by Denyse O'Leary

Recently, I have been reading Angus Menuge on "the failure of Darwinism," from a computer teacher's perspective. Menuge is a Professor of philosophy and computer science at Concordia University in Wisconsin. The following excerpt from his book, Agents under Fire is the clearest explanation of why Darwinist arguments that intricate machines inside the cell can be built up without any intelligence underlying the universe are unbelievable:

A Diagnosis of the Failure of Darwinism

Repeatedly, we have seen that even if gene duplication can make all the parts of an irreducibly complex system simultaneously available, Darwinism cannot provide credible solutions to the problems of coordinating these parts and ensuring their interface compatibility.

From my perspective as a teacher of computer programming, this limitation of Darwinism as a problem-solving strategy is surprising. First, consider the analogous problem of coordinating a program's instructions. As programs become more complex, it becomes virtually impossible to get them to work if they are written from the bottom-up, one instruction at a time.

With so many details, it is highly likely that some critical task is specified incompletely or in the wrong order. To avoid such errors, programmers find it essential to use top-down design. Top-down design is a problem-solving strategy that begins with an abstract specification of the program task and then breaks it down into several main sub-problems, each of which is refined further into its subproblems. This strategy is epitomized by such things as recipes, where the task is broken down into ingredients and utensils (initialization), and the mixing and cooking of the ingredients (processing), and a specification of what to d when te ds is ready (finalization). The same approach is clear in the instructions too build "partially assembled" furniture, such as a bookcase.

First, the assembly of the bookcase is reduced to its major tasks, constructing the frame, back, and shelves. Then each of these tasks is specified in detail. At every level, the order of the tasks is important; for example, the back and the shelves cannot be installed until the frame is complete. A quality top-down design is sensitive to the proper placement of tasks, ensuring that given task is not omitted, redundantly repeated, or performed out of sequence. In this way, top-down design facilitates the proper coordination of problem-solving modules.

Unfortunately, natural selection cannot implement top-down design. Natural selection is a bottom-up atomistic process. Tasks must be solved gradually, independent from one another. There is no awareness of the future function of the assembled system to coordinate these tasks. If even intelligent agents (experienced programmers) require top-down design to solve complex problems, it is tendentious to suppose that unintelligent selection can solve problems at least as complex without the aid of top-down design.

In fact, even with top-down design, programmers find that it is necessary top do two levels of testing to produce a functional program. One level, unit testing, tests the function of a module in isolation from the whole program. The other level, integration testing, ensures that when all the modules are assembled, they interact in such a way as to solve the overall problem .Both kinds of testing are needed: it is a fallacy of composition to argue that since all the part of a system work, the assembled system will also work.

Compare the following examples.

Each football player is fit; therefore the team will play effectively.

Each brick is sound; therefore, the resulting wall will be strong.

The conclusions do not follow because it matters how bricks and players are coordinated, and it matters whether they are compatible. Say that each player is fit but that the offense tries to score only when it has lost possession: the team will be hopelessly uncoordinated. And if each player has a different play for the same circumstance, the team will suffer from incompatible elements.

Likewise, if bricks are sound but are piled at random or are incompatible in size and shape, it will be impossible to build an effective wall.

Unfortunately, Darwinism commits precisely this fallacy of composition in the case of irreducibly complex systems. It has to suppose that the independent unit testing of atomic components (which natural selection provides)is a plausible way of coordinating and attuning those components for their combined role. But it is not. The majority of subsets drawn from the power sets of sound football players and bricks will be completely dysfunctional when combined as teams or walls.

Note 65: From another perspective, Darwinism is also guilty of the reverse fallacy, the fallacy of division. It argues that because a given "irreducibly complex" system has a function, it therefore must be composed of subsystems with the same or a different function. But by itself the flagellum's motor neither supports locomotion or any other function.

(pp. 120-21, Agents under Fire)

You won't read that in your government-funded textbook, so save this link.

More on Angus Menuge:

New Scientist conspiracy files: A philosophy prof responds

Dorian Gray, I hope you believe in miracles, because ...

New Scientist: More from the "just connect the dots and ... " files

Scare their pants off before they even start reading - the art of the panic headline

From British physicist David Tyler:

Ever since the 'anthropic principle' entered the language of science, the case for the universe having the hallmarks of design has become progressively stronger. There is a consensus in the thinking of physicists and cosmologists that far exceeds the alleged consensus about anthropogenic global warming, and also the alleged consensus that natural selection is the mechanism for explaining design in living things. Author Tim Folger elevates the principle to "an extraordinary fact" about the universe: "Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and - in this universe, anyway - life as we know it would not exist."

Folger's article is based on an interview with physicist Andrei Linde, who says: "We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible." Many of these are sketched out for the benefit of readers, and Folger comments: "There are many such examples of the universe's life-friendly properties - so many, in fact, that physicists can't dismiss them all as mere accidents."

If we apply Dembski's design filter approach, we have three avenues to explore: Law, Chance and Design. Law gets very little attention from Folger, despite the intense search for grand Unification Theories (GUT) or Theories of Everything (ToE). The reason is that GUT have not delivered. We cannot explain why the universe is like it is. No progress has been made in showing why the fine-tuning of fundamental constants should be a feature of the physical world. Indeed, the pendulum has swung away from GUT because of the interest in string theory - which has served to underline how extraordinary the evidences of fine-tuning actually are. "[Polchinski and Bousso]calculated that the basic equations of string theory have an astronomical number of different possible solutions, perhaps as many as [10 to the power 1000]. Each solution represents a unique way to describe the universe."

Go here for more.

Also just up at Colliding Universes:

Not just aliens - the multiverse has gotta be out there too!

Extraterrestrial life: Here's a story you could only read in New Scientist ...

The universe has the hallmarks of design and what can anyone do about it?

Free stuff: Ivy League University lectures of interest to Colliding Universes readers

Was Darwin's horrid doubt just horrid - or a reasonable fear?:

... the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

I'd say that if his theory was true, horrid was a a slam dunk (yes, you are an evolved monkey, and no, your thoughts do not mean anything).

But very little in science turned out to be what Darwin or his contemporaries thought.

Non-materialist neuroscientists think that your mind is real and that it helps shape your brain. It is not a mere illusion created by the workings of the brain.

Here are some excerpts from the afternoon panel of the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium (September 11, 2008), sponsored by the Nour Foundation, UN-DESA, and the Université de Montréal. The excerpts feature some interesting exchanges between a number of non-materialist neuroscientists.

Excerpts from the morning panel are here.

Both the morning and afternoon panels were televised and can be viewed here.

When someone tells you it (whatever it is) is in their genes, show them this article:

new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. “It cannot work that way,” Dr. Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.

It turns out, for example, that several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA. The familiar double helix of DNA no longer has a monopoly on heredity. Other molecules clinging to DNA can produce striking differences between two organisms with the same genes. And those molecules can be inherited along with DNA.

The gene, in other words, is in an identity crisis. - "Now the Rest of the Genome" by Carl Zimmer (November 10, 2008)

Now, can someone please text Lamarck and tell him, come back, all is forgiven?

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist: One third of British teachers think ID or creationism okay

Why does it matter if humans are not just the "third chimpanzee"?

If the universe was designed, it does not follow that your grandmother's superstitions are true

Here's a debate that illustrates the real intelligent design controversy:

Distinguished scientist and professor James M. Tour will moderate a debate next month in Texas about intelligent design and evolution featuring four prominent scientists and philosophers. What's interesting is that defending intelligent design are an agnostic who is skeptical of ID and an atheist philosopher. That would be Dr. David Berlinski and Dr. Bradley Monton, respectively. Defending evolution will be British theologian Denis Alexander and well-known physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Here's the lineup on line for last nights's and today's debate. The Friday night debate will be made available in DVD and MP-3.

Also, here's a podcast with Monton, who is attempting to "elevate the debate." I assume that means getting it out of the hands of people like fellow atheist PZ Myers, who is well represented by this exchange with an interviewer:

In a related matter, how come when I enter the search term "demented f*ckwit" into Pharyngula I get about a zillion hits?

Somebody's got to be in charge with slapping around the demented f*ckwits. The position has devolved on me.

To the extent that most people can distinguish between an argument and a knuckle sandwich, Monton has everything to gain by advancing an intelligent discussion.

A similar debate took place in England this fall, between agnostic sociologist Steve Fuller, for design in the universe as a legitimate perspective and Christina scientist Denis Alexander against it.

The big change ids that the debate is increasingly around a reasonable interpretation of the evidence from nature, not the conspiracy theories of an entrenched Darwin lobby whose materialist - or anti-realist Christian - view of life is being dramatically disconfirmed. Increasingly, their Darwinism is a mantra, invoked against the evidence.

Anti-realist Christian? Well, the Faraday Institute's Denis Alexander, standard bearer for "anti-ID" Christian academics, would certainly qualify. He says, "We live in a universe created and sustained by God which displays design, but design is not particularly located in those aspects of the created order that science currently understands." In other words, we must accept on pure faith that the universe is designed because it doesn't look that way.

The trouble is, it does look that way, which is why Alexander's brand of "theistic evolution" is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Krauss's materialist position may be defensible, but Alexander's position is simply a relic of the days when Christians in science thought that the tide of evidence was running against them, and wanted to move the discussion to sheer existential "faith" - which, for what it is worth, was a brand new definition of faith, not known to the historic Christian tradition, which insisted that belief in God is a matter of reason. A friend comments,

As ever Phil Johnson puts it so perfectly succinctly when he asks “How can God guide an unguided process?” Simon Conway Morris is talking about convergent evolution – that is, the randomness of RM+NS = Teleology. There are too many of these folks who don’t understand basic geometry: Circles can’t be squared.

Well, they don't understand geometry, but they have faith.

Here are the preface and launch questions for the Dallas-Fort Worth debate:

Here are both the preface and the debate launch questions:

1 Intelligent Design has been defined differently by different people. But one definition which has the advantage of simplicity and non-circularity is this one -- The study of patterns in nature best explained by a goal-directed cause capable of adapting means to achieve ends.

2 The Issue -- Preface: Recent advances in scientific knowledge concerning the physical properties of the universe have shown the remarkably precise requirements requisite for a universe in which carbon-based life might exist. It has oftentimes been stated that the universe almost looks fine-tuned for habitability. Similar advances in our understanding of the nature of life within the universe have shown many biological systems existing and functioning in such delicate and precise patterns of interdependence which appear to reflect evidence of information and intelligent design.

Question: Is it necessary or even helpful for the scientific method to assume the absence of a designer in a universe manifesting such features? Or might it be helpful toward an accurate understanding of the universe and life within it to examine certain of its features in light of the possibility of intelligent design and empirically detectable evidences of the same?

Also, just up at the Post-Darwinist:

A thoughtful engineering prof skewers the big mantra - "Natural selection does it all"

Evolution does and does not predict irreducible complexity, and anyway it doesn't exist

The inverse square law of force tells us that a mass (A) at a distance of radius(r) from mass (D) will experience gravitational (G) and electrical (E) forces that are proportional to 1/r2 (Ref 3, pp.394-398). So for a universe many dimensions larger, this proportionality would simply increase such that in four dimensions G and E would be proportional to 1/r3, in 5 dimensions, to 1/r4 and so on (Ref 3, pp.394-398). Today the race is on to probe distances smaller than a 10th of a millimeter with the aim of detecting any deviation from the inverse square law that might indicate the presence of the additional space dimensions predicted by String theory. As astrophysicists Bernard Carr and Steven Giddings have noted, the spilling over of gravity into adjacent dimensions may provide the avenue through which String theory can truly be tested (Ref 10)

For now, no measurements on gravity have revealed any deviation from the inverse square law. But the Large Hadron Particle Collider, scheduled for completion in 2009, may change this (Ref 10). If the gravitational force really is much stronger than we observe in our three dimensional space and it is leaking out into adjacent dimensions of space as predicted, the production of tiny black holes- objects whose immense gravitational hold trap anything including light- would require much smaller amounts of energy and matter. Such a scenario would be achievable through the high-energy particle collisions that the Large Hadron Collider will be capable of (Ref 10). While Hadron has recently suffered some major technical difficulties (Ref 11) it promises much when it is finally up and running. If the planned experiments do provide evidence for gravitational spilling, we may be one step closer to achieving the String Theorists' dream of unification.

Also just up at Colliding Universes:

A theory of "almost" everything is the best we can do?

Quantum mechanics and popular culture: Artist's kit offers chance to produce trillions of new universes

Alfred Russel Wallace on why Mars is not habitable

"When I say it, it's science, when he says it, it's religion!"

Here is a video about the Collider:

Genetic sequence comparisons are often used to try to establish relationships in evolution. But as Robert Deyes, writing over at Access Research Network, shows, the molecular "clock" often conflicts with the "tree of life.":

Writing over a decade ago, UCLA biologists Laura Maley and Charles Marshall noted how genetic sequence comparisons carried out between different animal phyletic groups can lead to significantly different interpretations of evolutionary relationships depending on which species is chosen to represent each group (Ref 1). Such a finding should raise concern amongst protagonists of molecular systematics who today use sequence data to determine evolutionary relationships. Yale University's Gavin Naylor showed just how inaccurate such comparisons could be in the context of the vertebrate evolutionary tree (Ref 2). Mitochondrial DNA sequence analyses of 19 different taxa generated an astounding result- frogs and fish were clustered in the same clade as chickens even though "strong morphological and fossil evidence" did not show these as being in any way related by a common ancestor (Ref 2). The same mitochondrial DNA sequences placed echinoderms- which include starfish and sea urchins- in closer proximity to the vertebrates than amphioxus even though, being a chordate, we would expect amphioxus to be closer (Ref 2). That is, if we give the evolutionary tree any credibility. Given such anomalies, one should be cautious about stating what we really do know about the evolutionary relationships between different classes of vertebrates. Nevertheless molecular biologist Thomas Sakmar and his colleagues from the Rockefeller University seemingly threw caution to the wind several years later when they redesigned the rhodopsin molecule- a visual, light perceiving pigment that is ubiquitous throughout nature (Ref 3).

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist, Denyse O'Leary's news and culture blog on the intelligent design controversy:

Expelled DVD released today, to brisk sales, more hit reviews

Great offer! Get Ben Stein's Expelled - plus new book and earlier ID films

 British physicist David Tyler looks at a recent find in cichlid fish which has been vastly overhyped as evidence for new species. He means hype like this Nature News story (1 October 2008), which proclaims "What you see is how you evolve: Differences in vision could give rise to new species."

Here's the abstract of the paper he discusses:

Speciation through sensory drive in cichlid fish

Ole Seehausen, Yohey Terai, Isabel S. Magalhaes, Karen L. Carleton, Hillary D. J. Mrosso, Ryutaro Miyagi, Inke van der Sluijs, Maria V. Schneider, Martine E. Maan, Hidenori Tachida, Hiroo Imai & Norihiro Okada

Nature 455, 620-626 (2 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature07285 Abstract: Theoretically, divergent selection on sensory systems can cause speciation through sensory drive. However, empirical evidence is rare and incomplete. Here we demonstrate sensory drive speciation within island populations of cichlid fish. We identify the ecological and molecular basis of divergent evolution in the cichlid visual system, demonstrate associated divergence in male colouration and female preferences, and show subsequent differentiation at neutral loci, indicating reproductive isolation. Evidence is replicated in several pairs of sympatric populations and species. Variation in the slope of the environmental gradients explains variation in the progress towards speciation: speciation occurs on all but the steepest gradients. This is the most complete demonstration so far of speciation through sensory drive without geographical isolation. Our results also provide a mechanistic explanation for the collapse of cichlid fish species diversity during the anthropogenic eutrophication of Lake Victoria.

Tyler comments:

"The strongest evidence yet" involves a correlation between the visual system, body colour and ecology. Instead of this being used to support a hypothesis of sexual selection based on body colouration, the authors claim to have demonstrated sexual selection in action. This has been picked up by the media as fact: "a fish species in the cichlid family has been observed by scientists in the act of splitting into two distinct species in Lake Victoria" (Source). The cover of Nature proclaims that this is "a textbook example of evolution in action".

Let us suppose that the hypothesis is tested and confirmed, and the "sensory drive speciation" is validated. What are the implications for our understanding of evolution? It means that an ancestral fish population can split into two or more populations on the basis of colour. The daughter populations have differences in sensitivity to light frequencies and differences in body colouration. These may be accompanied by other ecological adaptations. There is no new genetic information - just fine-tuning of existing genetic systems. There is no evidence that these new species lack the potential to interbreed. Indeed, the differences are so slight that hybridisation to produce fertile offspring can be predicted with some confidence.

Talk about textbook examples- as the study authors themselves observe, for their particular proposed path by which new species may occur, "empirical evidence is rare and incomplete." Now, to their delight, they may have finally found an example (if the two schools of fish don't just interbreed back into hybrids after a few decades).

The problem isn't with the researchers, who sound suitably cautious. It's the pop science media that jump on something like this and make far more of it than the current state of knowledge would justify. That wouldn't matter if they were just speculating about some celeb's bumpy tummy, but unfortunately, they help skew science textbook and science teaching. Tyler observes,

The punchline: ID scientists are not opposed to the teaching of evolution in schools, but want it taught properly - allowing critical appraisal and the recognition of spin. Let speciation in cichlid fish enter the textbooks, not as a proof of evolution, but as an example of how evidence is brought to bear on current hypotheses of the origin of species.

That would be higher quality teaching, but would lead to too many embarrassing questions. My guess is, both the pop sci mags and the textbooks will stick to "proof of evolution"for the present.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist: Darwinism and popular culture: Still not clear how mind emerges from mud ,

"Don't be fooled by their reputation for altruism and free love – bonobos hunt and kill other monkeys just like their more vicious chimpanzees cousins, according to new research," Ewen Callaway tells us in New Scientist (13 October 2008), revealing that

"Bonobos are merciless," says Gottfried Hohmann, a behavioural ecologist at Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He witnessed several monkey hunts among bonobos living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and says, "they catch it and start eating it. They don't bother to kill it". Yet unlike chimps, bonobos live in female-centred societies where sex, not aggression, settles differences and enforces social order.

I'd wondered when all that "bonobos could teach humans a thing or two" stuff would finally hit the bottom of the vast circular file of pop science.

The rest of the article is basically people talking around an inconvenient discovery. My favourite line: "Some anthropologists suggest that in the million or so years that separate bonobos from chimps, bonobos lost their appetite for violence."

Gentle reader, remind me of that if they are ever ripping us both to pieces, eating as they go.

See "A defense of Apes r us - an insider look at the pygmy chimpanzee enthusiasts" for the "loving ape" view

and

"Apes R Not Us, and we have to get used to it, revisited!" for the skeptical view.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack: Language: Students cannot form logical position about television's impact?

MercatorNet “Navigating Modern Complexities” has kindly published my recent article on getting good marks, “The payoff for straining the brain: Does self-discipline beat intelligence? What about a good night’s sleep?”(October 8, 2008):

When researchers examined the final grades of 164 Grade Eight students, together with their acceptance or rejection from a prestigious high school, they found that “scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ.” Students with more self-discipline—meaning that they would sacrifice short-term fun for long-term gain—were more likely to improve their marks during the school year than those who wouldn’t sacrifice fun. By contrast, a high IQ did not predict a rise in grades. Obviously, this won’t surprise an experienced teacher or a mature parent. But it bears repeating all the same: Modern neuroscience is not overturning millennia of experience; it is filling out what the other disciplines already tell us. Our brains are very plastic organs, and paying attention determines the areas in which they develop. Like our bodies, brains must be exercised effectively to achieve our goals. That is why self-discipline is as important to brain exercise as to body exercise.

Go here for the rest.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack ...

Artificial intelligence: Computers do not think, they "shuffle bits"

Artificial intelligence: Getting computers to pretend to converse is an " extremely hard computational problem"

Spirituality: Churches nobody goes to any more vs. the "ancient and ever new" ones

Spirituality and the arts: High time someone said this

The Mindful Hack is my blog that supports The Spiritual Brain (Beauregard and O'Leary, 2007) .

Years ago, I met Michael Behe, American biochemist and author of Edge of Evolution, and he - then and always - struck me as a scientist who needed to witness to what science is supposed to be, against the spirit of the age.

Born in the wrong time, he was. In a time when scientists exist to provide proof for fascistic atheism.

Darwin's theory of evolution is promoted in order to make atheism work.

Behe could not make Darwin's theory work because the theory is not true to the reality of life. And he was not willing to buy into the many ways that others cope with that fact, and go on with their careers.

Political correctness demands that he either make the theory work, or pretend to. But he can't because it is not true.

Of course, hordes of grantsmen are willing to pretend that it is true. The sponsors of theories like the peacock's tail and the big bazooms theory of human evolution prance and dance before the grants committees. So?

Surely we have all been here before. Flatuent profs and glad rag-waving teachers, to say nothing of eager, agreeable museum docents. The sort of people whose position depends on agreeing with whatever is going down.

But they cannot make their shibboleth true by an exercise of the will alone.

No wonder Behe is so hated. Anyway, here is a podcast with Behe:

How Michael Behe Came to Doubt Darwin's Theory

Click here to listen.

This episode of ID the Future features a clip from national radio host Michael Medved's intriguing interview with CSC senior fellow and biochemist Michael Behe. How did Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box and The Edge of Evolution first come to doubt Darwin's theory? Listen in and find out.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist

Darwinism and high culture: "Exactly why we do things this way is never a question that is asked"

Startling idea for a debate: Evidence really matters ...

Intellectual freedom: Post-modernism the key threat?

Christian mathematician John Lennox vs. former Christian science writer Michael Shermer, on God, design, and all that

In "Faith Beyond the Frontal Lobes" (Washington Post, September 27, 2008) Michael Gerson offers a common sense corrective to rampant materialism in neuroscience. Reviewing Andrew Newberg's work with meditators, which Mario and I discussed in The Spiritual Brain, he notes,

Human beings routinely have experiences that are not commonly associated with normal consciousness yet seem more real than normal consciousness. "There is something in the brain that facilitates and rewards that type of experience," Newberg says, "and our brain desires to make sense of it."

This leads some, of course, to reductionism -- the assertion that a physical basis for transcendent experience proves there is no such thing as transcendence. It is an evolutionary joke on humanity -- perhaps useful, but not accurate -- because everything explainable is thus illusory.

But this view is not more "scientific" than other views. It involves a philosophic materialism that is entirely faith-based. We know, for example, that a complex series of physical, hormonal changes helps bond a mother to her newborn child. Does this mean that parental love is a myth? Only according to the philosophic claim that chemicals exhaust reality. Is it not equally possible that a cosmos charged with transcendence might organize itself in such a way that human beings can sense transcendence?

Yes, it is equally possible. And that is a better explanation than reducing ideas to chemicals. Put another way, the chemicals that help mothers bond to newborn children don't help us understand why there is a black market in babies for infertile women who have never experienced such chemicals. Nor do they help us understand Mother Theresa and her Missionaries of Charity, who provided homes for thousands of children, even though she became a nun and never tried to have any children herself.

Neuroscience can help us understand some important things about human beings, but it will be the most use if it is treated as one source of information, rather than as a reductionist explanation - especially of subjects like spirituality.

For example, Gerson notes that some people's genes might not predispose them to spiritual experiences. Perhaps, but many spiritual traditions do not emphasize personal experiences; they are viewed as a gift that can become a distraction from the main business of learning to live as a whole human being.

See also:

"Neuroscience: Getting beyond the mind-body problem

"Neurotheology": Bad neurology and bad theology?

Neuroscience: Meditation really can change the brain

The recent USA Today op-ed fantasy that Britain does not suffer from controversies over intelligent design (because "theistic evolution" has brought such harmony to Brit land) is an instructive example of just what’s wrong with legacy mainstream media in general. The problem for Mark I. Pinsky's "Science and Faith the British Way" was its timing: The puff piece ran just as the Michael Reiss affair was blowing through the independent blogs.

Synopsis: The Royal Society attracted attention across the globe by firing education director Michael Reiss. As of October 4, 9:00 am EST, the Google search "Michael Reiss" "Royal Society" turned up 71, 500 hits, and blogging on the subject abounds. And the people who drove Reiss from his job (the sinner in the hands of an angry god affair), have earned condemnation on both sides of the controversy over evolution and intelligent design. (Reiss, a Church of England clergyman, is a convinced Darwinist, and his sin was suggesting that terms like "creationism" and :"intelligent design" be spoken aloud in class in order to tell students that they are wrong and that Darwin is right. But the fact that he is a clergyman caused prominent scientists to question his right to hold the education director's post anyway.)

Many Americans and Canadians found out about Reiss's sacking through blogs, and many lively public discussions ensued.

But along come the editors and author at USA Today and make clear their assumption that North Americans know nothing about the world that’s not on prime time Boob Tube.

So they publish a blog column that – in the context – would be outrageous if it were not so obviously and ridiculously false to the true situation in Britain.

Just being on the Internet does not transform legacy media into new media.

The basic legacy media principle is that you have no access to information apart from what they tell you.

It is a three-stage process: 1. They talk. 2. You listen. 3. You believe.

Only one problem: It doesn't work that way any more.

This is not the early 19th century. North Americans do not wait six weeks to find out what is happening in London; we know as soon as Brits do. And we now have lots of independent sources of information.

So legacy media - online or not - are spinning tales for a shrinking population, as their plummeting circulations show.

Those circulations are never coming back. And this little vignette is a window into one reason why.

The following stories will give you some idea of recent developments in the intelligent design controversy in Britain:

How angry is the Brit God of Science? Pretty angry, it seems ...

So they actually need to explain this? Britain's Royal Society is considering casting out God ...

Intelligent design and popular culture: The BBC spin on British creationism

Will Brit “faith and science” heavyweights speak up after education director’s firing?

Failed Brit Darwinist Michael Reiss: "A Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God": Synopsis of a Play in Three Acts

Intelligent design and high culture: Philosopher says teaching students about intelligent design should be okay - with qualifications (Here in evil, backward North America, the atheist philosopher was not driven from campus for his views.)

Darwinism and popular culture: The Anglican Church's non-apology to Darwin

Other stories at The Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: Only trolls would carry out Gallagher's orders, but for some reason he wants them carried out by gentlemen.

Darwinism and popular culture: Darwinian conservatism means "disintegration of morality"?

Theistic evolution: Straw men forked? Arguments for intelligent design addressed? Pigs fly?

Science and society: Here a tic, there a tic, everywhere a heretic ... Darwinism and popular culture:

Taking the fun out of fundamentalism - no hope for the one who does not accept ...

Both explained by psychiatrist Dr. Jeff Schwartz:

The easiest way to understand the difference between the mind and the brain is - the brain is a piece of biological matter ( protoplasm) in your skull. That's the brain. It's a thing; you can hold it in your hand. The mind is your experiences, and especially for scientific purposes your attention and attention focusing capacity so they aspect and the way in which you focus attention on your experiences.

and put to music by Marcia Bauman!

Hat tip Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack

Social psychology: "Only the lonely"? Yes, abstract concepts can generate physical sensations - for better or worse

Near death experiences: Large project to study up to 1500 cases - possible new insights into relation between mind and brain

Evolutionary psychology: Do people see faces in cars?

Spirituality: A conventional sad tale does not transform into a spiritual memoir just because God is hat tipped

In "Team finds Earth's 'oldest rocks'" (BBC News, September 26, 2008) James Morgan reports:

Writing in Science journal, a team reports finding that a sample of Nuvvuagittuq greenstone is 250 million years older than any rocks known. It may even hold evidence of activity by ancient life forms.

Geologist Don Francis and graduate student Jonathan O'Neil of McGill University in Montreal have found an ancient greenstone ("faux amphibolite") which may be the oldest rock known. The rock was dated to between 3.8 and 4.28 billion years ago.

"4.28 billion is the figure I favour," says Francis. It is not surprising that he favours the latter date, since it would make his find about 250 million years older than the second oldest one, the Acasta Gneiss in Canada's Northwest Territories, dated at 4.03 billion years old.

But now what's this about life?

Well, honestly, right now, it's mostly imagination. The greenstone shows a banded iron formation of magnetite and quartz also found in rock around deep sea hydrothermal vents. Many think that these vents hosted early life on earth.

"These ribbons could imply that 4.3 billion years ago, Earth had an ocean, with hydrothermal circulation," said Francis. "Now, some people believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria. "If that were true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life. "But if I were to say that, people would yell and scream and say that there is no hard evidence."

O'Neil adds,

We know that probably the right environment was there for life to be on the Earth -- so liquid water and all it takes to have life. Now was there life? This is a big question mark"

Actually, the geologists are probably safe. People are pretty open to speculation around the origin of life.

But let us say that their wildest dreams come true an they do find hard evidence of life in these rocks. In that case, life started on Earth almost immediately after the planet cooled (in geological terms, that is). If so, then life clearly did not originate via a long slow random swish of chemicals, as we have been encouraged to believe.

Francis and O'Neil had been looking for clues on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec about the Earth's mantle from 3.8 billion years ago when they found the outcrop of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. It was dated at the Carnegie Institution of Washington by measuring the isotopes of neodymium and samarium, rare elements that decay at a known rate.

Here are some other "oldest rocks" stories, and some photos put up by Professor Francis.

See also Origin of life: Positive evidence of intelligent design?

Origin of life: But is being greedy enough?

Origin of life: Ah, that "just so happens" intermediate series of chemical steps

Why should the search for Darwin's "warm little puddle" be publicly funded?

 Also just up at Colliding Universes, my blog about competing theories of our universe:

Galactic habitable zone not unique, computer sim suggests

Hail, ceaseless complexity! Or maybe FAIL, ceaseless complexity.

How much can complexity really do for us without design or purpose?

Time is the only true mystery?

Like clouds in our coffee ... all these other universes ...

Mathematics: 46th Mersenne prime number found

Apparently so. A recent study from Baylor University suggests that the answer is yes. In "Look Who's Irrational Now" (Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2008), Mollie Ziegler Hemingway notes,

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

Now, that in itself should not be a surprising finding. For one thing, traditional religious groups tend to oppose occult practices, so the regular attender is likely to be aware of the group's negative view.

Also just up at Mindful Hack:

Near death experiences: Respectful interview with near death researcher in Time Magazine

The Spiritual Brain: A "great primer" on the mind-body debate, says reviewer (= how does the mind control the body when the mind is immaterial and the body is material)

Neuroscience: Getting beyond the mind-body problem

Neuroscience: Where materialism misleads us

Evolutionary psychology: Misunderstanding superstition

Okay with some qualifications, that is. Philosopher Thomas Nagel of New York University is probably best known for his 1974 essay, "What is it like to be a bat?" (He was writing against reductionism in thinking about animal minds.) Now, in "Public Education and Intelligent Design" in Philosophy & Public Affairs (pp. 187-2005), Nagel, an atheist, stirs the pot again:

The political urge to defend science education against the threats of religious orthodoxy, understandable though it is, has resulted in a counterorthodoxy, supported by bad arguments, and a tendency to overstate the legitimate scientific claims of evolutionary theory.

You'd think Nagel was referring to the Michael Reiss affair, but he can't be because the essay came out before Brit Reiss was forced to resign.

It would be unfortunate if the Establishment Clause made it unconstitutional to allude to these questions in a public school biology class, for that would mean that evolutionary theory cannot be taught in an intellectually responsible way.

Actually, if the Reiss affair in Britain or similar incidents in North America are any guide, teaching evolutionary theory" in an intellectually responsible way" is not in fact an education establishment goal. He reflects on the odd situation that arguments against design are considered quite legitimate but not arguments for it. Why is that?:

The contention seems to be that, although science can demonstrate the falsehood of the design hypothesis, no evidence against that demonstration can be regarded as scientific support for the hypothesis. Only the falsehood, and not the truth, of ID can count as a scientific claim.

This, he says, creates a dilemma:

The denier that ID is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken.

and

Critics take issue with the claims made by defenders of ID about what standard evolutionary mechanisms can accomplish, and argue that they depend on faulty assumptions. Whatever the merits, however, that is clearly a scientific disagreement, not a disagreement between science and something else. ... It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the two sides are in symmetrical positions. If one scientist is a theist and another an atheist, this is either a scientific or a nonscientific disagreement between them. If it is scientific (supposing this is possible), then their disagreement is scientific all the way down. If it is not a scientific disagreement, and if this difference in their nonscientific beliefs about the antecedent possibilities affects their rational interpretation of the same empirical evidence, I do not see how we can say that one is engaged in science and the other is not. Either both conclusions are rendered nonscientific by the influence of their nonscientific assumptions, or both are scientific in spite of those assumptions. In the latter case, they have a scientific disagreement that cannot be settled by scientific reasoning alone. ...

So then with respect to discussing intelligent design in a classroom, he asks,

What would a biology course teach if it wanted to remain neutral on the question whether divine intervention in the process of life’s development was a possibility, while acknowledging that people disagree about whether it should be regarded as a possibility at all, or what probability should be assigned to it, and that there is at present no way to settle that disagreement scientifically? So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct, even though there are other religious beliefs, such as the literal truth of Genesis, that are easily refuted by the evidence. I do not see much hope that such an approach could be adopted, but it would combine intellectual responsibility with respect for the Establishment Clause.

This sounds a lot like "teach the controversy" to me. Nagel makes clear at various points* that he thinks that the Darwin fans have oversold their theory. Which they have. All around me, "icons of evolution" are tumbling (another one just came down the other day) .... Basically, in order to keep serious discussion of evidence for design from surfacing, the fans must imply to the public that vastly more evidence exists for the standard Darwinian view of the history of life than actually does exist - and all discussion of the quality of evidence must be suppressed. And for the very good reason that once we get rid of the bad or questionable evidence, there is only a little good evidence. Not enough to justify Expelling scientists who doubt. *For example, he writes,

My own situation is that of an atheist who, in spite of being an avid consumer of popular science, has for a long time been skeptical of the claims of traditional evolutionary theory to be the whole story about the history of life. ... Sophisticated members of the contemporary culture have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they easily lose sight of the fact that evolutionary reductionism defies common sense. A theory that defies common sense can be true, but doubts about its truth should be suppressed only in the face of exceptionally strong evidence.

Here is the article behind a paywall, but you may be able to read it through a library subscription. Here is lawyer Ed Sisson's view.

We learn from ScienceDaily (Sep. 11, 2008) that female spiders do not necessarily eat their mates. Now, before we move on, let us pause to think of all the just-so Darwinian sexual selection stories we have heard that explain why they do. (They add to their energy stores, they prevent the male from mating again, they ... ) Researchers Shawn Wilder and Ann Rypstra from Miami University in Ohio found that, in general,

Males are more likely to be eaten if they are much smaller than females, which likely affects how easy they are to catch. In one species of spider, Hogna helluo, large males were never consumed while small males were consumed 80% of the time. This result was also confirmed when Wilder and Rypstra examined published data from a wide range of spider species. Males are more likely to be eaten in species where males are small relative to females. Much research on sexual cannibalism has focused on a few extreme cases involving sexual selection and sperm competition. However, by looking at data on a wide range of spiders, Wilder and Rypstra discovered that the size of the male relative to the female (often referred to as sexual size dimorphism) determines how often sexual cannibalism occurs in a species.

This sounds like a polite way of saying that previous researchers have focused on the few cases that would confirm Darwin's theory of sexual selection and its theoretical heirs, without looking at fundamental facts like, how does a usually unintelligent creature like a spider know when to attack and consume another life form and when not to. This calculation may well be made irrespective of mating, as Wilder and Rypstra's research suggests. Does a spider even know that it is having sex? Or that that matters? They go on to say,

"We were surprised to find that such a simple characteristic such as how small males are relative to females has such a large effect on the frequency of sexual cannibalism," states Shawn Wilder. In many cases, sexual cannibalism may not be a complex balancing act of costs and benefits for males and females but rather a case of a hungry female eating a male when he is small enough to catch. In an interesting twist, evolution does not appear to be driving this relationship. ...

No surprise there. "Evolution" need not drive the relationship. Once spiders have neural circuits (however, exactly, they acquired them) which determine whether a given life form is too big to attack, they probably don't need "evolution" to drive the subsequent relationship, whether or not it involves reproduction. Our local spiders pounce on insects that get trapped in their webs but flee humans that accidentally break them. So, in the absence of neuroscience studies on spiders, I will assume that the spider has a system for judging size. In that case, we might predict that neural circuits urging spiders to flee will override those urging them to attack - when the size of the possible object of attack exceeds certain boundaries. In that case, it would be more useful for researchers to study the spider's nervous system and find the relevant circuit than to speculate on how Darwinian sexual selection might explain why spiders attack or do not attack.

See also: O'Leary meets an intelligent spider

Peacocks and sexual selection (another situation in which famed Darwinian sexual selection does not work)

Also at The Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: The Anglican Church's non-apology to Darwin

Intelligent design and popular culture: The ghost of Darwin rises - in a play

Journal reference: Wilder et al. Sexual Size Dimorphism Predicts the Frequency of Sexual Cannibalism Within and Among Species of Spiders.. The American Naturalist, 2008; 172 (3): 431 DOI: 10.1086/589518

In The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues, the pseudonymous Mike Gene comments,

The fact that DNA contains encoded information in the form of a one-dimensional linear string of symbols is very suggestive positive evidence for Intelligent Design behind the fabric of life. If we set aside life for the moment, then every other example of a sequence of characters representing convention is because of Intelligent Design. If a sequence of dots and dashes, or zeroes and ones, or scribbles, encodes something, we rationally infer an intelligent cause ultimately behind the existence of that sequence. In fact, this is often perceived as a working assumption behind SETI, the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence. To detect intelligence, SETI might eventually find a sequence of signals that appears to encode something, In striking contrast, geologists do not look for a sequence of characters that encode the formation of mountains or cause volcanoes to erupt. Nor do meteorologists look for a sequence of characters that encode the formation of rain or hurricanes. Nor do chemists look for a sequence of characters that encode the formation of crystals or gases. If every other example of encoded information points to Intelligent Design, and encoded information in science is specific to life, it is reasonable to follow this lead and make the same tentative inference for the ultimate origin of genetic information and life itself.

The alternative theory is that the genetic code is a "frozen accident" - it just happened and then it got stuck that way through self-replication because living things came to depend on it. It is remarkable to live in a time when many otherwise intelligent people are seriously willing to entertain such an idea.

Also, today at Colliding Universes

Big physics could end up putting physicists out of a job?

Will it be a disaster for physics if the Higgs boson is the ONLY thing the Large Hadron Collider finds?

Origin of life: Is it Positive evidence of intelligent design?

Mass: Is the Higgs boson the "stuff" of all that stuff we call matter?

Origin of life: The "billion billion" planets solution?

 In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel published a most interesting essay called "What is it like to be a bat", which reminded us that animals not only have different minds from humans, they - in some cases - have different senses. Their whole experience of life may be different: For example, he notes:

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like. [ ... ] I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

Nagel's main purpose was not really to understand what it is like to be a bat, which he believes unlikely. Rather, he opposed reductionism - as in "the mind is nothing but ..." as a strategy for understanding the mind. His point is that reductionism is not even a good way of understanding animal minds, let alone human minds. As he says,

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction. [ ... ] Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body—why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless. The most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it. Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future.

Other "animal mind" stories from The Mindful Hack

"Animal minds: Monkeys understand money?"

"When pop science TV wants to hear only one side ...

" Animal minds: Art produced by animals: Is it art?

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neuroscience: No, we really DON'T understand kids

Applied non-materialist neuroscience: Do not fire your boss before you listen to this ...

Psychology: What did you really see? You'd be surprised!

The God gene ... Warning! Restricted to people with a sense of humour!

Sending your brain back to school

A recent article in Nature by Katharine Sanderson suggests that "Greedy molecules could be behind the emergence of life" because an "Artificial system shows how a molecular soup could be exploited by a single self-replicating complex."

Douglas Philp, a chemist at the University of St Andrews, UK, has previously shown that a molecule made of two halves that recognise and bind to one another can then act as a template for its own replication1. Along with his colleague Jan Sadownik, he has now discovered that this template molecule can drive its own formation in a bigger pool of many more reactants, quickly taking over the processes in that pool and dominating the system so that almost no other products have a chance to form.

This kind of self-replicating system has been proposed as an explanation to how complex molecules such as DNA could have formed, ultimately triggering the emergence of life. Artificial versions of these systems, however, have remained elusive.

This, Philp says, "... shows that you can bring order from chaos."

Yes you can - but only over a limited range. And the fundamental problem we tend to run into is that further instances of order become astronomically less probable.

For example, if I dump the Scrabble letters, the ones face up can probably form some words. But if I must form a specific sentence - for example, "You better all move your cars because I can see the parking hornet from my window," my chances are very much lower. Origin of life is far more like that than it is like finding some letters that will form words.

Also just up at Colliding Universes, a blog about competing theories of our universe:

Large Hadron Collider: Experiments underway

Podcast: The argument from design in cosmology

The truth hurts ... and it can leave you seeing stars, too ...

The nothingness of nothing ... as seen by scientists, philosophers, and others

 In textbook folklore and pop science TV shows, yes. Otherwise,

University of Bristol (England) bacteriologist Alan H. Linton went looking for direct evidence of speciation and concluded in 2001: “None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of twenty to thirty minutes, and populations achieved after eighteen hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another. . . Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic [i.e., bacterial] to eukaryotic [i.e., plant and animal] cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.”21 So evolution’s smoking gun is still missing. Darwinists claim that all species have descended from a common ancestor through variation and selection, but they can’t point to a single observed instance in which even one species has originated in this way. Never in the field of science have so many based so much on so little.

I wonder if that guy still has a job.

- From Jonathan Wells’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), p. 59.

Intelligent design and popular culture: Secular humanists lead the way in offering open debate

Intelligent design and elite culture: Why evidence would not convince many top people that there is design in the universe

Intelligent design and popular culture: Why respect people?

Intelligent design and popular culture: Sherlock Holmes and design

Message to Canadian readers: Make intellectual freedom an election issue

Plants: The assured results of modern evolutionary science ...

In Why the Universe Is the Way It Is, astronomer Hugh Ross explains,

The solar system holds a special position in the Milky Way, close to (but not exactly at) the co-rotation distance - the one distance from the core where stars orbit the galaxy at the same rate as its spiral arm structure does. A star or planetary system located at the co-rotation distance and between two spiral arms would seemingly remain at that safe place. However, stars and planetary systems exactly at the co-rotation distance would experience a "mean motion resonance," repeated gravitational "kicks" exerted by the galactic arm structure. Such kicks would send the star and its possible planetary system flying out of the habitable zone.

Earth's solar system is located just inside the co-rotation distance. So it is safe from the mean motion resonance. Because the solar system revolves around the galactic center only slightly faster than the galactic arm structure, it crosses the spiral arms only one about every billion years. The last spiral arm crossing occurred 560 to 600 million years ago (just before the Cambrian explosion, when complex animals first came on the scene), so Earth currently resides in the safest possible position).

This protected location is truly exceptional. Not all spiral galaxies are like the Milky Way. In the vast majority, the co-rotation distance and the habitable zone fail to overlap. Not only is there a match for the Milky Way Galaxy, but also the best possible place for a newly forming planetary system to accumulate all the heavy elements and long-lived radioactive isotopes requires for advanced life happens to lie just inside the co-rotation distance." (pp. 68-70)

Other stories from Colliding Universes, a blog about competing theories of our universe:

Physics: No escape from philosophy through equations?

Extraterrestrials: Several million UFO reports later ... the state of the question

Today at Colliding Universes More demolition teams trying to blow up the Big Bang

Do you have time to hear about some new theories ... of time?

Now, if the butterflies would just appear out of nowhere ...

Chaos theorists stumped by butterfly effect?

A student wrote to me recently to ask whether I thought that whale evolution was now well understood - don't the funny little vestigial legs on some early whales explain how it all happened? I replied,

The problem with whale evolution, as one scientist explained to me a couple of years ago, is that the "legs" thing isn't actually that important.

Legs are appendages (= useful but not necessary for life).

Life forms can have appendages or not have them. Check out legless lizards and you will see what I mean.

The big issue with whale evolution is the some forty or more key changes that must occur simultaneously that adapt a land animal to marine life and to diving to deep levels of water while maintaining normal metabolic processes.

Also - and this is a pet peeve of mine - the scientist happened to mention in his presentation "the whale cow must also know how to bring her baby to the surface and start it breathing ... " I

 got hold of him afterward, and asked, "So HOW does the whale cow know that she must do this? If most whale cows did not know it, the species' duration on this planet would abruptly end. So, given that whales exist, how exactly did whale cows - not individual Einsteins in their own right - acquire this vital information? Not, I suspect, from prenatal lectures."

He admitted that it was a good question. Essentially,

I don't have any answers except to say that the certainties of current public broadcasting science programs will probably not bear up under serious scrutiny.

Solar system: Ours is special, researchers say

Aussie PM: Cosmic order proves God exists

Origin of life: Ah, that "just so happens" series of intermediate chemical steps ..

Physicist realizes that there is more to nature than materialist atheism can explain

Rehabilitating the idea of creation - Big Bang cosmology

Colliding Universes is a blog about competing materialist and non-materialist theories about our universe.