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J. B.

The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality « On the Human - 0 views

  • It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.
  • Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality.
  • the answers to the persistent questions are not what people want to hear, and the bad news may lead them to kill the messenger—scientific research
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  • So, scientists have an incentive to cover up
  • the mechanism Darwin discovered for building adaptations is the only game in town. Any explanation of the very existence of even the slightest adaptation must be Darwinian. 
  • Ever since Newton physics has ruled out purposes in the physical realm. If the physical facts fix all the facts, however, then in doing so, it rules out purposes altogether, in biology, in human affairs, and in human thought-processes.
  • The fundamental laws of nature are mostly timeless mathematical truths that work just as well backwards as forward, and in which purposes have no role.
  • the process that Darwin discovered–random, or rather blind variation, and natural selection, or rather passive environmental filtration–does all the work of explaining the means/ends economy of biological nature that shouts out ‘purpose’ or ‘design’ at us. What Darwin showed was that all of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. It’s all just the foresightless play of fermions and bosons producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose.
  • When it comes to life, natural selection, it turns out, is the only game in town.
  • One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.
  • Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right. Think of the adaptational benefits of racist, xenophobic or patriarchal norms. You can’t justify morality by showing its Darwinian pedigree.
  • The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent.
  • we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.
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    Alex Rosenberg pops the Naturalist's bubble.
J. B.

Antony Flew on Darwinism and Theology - 0 views

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    The late and former atheist Antony Flew writes a brief letter to Philosophy Now magazine, cautioning against drawing hasty theological conclusions from Darwinism
J. B.

Confrontation all the way : Pharyngula - 0 views

  • the great unifying principle of my discipline
  • wallowing in self-inflicted ignorance
  • weird fantasies
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  • religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the young
  • Gnu Atheists are so dang angry. Damned right we are. The real question is why everyone else isn't.
  • Idiot America
  • The sea our country is drowning in is a raging religiosity, wave after wave of ignorant arguments and ideological absurdities pushed by tired dogma and fervent and frustrated fanatics.
  • The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism.
  • pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design
  • disease
  • if you're one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you're part of the problem and we'll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.
  • the Gnu Atheists have values, too, and premiere among them is truth. And that makes us uncivil and rude, because we challenge the truth of religion.
  • Evolution is a real, and it is a process built on raw chance driven by the brutal engines of selection, and there is no sign of a loving, personal god, but only billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction. It's not pretty, it's not consoling, it doesn't sanctify virginity, or tell you that god really loves your foreskin, but it's got one soaring virtue that trumps all the others: it's true.
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    Atheist PZ Myers defends his anger toward religious people and has an interesting statement on what he believes the implications of Darwinism are (for those who consider themselves "Theistic Evolutionists").
J. B.

One Long Bluff: A Review of Richard Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth" - 0 views

  • any self-replicating mechanism must exhibit a definable minimal level of complexity, let alone the necessitude of functional, and thus sequence specific DNA and protein molecules. As theoretical biologist Howard Pattee explains in his The Problem of Biological Hierarchy: “There is no evidence that hereditary evolution occurs except in cells which already have…the DNA, the replicating and translating enzymes, and all the control systems and structures necessary to reproduce themselves.” In order to invoke a materialistic pathway which can account for the origin of specified information in DNA, the naturalist must invoke a process that itself depends upon pre-existing sequence specific DNA molecules. Yet, the origin of these molecules is precisely what the thesis seeks to explain.
  • the formation of the first RNA molecule would have necessitated the prior emergence of smaller constituent molecules, including ribose sugar, phosphate molecules and the four RNA nucleotide bases. But both synthesising and maintaining these essential RNA molecules (particularly ribose) and the nucleotide bases is profoundly problematic to perform under realistic prebiotic conditions.
  • Theological arguments — by their very nature — cannot be defended as a scientific statement, and thus ought to be given no place in scientific discussions regarding evolution.
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  • the real challenge of the Cambrian explosion is the wide variety of fossilizable forms which appeared at more or less the same instant in geological time. Every single phyla represented by modern day organisms — certainly all those with fossilizable parts — were included, yet for none is there any clearly identifiable ancestor. It is explaining the simultaneous and abrupt appearance of those which is one of the leading challenges in evolutionary biology.
  • paleontologists have discovered many Precambrian fossils, many of them microscopic or soft-bodied. As Darwinian paleobiologist William Schopf wrote in his The early evolution of life: solution to Darwin’s dilemma, “The long-held notion that Precambrian organisms must have been too small or too delicate to have been preserved in geological materials…[is] now recognised as incorrect.”
  • as discussed in some detail here, the Ediacaran fauna are not generally thought to be ancestral to the modern phyla which appear explosively in the Cambrian radiation.
  • While the fitness of bacteria had increased, it had come at a cost. For instance, all the tribes had lost the ability to catabolise ribose. Some tribes had lost the ability to repair DNA. These bacteria may indeed be more fit in a lab setting, but when placed back into their environment alongside their wild-type counterparts, they would be at a selective disadvantage.
  • wild-type E. coli already possesses the genes necessary for the transportation of citrate into the cell and subsequent utilisation of it.
  • Indeed, Lenski et al. (2008) note that “A more likely possibility, in our view, is that an existing transporter has been co-opted for citrate transport under oxic [high oxygen level] conditions.” Such a scenario could take place by a loss of gene regulation (meaning that the gene is no longer expressed exclusively under low oxygen conditions) or a loss of transporter specificity.
  • the central claim of neo-Darwinism is that natural selection, coupled with chance mutation, can mimic what would normally be ascribed to intelligence.
  • The concept of common descent is crucial to the Darwinian paradigm, but its falsehood is by no means critical to the design thesis. To the design hypothesis, as a scientific model, it is a secondary issue whether the various forms of life were created independently or by modification of previously existing forms. While the latter model rejects the theory of evolution as an overall paradigm, it is nonetheless consistent with common descent. Thus, even if one were to concede that the fossil record supports common descent — a notion which I challenge — it would not by any means prove neo-Darwinism.
  • we have only fragments of Lucy’s cranium, but her lower jaw is unusually well preserved.
  • There is good evidence that the bones attributed to Lucy really did all come from a single individual…
  • Only 40% was found, and a significant percentage of the known bones are rib fragments.
  • Ironically, Lucy still represents the most complete pre-Homo known hominid skeleton to date.
  • It is an extremely difficult case to state that all Lucy’s bones are clearly from one individual of one species, and it requires some heavy assumptions.
  • Given that the much earlier fossil record from the Miocene yields bipedal apes that supposedly evolved upright-walking completely independently from the line that supposedly led to humans, it would seem that the answer is emphatically no.
  • it is almost certain that A. afarensis and other australopithecines were not adapted to a striding gait and running, as humans are. It doesn’t seem very advantageous, and therefore likely, to use bipedality as one’s primary mode of locomotion if one cannot use it to quickly run from predators.
  • ltimately, Richard Dawkins is here depending upon the utilisation of theological arguments in order to support his case. The theory of intelligent design states that certain features of the natural world exhibit indicators of intelligent design. Questions relating to the identity or skill of the designer are questions for theologians and philosophers to address, and thus stand independently from biological or scientific concerns.
  • If it can be demonstrated that there exists functional reasons for the relevant instances of apparent ‘bad design’ or if new evidence suggests a pattern of degenerative evolution (that is to say, evidence of decay of an otherwise rational and beneficial original design), then the argument would no longer hold water.
  • Biologist George Ayoub has shown, for example, that the vertebrate retina provides an excellent example of what engineers call a constrained optimisation, in which several competing design objectives are elegantly balanced to achieve an optimal overall design.
J. B.

Education Week: Efforts to Improve Evolution Teaching Bearing Fruit - 0 views

  • I wanted them to understand it as an explanation for the natural world
J. B.

What Happened to Evolution at the NSB? | NCSE - 0 views

  • There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution
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    John Bruer quote
J. B.

Do our genes reveal the hand of God? - Telegraph - 0 views

  • I went into science because of these religious reasons, there's no doubt about that. I asked myself what were the two things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs: the difference between living and nonliving things, and the phenomenon of consciousness.
J. B.

How the Human Got Its Spots.pdf (application/pdf Object) - 0 views

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    Schlinger criticizes evolutionary psychology
J. B.

Science Warriors' Ego Trips - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • Standing up for science excites some intellectuals the way beautiful actresses arouse Warren Beatty, or career liberals boil the blood of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It's visceral. The thinker of this ilk looks in the mirror and sees Galileo bravely muttering "Eppure si muove!" ("And yet, it moves!") while Vatican guards drag him away. Sometimes the hero in the reflection is Voltaire sticking it to the clerics, or Darwin triumphing against both Church and Church-going wife. A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn't want to feel that sense of power and rightness?
  • a chasm has opened up between two groups that might loosely be distinguished as "philosophers of science" and "science warriors." Philosophers of science, often operating under the aegis of Thomas Kuhn, recognize that science is a diverse, social enterprise that has changed over time, developed different methodologies in different subsciences, and often advanced by taking putative pseudoscience seriously, as in debunking cold fusion. The science warriors, by contrast, often write as if our science of the moment is isomorphic with knowledge of an objective world-in-itself—Kant be damned!—and any form of inquiry that doesn't fit the writer's criteria of proper science must be banished as "bunk."
  • It is, in principle, possible that an empirical observation could confirm intelligent design—i.e., that magic moment when the ultimate UFO lands with representatives of the intergalactic society that planted early life here, and we accept their evidence that they did it. The point is not that this is remotely likely. It's that the possibility is not irrational, just as provocative science fiction is not irrational.
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  • Far from explaining nothing because it explains everything, such an explanation explains a lot by explaining everything. It just doesn't explain it convincingly to a scientist with other evidentiary standards.
  • he concedes that "nonscientific claims may be true and still not qualify as science." But if that's so, and we care about truth, why exalt science to the degree he does? If there's really a heaven, and science can't (yet?) detect it, so much the worse for science.
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    Critique of Massimo Pigliucci's book Nonsense on Stilts
J. B.

False Start? The Controversy Over Adam and Eve Heats Up - 0 views

  • As Hagerty reported: “Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College in Michigan until recently, says it’s time to face facts: There was no Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.”
  • “Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost. So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings”
  • They argue that science is unable to resolve the question of Adam and Eve as a whole, but they write: “All science can say is that there was never a time when only two people existed on the earth: it is silent on whether or not God began a special relationship with a historical couple at some point in the past.”
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  • Later, they argue that “the most [science] can say is that there were never just two individuals who were the sole genetic progenitors of the entire human race.” They also claim, again, that “genetics convincingly shows that there was never a time when there were just two persons.” Ever since the challenge of Darwin and evolutionary theory appeared, some Christians have tried to argue that the opening chapters of the Bible should not be taken “literally.”
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