An empty bag cannot stand.” It is, however, resourceful. Social Darwinism rests like a tiger moth on Darwinism, its mother theory; when challenged with facts, it flits to a slightly different position and poses anew, where its camouflaging coloration allows it to survive a bit longer.

However, Social Darwinism is not merely as tricky and insubstantial as a tiger moth. It also is as dangerous as a tiger. As shall be shown in these pages, a large portion of Northern Nigeria’s suffering can be laid directly at the feet of this tiger and its parent. This book is an invitation to readers, and to African scholars particularly, to look around them and determine to what extent Social Darwinism has mauled their respective societies and nations.

What Precisely Is This Dangerous Creature?

Though it goes by many camouflaging names, Social Darwinism is the pseudo-scientific ideology which posits that the biological principles of Darwin’s scientific theory of random mutation and natural selection bear analogy to human society.

One startling iteration of Social Darwinism occurred under the guise of tactical warfare in the 1920s, when a Russian scientist sought to produce a race of super-soldiers for Stalin’s army by impregnating women from French Guinea with the sperm of a dead chimpanzee — black African women, mind you, who were presumed to be less highly evolved and thus closer to chimpanzees than were white European women. The Russian scientist was not a lone gunman, so to speak. Colonial authorities approved the plan, and the Russian found support amongst both French and American scientists.

Horrifying though this experiment is in terms of religion and morality, it makes ethical sense under Social Darwinism. If humans are naught but evolutionarily advanced animals, and if we breed and crossbreed animals to suit our purposes, why should we not breed humans in the same manner?

Darwin’s theory of evolution further posited the natural world as a place where the fittest survive and the less fit decline and die; if this is indeed the case, thought Darwin’s contemporaries (and indeed many of our own), then who are we to battle nature herself? Why should we not let the less-fit die? Indeed, why should we not hasten their demise if it will profit us — the survivors, the fittest — economically, geographically, or politically? Why should the Briton not manipulate, oppress, and exploit the Nigerian? After all, the fact that he can do so surely proves that he is right to do so — he is fulfilling his very destiny, as decreed by Nature herself.

True, such predatory impulses are as old as man himself. This book, however, explores the 19th-century attempt to repackage those age-old myths, prejudices, racism, and general selfishness in a pseudo-scientific wrapper.

Examining the Wrapper

That pseudo-scientific wrapper has allowed myriad evils to flourish up to the present day. Without doubt, Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution and its social ramifications, though unproven and indeed increasingly discredited, hold pernicious sway in classrooms and boardrooms, in the halls of politics, medicine, and trade.

Though the objective of Social Darwinism was and still is the denigration, subjugation, exploitation, and dehumanization of targeted peoples, these evils generally are cloaked in the benevolent language of guiding an inferior race or protecting a superior one by weeding out supposedly inferior stock. At various times and in various places people so targeted have been the mentally or physically disabled, the elderly, the ill, the homosexual, the unborn; those whose ethnicity, nationality, or appearance has posed a real or perceived barrier to the fulfilment of another group’s desires; and those whose poverty or criminality has been blamed, Darwinist-fashion, upon inferior genetics. The problems of Social Darwinism are various and are pervasive worldwide, and all people wronged by Darwin and his followers deserve to have their stories told and the false narratives wielded against them deconstructed. My focus in these pages, however, will be on my people and my country.

Four Thousand Miles Away

Here is how the idea of a 19th-century scientist traveled four thousand miles to grievously wound Northern Nigeria: Charles Darwin emerged at a time when Europe and Great Britain were hungry for an excuse to exploit Africa. Darwin’s theories provided a morally palatable (though as we shall see, entirely wrong and illogical) excuse. Further, in addition to justifying self-serving colonization, Darwin’s theories shaped the way British administrators managed Northern Nigeria and the various people groups therein.

The false narrative of Social Darwinism as promoted by British colonizers caused great and unjust harm to Nigeria, and to this day many aspects of the pernicious narrative are widely and harmfully believed to be true. However, the critical link between the increasingly insatiable appetite for Africa’s resources, on the one hand, and Charles Darwin’s growing visibility, on the other hand, has been ignored, as if willfully, in the conventional Social Darwinist historiography. I will present ample evidence for my claims in Part One of this book, drawing on official documents, public statements, well-attested historical events, and so forth.

This book does not deny that there are differences in material culture, literacy, and technological attainments between Europe and Black Africa; rather, it firmly rejects the sleight of hand according to which these external differences indicate a difference in the basic building blocks of the European and of the African (understood to mean black-skinned Africans), and that this supposed inherent difference causes cultural differences and warrants “Europeans are superior to Africans” propaganda. These matters I shall discuss in Part Two of this book.

My purpose is not merely to point the finger of blame, nor is it only to restore a view of the black African as equal in all ways to the white European. It is also to show that Social Darwinism rests on a faulty foundation, so that perhaps the day may come when the House of Darwin and all his unruly, self-serving children harm no longer.

More on secular humanism's civil war

On the Gordian knot that is the Israeli Palestinian conflict

Controversy over the p-value

Cornelius G Hunter

There is much to agree with in Steven Novella’s article from this past week on the P-value. The latest news regarding the beleaguered statistical parameter used in hypothesis testing is the call to reduce its associated threshold for statistical significance by an order of magnitude from its venerable value of 0.05 to 0.005. This is a modest proposal compared the outright banning the use of P-values in recent years. But in any case, while a move to 0.005 would likely help to reduce problems, what is more desperately needed is the underlying training and peer review to ensure proper statistical testing, period, regardless of the value selected threshold for the P-value. This is because the problems discussed by Novella are dwarfed by hypothesis testing fallacies, such as false dichotomies, that routinely appear in the literature. Those problems, unfortunately, are routinely ignored.

Monday 20 February 2023

Uncommon sense re: intellectuals and society,

The Netherlands :the silent superpower?

Survival of the fittest taken to its logical conclusion?

When Darwin Came to Africa

John G West

Charles Darwin did not actually visit Africa. But his poisonous ideas certainly did, spread by aggressive Social Darwinists who left a bitter legacy that impacts Africans even today.

My dear friend Olufemi Oluniyi spent the last years of his life documenting what happened so the world could finally know the truth.

Olufemi was a Nigerian pastor, theologian, journalist, scholar, and human rights activist. I met him in 2017 when he participated in the Center for Science & Culture’s Summer Seminar program here in Seattle.

A Resolution to Write

As Nigerian scholar Mary-Noelle Ethel Ezeh explains,

Ideas rule the world, and corrosive ideologies damage human relations and destroy societies. In this book, Olufemi Oluniyi lucidly exposes how the pseudo-science of Social Darwinism fueled manipulative and exploitative British imperialist policies in Northern Nigeria to damage human relations and destroy societies… The author… vividly shows how British Social Darwinist policies were a root cause of the damaged relations among the peoples of Nigeria. This root cause continues to exert its influence in Nigeria’s effort to build a sustainable democracy in the 21st century.

Dr. Ezeh is Professor of Ethics and Christian History at Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University in Nigeria.

Historian Richard Weikart adds that Darwin Comes to Africa provides “a powerful reminder that Social Darwinism and the scientific racism flowing from it had profoundly damaging influences on real people, especially those — such as black Africans — denigrated by scientific elites as ‘inferior’ on the evolutionary ladder.” Weikart is Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, Stanislaus, and author most recently of Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism.

More Than an Indictment

Olufemi’s book isn’t just an indictment of Social Darwinism. It also tells the story of how Christian missionaries in Africa pushed back against Social Darwinism. And it presents evidence showing how all humans reflect the intelligent design of their creator.

“The author powerfully challenges evolutionary arguments for racism,” notes African scholar Dr. Richard Ochieng’. “He also refutes Western myths about the history of Africa as the ‘dark continent,’ recounting Africa’s many contributions to ancient manufacturing, medicine, architecture, mathematics, and more. Overall, the book presents an inspiring vision of the transcendent value of all people as equal members of the same human race.” Dr. Ochieng’ is a Lecturer at the University of Eldoret in Kenya and Chair of the BioCosmos Kenya Trust Foundation.

If you want to learn more about Darwinism’s real-world consequences in history, you couldn’t do better than add Darwin comes to Africa to your reading list.

More on Darwinism's simple beginning problem

File under "well said" XCI

"It is better to have the wrong answer to the right question than the right answer to the wrong question"

Anonymous graffiti writer.

Sunday 19 February 2023

Human exceptionalism on its deathbed?

World’s Oldest Medical Journal Endorses “Nature Rights”

Wesley J Smith

I have been writing for some time about how establishment medicine and bioethics have become profoundly ideological to the point of crossing into the nihilism of anti-humanism. Now, The Lancet, the world’s oldest and one of the field’s most established medical — not environmental — journals has published an advocacy column in favor of granting “rights” to “nature.”

The author backs the concept of granting humans the right to a clean environment: a plausible proposition that at least maintains the concept of rights that belong exclusively to the human realm.

However, according to Hong Kong–based bioethicist and law professor Eric C. Ip, such rights do not go nearly far enough. He wants rights granted to nature, which would thereby reject human exceptionalism. From the piece, “From the Right to a Healthy Planet to the Planetary Right to Health,”

Some interpretations of the right to a healthy planet could still be problematic. The planet’s ecosystems consist of communities of life forms, of which humanity is but one member, that interact with each other and their landscapes.

The Rio Declaration’s reference to the positioning of humans “at the centre of concerns for sustainable development” could no longer be defended. It is impossible to protect the well-being of the planet if humans persist in pursuing endless, albeit narrowly defined, growth with an aura of species superiority.

Jesting? Unfortunately, Not a Chance

In other words, we, flora, fauna, and, indeed, geological features such as rivers and granite outcroppings are equal. Lest you think I jest, at least six rivers and two glaciers have already been granted “rights” as this antihuman movement spreads.

Ip claims that human rights and nature rights are mutually reinforcing:

In their current form, rights of nature are enforceable rights attributed to natural entities of Earth, such as ecosystems; these rights — mainly the rights to exist, flourish, and restoration — underscore the core planetary health insight that humanity is part of, and not apart from, an interconnected planet. Practically speaking, the right to a healthy environment and the planetary right to health converge on the same obligation on the part of humanity to protect the planetary community. There does not seem to be any irreconcilable conflict between these two mutually reinforcing rights. Humans have an intrinsic right to flourish; however, that is impossible if they treat the natural foundations of life with disrespect.

This Is Simply Not True

Nature’s “rights” are typically defined, by environmental organizations, as “the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” That’s akin to both a right to life and noninterference with natural processes and life cycles.

Laws that grant rights to nature do so for the purpose of handcuffing human thriving by inhibiting development, all in the name of saving the planet. They generally allow anyone to bring court action to prevent development activities — meaning that all human endeavors that impact the natural world are at the mercy of the sensibilities of the most radical environmentalist. And that includes essentials such as the generation of electricity with fossil fuels, as well as the mining of minerals such as lithium needed to make renewables functional.

A Radical Agenda

At the very least, granting “rights” to “nature” would grant the natural world and human needs equal consideration before the law. Even if related lawsuits on behalf of nature’s “rights” are lost eventually, the chilling effect of their potential alone would be catastrophic. Imagine trying to obtain liability insurance for a new waterfront hotel or a mining operation when the insurance company knows that the most extreme anti-development activist can take the project to court.

Radical environmental misanthropy is on the march, now co-opting the medical establishment. Its activists are well funded and ideologically committed. The time has come to stop rolling our eyes at the apparent insanity of these proposals and take the threat posed by them seriously. The future of human prosperity and our self-identification as the special species, uniquely possessed with both rights and responsibilities, depend on defeating this radical agenda.

In search of what the science actually says re:.Darwinism.

Rob Staedler and the NABT

Cornelius G Hunter

It's no secret that the origins debate is highly polarized. Many people have their minds made up and too often there is no place for a reasoned evaluation of the science. That’s tragic because that is where things become interesting. I once spoke to a roomful of high school science teachers, explaining that they could accurately teach how the science bears on the theory of evolution—both positively and negatively. The response I got was that this would confuse the students who needed to be given a simple, unambiguous message. One teacher was concerned that anything other than an obvious, “evolution is true,” message would be detrimental to the learning. To be sure there can be a tension between detail and clarity in classroom settings. High school students learn introductory history lessons out of necessity. They simply are not ready for research-level topics. Clarity sometimes comes at the cost of less detail. But there is a difference between simplifying a lesson and biasing a lesson. I was again reminded of all this when I heard about how the National Association of Biology Teachers responded to Dr. Robert Stadler’s new book, The scientific approach to Evolution.

It would be difficult to find someone more qualified than Stadler to analyze how the scientific evidence bears on the theory of evolution. His academic background is in Biomedical Engineering, with degrees from the top universities in the nation (Case Western Reserve University, MIT, and Harvard). And he has twenty years of experience in the field, with more than 100 patents to his name.

Stadler’s interest in evolution skips over the usual culture wars arguments and focuses on the science. Stadler provides an approach that is sorely needed. While there are plenty of texts and popular books that review the scientific evidence for evolution, they invariably fail to provide any kind of accounting of the strength of the evidence. The field outside my window is flat and so is evidence that the Earth is flat. But of course that evidence is weak.

On the other hand, there is plenty of academic work dealing with methods of rigorous, quantitative, theory evaluation, such as Bayesian approaches. But they invariably fail to engage the real-world evidences for evolution, in any kind of comprehensive way.

For all the talk, there is too often a lack of actual practice of analyzing the evidence. Enter Rob Stadler and his thoroughly accessible approach to laying out how the evidence bears on the theory of evolution. Importantly, Stadler explains not just the evidences, but the strengths and weaknesses of those evidences.

Because Stadler’s approach is accessible, it is an excellent classroom resource. Indeed, regardless of what one believes about a scientific theory such as evolution, the learning is greatly enhanced when one is allowed to explore the evidence, think critically about it, form opinions, and defend them in discourse. Rather than rehearse the carefully selected subset of evidences routinely presented in textbooks, the science should be allowed to speak for itself.

Unfortunately those science teachers I spoke to are not the only ones uncomfortable with allowing science such freedoms. Earlier this year Stadler worked with an agency to place an advertisement for his new book with the National Association of Biology Teachers. The contract was signed, funds were paid, and beginning in May the ad was to appear on the NABT website.

But strangely enough, on May 1 the advertisement failed to appear. It was through the ad agency that Stadler learned that the NABT had no intention of running the ad. The agency informed Stadler that the NABT had “concerns” over the content of the book.

And what exactly was the problem? The Scientific Approach to Evolution allows the evidence to speak for itself. According to Stadler’s book, there could be negative evidences, as well as positive evidences.

And that was not acceptable.

The NABT was concerned that “Dr. Sadler’s attempts to address ‘strengths and weaknesses’ in order to establish a climate of controversy in the scientific community regarding evolution where there is none.”

Ironically, the NABT was also concerned that Dr. Sadler underappreciates that “theories are open to revision and refinement as new data becomes available.” That’s ironic because Sadler’s book does precisely that. Sadler appeals to new data to refine and revise our understanding of evolution.

Indeed, if Sadler’s theory-neutral appeal to the scientific evidence makes him guilty of attempting to “establish a climate of controversy” where there is none, then how can theories such as evolution ever be revised?

The fact is, the NABT’s ground rules are a form of theory protectionism. They won’t even run an advertisement for a book that dares question evolution on scientific grounds.

And rather than address the evidence that Sadler brings forth, the NABT contrives nefarious motives. According to the NABT, Sadler is guilty of dishonest pedagogy, and seeking “to establish a climate of controversy.” In the name of scientific integrity the theory must be protected. Darwin’s supporter TH Huxley called for a very different approach. We must, Darwin’s bulldog explained:

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

Huxley insisted that we cast aside our preconceived notions, and follow the evidence to wherever it leads. Otherwise “you shall learn nothing.” Unfortunately Huxley would not recognize today’s classroom. The NABT would do well to heed the warning of Darwin’s most vocal advocate.

Saturday 18 February 2023

On pondering the work of the original Technologist

Where Biology and Engineering Intersect: CELS 2023 Applications Are Open Now!

Steve Laufman

We recently announced the 2023 Conference on Engineering in Living Systems (CELS), which will be held June 1-3, 2023, at the Tally Retreat Center at Camp Copass, in Denton, TX.

CELS 2023 brings together an interdisciplinary group of biologists, engineers, computer scientists, medical practitioners and researchers, systems modelers, process designers, and others from related disciplines in order to: (1) apply engineering principles to better understand biological systems, (2) craft a design-based theoretical framework that explains and predicts the behaviors of living systems, and (3) develop research programs that demonstrate the engineering principles at work in living systems.

A Collegial Setting

The conference will follow a workshop-like format of discussion-oriented sessions in a collegial setting, with a goal of fostering active participation and establishing concrete results and action items.

Topics include the following:

Intersection of Biology and Engineering — the impacts of engineering thinking in the study of biology

Architecture of Living Systems — design principles and design patterns in living systems

Theory of Biological Design — theoretical foundations for a new design-based framework for living systems

Adaptation — mechanisms and processes used by living systems to adapt to changing circumstances and environments

Coherence — organization of capabilities and processes to achieve and sustain life

Optimization — mechanisms and processes for optimizing resource usage

Interdependency and Causal Circularity — how complex and coherent systems are initialized and jumpstarted

Resilience — failure prevention and anti-fragility in living systems

Process Coordination — mechanisms for orchestrating biological processes

Applications and Models — formal methods for modeling and understanding living systems

Not Merely for Listening

This is not a conference for listening to thought leaders in the intelligent design community (though many will be there), but an opportunity to jump in and become part of the conversation — working together to develop a new theoretical framework for how living systems work, as well as their adaptive capabilities and limits to change over time. We expect many who have long stayed on the sidelines will find themselves uniquely positioned to contribute.

We hope to be able to offer a limited number of scholarships to upper class and graduate students, or to post-docs in early career positions.

Space is limited in order to promote meaningful discussion and concrete results, so if you’d like to join us for this unique opportunity, we encourage you to complete the application process as soon as possible.

For more information, and to apply, go here. We look forward to seeing you at CELS 2023!

Carnivorous plants a trap for Darwinism?

Venus Flytrap Takes a Bite Out of Darwinism

Evolution News

On a classic episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid reads from Marcos Eberlin’s fascinating book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. In this excerpt, the distinguished Brazilian scientist highlights the challenge the Venus flytrap poses for evolutionary theory. Dr. Eberlin describes the problem: The Venus flytrap, like all carnivorous plants, has no use for its insect-trapping function unless it also has an insect-digesting function. And vice versa. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection selects for current function, not potential future function. Unlike a designing intelligence, natural selection can’t look into the future and plan in that way. So for natural selection to have selected these twin systems, they would somehow have had to evolve together. But could they really evolve together? How, when there would be no functional advantage along much of the evolutionary pathway to the sophisticated finished systems? Finally, how did this “evolutionary miracle” also happen in four other carnivorous plant genera, supposed cases of “convergent evolution”? Download the podcast or listen to it here. And see a video of the Venus flytrap in action below, as mentioned in the podcast:

Thursday 16 February 2023

Confessions of an ex-trinitarian?

The world war beneath our feet

On the machine code of life

Wednesday 15 February 2023

Even reductive materialists marvel.

Darwinism: trolled by lunatics?

Ruminants, Moon Watchers Bedevil Darwin

Evolution News

On a new episode of ID the Future host Andrew McDiarmid brings listeners a couple of fascinating recent articles from Evolution News by David Coppedge. The first is “Animals Tune Behavior by Lunar Cycle; but How?” The second article is “Darwin, We Have a Problem: Horse Teeth Are Not Less Evolved.” In the first, some ingenious molecular engineering crops up in widely divergent creatures, giving them some impressive abilities to read lunar cycles. The evolutionists’ go-to explanation is “convergent evolution,” an incantation that fails to explain how something like this could have evolved even once, much less multiple separate times. And in the second, a much-beloved story of ruminant tooth evolution gets a kick in the teeth from a series of uncooperative facts, not least of which are the teeth of a famous non-ruminant, the horse. Download the podcast or listen to it Here

Tuesday 14 February 2023

Why no rise of the machines

Darwinism's quest for a simple beginning remains a dead end.

The fossil record continues to "astonish" Darwinists.

New Scientist: Ichthyosaurs Evolved “Astonishingly Rapidly”

Casey Luskin

In December, Günter Bechly commented on the non-neo-Darwinian origins of ichthyosaurs (large marine reptiles that lived in the Mesozoic), writing:

A new study that described Sclerocormus as the sister genus to Cartorhynchus found “that ichthyosauriforms evolved rapidly within the first one million years of their evolution” (Jiang et al. 2016). This means that the fish-like habitus of ichthyosaurs originated from terrestrial quadrupedal ancestors within a quarter of the lifespan of a single large vertebrate species. Not exactly gradual in my view! Indeed, a friend of mine, who is one of the leading experts on ichthyosaurs and not a theist, privately and confidentially told me that he came to doubt neo-Darwinism as an adequate explanation for this very reason.

A Real Whopper”

Now, an article in New Scientist has confirmed these problems, with a story titled “Largest ever animal may have been Triassic ichthyosaur super-predator.” According to the subhead, “New fossil discoveries show predatory marine reptiles from 200 million years ago may have been bigger than today’s blue whales — and that they evolved astonishingly rapidly.”

Then, in 2021, Sander and his colleagues reported a real whopper. They described a 2-metre-long ichthyosaur skull, plus some other bones, found at a site called Fossil Hill in Nevada. The animal, which they named Cymbospondylus youngorum, was probably 17.5 metres long. It lived 246 million years ago, a mere 6 million years after the Permian-Triassic extinction, and only 2 million years after the proto-ichthyosaurs. The implication was clear: once they had taken to the water, some ichthyosaurs got very big, very fast.

At first glance this appears to be a shockingly fast pulse of evolution. For comparison, the whales seem to have taken tens of millions of years to evolve from land-dwelling animals to ocean giants.

Other sources have affirmed the rapid evolution of ichthyosaurs. A 2021 paper in Science cited “rapid evolution of body size in ichthyosaurs” and “fast increases in disparity measures in early ichthyosaurs” which “reflect rapid lineage diversification and dietary specialization.”

Of course, the claim above about whales taking “tens of millions of years to evolve” is not correct, as fully aquatic whales also are said to have evolved incredibly rapidly from land mammals in perhaps just a few million years, not “tens of millions.” An article at Phys.org also published last year stated:

Dr. Coombs comments “Within eight million years, the ancestors of whales go from being fully terrestrial, such as the four-legged, furry Pakicetus which lived around the edge of the Tethys Sea, to fully aquatic.

"This is super quick in evolutionary terms.”

That article was covering a 2022 paper in Current Biology, “The tempo of cetacean cranial evolution,” which found that “Cetacean diversity was obtained through three key periods of rapid evolution” where the “Highest evolutionary rates are seen during the initial evolution of stem whales” — the period mentioned above — and “fossils demonstrate rapid transitions into novel morphospace.” The paper continues:

The evolution of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) involves one of the most extreme transitions of any vertebrate lineage. This shift occurred over an evolutionarily short 8–12 million years and is captured by an exceptional fossil record beginning in the early Eocene (~53 Ma) that documents the reorganization of the cetacean body into that of a fully aquatic organism. Some of the most extreme anatomical changes in this transition occurred in the skull, allowing whales to feed, breathe, and navigate in their new aquatic environments

New Niches, Open for Business

In any case, the New Scientist article goes on to propose that the giant ichthyosaurs’ rapid evolution is because niches opened up after the Permian-Triassic extinction that allowed them to evolve rapidly:

But given that the ichthyosaurs were living immediately after a period of profound ecological upheaval, perhaps we shouldn’t be too shocked. “I suspect one of the key reasons for [their rapid evolution into giants] is simply because nobody else was doing that,” says Lomax. It may be that such a rapid shift was possible because the Permian-Triassic mass extinction reduced diversity in the oceans, creating an opportunity for gigantic animals to evolve, which the ichthyosaurs seized.

This concept that adaptive radiations occur after mass extinction when niches are empty and available to be filled is an old idea. A 2022 paper in Frontiers in Earth Science invoked or hinted at adaptive radiation to explain the rapid appearance of diversity in various vertebrate groups after the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction:

Among vertebrates in particular, the nature of their [post-extinction] recovery also seems to mark something unusual. Certain clades such as fishes and tetrapods showed very rapid diversifications in the sea. … Marine predatory vertebrates show spectacular and rapid diversifications in the Early and Middle Triassic, and new discoveries from China have confirmed their early start in the Triassic, but not in the Late Permian. … The recent analysis of a giant ichthyosaur, Cymbospondylus youngorum, from the Anisian-aged Fossil Hill Member of the Favret Formation in Nevada, gives impressive evidence of the rapid diversification of these marine reptiles. This animal is estimated as 17.6 m long and weighing 45 tons, and the authors carry out detailed macroevolutionary analysis which shows enormously rapid achievement of huge diversity and great body size by ichthyosaurs in the Olenekian and Anisian, a prime example of an ‘early burst’ radiation.

But this explanation lacks mechanisms and never explores how biological information can arise so quickly. The raw data remains in direct conflict with Darwinian gradualism — meaning this is a case of evolutionary biology trying to explain away the data that otherwise was not directly expected under their model.

Monday 13 February 2023

The sexual counter revolution?

Rise of the "eternal" Metropolis

On the Nexus of science and religion.

New Open-Access Book from South Africa Explores Intelligent Design and Science-Faith Issues

Casey Luskin

The intelligent design (ID) community continues to forge stronger ties with scientists and scholars around the world. The latest example is a newly published book from Aosis, a South African academic publisher, titled Science and Faith in Dialogue. This peer-reviewed book was released at the very end of 2022, and it is open access and can be downloaded for free Here.

An All-Star Lineup

The lead editor of Science and Faith in Dialogue, Frederik van Niekerk, is Professor on the Nuclear Engineering staff at Northwest University of Potchefstroom in South Africa. In addition to Professor van Niekerk’s chapter, the volume includes contributions from some well-known names from the academic conversation over intelligent design, including (in the order in which they appear in the table of contents):

Stephen C. Meyer: “Qualified agreement: How scientific discoveries support theistic belief”

Hugh Ross: “Cosmological fine-tuning:

Guillermo Gonzalez: “Local fine-tuning and habitable zones”

Fazale R. Rana: “Materialistic and theistic perspectives on the origin of life”

James M. Tour: “Are present proposals on chemical evolutionary mechanisms accurately pointing toward first life?”

Brian Miller: “Engineering principles better explain biological systems than evolutionary theory”

Marcos Eberlin: “The evidence of foresight in nature”

Casey Luskin: “Evolutionary models of palaeoanthropology, genetics, and psychology fail to account for human origins: a review”

Michael N. Keas: “Rumours of war and evidence for peace between science and Christianity”

We’ll be featuring excerpts here in the future, but for now I’d like to highlight some special features of chapters in the book.

“Return of the God Hypothesis”

Steve Meyer’s chapter reprises his “Return of the God Hypothesis” argument and explains why theism is the best explanation on a philosophical level for the evidence from the Big Bang, fine-tuning, and biological complexity.

Guillermo Gonzalez explores many features of our galaxy, solar system, and planet that make it specially suited for life — looking at the Cosmic Habitable Zone, Galactic Habitable Zone, and Cosmic Habitable Age all suggest that “the properties of our particular universe were designed and selected for us.”

Jim Tour explores various obstacles to a chemical origin of life, including the need to carefully guide origin-of-life experiments, and the overwhelming complexity of producing cellular features by blind chemistry. He also reflects on his own research designing synthetic nano-vehicles, concluding that if it’s so hard for skilled chemists to produce molecular machines, can dumb natural processes do the same?

Brian Miller provides an exciting chapter which outlines an emerging new paradigm of doing biology through the lens of engineering. He sees new evolutionary concepts like natural genetic engineering or phenotypic plasticity as mechanisms that are designed to allow organisms to evolve within limits. And evolution can’t be random, as he cites challenges to neo-Darwinism from the fossil record, phylogenetic tree construction, and developmental biology.

“Foresight” in Nature

Marcos Eberlin, a chemist who is a member of the Brazilian National Academy of Sciences, finds evidence of “foresight” and planning required to produce many biological features, like the cell membrane, DNA and the genetic code, and bird navigation. Even water, he argues, shows evidence of foresight so life can exist.

Mike Keas debunks various myths about the historical relationship between faith and science, such as the idea that Christianity produced the “dark ages,” that a big universe is incompatible with theism, or that the church has historically persecuted scientists.

As for my chapter, you’ll just have to wait — we’ll talk about it more soon here at Evolution News!

The ongoing search for the master race.

Fidel Castro: a brief history.

Fidel Castro

political leader of Cuba

Britannica

Fidel Castro, in full Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, (born August 13, 1926, near Birán, Cuba—died November 25, 2016, Cuba), political leader of Cuba (1959–2008) who transformed his country into the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere. Castro became a symbol of communist revolution in Latin America. He held the title of premier until 1976 and then began a long tenure as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers. He handed over provisional power in July 2006 because of health problems and formally relinquished the presidency in February 2008.

Castro was born in southeastern Cuba. His father, Ángel Castro y Argiz, an immigrant from Spain, was a fairly prosperous sugarcane farmer in a locality that had long been dominated by estates of the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company. While married to his first wife, Ángel Castro began an affair with one of his servants, Lina Ruz González, whom he later also married. Together they had seven children; Fidel was one of them, and Raúl, who later became his brother’s chief associate in Cuban affairs, was another.

Fidel Castro attended Roman Catholic boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba and then the Catholic high school Belén in Havana, where he proved an accomplished athlete. He was named Havana’s outstanding schoolboy sportsman in 1943–44, and he excelled in track and field (in the high jump and middle-distance running), baseball, basketball, and table tennis. In 1945 he entered the School of Law of the University of Havana, where organized violent gangs sought to advance a mixture of romantic goals, political aims, and personal careers. Castro’s main activity at the university was politics, and in 1947 he joined an abortive attempt by Dominican exiles and Cubans to invade the Dominican Republic and overthrow Gen. Rafael Trujillo. He then took part in urban riots that broke out in Bogotá, Colombia, in April 1948.

After his graduation in 1950, Castro began to practice law and became a member of the reformist Cuban People’s Party (called Ortodoxos). He became their candidate for a seat in the House of Representatives from a Havana district in the elections scheduled for June 1952. In March of that year, however, the former Cuban president, Gen. Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the government of Pres. Carlos Prío Socarrás and canceled the elections.

After legal means failed to dislodge Batista’s new dictatorship, Castro began to organize a rebel force for the task in 1953. On July 26, 1953, he led about 160 men in a suicidal attack on the Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba in hopes of sparking a popular uprising. Most of the men were killed, and Castro himself was arrested. After a trial in which he conducted an impassioned defense, he was sentenced by the government to 15 years’ imprisonment. He and his brother Raúl were released in a political amnesty in 1955, and they went to Mexico to continue their campaign against the Batista regime. There Fidel Castro organized Cuban exiles into a revolutionary group called the 26th of July Movement.

On December 2, 1956, Castro and an armed expedition of 81 men landed on the eastern coast of Cuba from the yacht Granma. All of them were killed or captured except Fidel and Raúl Castro, Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara, and nine others, who retreated into the Sierra Maestra to wage guerrilla warfare against the Batista forces. With the help of growing numbers of revolutionary volunteers throughout the island, Fidel Castro’s forces won a string of victories over the Batista government’s demoralized and poorly led armed forces. Castro’s propaganda efforts proved particularly effective, and as internal political support waned and military defeats multiplied, Batista fled the country on January 1, 1959. Castro’s force of 800 guerrillas had defeated the Cuban government’s 30,000-man professional army.

As the undisputed revolutionary leader, Castro became commander in chief of the armed forces in Cuba’s new provisional government, which had Manuel Urrutia, a moderate liberal, as its president. In February 1959 Castro became premier and thus head of the government. By the time Urrutia was forced to resign in July 1959, Castro had taken effective political power into his own hands.

Castro had come to power with the support of most Cuban city dwellers on the basis of his promises to restore the 1940 constitution, create an honest administration, reinstate full civil and political liberties, and undertake moderate reforms. But once established as Cuba’s leader he began to pursue more radical policies: Cuba’s private commerce and industry were nationalized; sweeping land reforms were instituted; and American businesses and agricultural estates were expropriated. The United States was alienated by these policies and offended by Castro’s fiery new anti-American rhetoric. His trade agreement with the Soviet Union in February 1960 further deepened American distrust. In 1960 most economic ties between Cuba and the United States were severed, and the United States broke diplomatic relations with the island country in January 1961. In April of that year the U.S. government secretly equipped thousands of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro’s government; their landing at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, however, was crushed by Castro’s armed forces.

Cuba also began acquiring weapons from the Soviet Union, which soon became the country’s chief supporter and trade partner. In 1962 the Soviet Union secretly stationed ballistic missiles in Cuba that could deliver nuclear warheads to American cities, and in the ensuing confrontation with the United States, the world came close to a nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended when the Soviet Union agreed to withdraw its nuclear weapons from Cuba in exchange for a pledge that the United States would withdraw the nuclear-armed missiles it had stationed in Turkey and no longer seek to overthrow Castro’s regime.

Fidel Castro

In the meantime Castro created a one-party government to exercise dictatorial control over all aspects of Cuba’s political, economic, and cultural life. All political dissent and opposition were ruthlessly suppressed. Many members of the Cuban upper and middle classes felt betrayed by these measures and chose to immigrate to the United States. At the same time, Castro vastly expanded the country’s social services, extending them to all classes of society on an equal basis. Educational and health services were made available to Cubans free of charge, and every citizen was guaranteed employment. The Cuban economy, however, failed to achieve significant growth or to reduce its dependence on the country’s chief export, cane sugar. Economic decision-making power was concentrated in a centralized bureaucracy headed by Castro, who proved to be an inept economic manager. With inefficient industries and a stagnant agriculture, Cuba became increasingly dependent on favourable Soviet trade policies to maintain its modest standard of living in the face of the United States’ continuing trade embargo.

Castro remained premier until 1976, when a new constitution created a National Assembly and Castro became president of that body’s State Council. He retained the posts of commander in chief of the armed forces and secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba—the only legal political party—and he continued to exercise unquestioned and total control over the government. Castro’s brother Raúl, minister of the armed forces, ranked second to him in all government and party posts.

Fidel Castro’s early attempts to foment Marxist revolutions elsewhere in Latin America foundered, but Cuban troops played an important role in various conflicts in other less-developed countries, especially in Africa. It was long held that Cuban forces were acting as surrogates for the Soviet Union in these Cold War conflicts. However, scholarship that emerged in the early 21st century made clear that Cuba had acted at its own behest in Africa as Castro sought to spread the Cuban Revolution internationally and to bolster his standing among nonaligned countries and in the less-developed world. From 1975 to 1989, Cuban expeditionary forces fought in the Angolan civil war on the side of the communistic Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. In 1978 Cuban troops assisted Ethiopia in repelling an invasion by Somalia. By the 1980s Castro had emerged as one of the leaders of nonaligned countries, despite his ties to the Soviet Union. He continued to signify his willingness to renew diplomatic relations with the United States, provided that it end its trade embargo against Cuba. In 1980 Castro released a flood of immigrants to the United States when he opened the port of Mariel for five months. The 125,000 immigrants, including some criminals, strained the capacity of U.S. immigration and resettlement facilities.

In the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev began to undertake democratic reforms and eastern European countries were allowed to slip out of the Soviet orbit, Castro retained a hard-line stance, espousing the discipline of communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 took him by surprise and meant the end of generous Soviet subsidies to Cuba. Castro countered the resulting economic decline and shortages of consumer goods by allowing some economic liberalization and free-market activities while retaining tight controls over the country’s political life.

In late 1993 Castro’s daughter sought asylum in the United States, where she openly criticized her father’s rule. The following year, economic and social unrest led to antigovernment demonstrations, the size of which had not been seen in Cuba in some 35 years. Shortly thereafter Castro lifted restrictions on those wanting to leave the country, and thousands headed for the United States in the largest exodus since the 1980 Mariel “freedom flotilla.” In 1998 Castro allowed Pope John Paul II to visit Cuba for the first time.

In 2003 the National Assembly confirmed Castro as president for another five-year term. During that year the Cuban government arrested dozens of independent journalists and activists in a renewed government crackdown on dissidents, and some 75 activists were convicted for conspiring with the United States to subvert the revolution. The following year Castro strengthened his alliance with Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez by helping him bring to fruition the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas [ALBA]; Alternativa later changed to Alianza [“Alliance”]), a socialist initiative to promote regional commerce, through which Cuba provided health care professionals to Venezuela in exchange for discounted oil.

On July 31, 2006, Fidel Castro passed power on a provisional basis to his brother Raúl in order to recover from surgery for a serious intestinal illness. It was the first time since the 1959 revolution that he ceded control. In February 2008, just days before the National Assembly was to vote for the country’s leader, Fidel Castro (who had not appeared in public for 19 months) officially declared that he would not accept another term as president. His announcement that he was stepping down was made through a letter that was addressed to the country and posted on the Web site of the official Communist Party newspaper, Granma. In part it read, “I do not bid you farewell. My only wish is to fight as a soldier of ideas.”

In the succeeding months, official photos were released of Fidel Castro in private meetings, and in July 2010 he made a public visit to the National Centre for Scientific Research in Havana. In September, on the eve of the release of the first volume of his memoirs, The Strategic Victory, he remarked to a reporter from the United States that “the Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” Many took his comment as an admission of the failure of communism. However, Fidel Castro was quick to qualify his remarks in a speech that followed a few days later. Most analysts saw his remarks as offering support for Raúl’s introduction of economic reforms that included a massive layoff of government employees as well as increased toleration of private enterprise. In 2011 Fidel stepped down as secretary-general of the Communist Party of Cuba and was succeeded by Raúl.

In March 2016 Fidel, who seldom had been seen in public in recent years, made a high-profile appearance in print when he responded to U.S. Pres. Barack Obama’s historic visit to Cuba with a 1,600-word letter in Granma. In the letter, titled “Brother Obama,” he recapped the aggressive U.S. policy toward Cuba during the Cold War and castigated Obama, the first sitting U.S. president to visit the island in nearly 80 years, for not acknowledging the accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution, including its efforts to eradicate racism. Addressing the warming Cuba-U.S. relations, Castro wrote, “Nobody should be under the illusion that the people of this dignified and selfless country will renounce the glory, the rights, or the spiritual wealth they have gained with the development of education, science and culture.” In April a frail soon-to-be-90-year-old Castro told the Communist Party Congress that he would be dying soon, and he implored party members to work to fulfill his communist vision for Cuba.

The God shared by irrational "theist " and "rational" atheists?

Sabine Hossenfelder Promotes Determinism

Cornelius G Hunter

We’ve Learned Nothing Since Laplace

Yesterday theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder became the latest in a long line of smart people to make the absurd claim of determinism (see Blog or Video), and that therefore there is no such thing as free will. This silliness traces at least as far back as Laplace and is based on the idea that any system evolves from time point 1 to time point 2 according to the laws of nature. As Hossenfelder puts it:

These laws have the common property that if you have an initial condition at one moment in time, for example the exact details of the particles in your brain and all your brain’s inputs, then you can calculate what happens at any other moment in time from those initial conditions. This means in a nutshell that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out.

The first problem with Hossenfelder’s sophism is that it is non empirical. We experience free will continually in our personal experience. Hossenfelder’s claim amounts to a denial of untold mountains of evidence. Hossenfelder’s predictable solution is anti-realism. The problem, according to determinists such as Hossenfelder, is that our experience is uniformly false. We may think we have free will, but that is nothing more than an illusion.

But why is that true? Hossenfelder makes the Humean appeal to the laws of nature. They show how systems evolve deterministically, so therefore the data from our personal experience must be false. Hossenfelder fails to see the unjustified leap she has made. She has declared the laws of nature to be authoritative without justification.

Hossenfelder has identified a conflict: our experience says one thing, and the laws of nature say the opposite. Something must give, and Hossenfelder unilaterally and without justification concludes that the laws of nature win out. The fallacy is reminiscent of Hume’s argument against miracles that John Earman demolished twenty years ago.

As if sensing a problem Hossenfelder attempts to justify her leap. She explains that “These deterministic laws of nature apply to you and your brain because you are made of particles,” and that “we know that brains are made of particles.” Furthermore, “the laws of nature that we know describe humans on the fundamental level.” But rather than saving the theory, Hossenfelder is merely digging deeper into the fallacy, as she simply begs the question. These are all non-empirical truth claims that are beholden to the assumption of determinism. She simply asserts these claims, but why should we believe any of them are true?

Yet Hossenfelder is supremely confident in her finding. Drop this free will nonsense, she warns, or “you will never understand how the universe really works.” This is the classic intellectual necessity argument, so common in the evolution literature. In this case it is determinism that is required for scientific progress and truth.

This brings us to the second problem with Hossenfelder’s determinism, which is her many truth claims. As she explains above, “the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang.” But if that is true then Hossenfelder cannot know anything. Everything she has typed out was, well, pre-determined by some initial conditions and some blind natural laws.

Why should Hossenfelder think for a moment that anything that occurs to her has any correspondence to truth? Above she made the classic intellectual necessity argument but, in fact, it is precisely the opposite. Her determinism undercuts her many truth claims, and knowledge in general.

There would be no reason to think anything we ever generate has any particular truth value. For instance, I could decide to type 2+2=5. In fact, there I did it. But of course, Hossenfelder would say that sentence was all preordained. She also would say it is not true. So certainly preordained sentences are not necessarily true. In fact, for Hossenfelder our notions, thoughts, commitments, and conclusions are merely a consequence of the arrangement of particles in our heads. Why should we think they would be true, if there even is such a thing?

Hossenfelder’s conclusion, that “the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out” is fitting. For it is the ultimate in meaningless, trivialization of the profound. She is mired in the absurd. Hossenfelder is the best and the brightest—a cutting edge theoretical physicist. The wisest that the world has to offer and look where she has landed. As Paul informed the Corinthians in the introduction of his first letter to them, God made foolish the wisdom of this world.

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Fidel Castro

Sabine Hossenfelder Promotes Determinism

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