Science has posted an article on the origin of religion: its in the genes.

(Let's just play along with these genii who write for Science.)

"Let me understand you. You are saying that belief comes from a predisposition from the genes, like belief in evolutionary theory. That means evolution isn't true, right, you're just programmed to believe in evolution?"

"No? So religion can be in the genes and can also be true?"

"No? So being in the genes has nothing to do with something being true or not, only with belief?"

"Great. I'm think I'm getting it. So your belief that religious faith is determined by genetics is also something in your genes, and doesn't mean that this paper you just wrote is actually true, only that you have a faith in evolutionary explanations that you were born with."

"No? I'm afraid you've lost me again, can you explain?"

"So, some things are necessarily true, like your belief in the truth of this paper, whereas other things are evolutionary artifacts, like your appendix and religion?"

"Great, we're communicating again. Then how are those things that are necessarily true separated from those things that you merely want to be true, especially since your evolutionary past will have mixed them up considerably?"

"Oh I get it. Your faith in evolution is what makes you certain that religious faith is fake.  But how do you know for sure that the religious guy is the one who is wrong; how do you know that tomorrow you won't wake up religious and think that evolutionary faith is fake?"

"Data? But I thought you just said that beliefs were something you were born with?"

"Oh, belief in data. But isn't that also something you are born with? What if you were born not to believe your eyes, say, you were born blind. Then how would data convince you of anything, especially that your data contradicted what you were born believing?"

"Wait!  I am taking you seriously! This is Science after all, a very serious journal... "

Alas. The theory is reflexively incoherent. Now if it had said that belief in Darwinism was in the genes, at least it would have been reflexively coherent. Why is it that none of these materialist positions can ever be subjected to their own analysis? When Skinner was telling how everyone was programmed to react for rewards and that this explained religion, my one question to him would be, "Why are you telling me this Bif?"

The nice thing about religion is that it is reflexively coherent.

Why do people believe in God? Because He made them that way.

From a conversation on another blog about Genesis, Intelligent Design (ID), and theistic supporters of evolution (TE).

If the TEs really want a miracle-less Christianity, there is a whole body of modern theological literature they can quote to sustain them. And if they really are not embarrassed by miracles in the slightest, there is another whole body of literature to sustain them: the Patristics, the Scholastics, the Reformers, etc. I don't understand why they have such a hard time stating their position....

Some of you know some of these ASA-list guys, from Christian conferences and ASA [American Scientific Affiliation] meetings and so on. Any idea why they are so elusive? Are they hiding some big-time skepticism about miracles behind this vague language? Or is it that they simply don't know what they believe?

In my time at Wheaton College, I did work with a number of TE's on the ASA list. And while I too am puzzled by their thought processes, my general impression is that they have made an uneasy alliance between the anti-Christian world of science and their devout faith. There is no question that they despise liberals for their lack of faith, but there is also no question that they admire their atheist colleagues as doing commendable science. So I use a psychologist's explanation that their vagueness is a case of "cognitive dissonance", which they solve by avoiding clarity. Not because they are dissimulating, but because they really don't want to know themselves. I think it was Greg Bahnsen's PhD thesis that discussed how a man can deceive himself, believing A & !A by adding more layers. A & B, where B--> !A. Or if that is too obvious, then A, B, and C, where A-->B, B-->C and C-->!A. With enough buffer layers, one can be a very content contradiction. Hence the vague buffer layers of TE's.

One of the many subgoals of ID, then, is to clarify these implications.

Yet another reason to be hated.

I'd be interested in a critique of the views of a related Wheaton character, John Walton, whose new book "The Lost World of Genesis" is creating a stir.

This Wheaton Bible-dept tripe is one of a piece with TE-ASA muddle-headedness. In 2002 Wheaton had a course called "Origins" which brought together 3 depts--physics/astronomy, biology/evolution, and bible/walton--to talk about the origin of the universe. The concept was clever, but the implementation was stultifying. Walton wanted to say thatGenesis had nothing to say about the Big Bang, which the physicist said had nothing to do with evolution, which the biologist said had nothing to do with Genesis. So the point of the course was....there is no point.

Now believe me, if the TE-ASAs could find evolution in Genesis, they would be all over it like jam on bread, but the fact that everyone is so anxious to declare Kantian walls of separation should tip you off that there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on.

I found Walton's material only slightly less annoying than the animated Powerpoint slides he insisted on using. One would think that Meredith Kline's work in the 70's had demonstrated how the Genesis account uses cultural understandings of Hittite covenants to frame its message of creation, rather than the other way around. It reminds me of the 30 year effort to claim that Noah's flood was derivative on Babylonian flood epics, when in fact all the data showed it was the other way around. So after many evangelical papers demonstrated the derivative nature of Babylonian accounts which finally silenced the critics, we have Walton claiming that the Genesis creation account is derivative on Babylonian (or as he would say, Mesopatamian) temple dedication rites.

And I would make the same sort of comment for Peter Enn's fixation that 2nd Temple eschatology was supposedly determinative of NT theology. Whenever we get an extra-biblical source that looks vaguely like the Bible, why then it is the Bible that must be the derivative!

Of course, when we get a scientific account of creation that looks vaguely like the Bible then it is the Bible that is....totally unrelated. It's all very tiresome. I look forward to the definitive review by the the tireless Jack Collins.

I am likely not the only one who would like to learn more about the papers that show that the Babylonian flood account is derivative of Noah's. Can you tell me where such arguments are made?

Good question, but I don't have my textbooks here, so I'll have to do some web searching. As I recall, the cogent arguments were made some 20 years ago, and most of the defenders of the "Noah is derivative of Babylon" have stopped making the claim, retired or died. One would think that if it were still a believable theory, it would be actively defended, so the silence is telling.

OK. I went over to OT Abstracts and put in "Noah flood" + "Gilgamesh", or "Babylonian" or "Mesopatamian". I found 5 hits on the first two, and 600 on the last. I didn't peruse all 600, so this is a rough cut from the first 100. I found 2 articles supporting Gilgamesh as original in 2004 and 1986. I found 6 articles supporting Bible as original, 1983, 1994, 1978, 1976, 2002, 2000.

So my impression of the fading of the Gilgamesh explanation is roughly correct, and corresponds to my Wheaton college Bible-class curricula impression circa 1980.

This survey does not include (simply because the abstract made no mention of a Gilgamesh), the many articles on the JEDP analysis of Noah, that makes its composition much later than Moses, and would potentially allow it to be influenced by it. After all, it is logically possible for Genesis to be a late redaction, yet reflect an oral tradition that predated Gilgamesh, so support for JEDP isn't necessarily support for a Gilgamesh influence.

Nonsense...

Well I am, as usual, ashamed to have written so hastily in such learned company. ... What I should have said, is that it is not that Genesis, as a document, preceded the cuneiform Gilgamesh, as a document, but that both are drawn from the living oral memory of a real actual flood that occurred in the Mesopatamian basin about 5000BC as determined from geology and paleontology. As a Christian, I believe that the Genesis document reflects more accurately, if not infinitely accurately, the actual events of Noah that later made it into the oral tradition of many of the world's "religions". (Just because a history is about origins doesn't automatically make it religious.)

I know that in many if not all Western institutions, a document and its contents are separately evaluated, with a reconstructed history to explain the divorce. But it is the subject of my attempted ThM thesis, that at least for some types of documents (say, titles and deeds), there can be no separation of document and content, if one is true, so is the other. And what distinguishes Genesis (as well as the other canonical books of the Bible) from, say, the Gilgamesh epic, is that it has the properties of a deed rather than a narrative because it is self-referential. (There's going to be a long chapter on speech-act theory etc, to put this claim in the appropriate jargon.) This then, is the critique of JEDP and similar documentary hypotheses: they can't be true, anymore than the title of your car can have a documentary origin and still be valid.

So given the existence of a real event, and a real oral history, the composition of Genesis as a polemic against the mythologizing of Gilgamesh is the point of the evangelical critique. That is to say, Genesis is not adapting Babylonian motifs, but defending the truth against Babylonian motifs. This is what I meant by saying cryptically that Gilgamesh is derivative of Genesis, inasmuch as Genesis is the infinitely true, and Gilgamesh the poor copy. It is this polemical aspect of Genesis that the evangelical literature supports.

[In a very similar relationship, science also reports the flood, but through a poor copy. What validates science, as ID [intelligent design] would claim, is design (and not MN [methodological naturalism]). And design is self-referential too. So the same criterion that ID develops for valid science has a direct analogy to Biblical/textual scholarship, which is why I find ID a far more productive hypothesis than simply biology. And BTW, just as many of the possible relationships between data/theory are highly improbable (random chance w/o design-->OOL [origin of life]), so also some of the possibilities for textual transmission are demonstrably improbable for all the same reasons.]

So thanks for clarifying my sloppy writing. Here is the link to the bibliographic list (which was constructed extremely crudely by flagging the words for Gilgamesh and Noah in the abstracts of a simple search, so please don't flog me for my slack criteria and obvious bias!)

* Fort Hood, TX. A policewoman directing traffic heard shots and tracked down the Muslim major who had shouted "Allahu Akbar" before killing 13 and wounding 31, by disabling him with 4 shots and taking a serious bullet wound to the stomach in return.

In Pakistan last month, when 4 Taliban commandos took over a military base, they terrorized it for 18 hours before being overrun, shutting down the entire Pakistan army. In America, Major Hasan had 5 minutes of gory before a civilian woman took him down.

President Obama cautioned everyone not to jump to conclusions about motives. But sometimes actions speak a lot louder than words. A Muslim. Blogs about noble suicide bombers. Gives away his furniture that day. Shouts "Allahu Ahkbar". Opens fire.

Then who speaks for America? A civilian. A woman. Moved toward the battle. Dropped him while being wounded. Did not kill him.

Where else in the world could you see this happening? England? Denmark? France? Iraq? Pakistan? Iran? Massachusetts?

Thank God for Texas.

Since the Dover PA case in 2006, when a Judge Jones tossed out ID as not being science, we have been told that Darwinism is victorious, that Darwinism won. The good judge has gone on the lecture circuit, getting accolades and dollars for recycling the enthusiasm. We've got scientists regularly if not monotonously reporting how finally their research has finally proven Darwin right. We've even got politicians telling us how belief in evolution is essential for the US economy!

But there's this nagging doubt, if Darwin is just obviously right, why is everyone so eager to keep proving it? Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Mike Behe returned from the Cold Spring Harbor Lab conference on evolution where his was the only poster on ID, bemused at the number of anti-ID papers that were delivered. I am reminded of the five stages of a scientific theory: preposterous nonsense; dangerous nonsense; irrelevant nonsense; inconsequential sense; and, absolutely fundamental as I've said all along. ID is moving between stage 2 and 3 at the moment.

Should this transition be inevitable as I predict, then what is the significance of Darwin? I mean, suppose Darwin was wrong after all, and all those accolades to his genius will be forgotten by fickle history, would it matter? After all is said and done, has Darwin made an impact on society that can't be so easily undone?

Yes. And it is pervasive. Let's look at the effect on several fields, and the necessary steps to undo the damage.

Biology.

When Trofim Lysenko decided that Lamarck was more Marxist than Darwin, convincing Stalin and directing Communist biology for 20 years, the West bemoaned the traitorous Russians. Typical of western comments is this one from Wikipedia:  Lysenko's work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.  Today, however, there is a resurgence of Lamarckian biology, with admission that the West has acted as censorious as Lysenko in promoting Darwin. Alexander Vargas writes that the suicide of pioneering epigeneticist Paul Kammerer was instigated by allegations of fraud.All that is left is the rehabilitation of Lysenko.

 Yet so adamant were they against Lamarck that all research into epigenetics was essentially stopped, just as all research into astrobiology/panspermia was stopped, because it threatened the Darwinist paradigm. Perhaps more surprisingly, research into natural selection/mutation of bacteria was also stopped, simply because it was getting the wrong answer. Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld write in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews How the Microbial World Saved Evolution from the Scylla of Molecular Biology and the Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis. 

This is the story of how biology of the 20th century neglected and otherwise mishandled the study of what is arguably the most important problem in all of science: the nature of the evolutionary process. This problem has suffered the indignity of being dismissed as unimportant to a basic understanding of biology by molecular biology; it went effectively unrecognized by a microbiology still in the throes of trying to find itself; and it became the private domain of a quasi-scientific movement, who secreted it away in a morass of petty scholasticism, effectively disguising the fact that their primary concern with it was ideological, not scientific.

They write of four discoveries which were suppressed because they violated the Darwinist dogma:

1) All single-celled organisms are NOT descended from bacteria.

“All these organisms share the distinctive structural properties associated with the procaryotic cell . . . and we can therefore safely infer a common origin for the whole group in the remote evolutionary past." (1962)
This dogmatic approach to the essence of microbiology would shunt development away from the problem of the nature of cellular organization, which Stanier and van Niel had solved by fiat....Stanier and van Niel’s assertion that all bacteria were prokaryotes was an eminently testable hypothesis—the only problem being that neither the authors nor microbiologists in general perceived it that way.

2) Microbiology is NOT just chemistry inside a membrane--reductionism.

It is difficult to imagine that the discipline which defined biology in the last century—that taught us so much and provided such benefit to the ambient society—is fundamentally flawed. But that is the case. Molecular biology expressly established itself within the (classical) Newtonian worldview. As such, its perspective was fundamentally reductionist. In other words, all things were explainable, completely and solely, as the sum of their various parts—which also meant that they could (in principle) be predicted a priori...
It is one thing to hold a perspective in principle, another to apply it in detail. Thus, in the early decades of the 20th century, molecular biology’s fundamental reductionist perspective was innocuous—especially when there were many problems that could benefit from a (simple) reductionist approach. It was another thing altogether when molecular biology began reconceptualizing biology in an exclusively reductionist fashion. Then the inadequacies of reductionist metaphysics began to show. The major wrong turn in biology’s course was its conceptualization and subsequent handling of the problem of the gene. It would come to a point where the discipline had to choose between the obvious biology of the situation and the tenets of reductionism. Molecularists choose the latter, thereby taking off the table a major biological question....
This turn in the road (of applying reductionist metaphysics to the understanding of the biological world) would become a superhighway that dead-ended before it reached molecular biology’s ultimate goal, that of understanding the essence of “livingness” and directly answering the question of how molecules come to life.

3) The modern evolutionary synthesis model is NOT the actual evolutionary process.

We have seen that molecular biology, the dominant biological discipline of the time, did not even recognize the evolutionary process as a scientific problem. Given its overview (axiomatic assumptions), molecular biology took evolution simply as biological epiphenomenology, “historical accident”—which means that evolutionary considerations have no bearing whatsoever on any fundamental understanding of living systems...
The modern evolutionary synthesis should have been the 20th century’s evolutionary bastion, the forefront of research into the evolutionary process. No such luck!
The basic understanding of evolution, considered as a process, did not advance at all under its tutelage. The presumed fundamental explanation of the evolutionary process, “natural selection,” went unchanged and unchallenged from one end of the 20th century to the other. Was this because there was nothing more to understand about the nature of the evolutionary process? Hardly! Instead, the focus was not the study of the evolutionary process so much as the care and tending of the modern synthesis. Safeguarding an old concept, protecting “truths too fragile to bear translation” is scientific anathema.

4) Inherited (and improved) genes are NOT as fundamental to evolutionary processes as horizontal gene transfer.

Dogmatic thinking has prevailed all too often in our account, with disastrous consequences for the progress of the fields of microbiology, molecular biology, and the study of the evolutionary process. It led to the stagnant and scientifically invalid notion of the prokaryote; it led to the redefinition of the problem of the gene; and through a slavish adherence to the modern evolutionary synthesis, it led to a premature declaration of victory in the struggle to understand the evolutionary process.
Today, we know that horizontal gene transfer is a powerful evolutionary force in the microbial world, well-documented in the phylogenetic record, and one whose ecological significance is only beginning to be fully understood. Spurred on by advances in genomic technology, microbial ecology is presenting new insights into the workings of the biosphere, demanding a synthesis with the evolutionary process, and forcing evolutionary biology to pay attention. The power of horizontal gene transfer is so great that it is a major puzzle to understand why it would be that the eukaryotic world would turn its back on such a wonderful source of genetic novelty and innovation. The exciting answer, bursting through decades of dogmatic prejudice, is that it hasn’t. There are now compelling documentations of horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes, not only in plants, protists, and fungi, but in animals (including mammals) as well. The evolutionary implications have not yet been worked out, but we are confident that a fully worked out theory of the evolutionary process is required in order to properly meet the challenges posed initially by microbiology.

To sum up the respected Carl Woese, we've lost a century of molecular biology because of Darwinist dogma. And that's just microbiology. We could include just about every subfield in biology which has been hamstrung by dogma. In the world of bad biology guides, Trofim was a piker.

Astrobiology

It is a small field, with a few sputterings from Arrhenius around the turn of the 20th century, and some sporadic support from meteoriticists in the early 1960's, followed by maverick Sir Fred Hoyle's spirited defense in the 1980's. I've blogged on this before, but the astounding thing to me is just how eagerly the scientific community concluded that the entire affair of life on comets was a huge fraud. One is reminded of the KGB's smear campaign of Pope Pius XII after his death, following Beria's dictum that people are more likely to believe false stories than true. So it was in meteoritics, and the "contaminated meteorite" paper went unchallenged, despite its clear fabrication and inability to explain the data it purported to deny. Even today, the conclusion, "contamination" remains unassailed, despite the discrediting of its origin, which can only be attributed to Darwinist dogmatic rejection of the implications of panspermia. This implicit Darwinism is echoed in the first and loudest objection to the discovery of life on comets, "But your data still doesn't explain where life originated!", which is to say, evolution is merely a sophisticated wrapper around an atheistic origin-of-life belief, and if an anti-theistic OOL is not asserted, the theory is unacceptable.

Education

This same implicit atheism has likewise afflicted education.There was a telling interview in Scientific American, where Berkeley psychologist Tania Lombrozo talked to SciAm's Steve Miller about the results of a survey on the beliefs of evolutionary theory. To her surprise, religious Christians were just as likely to believe evolution as non-religious, there wasn't a strong correlation between degree of rejection and degree of belief, rather it was the kind of belief. Theistic evolutionists tended to straddle the middle, being ardent evolutionist who nonetheless believed in God. Even more surprising, was the dashing of the stereotype that anti-evolutionists were ignorant, gullible people likely to believe in anything. In her words,

One thing that you don't find is a general propensity for people to have supernatural beliefs. So you might have thought that someone who rejects evolution in general might be more willing to accept supernatural ideas about everything, like the pyramids being created by supernatural forces or UFOs or astrology, for example, and you actually don't find a correlation between endorsing creationism or other kind of supernatural, counter human origins and those kinds of traditionally supernatural beliefs aren't associated with Christianity.

Then all that anti-science bashing about congressmen who don't accept evolution isn't actually true. But then you already knew that. Even more interesting is the admission that educators have a choice, to either teach the science or teach the belief. Here's the interchange:

Steve: Yeah, it was surprising to me when your data were presented. So what [does] that mean for, you know, education in the country? What should people be thinking about if they have a desire to have evolutionary theory be more accepted by more people?

Lombrozo: I think it has a couple of consequences. So, one of them is that any kind of educational intervention that increases people's understanding of evolutionary theory is not necessarily going to have a consequence to whether or not people accept evolution. I think that's surprising, but it also raises a lot of complicated ethical issues; whether or not it's even appropriate in the classroom for teachers to be trying to deliberately influence students' acceptance of evolution as opposed to whether or not they understand it. We normally think about the role of education as being one to communicate basic concepts, to communicate scientific theories, not to actually change whether or not people accept a particular theory that might conflict with their relative views. So I think it raises some complicated issues there.

Steve: So it may be justifiable to say, "Here's what we understand about evolution as a science. We don't care whether you accept it; we just want you to understand it."

Lombrozo: I think that's the way a lot of people think about education, and I think that's a way to sidestep some complicated ethical issues about whether or not it's appropriate to present ideas that could conflict with people's beliefs. On the other hand, people's policy making decisions, their medical decisions and a lot of other decisions might depend not only on whether or not they understand evolution, but on whether or not they accept it. So in some sense, I think the public has a lot at stake in whether or not people accept evolution; but I am not sure the best way to proceed given these kinds of findings about the dissociation between acceptance and belief.

The dilemma could not have been phrased more starkly. Do we teach the science, or do we teach the religion? What is the payoff of teaching the religion instead? As Tania describes elsewhere in this interview: a poor ability to understand the content of evolution. But when it comes to making medical (read: ethical) decisions, then the Darwinist religion is all-important.

If it is behaviour we are after, then by all means, teach religion, because that is what religion is for. But that raises the important question, "what exactly is Darwinist behaviour, and why is it both unscientific and unchristian? And what does it do to the ethics of those children who grow up to be scientists?" I think we already know the answers to these questions. This is the legacy Darwin has left for our children.

Philosophy

I would have liked to trace the influence of Darwin on philosophers such as Whitehead, Bergson, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the rediscovered Hegel. In many of these cases, teleology is denied and the history of philosophy is reduced to method. The rediscovery of Hegel is fascinating, because Hegel began with a very fundamental teleology, but his modern proponents have substituted a Darwinist parody. Like the Marxist inversion of Hegel, this modern version is also an inversion, but more importantly, it removes the search for God from the list of approved investigations. Perhaps at a later time, we can explore the psychological appeal of Darwinism which has profoundly infected philosophy.

Theology

Theology likewise shows a deep influence from Darwin. Most obviously it is found in the writings of the apostate Teilhard de Chardin, or the existentialism of Paul Tillich and the rise of Open Theism, which combined with Gnosticism, is the unofficial theology of The Episcopal Church. So whether we look at Catholic Jesuits or Reformed Protestants or Episcopalian half-breeds, we find the influence of the God who evolves. Perhaps it isn't so surprising, since for the past 300 years, theology has been the younger sister to philosophy, tagging along with a me-too metaphysics.

Physics

But what is, at least to me, a truly surprising development is the effect of Darwin on physics. Physicists note with pride the dependence of the other sciences on physics, because physics is the ultimate reductionist science. But reductionism can't every achieve the satisfaction of purpose, of synthesis, of aesthetic delight. And so, in a perverse way, physics has relied on theology for its overall unity, which in the last few decades, has become the theology of evolution. Lee Smolin argues that to avoid the evidence that the creation was designed requires a belief in a Hegelian view of time (which itself owes a great deal to Darwin). Leonard Susskind objects strenuously, that we need only allow universes to evolve. (No, I'm not making that up. Evidently there's this place called the multiverse where baby universes are born and if they don't have the right stuff, they die.) Here's his actual words:

Darwin was not particularly interested in astronomy or physics, yet his impact on cosmology was enormous but in a way subconscious. In successfully explaining the origin of species, he eliminated superstition and set a new standard for what an explanation of nature should be like. As I wrote in my book The Black Hole War (Little Brown, 2008), Darwin’s masterstroke was to have “ejected God from the science of life”. True, Darwin was not the first scientist to cast out supernatural beliefs. Two centuries earlier, Newton — another great Cambridge scientist — had done so more than anyone before his own time... In other words, before Darwin, even the greatest physicists had little alternative to a supernatural explanation of the origin of life, and therefore of nature itself. It was the success of Darwinism that forced the issue and set the standard for future theories of origins, whether it be it of life or of the universe. Explanations must be based on the laws of physics, mathematics and probability — and not on the hand of God.

If you missed that bit of genuflection, here's his conclusion

Whether string theory with its huge landscape, and eternal inflation with its reproducing pockets of space [both=evolving universes], will prove to be correct is for the future to decide. What is true is that as of the present time, they provide the only natural explanation of the universe that lives up to the standard set by Darwin.

Recall that Darwin believed in an eternal, God-free cosmos, so he merely had to find an atheistic solution to the origin of life. Now that we know Darwin was wrong about the universe, Susskind merely has to find an atheist solution to the origin of the universe to fix the atheism. So if you bought that bridge from Darwin, have we ever got a deal for you! The important point to notice here, is the circularity of the logic. Since the universe is eternal, then life also does not need a creator; but once we know that the universe is not eternal, then since life didn't need a creator, neither does the universe. No other option, says Susskind, preserves our atheism intact.

Then when physicist Frank Tipler writes a book like "The Physics of Immortality", where he argues that religion is based on physical principles, he states that the final condition of the universe as described by physics must evolve because the theory of evolution is true. Once again, physics is turning to evolution for metaphysical confirmation of the nature of reality. It is perhaps no surprise, that Tipler's immortality seems to be a pseudo-scientific gloss on Tielhard de Chardin's.

Political Science

Despite vociferous denials, Richard Weikart's masterful "Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress" describes precisely how Darwin affected the 3rd Reich. Nor should we leave out Communism with its strident atheism and evangelical materialism. The real surprise comes from Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism", that charts the influence of Darwin on American politics. It is needless to remind one that the politics of the 20th century were dominated by Darwin. What is still unknown is his effect on the 21st century, though one thing is clear: Darwin has an advocate in President Obama.

Conclusions

Yes Darwin does matter, and as we saw with physics, his atheism lives on long after his cosmology is overturned. Or as we saw with education, his moral relativism lives on long after we stop teaching the science. Or as we saw with political science, his philosophy gets resurrected whenever a capricious leader covets greater power. These are a few of the reasons why the science must be thoroughly and completely discredited, so that all these efforts can be seen for the naked atheism they embody. That is the singular goal of ID, and its best justification. And that also explains the raw hatred towards ID.

A colleague alerted me to a recent published book entitled, Is Science Western in Origin? by Indian physicist, C.K. Raju. Not too surprisingly, he discovers otherwise (says the back cover)

On stock Western history, science originated among the Greeks, and then developed in post-renaissance Europe. This story was fabricated in three phases.
 * First, during the Crusades, scientific knowledge from across the world, in captured Arabic books, was given a theologically-correct origin by claiming it was all transmitted from the Greeks. The key cases of Euclid (geometry) and Claudius Ptolemy (astronomy)—both concocted figures—are used to illustrate this process.
 * Second, during the Inquisition, world scientific knowledge was again assigned a theologically-correct origin by claiming it was *not* transmitted from others, but was “independently rediscovered” by Europeans. The cases of Copernicus and Newton (calculus) illustrate this process of “revolution by rediscovery”.
 * Third, the appropriated knowledge was reinterpreted and aligned to post-Crusade theology. Colonial and racist historians exploited this, arguing that the (theologically) “correct” version of scientific knowledge (geometry, calculus, etc.) existed only in Europe. 
These processes of appropriation continue to this day.

Is it true that the West merely appropriated science from other cultures and "laundered" it to make it look Greek? Did the West steal everything that made it powerful? Did the West borrow Science or invent it?

There is more than bragging rights going on in this debate, for various groups have appropriated the rise of Science as proof of their sweeping claims. For example, John William Draper's 1874 "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science" and Andrew Dickson White's 1896 "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom" coupled the rise of Science with growing atheist sentiment. Or during the 1920's the rise of Science was used to support a racist superiority of northern Europeans over southern, or Europe over Asia. More recently, the UN's IPCC has used the science of climate change as justification for a sweeping global power grab. So what is responsible for the rise of science and the transfer of power--luck or prowess?

This is the sort of question we used to ask 20 years ago, when Japan had all the innovative electronics, but the US had all the patents. Was there something about the US that made innovation possible but stifled implementation, or were US scientists just more creative but gullible? In a similar vein, was the success of Science in the West fundamentally a strategic, internal, and theoretical advantage (better genes, better religion), or merely a tactical, external, and practical advantage (higher income, longer life)?

Grouping the (non-exhaustive) responses into these two categories, we find the following answers:

Strategic:
  Genius theory: The West had more genii such as Newton, Huygens, Leibniz, Faraday, Maxwell, Heisenberg, Gödel, and Einstein.
  Christianity theory: The West had a superior metaphysical understanding of science.
  Racist theory: The West had better genes, more genii, etc.

Tactical:
  Stolen theory: The West were better copycats. (See above reference to Japanese electronics)
  Capitalism theory: The West had more leisure time because of superior economic environment.
  Health-care theory: The West had higher productivity because their wise had better health care. (Obama take note!)
   Accident theory: The West just had an improbable collection of lucky events.

Robert K. Merton, a sociologist at Columbia University (and thus by definition an anti-metaphysical advocate of naturalism), argued that it was external, practical factors that caused the West to succeed in his 1938 article, Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth-Century England, principally the Protestant ethic (shades of Max Weber) that also inspired Capitalism. You might also compare this sort of analysis with that of Jared Diamond, whose 2005 "Guns, Germs and Steel" argued the same sort of external factors for the success of Western technology.

In contrast, Rodney Stark, a historian at Baylor University used the database of Chinese, Greek, Arabian and European science to argue that it was an internal, philosophical difference. The conclusion of his 2005 book, The Victory of Reason, was that Christianity provided the theoretical foundation that led to all the other practical benefits. The real credit for his thesis probably belongs to the late physicist-philosopher, Stanley Jaki, who argued in his 1990 Science and Creation, that it was the superior metaphysics of Christianity that could take Science out of the superstition that waylaid other cultures. (Jaki also credits Pierre Duhem and Alfred North Whitehead, who along with Nicolai Berdyaev, M. B. Foster, and R. G. Collingwood formulated this thesis decades earlier in opposition to the Merton theory.) This thesis was developed by Michael Bumbulis in a 1996 whitepaper. Eric Snow does a nice job summarizing the arguments in his 1997 review.

Then there are those who thread a course between the Merton accident and the Duhem miracle. John Mark Reynolds in his 2009 "When Athens Met Jerusalem" holds that it was the collision between Greek pagan thought and Christian elevated metaphysics that provided the explosive power of the Renaissance. Of course one should give the ancients their due, but which ones? C.K. Raju would argue that it was really Indian physics that collided with Christianity, and then the debate settles into a Merton/Diamond sort of conglomerate about all the accidents of history. So despite Reynolds attempt to diminish Christian arrogance or elevate Greek classicists, he cannot hold a middle ground. Either the miracle of Christian philosophy was the magic ingredient, or it was an accident of circumstance, which is to say, the conclusion is forgone in the assumptions.

Well as you might guess, Stark's conclusion nettles those who prefer a Draper-White conclusion, or a Raju sour-grapes response. One academic, Richard Carrier, prefers to take his objections on the road (rather than, say, an obscure academic journal). Here's his blog/YouTube dissent, pointing out that Stark has made some historical blunders in his book. (Though it would seem that Carrier's strawman arguments don't address the underlying work of Duhem-Jaki-Bumbulis-Snow.)

In addition to all these carefully reasoned arguments by Snow and Stark, I've been more and more convinced that it was not metaphysics per se, but theology that made the difference. That is, metaphysics is not an acquired taste, but an indoctrinated one. And the principal means of indoctrination is religious instruction. Thus it is not the metaphysics of Christianity that makes Christians different, but the theological content, the creeds, the confessions that make it unique. The metaphysics is, as it were, merely the intellectual dressing on the naked body of belief.

And what is that belief that led to the emergence of Science? The Trinity.

For the scylla and charybdis of science are transcendent monotheism and immanent polytheism. The first allows no rational causes to hold, the second holds to no rational effects. The intermediate belief of science as both permanent and peculiar, both global and local, is a tenuous and impossible place to stand unless there be a third thing, a tertium quid of equal immanence/transcendence, global/local, permanent/peculiar, which is only provided by Christianity.

The problem is what to do with Reason.

Let me simplify by lumping animism, Greek polytheism, and Zoroastrian dualism into the same bin as Hindu pantheism. They are all alike in having an immanent god(s), an absolute which is part of the same world that you and I inhabit. This god can be touched, can be changed, can be affected by our entreaties. It is not that this god is sometimes approachable, but that he cannot avoid being approachable. For him, the hard part is staying godlike and not devolving into sub-godlike behavior.

Okay, now what do we do with Reason? Is it approachable? Is it changeable? Can it respond to entreaties? Is it made from the same stuff as us? If this seems too abstract to follow, imagine Reason is a Math Theorem. Does a math theorem respond to special pleading?

Thus an immanent god might be rational one day, and irrational the next. Or even if he were rational 99% of the time, the one time you need absolute and total assurance, he would let you down.

Pantheism/polytheism cannot handle absolutes, and therefore cannot formulate laws.

Post hoc interpretations of history showing science to emerge from Christianity, while true, aren't really enough. At the very least, from a rhetorical perspective, it looks more like a turf battle. What would really decide the debate is not only saying "Christianity best explains science" but going further and saying "Christianity not only explains science, but qualitatively improves upon our modern idea of science in a way inseparable from Christianity."

This is because you want a "scientific explanation" for the evolution of science! If you were a Muslim, post hoc is more than sufficient explanation--Allah wills it so. And if you were a Hindu, then post hoc is the mind of maker. It is only that you are neither, but rather a scientist, that you want a positive metaphysical explanation for the origin of science. The difficulty is that the very desire is a consequence of Christianity, so in order to explain the spiritual roots of the fulfillment, it is necessary to explain the spiritual roots of the desire. But should the desire be denied, then so also the fulfillment.

So, to move the debate in that direction, here's my question: Given that Christianity provides grounds for expecting the world to be rationally formed, why should we then expect it to be humanly understandable?

You began by rejecting the polytheistic position, and positing Reason. Having made your foundation in the transcendent absolute of Reason, you then wonder how it can be immanent. How can it be that this cold and rational god of Math who lives in a Hilbert space of infinite dimensionality could stoop down to make sense in my finite 3-dimensional existence? This is the opposite problem confronted by Islam, that God, who is absolute, is not forced to "make sense" to me. Rationality is, after all, merely the projection of infinite Reason into a my small finite brain, and is therefore a subset of all that God is. All squares are rectangles, and all rectangles are parallel quadrilaterals, but not all parallel quadrilaterals are squares. To my square mind it might be impossible to explain rectangles not to mention the parallelograms of God.

Thus comes the need for the intermediate mediator, the immanent transcendence, the absolute peculiar, the global locality, the transfinite 3D set, the god-man bridge. But this third thing cannot be a mixture, it cannot be even a compound, it must be indivisibly both, a tertium quid. And that means the metaphysical world cannot be a one-dimensional polarity, a single axis between two extremes, but it has to have a second axis with a third point. There must be a metaphysical trinity for such an absolute not to collapse into one or the other extremes. This was the message I learned from Vladimir Lossky's book "In the Image and Likeness of God" where he spends considerable effort on the necessity of metaphysical trinities.

Only Christianity posited such a thing. Only Christianity permitted Science.

Plus, it is not only Christianity that posited a rationally created world. So did Plato and Virgil. What exactly is unique in Christianity's contribution? I suspect the first question may provide an answer to the second, but that's just a guess at this point.

One can stand at either end of a single-axis world and pine for the riches of the other. Plato's absolutes desired immanence, but all he could offer were the shadows on the cave wall. The Hindu promised the nirvana of the absolute, but could only offer the wheel of reincarnation, endlessly turning without arriving. For pining is not possessing.

Neither of these could offer what Christianity had, and that was the very real substance of the absolute God, the very real access of human mercy to the terrifying transcendence of absolute justice. Only Christianity had a Christ who was neither swallowed up in Reason nor subjected to human decay. This tension is what makes Science possible, and without it, Science rapidly turns into one or the other.

For illustration, global warming is a scientific theory that has taken on moral aspects. Read that interview with the Greenpeace president, watch Gore's movie, the truth is less important than the moral imperative of global warming. This is what happens when science drifts toward transcendence, it becomes dogmatic.

The opposite extreme is when science attempts to be practical, to be immanent without understanding the metaphysics. Denyse O'Leary's The Spiritual Brain shows how neuroscience attempts to draw conclusions without understanding the mind. The field becomes rife with recipes, or comical "just so" stories to replace the metaphysics. In the end, one makes up stories "what ain't so" to formulate a quasi-metaphysical explanation for behavior one wanted to rationalize in the first place.

Neither global warming nor evolutionary psychology are Science, but for opposite reasons; the first abuses reason for the sake of morality, the second for immorality. But I stress that this story of two sciences is not unique to the 21st century, but is precisely the sort of barrier Jaki identifies when he said that Chinese, Greek, and Arabic science were not able to make progress. They were not Trinitarian.

So to answer CK Raju's question, Science is as western as Trinitarian theology is western. And no, trinitarian theology was not appropriated,  it was revealed.

After my difficulties with academia ten years ago, many friends came to counsel me and offer advice. The most common was that I should be more flexible with my expertise, more conciliatory with my opposition, more secretive with my politics and especially with my religion. My answer had been the one Jesus gave on the Via Dolorosa, "For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?"

Now the twenty-year tenured veterans, the temperate teachers, the seasoned dry wood is feeling the heat. Marvin Olasky, WORLD editor and faculty member at UTAustin, writes about a fellow philosophy professor who was recently demoted for spear-heading a successful "Western Civilization" program that brought in millions of outside dollars and satisfied students. 

As word spread that WCAI had established a beachhead, professorial machine guns began to spew out a response. Pangle recalls that even though Koons included professors and guest lecturers who were clearly not conservative, "people perceived it as a really right-wing ideological program. [Some thought] we had an American triumphalist lesson we wanted to teach . . . that the West has all the good ideas, that we celebrate dead white males . . . that we have a prescribed canon of books."

When faculty pressure failed to kill the program, detractors turned to the "nuclear option", front-page op-ed rag formerly known as the New York Times.

Three days later a New York Times front-page story, headlined "Conservatives Try New Tack on Campus," prominently named UT's program as one "mostly financed by conservative organizations and donors, run by conservative professors." That triggered explosions of the sort I know well....Numerous UT professors emailed Diehl with complaints that right­wingers were hornswoggling him. Diehl summoned Koons and chewed him out, saying his claims that the program wasn't ideological were wrong because its funding came from conservative organizations. (This should not have surprised Diehl, because the checks went through his office.) Diehl said the departmental chairs did not trust Koons either.

The outcome was predictable, though because of tenure, Koons is still around at UTAustin. The same reserve that enabled the formation of the program I suppose, also kept him tight-lipped for an entire year, but after 12 months it was clear that WCAI was history, and he wrote this in a blog:

In retrospect, we overestimated the value of strong support from outsiders such as private donors, legislators, and policy groups, while we underestimated the determination of our internal opponents.
The main obstacle to our success was the idée fixe of unbridled faculty governance over the curriculum, which dominates at UT and elsewhere. In practice, that means the tyranny of the faculty majority.
Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a 'distribution' standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences. . . .
The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.
Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one's salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one's own narrow research agenda. . . .

Even in his criticism, Koons is showing marked restraint. He is saying, in essence, that his colleagues are lazy. But this does not explain or excuse their raw hatred. A lazy man does not work himself into a rage over the industriousness of others. Koons is picking the least offensive of their faults, he is shining the best light possible on the University, for the motive is far uglier than laziness, as the dean's emails attest; it is religious hatred, not envy that motivates the NYT slime job.

Whether we know or only suspect the motivation, the results are quantifiable and predictable. Koons writes:

Due to the Uncurriculum, the humanities are committing slow suicide. There has been a steady decline in liberal arts majors in the last thirty years (from over one-half to fewer than one-quarter of the total). However, the decline is slow enough to make little difference to tenured professors.

The very same conclusions were reached a decade ago by Victor Davis Hansen, entitled "Who Killed Homer?" But what was a disease affecting only the Classics then, has now infected the Humanities, and is making inroads on the Sciences. We are witnessing a slow-motion train wreck that is destroying America's Universities. The Classics were the canary, the Humanities are at the face, and the Sciences include every warm body up to the surface. The implosion is coming to higher education, and it will be as sudden as it is thorough.

For the entire value of an academic degree is based on attitude, on inflated stock, on ephemeral opinions. The day will come when the stock collapses, when a college diploma will be seen for the worthless piece of paper it has become, completely undeserving of its $100,000 - $200,000 price tag. The day is coming when students will refuse to attend the suffocating indoctrination of ivy-covered halls. The day has come when parents and students alike will find alternate ways to prepare themselves for the future and its vicissitudes.

What then will replace it, what will replace the indispensible "face-time" of the over-priced academy?

It is already here. The audio tapes of famous teachers lecturing about Euclid's theorems or Plato's Forms are already upon us. The YouTube videos are even more widespread. MIT lists the homework assignments for all its classes. Homework is graded by the world's most patient instructor--the electronic computer running an "expert system".

But if these are all so great, how come people aren't using them to replace the expensive schools?

Oh, but they are.

It's called homeschooling.

The homeschool we belong to (and yes, I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but the government required homeschoolers to be part of a bigger "covering") has math scholars that compete with the elite private school in town. It has quiz bowl teams that compete at a national level, individuals that beat out all competition to win spelling bees, history competitions, geography bees. One memorable year it had 7 National Merit finalists out of about 60 graduates, which is several sigma above the 1% chance probability, and even a sigma above the 12/600 national merit average of the best public school in town.

The explanation for this anomaly cannot be attributed to "motivated" parents, because many of the private school students have parents motivated to spend $20k-$30k/year. Nor can it be attributed to better education of the moms, because most of them have no advanced degrees, certainly not as credentialled as the public school teachers. Nor is it wealth, unless poverty is correlated with intelligence, nor race nor gender nor religious affiliation. The only thing accounting for this anomaly is the curricula itself.

This past year, our homeschool group graduated 75, swollen by students whose parents yanked them out of public school so they could have "homeschool" listed on their college application.

Yes, their day has come when homeschooling has become "hip".

And now I will let you in on the "next big thing", many of these parents have looked at the college choices for their child, and they've opted instead for a correspondence degree: a homeschool college. The very same criteria that caused them to do their secondary education at home is motivating them to do their collegiate experience the same way.

And why not? Alexander the Great didn't go to a University, he had Aristotle come to him. We would all be tutored if we could afford it; the University was only supposed to be a cheaper and more efficient method, not a superior one. What with the Internet and YouTube, we can all have Aristotle in digital reception on our 48" widescreen home theaters, we can have Einstein explaining relativity, Burke explaining politics, Madison explaining federal government. What exactly does that $50k/year obtain that the Internet doesn't--hangovers?

And that is what should be giving deans and vice presidents sleepless nights.

For colleges have become expensive indoctrination camps, where NSO (new student orientation) include faculty instruction to ignore parents and make use of the free condoms at the health center. Colleges demand co-ed dormitories, and would make all bathrooms co-ed too were it not for student revolt. As Koons relates above, professors teach only in their "specialty", on work they are already getting funded to study, causing education to be spotty and completely oriented toward faddish scholarship. Whether it be gender studies or global warming or international justice, there are no alternate views permitted, and the status quo is supported on an increasingly shrinking foundation.

For the day of judgement will surely come as sudden as the mortgage meltdown, when half of America's colleges and Universities will close their doors forever, and the other half will admit to being what they have in truth already become--federal government research institutes.

Yes, the day is coming when the indomitable American mother realizes that she must act to prevent her child from becoming the last in the class of world economies, when the future of America is no longer buoyed up by international faith in America, when foreigners occupy all the positions of prestige and power.

For I firmly believe that American academia will survive, but only through the fire of citizen revolt. And if I were a betting man, I would put my money on Internet curricula, take it out of higher education, and consider starting a consulting agency specializing in second careers for academics.

For the Uncurriculum becomes the Unversity.

Lori Kozlowski of the LA Times did an interview with Chris Mooney, the author of a recent book, "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future". It seems that Chris Mooney thinks that your basic 20th century progressive like Hillary who believed that "The Jetsons" would be the destiny of America, are now a persecuted minority. Lori asked him about the opposition to vaccines, and here's what he said.

Since then, science has come in and we can't detect the correlation between a rise in autism diagnoses and use of childhood vaccines. And study after study has been done.
So, at some point you have to let go. But that hasn't happened. Instead, there's a conspiracy theory and people have appointed themselves as experts on this. And so it starts to take on the cast of kind of a more-left-leaning version of global warming and evolution where -- I'm sorry, but your anecdote doesn't beat the studies' evidence.
It is really unfortunate. It's not like people who think the moon landings are a hoax. Vaccine denial really is dangerous. The people who try to avoid vaccination, who believe this, are not stupid. They're not disadvantaged. They actually tend to be well-to-do, educated. So the distrust of science -- this is not something a better high school education would have saved them from.

Mooney doesn't seem to know where the distrust of science is coming from. Like limousine-liberals, they're pretty well off, they didn't have any kids with autism, so they don't understand where the antagonism is coming from.  Ginger Taylor, an irate mother writes the LATimes to tell him, concluding with,

Chris, when your own suggestion on how to fix the problem that you have defined is to lean more about the people who are resisting your message, not so that you might learn from them as to where you might have gone off the tracks, not even so that you might enter into a mutually respectful relationship with them where you are on the same level (what with you being "super smart", "highly educated" and "doing great stuff" while they are way behind you on some imaginary starting point), but so that you might condescend to where they are in order to manipulate them into believing what you want them to believe... can you see that you can't even see what the real problem is?
It is clear from this article that those you target, you do not consider your equals.

"Smart" is not the only virtue, and it may not even one of the most important virtues. Look back at the people who have done the most damage to humanity through out history. You will be hard pressed to find a dummy among them.

What Ginger is saying is what the movie Expelled is saying is what the townhalls are saying to our Congress--treat us with respect!

But why do ordinary American citizens, raised to revere the same liberties and freedoms as their compatriots, when given a science education turn into soup Nazis? What is the poison that makes them so manipulative, so arrogant, so willing to sacrifice other's lives for their own benefit?

The first of Ginger's commentators quoted John J. Simmins in a blog entitled:
The seven basic elements of the universe according to the scientific world: Time, Space, Matter, Energy, Power, Prestige, and Funding. Here's Simmins conclusion:

It works like this: You study frogs in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Nobody wants to fund the study of frogs. Why would they? So in the early 80’s you write your proposal to study the effect of the hole in the ozone layer on the frogs. The mid 80’s your try to figure out how to write a proposal on frogs and missile defense but give up. In the 90’s you write proposals on how frog pee can help certain forms of cancer. You partner with NIH on this because they are getting lots of funding, being the ‘hot’ agency. You both know that the results are useless from the get go but you do it anyway. In the late 90’s you write proposals on how frogs from South Dakota can be used to detect nerve gas as part of the Global War on Terrorism. You routinely reject papers to the Journal of Herpetology that claim that five lined skinks can detect nerve gas by their tails falling off. In the 2000’s you are awarded grants to study the decline of frog populations in the Black Hills due to global warming, despite the fact the frogs were there through the last dozen ice ages and that they’ve survived eight periods since the last ice age where the temperature was much warmer than now. You know that the frog population is declining because the government is leasing the land to cattle ranchers and the cows are crapping in the water but you don’t really care because you’re now just a few years away from retirement and you don’t want to work at Burger King.

Read the whole thing. I committed the unpardonable sin of reading it out loud while at work. But I just couldn't bottle it in until 5 pm. And if anything, this is an understatement of "how science works".

But how does this turn us all into "little Eichmanns" (as Ward Churchill, a former U Colorado professor famously opined about businessmen)?  The same way it turned him into one. The bible on the psychology of Nazi corruption was Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she reported on his trial. The thing that surprised her, was his ordinariness, just an apparatchik doing his job.

(From the Wikipedia entry) During his imprisonment before his trial, the Israeli government sent no less than six psychologists to examine Eichmann. Not only did these doctors find no trace of mental illness, but they also found no evidence of abnormal personality whatsoever. One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was "highly desirable", while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more "normal" in his habits and speech than the average person. Arendt subtitled her book "The banality of evil".

This seemed so counter-intuitive that Arendt tried hard to analyze how good, decent human beings could get so deeply into an evil regime without recognizing it. Here's her analysis of how Eichmann was snared (from the Wikipedia entry):

• Eichmann stated himself in court that he had always tried to abide by Emmanuel Kant's categorical imperative (if everyone did what I do, would the world be a better place?)
• Eichmann's inability to think for himself was exemplified by his consistent use of "stock phrases and self-invented clichés."
• Eichmann constantly joined organizations in order to define himself, and had difficulties thinking for himself without doing so.
• Despite his claims, Eichmann was not, in fact, very intelligent.
• Bragging was the vice that was Eichmann's undoing.
• Upon seeing members of "respectable society" endorsing mass murder, and enthusiastically participating in the planning of the solution, Eichmann felt that his moral responsibility was relaxed.

Let's rephrase the findings in Arendt's book. (a) Eichmann rejected Judao-Christian morality in favor of some philosophical ethical system. (b) He was a "consensus-science" thinker, (c) a "consensus-science" member, (d) insecure; (e) and therefore arrogant, (f) subordinated ethics to "consensus-science".

Now go back and read Chris Mooney's interview. Read his comments about global warming, about evolution, about religious Americans. You will find all the same properties as Eichmann had, the same attitudes that drew Ginger Taylor's ire. (And, not surprisingly, also in Ward Churchill's accusations, which I have learned to receive as confessions.)  This is the thesis of Expelled. There is something about the system that does this to professors.

Now re-read Simmins humor piece. The scientist constantly subjugates the principles of science to prestige, to power, and to money. Surely we scientists are embarrassed to admit that we don't want to work at Burger King. Surely we need to find some fiction for why we are living well, and our plumber isn't. Surely we need to find a justification for why moms of autistic kids are hopping mad without implicating us.  And the solution is to build a wall to keep the mobs out, an ivory tower to retire to, all the while telling ourselves that like European nobility, we deserve all the benefits we are maniacally pursuing.

In other words, we become anti-Americans.

When did this metamorphosis begin? Read the first bullet of Arendt's analysis: the moment we adopt a "scientific" ethic. For religion isn't just an illusion that scientific elites must humor, religion isn't just a transitory condition before the State liberates us into a classless society, religion isn't just a barrier to a technological utopia, but Christianity is the only antidote to hubris, the only purgative for pride, the only cure for sin.

If the theme of Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" is that the way of hubris leads to slavery, then the theme of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" is that the way of Athens leads to hell.

I'm a little behind on my blogging here, with so many interesting stories to cover in the past few weeks, I've been storing them on my desktop. Today I'm cleaning house, and decided on some short blogs to clear them out.

One commentator read the lengthy comet-life debate, and asked about "Plasma-Cosmology" and the attempt to find alternatives to the Big Bang. Well, to begin with, Hannes Alfvén wasn't trying to start a new cosmology with his discussion of plasmas (ionized gas), he was trying to revive an old one. Like Sir Fred Hoyle who coined the pejorative "Big Bang" he was resisting the new-fangled fascination with cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and attempting to explain the data with the more atheist-friendly "steady-state" universe theory. He didn't succeed, in part because Alfvén never really had a comprehensive theory, merely an objection to the way astrophysicists ignore plasmas. And judging by the referee comments on my one and only astrophysics proposal, they still do.

So what are some of the cosmological consequences of ignoring plasmas? Here's my list of Alfvén-like objections:

 a) Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is the process by which hydrogen, helium and a smattering of Lithium were made in the primordial explosion. Along with the CMB, it is the principal evidence for the BB. But the era in which plasmas dominate is treated as if it were a wet-chemistry experiment. There are no long-range forces, and no provision for plasma instabilities. Should such instabilities exist, it would shift the equilibrium away from deuterium-tritium, and possible explain how heavier atoms like lithium, beryllium and carbon were made in the "dark ages" when light could not penetrate the plasma. And should sufficient carbon/oxygen be made in the BBN, then it would form the baryonic "dark matter" that is presently unexplained, hiding it in black, boulder-sized comets. The paradox being that current BBN models underpredict the baryonic component of the universe (atoms) leaving theorists to postulate "exotic" forms of dark matter, such as MACHOs and WIMPs. All this may be solved by putting in the plasma physics where it belongs.

b) The engine at the center of astrophysical jets remains a mystery. From a physics viewpoint, it really is an engine, with unspecified potential energy going in , and kinetic energy coming out. Now a heat engine is a particular type of engine, taking the random incoherent motion of heat and tidying it up by having coherent motion coming out. In the case of a car, it is the coherent motion of the driveshaft, at much lower velocities than the hot exhaust molecules in the pistons. In the case of a gun or a rocket, the projectile has nearly the same velocity as the gas molecules. And in the case of a linear accelerator, the projectiles are at much higher velocities than the electrons travelling through the cables. In all of these cases, we can compare the energy in the projectile to the energy in the fuel, and calculate an efficiency. A gasoline engine is about 25% efficient, a gun about 2%, and a linear accelerator too small to calculate, <0.001%. So when an astrophysical object pumps enormous energy into a beam of accelerated particles with no obvious linear accelerator or powerplant nearby, we want to know how it does this magic that we cannot duplicate on Earth. The astrophysical answer has been "black holes", which is to say, "hidden under the rug". A better answer might be "plasmas".

c) And this brings up the whole notion of black holes. A Big Bang and a Black Hole are really the same object, theorists claim, the one going forward in time and the other backward. So if BB is a fiction, then probably so are BH. Several theorists have argued that we really don't need BH in our cosmology, that all the effects of a BH can be constructed out of a very hot, dense and magnetically constrained plasma, with radiation pressure holding the entire thing together. It's an intriguing concept, which may explain why jets are seen equally for young stellar objects, microquasars, neutron stars and galactic black hole candidates.

But if a plasma could simulate a black hole, could a plasma simulate a big bang? The authors don't say. Maybe Alfvén was once again, more right than he knew or deserved.

There is another connection between Big Bang and Black Holes, with some surprising results that suggest once again, we need to revisit the physics, for it would appear that perhaps there is one thing that black holes can't destroy, and big bangs can't create...

Information.

NASA recently announced that they had discovered an amino acid, glycine, in a comet. This comes two years after the Stardust probe had flown by a comet's tail, collected dust in an aerogel bucket, and parachuted the bucket back to Earth for analysis.

The significance of this discovery, is that amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and proteins are the workhorses of life. Did this discovery mean that comets have life?

That was the reason for the delay. The scientists wanted to be sure that this particular glycine came from the comet and not, say, from oily fingerprints left by the technicians who assembled the bucket. The first problem was that there was so very little of it. We're talking about less material than a fingerprint, merely the vapor from an impacting dust grain. So the team set up their lab and kept calibrating and testing until they felt they would be sensitive to even that small an amount. Then they carefully took samples of foil from around the site of a dust-grain impact (sort of like looking at the gunpowder stains around a bullet hole) and ran it through their mass spectrometer.

I have a special fondness for mass spectrometers, crediting them for snatching me away from solid-state physics and directing my career into space plasma physics. So I can appreciate the carefulness with which they carried their sample to the instrument, gently heating the surface while flowing noble gases or organic solvents over it and then delicately ionizing the molecules to avoid destroying the organics. It is a tour-de-force, demonstrating a proper reverence for the unique sample of comet dust that they had spent 100's of millions of dollars obtaining, and might never obtain again. And indeed, the isotope of Carbon-13 revealed the glycine to be not from Earth.

On the other hand, they might have spared themselves the anxiety because tons of cometary dust rain down on the earth every year, and when big enough chunks make it through the atmosphere to hit the ground, they are classified as carbonaceous chondritic meteorites.   Unfortunately, rain and water will dissolve these type of meteorites, so unless they are collected immediately, they will vanish. But by good fortune we have about a dozen of them over the past century that were collected immediately. And when we analyze them, they are chock full of glycine, as well as four other amino acids and even two nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA. And just like Stardust, these amino acids are made of extraterrestrial heavy carbon.

So yes, Stardust confirms what carbonaceous chondrites have been telling us, there is extra-terrestrial life.

We've known this for upwards of 40 years, but the two primary counter-arguments that it doesn't represent extraterrestrial life have been: (a) contamination; (b) non-biological origin.

Is it Contamination?
1) All amino acids are chiral, with Left-handed (L) and Right-handed (D) forms. All living organisms are only L-amino. Test-tube chemistry can make amino acids, but lacking a chiral catalyst, they generate equal amounts of L and D called a "racemic" mixture. Given that cosmic rays or heat can break/remake chemical bonds, an originally chiral amino acid will become racemic given enough time. Therefore determining whether cometary amino acids are L, D, or racemic will indicate their source.

Answer: they are noticeably non-racemic, with a bias toward L-amino showing that they are either very old life, and/or mixed with some non-biological racemic amino acids.

2) There are 20 amino acids in life, although many more in the test tube. Not all of them are equally stable, with half-lives from a few thousand years to a few million. As a consequence, dinosaur protein surviving 60 million years is considered a true miracle. But more significantly, the presence or absence of select amino acids can tell you how long it has been since a organism was alive. Think of it as C14 dating for proteins. What do comets show?

Answer: Comets are missing many of the complete 20 amino acids, consistent with a clock of 10-100 million years. This is also consistent with the racemization seen in point 1.

3) All life on Earth is recycling CO2 from the atmosphere. The oceans dissolve a lot of CO2 as well as recycle old carbonates, so they represent an older atmosphere. The two stable isotopes of carbon are C12 and C13. Because C13 in methane or CO2 makes it noticeably heavier, C13 settles out of the atmosphere more readily and eventually disappears from the life cycle. So all recent life shows an enhancement of C12 over C13, whose normalized ratio is called by mass spectroscopists "dell-13". Dell-13 for terrestrial organisms runs from -30 to 0, with plants near -30, people near -10, and marine organisms near 0 (which is how they caught Floyd Landis doping on artificial testosterone). What do comets show?

Dell-13 for amino acids recovered from meteorites are above +35, very heavy carbon. Nothing even remotely terrestrial has those numbers. See the articles in this book.

At the Astrobiology conference this year (SPIE publication coming in about 1 month), two necleobases (A&T?) found in carbonaceous chondrites were described (original discovery published in 1970's) whose dell-13 was also +35.

Conclusion: from (1) we know that these amino acids were made by living organisms. From (3) we know that when they were alive they munched on "heavy" carbon not found in the Earth ecosystem. From (2)+(3) we know that they were alive a long, long time ago. Therefore it is not consistent with recent Earth contamination, nor with ancient abiotic contamination, but only with ancient life.

But is it a Comet?

I suppose there is a sliver of an argument that carbonaceous chondrites aren't comets, but if they aren't then we have lots more problems. Consider:

a) They arrived like all meteorites, from extraterrestrial material hitting the earth

b) The parent bodies of most meteorites are known, from stony to nickel-iron asteroids, by matching their reflectance signature. The parent bodies of carbonaceous chondrites match the spectra from the 3 or 4 comet flybys, as well as some recent Hubble measurements. (Dark black objects are hard to see, especially when surrounded by a glowing ball of evaporating gasses, hence the very recent measurements.)

c) An asteroid that has water on it, must produce a tail if it is within the orbit of Mars. Solar system objects with tails have historically been called comets.

d) The composition of carbonaceous chondrites is heavily proto-solar, undifferentiated, lots of "dusty" supernova remnants. If it is not a comet, then its origin would be very mysterious.

So that's why 99% of the meteorite community thinks that they are extinct comets. Of course, we can't rule out that they might be refuse from flying saucers too, but you can see why such explanations raise more questions than they answer.

But did NASA's Stardust return cometary silicates lacking water?

Another name for hydrated silicates is concrete. If you took a piece of concrete from your sidewalk, turned a propane torch on it for a few minutes until it glowed, it would dehydrate the silicates and resemble the powdered cement you began with when you mixed it up in the first place. The silicates collected by Stardust were travelling some 6.1 km/s relative to the aerogel collector. If all that kinetic energy were turned into heat, the kinetic temperature would be about 125,000K, where the boiling point of silicates is perhaps 3000K, so the sand would completely vaporize.

Therefore the entire mission hinged on the ability of aerogels to stop a dust grain without thermalizing it, either by ablation or elastic collisions etc. Despite careful calibrations, every "track" left by a dust grain in the returned aerogels shows a "ballooning" in the middle, where the grain exploded, evidently from heating. So rather than saying it was a surprise not to find hydrated silicates, I would rather ask whether one should be surprised to find silicates at all. 

But Stardust was calibrated before launch, and showed that hydrated silicates from a carbonaceous chondrite would survive capture in the aerogels. Doesn't their absence prove that comets aren't carbonaceous chondrites?

Yes, they did do hypervelocity studies, but not having actual comet to test, they used proxies. Here's what I think is the difference between their proxies  (which included carbonaceous chondrites!) and a comet. When dust is lifted off the comet later to be collected by Stardust, did it consist of hydrated "mud" or anhydrous dust? Did it come from a water geyser or a vapor jet? To answer that, we have to discuss the life history of comets.

Carbonaceous chondrites are the end product of many, many trips around the Sun, where a comet melts and sublimates many times, effectively creating a well-mixed, well-hydrated precipitate or agglomerate that subsequently gets baked solid when all the liquid water boils off, leaving behind mostly hydrated minerals still stable at the relatively cool temperatures of the comet (some 400K according to Halley's armada). That's why the team expected hydrated minerals, because that is what is found in chondrites.

Young comets that have just arrived in the solar system, however, are big, fluffy and dusty, since the ice has never melted, the dust has come straight from a stellar furnace and is therefore anyhdrous, and sublimation pressure of evaporation drives anhydrous grains out of the fluffy comet's weak gravity well. This is the original "Whipple" model, which was widely accepted before the first visit to comet Halley.

All this changes when a comet melts, forms concrete, and then collects water. The jets coming off a melted comet are then water jets, or geysers, though limited to regions near the equator. Eventually, erosion changes the stability of the spinning comet, and it does a spin flip putting the "apple core" shape into a tumbling mode, or a prolate comet.

Adolescent or prolate comets have some melted spots (near the equator) and some dusty spots (near the poles). I think the ESA-ROSETTA mission to comet C-G is going to find an adolescent comet. My paper suggests that liquid water acts as a speed governor in a comet, keeping it right at the rotation rate that generates a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. If it spins faster, it melts more water, the water moves to the equator, and slows it down. But as a comet ages, it loses more water and becomes hollow. This means that the moment of angular inertia changes, so in effect the R-T "speed limit" keeps dropping. (The math is in the paper). So the age of comet can be determined from its spin rate.

Comet Wild was definitely up there in age, with some 90% of its water gone (based on density measurements and spin rate), with temperature maps showing nearly a constant 273K surface temperature, e.g. melting point of ice. All this suggests that we should expect hydrated minerals, or mud in its outgassing.

But when a comet is nearly hollow, the source of the outgassing is no longer the pockets of liquid water near the equator, where centrifugal force concentrates them, but the huge reservoir of gas in the interior bursting out of the thin spot at the pole. This can be seen by the stability of the comet jets in inertial space, which was certainly true of comet Borelly. This suggests that rather than water geysers, a comet of Wild's age will end its life with a gas geyser powered by unmelted dusty ice in its core, more similar to the first pass of a long-period, Oort-cloud comet.

And that means the dust scooped up by Stardust will likely contain clusters of anhydrous crystals held together by ice that evaporate within days or hours of being ejected from the comet. More mysterious is why the grains of fosterite "sand" were in the comet in the first place, which suggest that it may have scooped up terrestrial dirt in the inner solar system. I haven't tried to calculate it, but perhaps there is more cometary recycling of dirt than I had thought.

The Stardust team calibrated with hydrated silicates, so we know they can survive impact, so where are they? And how do you know that carbonaceous chondrites are comets? Maybe they are leftover planetesimals and the amino acids are primordial?

And just as concrete is a mixture of sand and hydrated silicates, it doesn't surprise me that the small, hydrated crystals (look at a microphotograph of concrete) would have exploded, leaving behind the fosterite filler. I think the observations are consistent with the hypothesis that the collection method evaporated the hydrated crystals, and that carbonaceous chondrites, while cometary in origin, have been processed differently than the material outgassed by a comet.

And while my description of the life-cycle of a comet is undoubtedly speculative, it is nonetheless based on observations both before and after the spacecraft-flyby era, as well as being consistent with the physics of rotating objects.

Whether carbonaceous chondrites are primordial planetesimals, water-bearing asteroids, or amorphous achondritic accretions, they would all produce tails when orbiting the Sun inside the orbit of Mars. And historically, anything with a tail was called a comet. You can call it lots of other things as well, but as far as I understand, it doesn't stop it from being a comet.

Finally, amino acids might have been in the primordial stuff that made the solar system, just as crude oil might have been part of stuff that constructed the earth (Tommy Gold's hypothesis), but amino acids would not have survived 5 billion years to the present, except perhaps buried under a foot of ice in the Oort cloud, because cosmic rays, sunlight and heat would have destroyed it. In fact, as I mentioned in a previous post, many of the 20 amino acids are missing in comets for precisely this reason, giving a "clock" of between 10-100 million years for their origin. And while this rules out recent contamination, it doesn't support primordial origin either.

So once again, I do not attribute ancient life to comets lightly, nor do I propose it for ideological reasons, but because there aren't any other theories that work. If any of your alternate explanations are better, then they have to explain: the missing amino-acid racemization, the missing amino acids, the missing non-biological amino acids, the presence of nucleobases, the dell-13 enhancements of both amino acids and nucleobases, the fossilized blue-green algae, the missing nitrogen of the fossils, the water-soluble nature of the fossilization; not to mention the older telescopic evidences: the cometary source of cyanogen, the outbursts of distant comets, the color of comet surfaces, the prolate shape of comets, the phylosilicates ejected by the Deep Impact probe, and the presence of sand grains in comets, to name a few. The data is overwhelming, and the only hypothesis that brings all these surprising observations together is that of life on comets.

Could any of these signatures be "front-loaded", primordial organic materials placed there by God for their subsequent use on Earth?

While I believe in front-loading, I don't think you and I agree on the mechanism. As I wrote on my website a month ago, I think front-loading is a term invented by Laplacian determinists, to explain how Newton's equation of motion, F=ma, can be based on initial conditions x0 and v0. Since QM has destroyed that Newtonian precision, and chaos theory destroyed the remaining hold-outs for initial conditions, it seems that now "algorithmic" front loading is proposed instead: where the universe is a computing machine executing some "boot sequence" program stored as information, e.g., the machine keeps updating its state based on a stored data base so it doesn't need phenomenal precision. Based on my understanding of the Turing problem of feedback, I have argued that even algorithmic front-loading is impossible. That is, there is no place to store the program separately from the computer, and hence "strong" Turing feedback prohibits a deterministic outcome.

Nevertheless, as you may have read in my "Cometary Biosphere" paper, I think the Earth shows a "bootstrap" progression of information and life just like a laptop starting Windows. So how can it be possible to believe in both a bootstrap Earth, and the impossibility of bootstrapping?

The resolution, I believe, lies in the nature of information.

When attempting to solve a problem on a balloon-born astronomy platform, where Harvard U had spent a million dollars on a star-camera pointing system, but failed to deliver a usable product, I concluded that the information in the starfield existed in both the CCD-image, and in its Fourier transform. Harvard researchers failed to lock onto the starfield because they neglected the information in the Fourier transform. This led me to an essay on Fourier transforms as an analogue of eternity and as another way to view global information.

Applying this insight to our bootstrap problem, the universe as created by God is like a computing machine playing back the boot-prom-program that does not itself exist locally in the machine, but globally, around the machine. That is, the hologram of the universe holds the information that drives the components of the universe toward complexity. You can also think of this as the QM entanglement of all the wavefunctions from the creation of the universe. Since something that is ubiquitous or global cannot be material, we are looking at information being "spirit". So in effect, we solve the Turing dilemma by getting rid of feedback between the parts, by getting rid of the parts, by making everything global.

Well such a view is unfortunately very close to Tipler's "The Physics of Immortality" and its quasi-Hegelian emphasis on "world spirit", or Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega Point", etc. But that is because Tipler gives the Fourier transform the primacy, whereas materialism gives the space-time locality the primacy. I would argue that neither is primary, but both are important.

This is akin to the Chalcedonian solution that Christ is 100% human and 100% divine. Such a view, of course, is nonsense, since something cannot be itself and its opposite without violating basic principles of logic. However Church Fathers at Chalcedon didn't derive its validity from dualism, or from denial of logic, but from an affirmation of the Trinity.

So the reason Tipler is wrong, the reason Teilhard is wrong, the reason Hegel is wrong, is that they deny the Trinity. The reason we can hold the world and the spirit in creative tension, is because there is a third thing that "is before all things (material), and in him all things hold together (spirit)." (Colossians) or even better, "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe (material) by the word of his power (spirit)." (Hebrews).

We may be able to unravel the material of the universe, and even detect the spirit that holds it together, but the information lies in the word who created it.

Stephen Meyer, a founding member of  Discovery Institute, and cause celebre for the brouhaha generated by his peer reviewed paper on ID, has just come out with his best argument in a book. To recap the ID arguments: Dembski argued on the basis of mathematics, Behe argued for "irreducibly complex" biological mechanisms, and Johnson argued for legally coherent logic. Meyer bases his argument on the digital information system of the cell. His book hit the shelves last month, and while I have only read the front matter (as well as Meyer's previous essays) here is my response to a hostile review of his book by a biology major.

I received Signature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer in the mail today. That's 600 pages to kill in less than two weeks, but I'll do my best. I've started reading it already. I was momentarily surprised to recognize the name of the author. And while was involved in the scandal at the Smithsonian, I don't believe he is guilty of much beyond doing poor science.

This is kind of you, but whether he is guilty of manslaughter or not really makes no difference to the arguments he presents. You will have to stop moralizing about the motives of scientists and address their purported claims. Ad hominem is not and never was, a scientific response.

The real breach of ethics came from Robert Sternberg, who by-passed the peer review process in order to sneak on Meyer's article into the journal the Proceeding of the Biological Society of Washington.

No, that is NOT what a blue-ribbon congressional committee concluded. It would do you good to read what the lawyers say, because scientists make really poor legal eagles. Take my 30-year-experience word for it, no peer review operates the way a journal claims. No ethical breeches were made, merely the breech of publishing something that was deemed a priori blasphemous, which is generally where the good science is located. Read Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" if you want more details on what was really going on in the debate. But more importantly, ad hominem rebuttal does not actually address the science in the article. If you are going to attack ID for what it says, you should not attack it for who says it.

There is a lot of misinformation about the events surrounding this episode.

Indeed there is. It would do you good to get Sternberg's opinion too. Watch the "Expelled" movie and you will see the interview with him discussing this "scandal".

In fact, the book's prologue spews lies and misinformation starting on the first page. Luckily for the author, this early dishonesty is independent of the intellectual work he purports to have conducted, which I have taken time to evaluate.

Hmm. Once again, attacking the irrelevant details of a story is just another method of ad hominem, for it really doesn't matter who your mother is, frankly, when evaluating scientific debate. And when you research the "lies and misinformation" I guarantee you will be astounded how the story you've been told has been twisted as well. Best not to argue over irrelevant points, you can't win, but you can lose.

I would like to note that Meyer states that he published an article in a respected peer-reviewed journal. While this is technically correct, the peer-review of his particular article was never carried out.

You're nit-picking at irrelevancies. It was peer reviewed by three reviewers, despite what you may hear otherwise, both Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg will tell you how. And as I told you before, peer-review is a murky enough process that you really don't want to get into a debate of what constitutes valid "peer-review". The stories are quite spicy, and I have an evening full of them.

It is also important to note that there has not been a publication of a pro-intelligent design article in any peer-reviewed scientific journal since (nor was there before).

Um, quite the contrary (and you can go to Discovery Institute and check out their list). But you have made a claim in the form of a universal negative, which everyone since Aristotle has pointed out is extremely difficult to validate. I don't think you can exhaustively prove this claim until you have read every peer-reviewed article ever published and asked if it supported design. But if you did, you would find many more than you just stated. (Yockey's 1992 paper comes to mind, though the man himself eschews ID, his papers support it.)

So in general you are quite right, there are not many peer-reviewed articles, but there have been two dozen or so that have been highly influential. But you might ask why this is an important point to make? Were there any publications of the inverse square law of gravity before Newton? Did that invalidate his theory?

Meyer makes the point that truly innovative work doesn't fare well in the peer-reviewed journals, simply because one can't make a lengthy argument in that brief format, and abbreviated papers are too incomplete for reviewers to approve. After all, even Darwin had to publish his innovative work in a book. So whether there have been one, two, or a dozen peer-reviewed articles doesn't make a theory any more valid or invalid. Science is NOT consensus, politics is.

My very first point of contention is that there seems to be a radical misunderstanding about what evolutionary theory claims to explain and what it does not.

You are catching on to the whole problem with this debate. When there are different definitions for the main terms, then how can any consensus be achieved? But the problem is worse that that, the problem is that multiple definitions are used and interchanged causing ambiguities that are intentional; a method known to students of Aristotle as "equivocation". Once again, lawyers are all over these rhetorical shenanigans, while scientists seem oblivious. That's why Phillip Johnson, a lawyer, got involved in ID, because without knowing the science, he got very suspicious of the equivocation he saw in the defence of Darwin.

Meyer's point about intelligent design does not necessarily conflict with evolutionary theory, though it is closely related. Meyer argues about origin of life, which evolution technically does not address.

No, if you read Meyer carefully, he objects to both Evolution (as a deterministic system of speciation) as well as origin of life (OOL). The point is that if bacterial life is designed, then why isn't invertebrate life, vertebrate life, mammals and primates? There is no a priori reason for terminating design with the first bacterium. The same principles that detect design in OOL, can detect it in transitional forms as well. Which is why Darwinists see OOL as the camel's nose, as well they should.

But your technicality for evolution is just that, an equivocating technicality that is easily dismissed. The problem is that there are 5+ definitions for evolution, and when someone brings an argument against one, then retreat to another definition is pure and simple equivocation. I don't have space to enumerate the many definitions of evolution, here are just a few:

1) evolution-1: change over time. -- Both ID and Darwinists accept this.
2) evolution-2: change over time caused by random chance.-- Both ID and Darwinists accept this.
3) evolution-3: change over time caused by random chance leading to fundamentally greater complexity -- Darwinists accept this, ID doesn't.
4) evolution-4: absemce of change over time due to any other process than chance and law (physics) --Darwinists accept this, ID doesn't.
5) evolution-5: Non-existent, impossibility of any forces in nature except those due to material causes (physics) --Darwinists accept this, ID doesn't.

OOL problems fall into the category evolution-4, which is a subset of evolution-5. Claiming that OOL is a mystery to evolution (and therefore not defended) would still permit miracles and ID, so that despite not wanting to talk about OOL, no Darwinist will abandon evolution-4 and evolution-5. That's why it is an equivocation to say evolution is technically not about OOL.

(We could say a great deal about -4 and -5 and metaphysics, but it would distract from the science right now.)

Evolution by natural selection describes a mechanism to explain how lines of organisms change over time. It is used to elucidate the mechanism by which, from generation to generation to generation, organisms gradually change. We know from incredible amounts of data, fossil and genomic evidence to cite two sources, that organisms do change over time. We can see this very clearly in bacterial evolution today because bacteria reproduce so quickly.

You are defending evolution 1, and evolution-2. There is no debate here. There is, however, a debate whether evolution-3 has ever been observed even in bacteria. See Michael Behe's "The Edge of Evolution" for a recent discussion of the malaria parasite by a microbiologist. The problem is the that all observed evolution in bacteria (notably anti-biotic resistance) is devolution, not evolution. The resistant species is less robust in the wild than the original, which cannot be an argument for "progress".

The issue of origin of life, or abiogenesis, has implications for evolution but in no way can call evolution into question.

Indeed it can. Because if instead evolution was caused by--as I have peer-reviewed published papers describing--bacterial transport on a comet, then the whole scenario of "descent with modification" is called into question. If life arrived from outside the Earth, then we aren't seeing "change over time", but "transport over time", making evolution no more correct than saying your old neighbors mutated into that new family with kids.

It is origin of life that Meyer claims to address. However, what he actually does is address origin of information of life. These are two closely related but subtly different claims. Essentially, he constructs a straw man by saying that DNA has information in the form of the genetic code and that since we see code today in the form of digital, which is man-made, the genetic code must also be made by some intelligence which he terms a "designer."

Look, it is a rhetorical device to insist that your opponents arguments are "straw men", when you cannot refute them. Whether or not DNA==Life or merely DNA-->Life is an irrelevant distinction. Or as they say in rhetoric, "a distinction without a difference". There are no examples of life without DNA/RNA. If you want to call prions "life", then you have most of the biology community against you. So it is perfectly within the purview of science to replace a mushy biology word with a concrete physical analogue, and then draw conclusions from that physical analog.

But what he fails to adequately address is the fact that DNA is not the only material that can store information.

Again, this is a distinction without a difference. Information is stored in countless ways on your laptop, in the RAM, in the buffers, in the monitor, but if it evaporates when you turn it off, it isn't the kind of information that is important to your thesis. DNA is the permanent record of info in the cell, and everything else derives from it. None of the other information storage devices are relevant to the question of speciation. In fact, Darwin formally disallowed information flow backwards from the environment into the genome, condemning Lamarck's thesis, (which is now being supported as the newly discovered "epigenetic" information). Biologists even give this one-directional information flow a name, "The Central Dogma" is that the DNA holds the info, and everything else derives from it. If your complaint about other sources of info were valid, you would have to erase the "central dogma" from the textbooks.

Further, he asserts that any assemblage of information must be artificially created. Both these statements are false. Proteins, RNA, clay, and many other pre-biotic molecules can store and replicate informaiton, especially if all these materials are allowed to interact with each other, which is almost definitely the case.

Okay, we now have two T/F issues that you think are central to Meyer's thesis. He says:

(1) DNA is the central information storage of life, and hence to OOL. You say no. Let's examine the evidence:

a) Do proteins contain information? Yes. Can they replicate that information? Not very well. Can they store that information for any important length of time (say, 100 years, the lifespan of tortoises and some people.) No. Can they store it for 1 year? Not without enormous error rates. Can they store it for 1 day? Not at the part-per-billion error rates of DNA. Why? Because the peptide bonds get hydrolyzed, and several of the amino acids that make up proteins are unstable. They are nearly useless an information bank, with cellular lifetimes on the order of seconds or minutes.

b) RNA. Can it replicate? Not really, it is 99% the product of a cell that has DNA in it. Does it have information? You bet. Can it store information for 100 years? No, it is much less stable than DNA. Typical lifetimes in the cell are again seconds to minutes. Does this invalidate Meyer's thesis? No, he specifically mentions that DNA and RNA are considered the same in principle, but the "Central Dogma" says that RNA is produced from DNA. So Meyer is merely going by the book here, and if you want to argue a "RNA-world" hypothesis, you will have to take a controversial thesis. But you called this pre-biotic, which is ridiculous. RNA is as biotic as DNA.

c) Clay. Can they replicate? No, they are formed from bacterial interaction with silicate rock. This is not replication anymore than feces replicate. Do they have information? No. Then what are we arguing about? Someones half-baked speculation on OOL from clay. Why are you then so sure that there is information involved? Because you relied on faulty information sources, who needed this as a way to solve the OOL problem for evolution-5.

d) If you have "many more" pre-biotic information molecules then let the world know, it would really help the discouraged OOL community.

So your objection turns out to be another distinction without a difference. There may be other ways to store information, but none of them turn out to be important. Perhaps what Meyer said was that DNA was the only important one, and I believe you are in agreement with him.

(2) Meyer says that any assemblage of information must be artificially created.

Is clay artificially created? Yes, by bacteria. Is RNA? Yes, by DNA.
Are proteins? Yes by RNA and ribosomes.

So once again, you are in complete agreement with him. Find me some information that was created by chance or by physical law. That is what would prove Meyer wrong. Crystals are made by physical law, but they lack information. Constellations are made by chance, but they don't encode any message. Until you offer an alternative, I think you are in complete agreement with Meyer here.

Next he tries to play games with large numbers, again employing a straw man.

I hate straw men as much as the next guy, but you will have to explain why these are straw, and why real men don't obey the same laws of physics that dominate these number problems. Sir Fred Hoyle, an ardent atheist and materialist, did the numbers for evolution and arrived at nearly the same calculation. See his 1987 book "The Mathematics of Evolution". It isn't a straw man argument, and it has never been satisfactorily solved.

He is also guilty of using what wikipedia call "weasel words." Here is a link explaining them. Weasel words are sometimes a problem in wikipedia articles when a person wishes to put spin on an otherwise largely objective article. Meyer uses words like "random" and "chance" in sometimes inappropriate ways to create the illusion of clarity while actually attempting to make use of the common connotations of the words to manipulate the reader's opinion.

We are descending into ad hominem again. I mentioned that you yourself used equivocation earlier (the British use vocabulary where an American uses idiom), so be careful whom you accuse. If Meyer is guilty of equivocation, then carefully distinguish between the two meanings and see if his argument depends on confusing the two. If not, then he is no more guilty of "weasel words" than the "pro-lifers and the anti-aborts" are. Face it, words have connotations along with denotations. Get used to it, because one day someone will do it to you, and calling them names doesn't really pack the same persuasive punch. (BTW this is why newspapers and dead-tree media are going the way of the dinosaur--they decided weasel words were necessary in reporting the news the right way. Morality crusades and ad hominem have a way of destroying their messengers.)

Meyer misdefines a scientific theory, calls it the "chance hypothesis," and attacks an idea that no serious scientist really endorses. The "chance hypothesis" that he describes was tossed out more than 40 years ago, way before much of the really robust and insightful work in pre-biotic chemistry was performed.

Umm, just because an experiment was declared "old-fashioned", doesn't mean that the results aren't still cited as evidence. The Miller-Urey experiment and the Oparin hypothesis remain in every textbook despite the fact that they are not considered valid mechanisms for OOL. The point Meyer is making, is that these hypotheses lie at the foundations of biology, and when they are overturned, there is a serious problem with the super-structure built upon them. Calling them out-of-date, does nothing to uphold the logical superstructure. It is the status-quo biologist who has to find a replacement for the chance hypothesis, or the entire Darwinian edifice is endangered. (As every serious Darwinist along with Darwin readily admits.)

Below is one example of hundreds of papers published in well-respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals (which didn't by-pass the peer-review process).

Quantity is no substitute for quality, and the sheer quantity of papers pushing weird OOL theories does not make them believable or even make them probable. I can tell you the funniest I've heard, about hydrogen-peroxide based life on Mars. Simply hilarious. Remember, quantity is not quality, consensus is not science.

This is a link to a podcast from Nature magazine that interviews the author of a paper that identifies mechanisms for the spontaneous formation of pyrimidine RNA nucleotides in the conditions of the early earth.

I am peripherally involved in the OOL debate, because I wrote some papers on cometary transport of life, and listened to various OOL arguments against comets and supporting an Earth-origin. So having listened to these people come to the Astrobiology conference and attack my friends, I can only laugh when I hear their arguments. Since you take this so seriously, let me point out a few relevant issues the paper seems to overlook. Here's some of the abstract:

Here we show that activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides can be formed in a short sequence that bypasses free ribose and the nucleobases, and instead proceeds through arabinose amino-oxazoline and anhydronucleoside intermediates. The starting materials for the synthesis—cyanamide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde and inorganic phosphate—are plausible prebiotic feedstock molecules and the conditions of the synthesis are consistent with potential early-Earth geochemical models. Although inorganic phosphate is only incorporated into the nucleotides at a late stage of the sequence, its presence from the start is essential as it controls three reactions in the earlier stages by acting as a general acid/base catalyst, a nucleophilic catalyst, a pH buffer and a chemical buffer. For prebiotic reaction sequences, our results highlight the importance of working with mixed chemical systems in which reactants for a particular reaction step can also control other steps.

a) The first point is the admission of the impossible
From a colleague's blog:

"The first point worth making is that new advances are often shown to be significant by referring to the lack of progress that had earlier characterised the field. This is often a surprise to the general public, who are typically fed a story that the problems are largely cracked and abiogenesis researchers (OOL) are confident of tying up the loose ends in the near future. Wade's report refers to the solution of "a problem that for 20 years has thwarted researchers trying to understand the origin of life - how the building blocks of RNA, called nucleotides, could have spontaneously assembled themselves in the conditions of the primitive earth."
Van Noorden explains the problem like this:
"An RNA polymer is a string of ribonucleotides, each made up of three distinct parts: a ribose sugar, a phosphate group and a base - either cytosine or uracil, known as pyrimidines, or the purines guanine or adenine. Imagining how such a polymer might have formed spontaneously, chemists had thought the subunits would probably assemble themselves first, then join to form a ribonucleotide. But even in the controlled atmosphere of a laboratory, efforts to connect ribose and base together have met with frustrating failure."
Abiogenesis researchers adopt either 'law' or 'chance' as causal explanations. They have rejected 'design' (not because it does not work, but because they insist on all causation being material). The new research is driven by a confidence in 'law'. The researchers are chemists. For them, the origin of life is a matter of chemistry. Thus, Sutherland, the lead author, is quoted as saying:
"My ultimate goal is to get a living system (RNA) emerging from a one-pot experiment. We can pull this off. We just need to know what the constraints on the conditions are first." [and] "My assumption is that we are here on this planet as a fundamental consequence of organic chemistry, so it must be chemistry that wants to work."
What, then, has been achieved? The researchers have synthesised both pyrimidine ribonucleotides (but not the purine ribonucleotides). As Van Noorden described it, they have "shown that it is possible to build one part of RNA from small molecules". They havenot formed RNA molecules; they have not addressed the chirality problem, they have not generated any biological information and they have not made RNA do anything of biological significance, let alone become clothed with a membrane and undergo replication.
Nevertheless, what they have done can be applauded as an elegant example of systems chemistry. A specific bond was needed between the Ribose and the Nucleobase, and a decade of research proved that the bond was not going to form directly. So what the researchers did was to create the bond and then turn the components on each side of the bond into the desired building blocks of the Ribonucleotide. Phosphate, which previously caused problems for OOL researchers, becomes a catalyst. Szostak's News and Views essay draws attention to the elegance of their approach:
"But in a remarkable example of 'systems chemistry', in which reactants from different stages of a pathway are allowed to interact, Powner et al. show that phosphate tames the combinatorial explosion, allowing oxygenous and nitrogenous reactants to interact fruitfully."[. . .] "The penultimate reaction of the sequence, in which the phosphate is attached to the nucleoside, is another beautiful example of the influence of systems chemistry in this set of interlinked reactions. The phosphorylation if facilitated by the presence of urea; the urea comes from the phosphate-catalysed hydrolysis of a by-product from an earlier reaction in the sequence."

b) The second point is the redefinition of the "Plausible"
As you know, Miller-Urey tried to start with a plausible reducing atmosphere, added electricity, and found amino acids. The whole argument they made was that this was a plausible composition for a plausible atmosphere. Unfortunately, both assumptions have been challenged, and the Miller-Urey experiment is no longer used as OOL evidence (except in biology textbooks!) Not because it doesn't work, but because it is implausible. But compared to Miller-Urey, the compounds and concentrations of "cyanamide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde and inorganic phosphate" are totally and completely implausible! Not only so, but the plausible introduction of water and oxygen completely poison the reaction. So the RNA-world hypothesis is watering down the word "plausible" to mean "anything that we can do in a lab".
Here's a more erudite description from the same colleague's blog:

"It is good chemistry, but does it achieve a major advance in abiogenesis research? Questions can certainly be raised. The researchers argue that they are not starting with any unrealistic initial conditions: "We don't use any way-out scenarios - all the conditions are consistent with what we know about early Earth." However, this is disputed.
"The flaw with this kind of research is not in the chemistry. The flaw is in the logic - that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth," says Robert Shapiro, a chemist at New York University. [and] Dr. Robert Shapiro [. . .] said the recipe "definitely does not meet my criteria for a plausible pathway to the RNA world." He said that cyano-acetylene, one of Dr. Sutherland's assumed starting materials, is quickly destroyed by other chemicals and its appearance in pure form on the early earth "could be considered a fantasy." [and] "But while this is a step forward, it's not the whole picture," [James] Ferris [of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.] points out. "It's not as simple as putting compounds in a beaker and mixing it up. It's a series of steps. You still have to stop and purify and then do the next step, and that probably didn't happen in the ancient world."

c) The third point is the unintentional support of ID.
But "anything we can do in a lab" is done by intelligent agents, chemists, who control the temperature and composition to get the result they need. Since this is unlikely to occur by chance in the pre-biotic Earth, what this experiment really reveals is just how much ID is required to make ribonucleic rings in the absence of life. Here's my colleague's blog again:

"It can be argued that the chemical reactions documented actually yield products that are intelligently designed. The experimental conditions are engineered to selectively accumulate some reaction products (by fractional crystallisation) and selectively destroy others (by the influence of UV radiation). These conditions are considered more plausible in Darwin's hypothetical "little warm pond". Indeed, Wade's report says: "Dr. Sutherland's report supports Darwin". This is significant because the emphasis in abiogenesis research has shifted in recent years to other scenarios - notably at mid-ocean ridge locations. Those who find themselves impressed with the potential of this research would do well to reflect on the way the chemistry is engineered to achieve the outcomes and the associated fine tuning of environmental factors. These are not Darwinian emphases!

d) The fourth point is the failure to address the problem: what makes RNA special.
All this work is just on the pyrimidine rings! We haven't even discussed the bases that line the RNA, which is where the real information is found. We're debating the abiotic manufacture of the machinery and haven't even gotten to the primary evidence of ID, the information coded on the RNA. Nor have we discussed peculiarities of living RNA versus the RNA of this reaction, namely, the chirality of life versus the non-chirality of chemistry. We still haven't figured out the machinery, and likely never will. The blog again:

"Of the other limitations mentioned above, the chirality problem is noted in Wade's report: "A serious puzzle about the nature of life is that most of its molecules are right-handed or left-handed, whereas in nature mixtures of both forms exist. Dr. Joyce [an expert on the chemical origin of life at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.] said he had hoped an explanation for the one-handedness of biological molecules would emerge from prebiotic chemistry, but Dr. Sutherland's reactions do not supply any such explanation."

e) Conclusion
Does any of this discussion give me confidence that we are on track to explain RNA-World? No, because if anything, these "advances" admit just how far away we are from getting even one aspect of the RNA-world to function, much less the coding and the self-enzymatic activity. Miller-Urey was wrong about a "protein-first" OOL solution, but the RNA-first solution is even more implausible and difficult to imagine.

Furthermore, Meyer also "takes on" other scientific theories by the same misrepresent and attack method.

Attacking is the nature of science. Misrepresenting isn't. So if he is guilty of misrepresenting, then you are duty bound to make it clear what is being misrepresented. Sure, you can quote PZ Myers at Pharyngula who claims all sorts of misrepresentation, but my point is that after the ad hominem name calling and accusations are finished, no one is able to clarify the precise misrepresentation nor demonstrate which logical error was committed. In other words, it wasn't a misrepresentation that was at fault, but a disrespection problem; it wasn't the science but the religion that was violated. Calling blasphemy a misrepresentation is a category mistake.

If he were to appreciate the common sense of evolution, he would understand why his attacks don't make sense.

Science is not common sense. This is rule #1 in every text book on the philosophy of science. Otherwise we could all be arm chair scientists. The only reason for scientific experiments is that science violates common sense. Metaphysically stated, nature is external to us, and therefore we can never predict what nature will do without an experiment.

He uses highly evolved macromolecules and asserts that this huge complex couldn't have come together by random chance. Well duh! Evolution says that it would have been the result of 4 billion years of small changes and gradual additions. Further evolution asserts that each form along the way had to have served some purpose in the cell, though that purpose could change as other elements also evolved to shift structure and function.

I'm glad we are in agreement about the mathematics of evolved macromolecules. But you are taking on faith two further assumptions: (a) that 4 billion years of small changes will accomplish the big changes; (b) each change had a beneficial function at that time. Both assumptions can be tested. Yes, evolution really is a theory and not religion if it can be tested. And both experiments reveal the opposite conclusion.

a) Not billions, not trillions, not even quadrillions of years are sufficient to account for the information changes between bacteria and humans, or OOL. The simplest bacteria still has more information in it than the probabilistic resources of every hydrogen atom in the universe (10^80) rearranged at their vibrational speed (microseconds=10^-6s) for the age of the universe (10^15 seconds) = 10^(101) combinations. Because the amount of information is closer to (10^10,000) which is Hoyle's estimate. Hubert Yockey, another non-ID atheist, gets 10^40,000 information bits, I believe.

b) Most mutations are not beneficial. In fact, most beneficial mutations involve 2 or 3 changes, which have probabilities that become vanishingly small, because they have to happen simultaneously if the organism is to survive. Considering that there are fatal mutations between the beneficial ones, you need to recognize just how difficult it is to evolve a change in a protein. The only reason it has been stated as an easy problem is because people wanted the conclusion, but didn't want the experiment. Once again, the science-is-not-common-sense problem.

Meyer also rudely dismisses the criticism of Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and a devout Christian.

Miller is neither polite, nor devout. But this is an ad hominem argument. Most importantly, he is wrong.

If you would like a Christian's take on evolution, I suggest reading one of his books--Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution or Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul.

Such views are by Theistic Evolutionists, who are really not theistic at all, they are deistic, which either out of ignorance or malice, they do not differentiate. That is, they are much closer to Unitarians than Christians. This includes Frances Collins too, and the former Calvin College prof, Howard Van Till. But once again, this is all ad hominem, and irrelevant to the question at hand.

It is not until chapter 14 that Meyer even addresses any chemical or biological questions at all. He attempts to discredit the RNA world hypothesis with 5 "problems." The first problem he highlights is being solved right now, piece by piece. The link to the podcast above addresses one of the issues with prebiotic chemistry, and issue which is commonly known in that field of study as the biggest problem with the RNA world hypothesis. And look, we've just figured it out. So, so assume that we won't figure out how the rest of it works is defeatist.

Umm, I think the claims to victory are a bit premature (see my earlier comments on the Nature paper). Not only so, but human history tells us that hubris is a bigger problem than humility. I would say that RNA world has so many compelling and orthogonal counter-arguments, that there really is no chance that it will survive, say, even 10 years. It is less compelling than Oparin in his day, or Miller-Urey in theirs.

The second problem isn't actually a problem. He just states that a highly evolved system functions more efficiently than a less evolved one. By "evolved" I mean several things, not simply complexity. Specificity is a major part of it. There are an ever increasing number of papers that identify RNA functioning as enzymes in a range of critical roles. To say that RNA can't do this function well enough is just silly.

On the contrary, it isn't silly because it is based on experiment. The fact of the matter is, that RNA is not the primary component of life, DNA is. I may sound like a broken record, but it is the Central Dogma for a reason. One would have to assume that OOL began with RNA, and then magically converted to DNA later, wiping out all traces of RNA life. So the first problem is how RNA-first could have evolved and then vanished.

Likewise, DNA holds more data than RNA, so the second argument is that one would have to assume that the less info-rich molecule created the more-info rich molecule, which is like saying heat flows from colder to hotter. And I could go on. The logic is so strained as to make one wonder what RNA has going for it at all, that it should have become the OOL favorite.

The third problem makes a big jump in logic and again forgets that evolution occurs by a series of small changes rather than giant leaps.

I think we are dealing with the gambler's paradox here. The fact that rolling snake-eyes 100 times in a row is unlikely, cannot be made more likely by breaking it down into 100 separate rolls of the dice. You cannot make evolution more likely by talking about intermediate steps. Statistics won't let you. But more importantly, biology won't let you.

He also asserts that there is only one way for a coding system to have evolved, which is quite absurd. Explaining all the problems with his logic on this point would take a very long time.

Nevertheless, it would be quite instructive. Because as you take your opponents argument seriously, you will discover the weaknesses in your own. His logic, along with his education, is more extensive than your own, which means you really have no reason to dismiss him, other than the "argument from authority" of your teacher's unsubstantiated opinions.

The fourth problem again misapplies "chance" and statistics, among other things.

I have yet to meet a Darwinian biologist who can do statistics. I would wager 10:1 odds that his statistics are better than yours. Check out Michael Behe's blog on the errors made by biology PhD statistics.

The fifth complains that we haven't figured out how to make a specific RNA enzyme. This is perhaps a challenge for scientists to figure out, but is not sufficient to toss out the RNA world theory unless you subscribe to Michael Behe's motto "This is too hard for me to figure out, so I'll just say God did it." Behe, btw, has claimed for years that the bacterial flagella couldn't have evolved. The problem is that some scientists found not just one, but several plausible mechanisms for its evolution. Behe, predictably, maintains that he is right.

Well, your profs, predictably, claim that Behe is wrong. Being able to predict a scientist's biasses does not, I repeat myself, invalidate his arguments. But Behe doesn't say what you just claimed he said. This is another one of those equivocation problems. Behe claims that there are three causes for an action: law, chance and design. Design is not a "gap theory", it is not the absence of law and chance that defines it, though certainly it is a strong argument for its existence. Rather, it is the presence of a certain quantity, which Dembski calls "complex specified information", that defines design. Behe demonstrates why bacterial flagella are complex, he demonstrates why they are specified, and he demonstrates why they possess information, from that he infers design.

Now materialists only allow for two explanations: law and chance. This means that they have no explanation when flagellar motors are highly improbable and no law defines their construction. They fall back on either speculation (Darwin's speciality) casting about for some law that will derive this result, or they rely on some incredibly impossible accident. But unfortunately, speculation is not science. It is not experimental. It is not data. It is merely that, speculation. So just because Darwin can "imagine a warm pond" for OOL does not make it any more likely, nor imagining a "injection mechanism" for flagellar motors, makes it any more probable. Not until an experiment demonstrates OOL, or demonstrates the evolution of flagella from some less intelligent precursor, are we left with anything more than pure speculation. This is why Behe doesn't have to accept their "plausibility" arguments because there's nothing there to see. See the discussion of "plausibility" above.

Most of these criticisms are what can be termed an "argument from ignorance."

Au contraire, pierre. Argument from ignorance requires there to be a lack of evidence to make a case. On the contrary, as I said earlier, design is a positive evidential argument from observation of complex specified information. Darwin and the evolutionary biologists are the ones making speculative arguments from ignorance.

In chapter 17, Meyer attempts to state that he has not been arguing from ignorance. However, if we are to read him literally, he seems to be arguing that aliens designed life on earth.

And why not? We have comets with fossilized life on them, some of which we have never seen on Earth. I refer you to spie04.pdf, as well as spie05, spie06, spie07 and spie08. (I didn't have the money to attend SPIE this year, though I was planning to describe magnetite framboids as a bacterial adaptation to cometary living.)

Even so, his argument puts aliens and God on equal footing as being the agents of creating life on earth. Actually, I take that back, he actually gives aliens a slight advantage.

And this is a problem for an atheist? What exactly do you find objectionable about this?

Further, his justification for not accepting that in the future science may be able to give a more complete picture of how life began through natural means is dubious. He asserts that science makes similar assertions all the time. However, this is another misrepresentation.

Again, I think this is clear and obviously true. So be careful about calling blasphemy a misrepresentation, that's a category mistake.

For instance, the conservation laws of thermodynamics say that matter and energy are never created or destroyed.

No, actually they don't. Materialists (from 500BC until 1904 AD) used to say that matter is neither created nor destroyed, but Einstein demonstrated that they are convertible. So now some materialists say that the sum of matter+energy is constant, but again, string theorists and multiverse cosmologists disagree. In neither case did thermodynamics have anything to say about it.

The reason for this is that if matter or energy were created or destroyed the universe could not exist given the known laws of physics.

On the contrary, Fred Hoyle wanted a materialist universe with chance evolution, but knew that it was too improbable. So he suggested that the universe has lasted forever, constantly creating matter out of nothing and expanding so as to maintain a constant density. He kept the physics the same, even with a small rate of ex nihilo hydrogen creation. It was the most popular cosmology among astrophysicists from 1930 to 1960. Read about it in Robert Jastrow's "God and the Astronomers" [1978].

However, he is not justified in saying that we will never figure out the origin of life because doing so is 1) possible, 2) increasingly likely, and 3) would violate well established laws of physics.

I don't know quite what you meant to say with this sentence. The OOL problem can be solved, since obviously there was a beginning to everything, it just may take aliens to solve it. It is the a priori elimination of all intelligence and aliens from the set of potential explanations that cannot be justified.

I stopped reading after chapter 17 due to time constrictions, but also because he stops talking about anything scientifically relevant.

That's a pity.

This book cites no experimental science in support of its thesis.

I found all kinds of scientific support. I'm not sure why you said this.

It avoids most recently published scientific work, mostly because it would cast doubt on his assertions (something he admits to having done before).

No, a book has to be finished sometime, and that means publishing something that is at least a year out-of-date (given the lead times for publication). Nor has there been any progress in OOL or DNA research in the past few years that has changed any of the standard models, as your own citation of RNA-world demonstrates. He's as relevant today as he was 2 years ago.

He misrepresents current scientific understanding and misrepresents the criticisms that have been raised against him, albeit cleverly.

You're making a category mistake again.

The author, whose PhD is in a humanity discipline, not a science discipline, argues just as I would expect him to given his degree, which is in History and Philosophy. Thus, he gives long accounts of history and trivia and recites lots of well-accepted philosophical thought to establish rapport with his readers (though he bored me with long-windedness) before pulling a sort of bait and switch by getting the reader to keep agreeing with him and then making an assertion that is poorly supported. And he did this repeatedly.

I fail to find the "poor support" that you cite. Unless you mean "blasphemy" again.

It's one of the more cleverly written pieces in a long line of intelligent design and creationist dogma. Still, it is written to make a political or religious point rather than a scientific one.

There is no such thing as a purely "scientific point", all objective arguments have subjective presuppositions. Read Kuhn. Really read Kuhn. His advisor was a logical positivist who expected that sociology would support this myth you are citing about a "scientific view". Kuhn's scientific data did not support the myth. Read Berger and Luckman on the sociology of knowledge. You really need to interact more with the liberal arts faculty who have been saying this for 50(!) years to the deaf ears of biologists. Even physicists are beginning to catch on, albeit slowly.

This is not surprising because intelligent design is by definition not science.

By whose definition? Biologists? And how, precisely, does one do an experiment to find the definition of science? Isn't definition, by definition, a non-scientific activity? So then, since definition is by definition not empirical, we must not let unscientific definers define what scientists can do. If, on the other hand, science is defined by what scientists do, than ID is a truly wonderful scientific field, pursued by Aristotle on up to the present. It is materialists who are in a minority.

Our scientific understanding a vast range of disciplines advances weekly (with peer-reviewed publications) and we gain a deeper understanding of the natural world. There is still a vast amount we do not yet know or understand. There is much left to discover. But to arrive at a conclusion and then try to argue and manipulate the public understanding of science for personal reasons is not ethical.

Agreed! So you should never use ad hominem arguments, or let statements about the "lack of peer-reviewed papers" stand in the way of doing science.

It should be recognized as such and discarded.

Isn't this conclusion at odds with the previous sentence?

This is an out of the blue question, but I was wondering - do you think there's anything in Leibniz's talk of monads that resonates with your views on recursion? I was browsing the monadology entry on wikipedia (Horrible place, I know, but still) and saw this:

"*(III)* Composite substances or matter are "actually sub-divided without end" and have the properties of their infinitesimal parts (§65). Some understanding how this is possible has been provided by the recent development of fractals. A notorious passage (§67) explains that "each portion of matter can be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each organ of an animal, each drop of its bodily fluids is also a similar garden or a similar pond". There are no interactions between different monads nor between entelechies and their bodies but everything is regulated by the pre-established harmony (§§78-9). Leibniz concludes that "if we could understand the order of the universe well enough, we would find that it surpasses all the wishes of the wisest people, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is — not merely in respect of the whole in general, but also in respect of ourselves in particular" (§90)."

I only mention it since you referred to fractals recently with discussion of consciousness, and it seems like an idea related to recursion.

To be honest, Leibniz' monads always seemed a bit eccentric to me, a lot like PAM Dirac's obsession with powers of 2. But if you will notice in the last sentence, I mentioned one's and two's. I've got this obsession with the number three, which I suppose makes me as eccentric as both of these men. Actually I wasn't always this eccentric, I was infected by my theology professor at seminary, Dr Vern Poythress, who has a second doctorate in math from Harvard. He wrote a book on trinities, and sees them everywhere. As both a mathematician and a theologian, his horizons stretch from the foundations of mathematics to the foundations of theology, from physics to metaphysics, from mechanics to ethics.

My contribution has been the intuitive reasoning of a physicist (a trait that separates mathematical physicists from applied mathematicians). So I've suggested that most of philosophy can be described as a struggle between Heraclitus and Parmenides, between the one and the many, between the transcendent and the immanent. You will notice that these problems are one's and two's. The critical contribution of Christianity was the number three.

Now a 2+1=3 trinity is unstable to being chopped in two pieces again. In physicist terms, the problem can be reduced to a simpler problem. The only way to prevent this from happening, is to balance it so carefully, it can't be chopped up: eg. a 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 "tri-unity". Most of the heresies of the early church arise from this confusion, and if you read the text of the Nicene Creed, you will discover it attempts to protect 1+1+1 rigorously.

There's a bunch more things one can say in support of a robust tri-unity and its relation to recursion, and I refer you to a paper a wrote for my "Philosophical Foundations of Theology" course with Paul Helm last winter. It mentions Jonathan Edwards' attempt to use recursion to argue for a trinity (and personal consciousness) so there is a deeper connection to mind than perhaps is obvious.

But the relevance to Leibniz is that he wanted to go from Monads to Life without seeing the necessity of Triads. It's a big mistake, and the same one made by Pantheism, Hegel, Islam and Materialism. Likewise, it is a big mistake to think that one can go from Monads to Duals to Life, or from Duals to Triads to Life. Generally speaking, anything with a duality in it is bad news. All these constructions are unstable, as Eastern Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky argues in his book "In the Image of God". I've got some blogs on that stuff too if you are interested.

Having said all that, Leibniz was on to something when he said a microscope and a telescope can see the same thing. If focussing down on the monads and the elements that make up life reveals increasing sophistication, then we have a system that is anti-reductionistic.

In the 1850's we thought that all matter was made of about 90 different atoms we called elements, and in the 1920's we thought that all atoms were made of 3 subatomic particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. This was as it should be, finer and finer microscopes were achieving greater and greater simplicity.

Then in the 1930's and 1940's the number of subatomic particles exploded to somewhere in excess of 100. One bewildered physicist, when he discovered the muon, an exceptionally overweight electron, asked "Who ordered that?" Reductionism had failed. (Today we are back down to 12 quarks, 12 leptons, 8 gluons, 3 electoweak-ons, and a Higgs, but it really isn't clear if the number is going down or up.)

The same story was true of life. In the 1800's we knew that all the varied forms of life on the planet were made of cells. Darwin thought cells were little bags of water and salts driven by diffusion and chemical gradients. This is what reductionism predicted.

But by 1900 we knew they had enzymes in them, and soon DNA and proteins and with electron microscopes we now we know them to be the farthest thing from bags of water, but nanofabrication factories of unbelievable complexity. Random diffusion plays almost no part of a cell's operation, but every important molecule has its own transporter. Reductionism failed.

So when Leibniz suggested that the details kept getting richer as one went to smaller scales, he was suggesting an anti-reductionism.

Now a fractal is just such a system, that shows the same detail at all levels of magnification. But when this happens, it reveals that there is a non-local, or a global property of the system. In physics, when we run into a problem that seems to make our calculations explode, say, finding the electric field of 1/r where r--> 0, we try to change coordinates to a more amenable integral, r--> 1/x for example. In other words, we attempt to turn our universe inside out. (The fancy name for this is "renormalization".) Leibniz is saying that microscopes and telescopes are interchangeable, that whether we look on the largest scales or the smallest scales, we see the same order and purpose. And if we are aware of ourselves being aware, if we are a recursive algorithm, then we are fractal in time. Then space-time is a true fractal. And if we live in a fractal world, then it says there is an order parameter, a global system bigger than any of us.

Well, the other characteristic of a physicist different from a mathematician is that he knows he must abandon an analogy somewhere, so I think I'll leave this one here.

Is it possible for a system to lack information in the details, but gain it in the action; to have little static knowledge but lots of dynamic; to have no information in the boundary conditions, in the initial state, or stored in special registers, but when the power is switched on, suddenly become Einstein?

This is the thesis of the Sante Fe Institute, of Stuart Kauffman's chosen vocation, for this is essentially what Darwin proposed: living things collect information just by being alive. They get smarter the way football jocks pass Algebra 1, just by being there.  Darwin called it natural selection, which doesn't actually explain anything anymore than Nietzche's "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is advice on picking mushrooms. But if you had to find a reason for this miracle of dynamic information emergence, you might be tempted to say that it is due to the system, it's designed for this, it's in the ground rules.

But is it? I mean, other than saying that this is the only explanation for the data, which is a bit of a tautology, how can we test whether or not it is in the rules of the game?

Well, in the past century, biologists have bred fruit flies, nematodes, flatworms and other nasty biological pests in an attempt to see how evolution works. We learned a lot about Mendellian genetics, but we haven't actually learned much about natural selection. Part of the problem is that even fruit flies with their 10 days per generation, in the 100 years of fly research there have been at most only 3650 generations to observe evolution. (Not enough! say the Darwinistas.)

Bacteria are bit faster at 20 minutes per generation, and have smaller genomes with sloppier genetic copying, so Richard Lenski proposed to see if Escherichia coli bacteria (common gut bacteria) could evolve the ability to digest a new material--citrate. After 20 years,  and 400,000+ generations, he claimed success.  Only it sorta needed some help, it wasn't exactly survival of the fittest, it looked more like devolution than evolution. And in fact, Michael Behe used wild malaria parasites as his test case for 100 years of evolution in the face of anti-malarial drugs, and sure enough, it was too slow to account for Darwin's magical dynamical emergence.

Well we could wait another 20 years for more results from Lenski, but if Behe is right, we would need millions of years to get anything interesting out of bacteria, and billions of years for fruit flies, and... you get the drift.  What is a thinking man to do?

Computer simulations!

(Reminds me of an old song, "you can get anything you want, at Alice's Internet cafe...")

Well there's no shortage of 30-somethings who want to make their mark on the world, and proving Darwin with a computer is just the ticket to fame and glory. So we have a dozen evolutionary simulations as sophisticated as the best big ticket shoot-em-up game, all cranking on government supercomputers to see how this emergence thing works. 

Not very well. At least, not as well as say, you and I operate, and supposedly we evolved from far less efficient wetware.

Gregory Chaitin, a famous mathematician and computer scientist employed at the IBM flagship Thomas J Watson Research Center (where I spent an enjoyable summer in 1981), has written extensively on information and complexity. He gets quoted favorably by Intelligent Design's resident mathematician--William Dembski. He's not naive about the problem emergence is supposed to solve. But he's embarrassed that the mathematics of evolution has, well, not evolved. Biologists are more scared of math today than 60 years ago when JBS "Jack" Haldane defined the field. So he decided that the problem with all those computer simulations is that they are trying to do too many things at once. On his web site, he proposes the following solution:

• 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species.
• The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics (Wigner) versus the lack of effectiveness of mathematics in biology (Gelfand).
• We wish to extract the fundamental mathematical ideas contained in biology.
• We wish to prove theorems about extremely simple unrealistic models, not run simulations of extremely complicated realistic models.
• Our goal is not to realistically simulate biological evolution, but to represent mathematically the fundamental biological principles of evolution in such a manner that we can prove that evolution must take place.
• This may be regarded as a toy model, but we do not see it as a toy, we see it as a way to eliminate inessential distractions that only serve to confuse the issues!
• Theories are lies that help us to see the truth (Picasso).
• Math is extremely single-minded and can only deal successfully with a single idea at a time (Jack: The Pernicious Influence of Mathematics on Science).
• If Darwin's theory of evolution is as fundamental, basic and general as most biologists think, then it must be possible to extract some basic mathematical ideas from it.
• Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution (Dobzhansky).
• It is scandalous that we do not have a mathematical proof that evolution works!
• I am a pure mathematician, not a biologist: I am trying to find the Platonic ideal of evolution, the archetypical behavior, not the messy version that takes place in the real world!
• The aim is proofs, not realistic simulations.
• Another way our model differs from previous models: Our goal is to understand biological creativity and the major transitions in evolution, not gradual changes.
• Fisher-Wright population genetics studies changes in gene frequencies. We are trying to model how new genes arise, and major changes such as from single-celled to multi-cellular organisms.

But why is Chaitin feeling embarrassed now, after 60 years of bad biological mathematics? Because another mathematician said it couldn't be done. Here's Chaitin's own words,

Our random walk model was inspired by the stimulating critique of Darwinian evolution in D. Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion, Crown Forum, New York, 2008. See especially pp. 192-195. In a nutshell, model = Jack (digital software) + Berlinski (random walk) + Busy Beaver Problem. Our model is an attempt to answer Berlinski's criticisms.

Wow. An ID book having an impact! Who would have thunk it? (Maybe somebody should contact that judge over in Dover PA who said ID wasn't science.) So what will be Chaitin's modus operandi?

• I think this discussion makes a convincing case that a theory of the evolution of randomly mutating software is possible, and that random walks in software space are worth studying.
• How biologically relevant such a theory may be remains to be seen.
• But that it will be an interesting new field of mathematics is now plausible. However, carrying out this research will require a great deal of work. Maybe you would like to work on these problems?
• I propose calling this new field metabiology: I hope that it will eventually develop into a field parallel to biology, dealing with the random evolution of artificial software (computer programs) rather than natural software (DNA), and simple enough that it is possible to prove rigorous theorems or formulate heuristic arguments at the same high level of precision that is common in theoretical physics.
• Whether or not this happens, as the concepts of computation, information and complexity how, mathematics is moving in a biological direction. This trend will continue.

Let me summarize his modus operandi -- a hope and a prayer.

Chaitin quotes a famous mathematical physicist, Eugene Wigner, who pointed out that math works better than it should ("an unreasonable success") in the field of physics. In fact, physicists often don't wait for the mathematician to prove, say, that there exist solutions to the famous supersonic solar flow equations, they just assume the answer because they can see it. And Chaitin is asking, why can't this apply to biology? He tosses off all the excuses "too complicated", "different methodology" and says "look you guys, we had a good start with Jack, why didn't you finish the race?"

Well maybe the failure of 3 generations of mathematicians is because the problem is insoluble, or as they say in math "it is not a well-posed problem". Maybe there isn't any secret method of adding information dynamically. Maybe emergence is a myth. Maybe natural selection doesn't do anything to DNA and only affects the epigenetic response. Maybe Galapagos finch beaks have absolutely nothing to say about speciation and the origin of the species.

U of British Columbia Applied Mathematician, Richard Johns has submitted a paper quantifying the amount of information that supposedly emerges dynamically. It turns out to be a lot. And there are no short cuts by dividing the problem into stages, as the non-mathematical biologist Richard Dawkins suggests.

The late great irrascible mathematical physicist and confirmed atheist, Sir Fred Hoyle, used to propose the following test of emergence. Take a test tube, add some water, the amino acids and ingredients that supposedly produced life 4 billion years ago, but of course at much higher concentrations. Since chemical reactions go as the product of the concentrations, we can easily achieve chemical rates trillions of times above the dilute concentrations produced by the Miller-Urey method. Wait a few minutes, now examine the test tube for life. If life is as emergent as the Darwinists claim, it ought to be trivial to reproduce it in the lab. The fact that we don't see life, on the other hand, put stringent upper limits on the probability of emergence. What makes Hoyle so lovable, is that long before Dembski was talking about improbabilities, he went ahead and calculated all these numbers and published them in The Mathematics of Evolution (1987).

You would think Chaitin would pick a better-posed problem.

Michael Ruse is no friend of Intelligent Design. He famously defended methodological naturalism (MN) against Alvin Plantiga in print and in person, which is a very brave thing indeed. But his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals a philosopher that desperately wants the purpose, order, design, and all the fruits of theism that MN resolutely denies. I didn't think I would like Ruse, but I liked this essay. (Read the whole thing.) It is asking all the right questions, though of course, without the freedom to answer them. I checked out his bio, and found that he was a British import, which explains his classical understanding. But like Richard Dawkins, it is proof that a classical education may bring a man to the river, but cannot make him drink.

Gaia in the Light of Modern Science

By Michael Ruse

For many years, I taught an introductory philosophy class based on Plato's Republic. It is a wonderful work through which to bring students to some of the crucial issues that engage and divide human beings—the nature of knowledge, the desirability of democracy, the place of women in society, mathematics, and God. Above all, there is the Theory of Forms, extrasensory entities that are supposed to inform and determine the objects in this world of sensation and experience. They are Plato's answer to the challenge posed by two earlier thinkers: Heraclitus, who claimed that everything changes ("You cannot step into the same river twice."), and Parmenides, who claimed that nothing changes ("How could what is perish? How could it have come to be?"). The Forms are timeless and yet manifest themselves in this physical world of corruption and decay.

After explaining how Plato solves the hoary philosophy problem of "the-one-and-the-many", aka Heraclitus vs. Parmenides, Ruse goes on to discuss the Gaia hypothesis that the Earth acts as a giant organism, maintaining its temperature and environment to keep it friendly to life. Getting too cold? Erupt a few volcanoes. Getting too hot? More clouds.

The problem with this theory, of course, is that it presupposes purpose. It looks like we are here because Gaia wanted us to be here. It undermines Darwin because it says we are not a cosmic accident, but the result of the larger purposes of Gaia.

Well, as you can imagine, that bothers Darwinists and Ruse, so he defends Gaia by arguing that the physics of the Earth conspire to "look like purpose". That carbon dioxide can't help but regulate climate. It's the darn physics that make everything look planned, not the biology! We've all heard that refrain before, not just in Darwin's "appearance of purpose", but all the way back to Lucretius' De Natura. So Ruse knows he's pulling an old ruse, and feels as if he has to defend his dissembling.

My sense is that Gaia has made an important contribution to our thinking about the planet, if only by virtue of the fact that it makes us think seriously about such issues as global warming and pollution of the oceans. As a historian and philosopher of science, I find that both Lovelock's theory and those of his critics inspire me to go back to the foundations of science and consider the root metaphors of empirical inquiry and why we prefer one set of models and ideas over another. It is true that as Gaia has been tamed (by Lovelock himself) into a more respectable notion in the light of modern science, it has lost some of its original dramatic appeal. No doubt those earnest Californians seeking spiritual backing for their enthusiasms will find other outlets.
As a Darwinian and a Heraclitean (and an ex-Quaker shunning his childhood roots), I confess that I am uncomfortable with balance and equilibrium, those Parmenidean conjectures. Although books like Ward's The Medea Hypothesis—so obviously written for the trade market, so selective in the evidence they use to make their case —make me no less uneasy. Perhaps in the end, Plato had it right: We need both perspectives, Heraclitean and Parmenidean, to get the whole picture. At our peril, and at our children's peril, we ignore the messages of those seminal Greek thinkers.

Poor Ruse! He can't shake off Plato, no matter how hard he tries. And of course, it was Augustine who made the argument that Plato is half-way to Christianity, and certainly nowhere near Democritean atheism. I don't know how Ruse manages to keep one foot on Democritean MN and the other foot on theistic Plato. 

One modern approach is to say that one cannot, that one has to do a Hegelian two-step: "Thesis (huff), antithesis (puff), Synthesis! (pant, pant). Again! Thesis (puff), antithesis, (huff) Synthesis!.." But the very focus on the dance rather than on the ground beneath reveals the weakness of the whole approach. You can dance your way equally well to Tipler's Omega Point or to Marx's hell. It really provides no standards, no signposts, no certainty. It no more solves the Greek dichotomy than Solomon's sword solved the problem of contested motherhood. Rather, the entire paradox should reveal that there is a third solution that subsumes both.

Here's what I wrote another prof:

I've written a bit on the organic vs machine view of nature, and how many physicists like Robert Jastrow and Paul Davies have noted that biologists are getting more machine-like, while physicists are getting more organic: QM vs Newton, for example. Look at the tables in this paper on these tendencies.

The discussion of homeostasis is also very interesting, because I've become convinced that recursion, or self-reference, is the hallmark of intelligent design. As Denyse can tell you, self-awareness is perhaps the gold standard of mind and consciousness, we will know we have achieved AI when a machine knows about itself. In theology, the hardest nut to crack is the hermeneutical circle, that you have to know what a text is about before you can understand a text. The MN equivalent in theology is assigning "meaning" to the origin and intent of a text. E.g., Moses didn't write the penteteuch, but 4 different sources, JEDP, wrote it with differing intentions. So the way to understand a text is to understand everything that came before it. But what happens when a text is writing about itself? What then does that do to our analysis? Can we capture a deterministic meaning, when the loop of interpretation includes us?

Let me say it another way. The "S" in CSI involves an awareness of itself. What makes CSI imply ID, is that only a "mind", only an "intelligent agent" can provide the specification that makes complex information useful to itself. One of the implications of "purpose" of "teleology" is that the intelligent agent is aware of what it is doing. If it is unaware of the consequences of its action, then "purpose" is either lacking or exists at an even higher plane that involves controlling the intelligent agent.

So what do we make of Ruse's comments about "daisyworld", a homeostatic environment that lacks purpose? His argument is that the "daisyworld" isn't aware of itself, and that there is no designer above daisyworld that is aware of itself.

But if CO2 is just homeostatic by physics so that Gaia is just naturally homeostatic, then why did CO2 cause Venus to have runaway greenhouse warming and cook, whereas CO2 is far more benign on Earth? Ruse would say that it proves how random and unpurposeful homeostasis is. A Christian would say, even Gaia was designed by a more intelligent agent. No, I'm not advocating Sol as the King of the Planetary Gods! For this recursion could go on forever--"whom does Sol obey?" How does one terminate this endless chain, this gnostic hierarchy of greater and greater intelligences?

Recursion is both the key and the riddle.

I'm trying to write a thesis on recursion, but I keep thinking about it and don't know where to start.

I've also resolved to stop procrastinating, tomorrow.

All these sentences are false because all generalizations are false.

Once you are sensitized to the issue of recursion, you will know it must be divine to be so ubiquitous. Which is another reason it is hard to start the thesis, everything seems to entail recursion.

For example, suppose there's a El Nino combined with a decadal oscillation that produces 10 years of warm winters. It's not in anyone's climate model, so at meteorology meetings everyone talks about this anomaly. Someone comes up with a neat solution, feedback in the greenhouse gas radiation module. Soon everyone has that fix in their model. Is it right? Well, everyone's models are in complete agreement, and it matches the current climate, so it has to be right. Lots of funding is poured into this solution. Then the El Nino gives way to a La Nina, and the climate cools. It is not in anyone's model. Someone comes up with a neat solution, aerosols are heating the Arctic. Is it right? Of course not, no one has it in their model. And besides, too much money is invested in the other solution. Science is a finite state machine which has locked into a "global warming" solution that can hardly be changed.

The problem with the scientific method, like the problem with anything humans get involved in, is that we can foresee the result and accommodate our behavior accordingly. Our predictions are contained in our assumptions. In other words, we apply feedback or recursion into the science. Once this is done, and there is no way to really avoid it, we no longer have a deterministic system. Without a deterministic system, science is not deductive, it isn't even very inductive, because it isn't reductive; it is creative. We create a reality which didn't exist before, so we can neither deduce it nor induce it. Science is part of the system that we are describing, and we cannot objectively remove ourselves from the endeavor. And until science admits that it is a social endeavor and employs the same sort of checks and balances that apply to other human organizations, it will forever be mislead by the same people who lead it.

Let's see how this works in biology, more specifically, in the Evolution versus Intelligent Design debate. Jerry Coyne is an ardent evolutionist who argues that all the science support him and undermine his enemies. Here is his argument:

I have little to add to what P.Z. said except to note that the argument from imperfection — i.e., organisms show imperfections of “design” that constitute evidence for evolution — is not a theological argument, but a scientific one.  The reason why the recurrent laryngeal nerve, for example, makes a big detour around the aorta before attaching to the larynx is perfectly understandable by evolution (the nerve and artery used to line up, but the artery evolved backwards, constraining the nerve to move with it), but makes no sense under the idea of special creation — unless, that is, you believe that the creator designed things to make them look as if they evolved.  No form of creationism/intelligent design can explain these imperfections, but they all, as Dobzhansky said, “make sense in the light of evolution.”

Cornelius Hunter is all over this (lack of) logic. Let me add something I'm sure Drs Myers and Coyne will undoubtedly recognize--Bayesian hypothesis testing. The quality of a theory, according to Bayes, is more than whether an experimental result was predicted by the theory, but rather is defined as the "Occam factor", the experimental measurement (with error bars), divided by the space of the prediction (highest minus lowest prediction). If a theory is consistent with any measurement, as Karl Popper famously said of Freud, then it is a pretty useless theory for it is unfalsifiable. Bayes would say it had a very small Occam factor.

Now Coyne says that if an organism has a bad design, it is consistent with evolution, and of course if it has a good design, it is consistent with evolution. Evolution is consistent with any design, but not ID, which specifically mentions design. According Coyne, God would never make something with a bad design, which says Coyne, is not a theological argument(!). Whether or not it is a statement about the God Coyne doesn't believe in, it still seems to me that it is a Bayesian argument. Coyne just admitted that ID is a better theory than evolution, because ID is falsifiable, as he futilely attempts to prove.

Cornelius points all this out in his blog, which is another failed attempt to convince Coyne that he is as religiously dogmatic as the straw men he skewers. But Cornelius is puzzled by one thing, the brazenness of Professors Coyne and Myers that make these illogical arguments as if they were perfectly obvious. Are they playing the fool, or playing us for fools? (This is the Procrustes Dilemma: incompetence or malice?)

I think the answer is both. Or more precisely, recursion. Like global warming, once the fix is in, then the system produces feedback that makes it impossible to get any other answer. Once Coyne has said that he is an atheist, then it is impossible for him to be religious about his atheism. Just as it is impossible for a woman to be a chauvinist, or an African-American to be a racist. If Coyne were to admit that he is recursively trapped, he would have to admit that something very basic, something very fundamental in his worldview, is wrong. Thomas Kuhn called these things "paradigm shifts", and seemed to think that one couldn't be gradually talked into or out-of a paradigm. Instead, there was a "conversion experience" as one moved from one paradigm to the other. Despite the analogy, these quantum jumps have no physical basis (unlike real electron quantum jumps), and merely reveal something about the human brain, something about consciousness, something about ourselves. And that something is feedback.

Feedback is why we polarize into opposing camps. Feedback is why we can't be objective. Feedback is why global warming is such a big topic in a frigid year. Feedback is why Science is doomed. Feedback is why the human race is damned. For there are many ancient theological terms for feedback--rebellion, sin, pride, conceit--and it was this feedback in that garden so long ago, that introduced the human race to this strange condition called original sin. What starts out as incompetence rapidly turns into malice. And so malice propagates from heaven to earth and from past to future. Perhaps, in some theological sense, eternity will have no incompetence, only malice.

Which is why there is but one cure for recursion, for science, for history, for man: love.

I struggle with a Gedankenexeperiment for years, because no one could really answer to the following: (Let me remark that I personally think artificial consciousness is not possible, but I believe this for strict theological reason only, not because of scientific ones; so I am a carbon based chauvinist, see below)

As we know, biological neurons (carbon based) can be simulated by (silicon based) artificial ones (I give lectures in neural nets and we do this all the time). I heard from a surgery, where parts of a human brain were damaged by an accident and some of the parts were substituted by artificial neuron circuits (silicon based). This brought me to the following:
Imagine, that step by step every neuron and its attachments are replaced by an artificial, silicon based neural circuit with the same function. One at a time. Let’s give every substitution a natural number 1, 2, 3 etc.; now come the crucial questions:

1. At which exact number “n” is the consciousness not longer “real” but “only” a simulation?
2. Assumed further that all natural neurons are replaced by artificial ones –then we have an artificial brain which might behave exactly like the former biological one- can we say (with good consciousness) that the new person has no longer a consciousness?

The same Gedankenexperiment can be made concerning the question of the soul:
3. At which exact number “n” is the soul not longer there (since we assume that machines can not have a soul)?

Has anybody a good explanation for “carbon over silicon”?? Or is God not restricted to "distribute" a soul only to carbon-based entities?

There are a few assumptions in your gedankenexperiment that need to be teased out.

a) Expanding on Richard Gonzalez's comment, Roger Penrose thinks that consciousness is a non-local phenomena where QM weirdness interacts with brain cell components based on their compactness. He likes to pin the connection between material structure and QM consciousness on the microfibrils that give the cell structure. So your silicon would lack this QM feature and therefore would be incapable of replacing brain cells. So Gonzalez and Penrose have identified different reasons but the same conclusion that silicon could never in principle replace carbon.

b) [Another physicist] sees consciousness as a dynamic thing, sort of like a candle flame. Suppose we don't understand fire, and can't relight the candle, but we are sure we could do a better job than using carbon-based wax. Replacing all the wax in a candle with silicone might give the same mechanical properties, but how would insure that the flame is still lit? So there are a whole raft of problems in substituting silicon for carbon while insuring that the flame doesn't go out. Maybe it isn't possible.

c) Suppose that the brain is not a linear computer, but a holographic computer. That is, the neuron we are replacing doesn't just directly control the index finger, but also remembers when Aunt Mathilda hit my knuckles so hard my fingers hurt, as well as the trill in Bach's 2-part invention. How can I design a substitute neuron, when I need to know everything in the brain to replace one part? I have to have the answer to consciousness before I can substitute one piece of that consciousness.

d) Suppose that the brain is aware of itself. So that when you insert your silicon connection, the remainder of the brain cells take a vote whether to include that circuit in their consciousness. Oh they are happy to give the silicon menial tasks like moving muscle cells, but would never allow it to take part in the alpha-wave community of consciousness.

I guess I'm trying to say that reductionism is built into your model, where you assume consciousness is some sort of collective state of individually unconscious elements. But turn your assumptions inside out. Maybe your brain is the collective stupidity of holding a democratic vote among highly individual opinionated cells. Or my current favorite analogy, perhaps consciousness is fractal, looking the same whether viewed reductively or constructively: the hologram contains as much information as the image, the spatial and its Fourier-transform have the same amount of information.

Is there good reason to believe that physics cannot be, at least in theory, reduced to an algorithm? As far as I know, it is a discrete system guided by deterministic and stochastic processes, both of which can be represented by Turing machines.

Note, I'm not asking whether we actually *are* in a computer simulation, rather merely whether there is any logical distinction between the two. If not, then no matter what kind of matter a human body is built out of, it's behavior can be reduced to AI.

Yes! Turing himself discussed this problem. If the system has a feedback loop, then de facto, it cannot be reduced to an algorithm. Or conversely, the algorithm cannot predict the output. Right away, there are numerous things that serve as feedback loops. Consciousness and self-awareness is the acme of feedback. In addition, much of "emergent phenomena" that physics likes to talk about is feedback related. Scale-invariance, for example, leads to feedback between vastly different spatial scales. QM weirdness (collapse of wavefunction) is a sort of temporal feedback mechanism. Then there are feedbacks on first derivatives--viscosity for example, where it depends on velocity. These are normally called non-linear effects, and they are responsible for chaos in the solutions. But the key point is that they make algorithmic determinism impossible.

So yes, you can reduce Physics to algorithms, but then you won't know what the answer is. And as far as AI is concerned, you can do algorithms till you turn blue, but in the end you will have replicated Artificial Ignorance, which is fun, but not what was advertised.