design
evolvingthoughts | February 24, 2007
In another interesting piece about demarcation of science from nonscience (see my previous items about this here, here and here), Janet Stemwedel has a nice series of hand-drawn flowcharts that make the difference between creationist arguments and real science clear.
Janet, I would have done nice neat computer-drawn flowcharts for you, if you'd asked...
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2007
James Randerson, at the GrauniadGuardian blog site makes an interesting point about the new bionic eye. It's only a 4x4 grid of monochrome pixels, but it's revolutionised the life of a blind man. Of what use is 1/2^n of an eye? Well it's enough to navigate. Randerson points out that this totally demolishes the ID argument. So it's not only a cool invention, but a great rebuttal.
evolvingthoughts | December 30, 2006
Brent Rasmussen, at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, has a nice smackdown of the atheism-intolerance of Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College and Distinguished Scholar of the City University of New York, with which I agree totally.
But in the course of it, Brent shows a taxonomy of the so-called "weak" versus "strong" atheism that is so common on the internet, but which is what I dispute. More below the fold...
Here is Brent's taxonomy in a diagram:
My problem lies in the primacy of the questions that are asked, to which these axes are…
evolvingthoughts | December 13, 2006If things could be created out of nothing, any kind of things could be produced from any source. In the first place, men could spring from the sea, squamous fish from the ground, and birds could be hatched from the sky; cattle and other farm animals, and every kind of wild beast, would bear young of unpredictable species, and would make their home in cultivated and barren parts without discrimination. Moreover, the same fruits would not invariably grow on the same trees, but would change: any tree could bear any fruit. Seeing that there would be no elements with the capacity to generate each…
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2006This site, a faith-based Catholic (I think) news site, has an Op-Ed by an erstwhile science teacher on Dennett's Breaking the Spell. It's not pretty to see someone trying to take down a professional philosopher philosophically, when they are not educated in the field
Basically, Dr David Roemer tries to redefine terms that have a long history in philosophy and science in line with the talking points of the Intelligent Design crowd. He says of materialism, which Dennett correctly defines as explanation of phenomena without recourse to the immaterial, such as "soul", that it is in opposition to…
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2006
So, in an obvious case of Scibling Rivalry, Jason Rosenhouse has taken me to task about my comments on Dawkins and agnosticism. Indeed, I have been fisked. Obviously one can decide about whether God exists or not, and agnostics are just inadequate atheists...
Let's set the scene with some philosophical definitions. A scientific question is one that evidence can tell for or against. All else is a philosophical question, or as it is popularly known, navel gazing. What is at issue here is whether or not evidence can tell for or against the notion that God exists. Atheists (and theists) say…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2006
Adapted sort of with permission from The Crackpot Index by John Baez, with contributions from the talk.origins howlers.
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to biology.
1. A -5 point starting credit.
2. 1 point for every statement that is widely agreed on to be false.
3. 2 points for every statement that is clearly vacuous.
4. 3 points for every statement that is logically inconsistent.
5. 5 points for each such statement that is adhered to despite careful correction.
6. 5 points for using a thought experiment that contradicts…
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2006There's a fair bit of to-and-fro going on with the Sciblings about Richard Dawkins' latest book The God Delusion, which, being at the edge of empire, I haven't yet seen. When I do, I will read it and comment, of course.
But I want to ask a general question - is religion in itself a malign influence on society? For example, any number of Islamic Imams, including the leader of Australia's Muslim community, think that women who don't dress "modestly" (which can mean anything from wearing a long sleeved top to the burka) are to blame for being raped.
And attacks on the moral influence of…
evolvingthoughts | September 13, 2006
Previous posts in this thread: 1, 2, and 3
With this model of the bounded rationality of anti-science in mind, what lessons can we draw from it for public policy and education?
Assuming that the model is a good first approximation of why people choose to believe creationist and other anti-science belief sets, several implications might affect our mode of public education and discourse.
The first is that it is highly unlikely that we can argue creationists et al. out of their belief sets by merely presenting better information about science. Since they lack the epistemic values that…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006LifeSite has this: Pope Preaches Against Chance Evolution: "Man is Not the Chance Result of Evolution".
Yep, it's the old "evolution implies chance and a lack of meaning" trick. Second time we've fallen for that this week. Would you believe...?
For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on, this seems very Controlish. The pope is worried about KAOS. They had a Cone of Silence conversation, which pretty well everyone in the world overheard, and while I'm very pleased that the Catholic Church isn't about to go ID on our asses, we might perhaps think a little bit about this.
In a homily in…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2006
What happens when rational coherence is not assumed, in the development of creationist views?
No child is able to make their epistemic set maximally coherent, and so it is likely that they will acquire a number of mutually inconsistent epistemic values and principles. If your parent tells you to try and see if things work out on the one hand, and that you need not do anything but believe the pastor or Bible on the other, this does not register for most young children as a conflict.
Young learners are natively active explorers and experimenters to some degree, but this doesn't immediately…
evolvingthoughts | September 9, 2006Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 611]
A question I have wondered about for a long time is this: why do people become creationists? I mean, nobody is born a creationist (or an evolutionist, or a Mayan cosmic-cyclist, etc.). These are views that one acquires as one learns and integrates into society. But we live, notionally, in a society in which science has learned more about the world in 300 years than in the prior million or so. So, why do people become…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2006John Allen, at National Catholic Review, has an interesting analysis of the motives behind the recent Evolution Study Day the pope held. Unsurprisingly, the issue is not whether life changed over time, or even whether natural selection works - although he indicates that as Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict inclined to thinking that "macro-evolution" (speciation and above) was impossible by random variation and natural selection, showing that he knows very little about the actual biology.
No, it's this:
Evolution has become a kind of "first philosophy" for enlightened thinkers, ruling out the…
evolvingthoughts | September 3, 2006I only just saw this today - here's a nice (and more informed) discussion of my use of Aquinas on design. It seems I relied on the term "designedly" a bit too much, when it should be about why the cause of something causes that outcome and not another. I misread by reading Aristotle himself into the medieval period.
I shall now go smack my knuckles.
evolvingthoughts | August 12, 2006PZ Placeholder at Pharyngula is reporting that evangelical churches in Kenya want to shut down the rich human fossil exhibit at the Kenya national museum. He's concerned that a rich heritage of all humanity will be Talibanised (remember the Buddha statues in Afghanistan?). From what I know of African religion, churches there tend to be more conservative than western churches, but I doubt Kenya will accede to their requests. Despite Arap Moi's previous dictatorship there, it's now a democratic nation not based on religion.
More encouraging for me is that the current Australian federal science…
evolvingthoughts | August 9, 2006One of the pitfalls of blogging is that you can go for days without finding anything worth saying, and then get a bunch of things worth noting all at once. Today is such a day. So here is a heterogeneous collection of links and topics for your delectation (I love that word, and "heterogeneous"):
1. The AAAS has released a book called The Evolution Dialogues, which addresses the relation between Christian theology and science, with a study guide to come. More power to Christians, I say, if it helps them understand the actual science.
2. Here is a release about the loss of retrocyclin, a…
evolvingthoughts | August 3, 2006Science & Theology News has an article on "evolutionism" that is replete with historical errors and other misdemeanors. But it indicates some nuances of the evolutionary biological debates are starting to have some impact.
The author, Gennaro Auletta, is a philosophy professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. One may applaud his attempt to come to terms with biology, but he repeats many of the usual theological canards about evolution. Let's have a look at his article, shall we?
The distinction between evolution and evolutionism is of extreme relevance. Michael Ruse's…