Category Archives: Science

Typical Objections to Intelligent Design by Bob Murphy

As part of my usual scuffling around, reading about intelligent design, I ran across this article:

Typical Objections to Intelligent Design by Bob Murphy

which appears to be a sincere attempt by someone who doesn’t follow the issue of intelligent design very closely to make some sense out of the recent hullabaloo regarding it. He begins by stating:

However, I do think I’m pretty good at analyzing arguments, and – as I’ve said before on this site – the more I look into this stuff, folks, the more I think that the ID people are on to something, while the proponents of Darwinian evolution are missing the point. In the present article, I want to quickly discuss several typical objections to ID.

The first primary objection is that scientists have accused Behe of being ignorant and/or deceitful. Murphy cites Behe’s own statement of his curriculum vitae in order to show that he shouldn’t be labelled as ignorant. On the face of it, I think that Murphy is right: Behe should not be assumed to be ignorant solely because of his stand on Intelligent Design. We should look at what his qualifications are in the field in which he is engaged and his publications and statements to decide whether he is qualified or not. Certainly, he has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in biochemistry. He certainly has published, he was tenured, he gets research money. All good signs that he’s qualified.

But if you look closer to the statements that Behe is responding to, people are making very specific accusations: that Behe made a claim that he knew of no papers which tried to illustrate evolutionary pathways for irreducibly complex systems, and in this, Behe showed that he really didn’t do his homework (despite his protestations to the contrary). For example, Behe made the claim that there were only two papers that “even attempt to suggest a model for the evolution of the cillium”. But David Ussery did a quick search on PubMed (a standard database of relevent publications) and located 107 at the time he did the search (188 showed up just now when I did it). From:

http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/Behe.html

A quick PubMed search (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/, (all the PubMed searches were done in July, 1998 – here I just typed in “cilia” and “evolution”), revealed 107 articles, many of which discuss exactly the types of mechanisms Behe claims are missing from the literature. The interested reader with web access is certainly encouraged to try this little experiment for themselves – how many articles can you find about the evolution of flagella? According to Darwin’s Black Box, “Even though we are told that all biology must be seen through the lens of evolution, no scientist has ever published a model to account for the gradual evolution of this extraordinary molecular machine.” (page 72, emphasis his) I found 125 articles, several of which DO discuss and give models for gradual evolution of flagella, with titles such as “The flagella apparatus of spermatozoa in fish. Ultrastructure and evolution”. So my point in all of this is that Behe hasn’t done his homework.

It’s usually in this kind of context that strong criticism of Behe’s competency and honesty are put into question.   He does respond usually that such papers aren’t significantly detailed, but that amounts to hair splitting, and is different than saying that such papers don’t exist at all, which was his argument in the first place.   When someone tries to shift the aim of an argument, that amounts to deceit.

Murphy goes on to Behe’s admission that ID that under his definition of science, astrology would also be classified as a science, as if that admission where somehow proof that Behe was honest.   I would merely suggest that when one is part of a court proceeding and sworn in as a witness, there are very serious legal consequences to lying to the court.  It was not laudible for Behe to tell the court the truth in this case: it was required by law.

Regarding peer reviewed publications, Murphy again leaps to Behe’s defense.   It’s simply a fact that intelligent design papers aren’t published in scientific journals.   There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that this is in part because ID theorists don’t actually submit articles to scientific journals for review and publication.   Science journals are (by and large) not particularly scared of publishing scientific work which may not pan out, which might be speculative, which could be wrong.  This is because science publication is a conversation amongst the world’s scientists, and the ability to think and speak freely are good.   But it’s also true that such publications have review processes, and they are unlikely to publish things which are of dubious value or are by their very nature unscientific.   In other words, scientific publications do have a bias: it’s a bias against crap.  ID loses on two fronts here: scientists like Behe are for the most part not submitting such papers for publication, and when they are submitted, they are recognized for being incredibly unscientific in their methodology and conclusion.

Murphy goes on to address the issue of Intelligent Design being unscientific.   It is.   As a counterargument, he quotes William Dembski as saying that Intelligent Design might be useful in determining if a disease outbreak was the result of bioterrorism or a naturally occuring mutation.  Of course, Dembski doesn’t actually have any idea how to do that: he’s just riding the bandwagon of anti-terrorism hysteria in some attempt to make his work appear relevent.   I’d also add that forensics, which nominally tries to reconstruct what actions were performed by intelligent agents, gets all its leverage from actual observations of the intelligent designers.   When we see a bullet-ridden corpse lying in an alley, we don’t consider that Wesson, the American God of Bullets suddenly appeared and shot him full of holes, we consider the motives, means and opportunity that known intelligent beings had.  Since ID works so consistently to avoid determining any properties of their ID, they really can’t pretend they are very good at this forensics game.

Murphy then addresses the issue that critics call Intelligent Design an Argument from Ignorance.  Well, it is.   Behe says that since he can’t imagine a probable pathway that leads to the blood clotting cascade or the bacterial flagellum, that the most reasonable conclusion is that some unnamed designer, about which he can tell you nothing, is the most likely alternative.   Does that seem sensible to anyone?

The last argument he addresses is that Intelligent Design is simply Christianity in disguise.  Well, it is.  The testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover was pretty conclusive, and witness the response.   The outrage of Christian group after Christian group. Where are the scientists arguing that it was a bad decision?  Where are the atheists?

In the end, Murphy misses the real point.   The real point is that there is no scientific controversy: ID began and remains a political and social issue.  ID theorists want to adopt the mantle of science without doing the work.  They want the respectability that science has in the modern world, but they aren’t going to earn it.   Scientists and people of good conscience simply aren’t going to stand by and let that happen.

Addendum: One last thing regarding Behe.   His own department at the University of Lehigh has this to say:

http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm

The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of “intelligent design.” While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.

This comes from the people that sign his checks.

[tags]Behe,Intelligent Design, Bob Murphy,Evolution[/tags]

Stardust – NASA’s Comet Sample Return Mission

Reader Bill Harris reminded me that tonight is the night that Stardust, NASA’s comet sample return mission, will return to earth carrying its cargo of aerogel that was exposed to the particles in the wake of Comet P/Wild 2. At 2:12AM PST on Sunday morning, the probe will jettison it’s cargo at 105,000 feet over Utah, and helicopters will recover the cargo. Interestingly enough, they anticipate that only 45 hits will be recorded in the square foot or so of aerogel, so they have a project similar to Seti@Home planned to scan the plates, but instead of needing your computer time, they need your eyes. The entire panel must be examined under high magnification, and they want to employ volunteer labor to help find these particle hits.

In any case, check out the link, consider volunteering, and stay tuned for more info as it becomes available.

Stardust – NASA’s Comet Sample Return Mission

Addendum: Phil Plait has a nicer writeup and reminds that if the weather is clear, you might be able to observe the reentry of the probe from the Western U.S. It’s cloudy and rainy here, so I doubt we’ll get any chances here. Too bad.

Addendum2: Surprisingly, it looks like it might be clearing up. I’m thinking of trying to snap some quickie video of the reentry. It will be pretty low on the horizon when it shows up here, and I’m not sure exactly the best way to photograph this thing, but we shall see. 🙂

Addendum3: Nope, while the sky was clear, I suspect that the local horizon to the north was slightly too high, and the object passed behind it. Oh well.

[tags]Comet,NASA,Stardust,Space,Science[/tags]

Alaska Volcano Observatory

In keeping with my recent reading on volcanos, here is a link to the Alaska Volcano Observatory which is observing the increasingly active volcano on Augustine Island in Alaska. Recently earthquake activity has significantly increased, and some kind of eruption seems imminent. They even have a pair of webcams. The streaks running down the snowcapped mountains are apparently mudflows, not lava.  Cool!

[tags]Volcano,Geology[/tags]

New Find Pushes Back Date of Mayan Writing

I’m a bit of a nut about ancient writing (probably as an outgrowth of my interest in codes and cryptography) and one of my interests have always been with the Maya (after all, astronomers and writers, okay, the human sacrifice thing was not so good, but still…). Scientific American has just published this link about recent work that pushes the dates of the Mayan writing systems back to about 200 to 300 B.C. Interesting stuff.

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: New Find Pushes Back Date of Mayan Writing

[tags]Heiroglyphics,Maya[/tags]

Flash Boil!

A couple of days ago I mentioned the idea of supercooled water existing in liquid form well below the freezing point. Perhaps more dangerous is another delayed phase transition: water can exist in liquid form at temperatures much higher than the boiling point and can flash boil when subject to a disturbance. This usually happens in the microwave oven, which is why sometimes people recommend placing a wooden skewer into a cup of water that you are heating for tea.

Check out the videos here for some examples. Do not try this at home: you can be badly burned by experiments like this. IIf you don’t particularly value your life, you could refer to Bill Beatty’s list of unwise microwave experiments for more dangerous ways to learn about science.

Supercooled Water

Courtesy from digg, check out this article with video dramatically demonstrating the freezing of supercooled water.

If you ask most people with the freezing point of water is, they will confidently answer that water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius (or 32 degrees Fahrenheit if you are in a backward country that never shifted to the metric system). But what many people don’t know is that water can exist in liquid form at temperatures which are significantly lower than that. I first remember reading about this in Craig Bohren’s excellent book Clouds in a Glass of Beer: Simple Experiments in Atmospheric Physics. It’s a great book detailing many of the processes that govern weather. He mentions an experiment where you place a small plate with several individual drops of water on a plate and place it in your fridge. You will find that many remain in liquid form for a considerable period of time, and that mechanical jostling of them can cause them to instantly freeze. The video on the webpage above demonstrates some of the same ideas, but much more dramatically.

Cool stuff with a nice writeup.

National Academy of Sciences and National Science Teachers Association Play Hardball

As the Kansas Board of Education review gut their science standards to appease creationists, the NAS and the NSTA have decided to revoke their permssion to use their copyrighted materials in the new proposed standard. Yeow. From their letter to the Kansas BOE:

While there is much in the Kansas Science Education Standards that is outstanding and could serve as a model for other states, our primary concern is that the draft KSES inappropriately singles out evolution as a controversial theory despite the strength of the scientific evidence supporting evolution as an explanation for the diversity of life on Earth and its acceptance by an overwhelming majority of scientists. The use of the word controversial to suggest that there are flaws in evolution is confusing to students and the public and is entirely misleading.

In addition, the members of the Kansas State Board of Education who produced Draft 2-d of the KSES have deleted text defining science as a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena, blurring the line between scientific and other ways of understanding. Emphasizing controversy in the theory of evolution when in fact all modern theories of science are continually tested and verified and distorting the definition of science are inconsistent with our Standards and a disservice to the students of Kansas. Regretfully, many of the statements made in the KSES related to the nature of science and evolution also violate the document’s mission and vision. Kansas students will not be well-prepared for the rigors of higher education or the demands of an increasingly complex and technologically-driven world if their science education is based on these standards. Instead, they will put the students of Kansas at a competitive disadvantage as they take their place in the world.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Of Prions and People

Wow: another terrific article from The Panda’s Thumb, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite destinations on the web. This article is discussing some of the interesting research surrounding prions, self-propagating variants of certain proteins that are the infectious agents behind diseases like scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and variant Cruetzfeld-Jakob disease. What’s really interesting is that they may enable a form of Lamarckian evolution where traits which are not encoded genetically but are rather acquired through infection can be passed to offspring, subject to normal natural selection.

In certain conditions, for instance when an organisms recurrently but unpredictably encounters a specific, strong selective condition, prion systems may result in the environmental induction of adaptive, acquired heritable phenotypes.

At this point, we don’t have any bona fide examples of this actually happening, but in principle it’s possible. Moreover, this model provides a real, testable mechanism to explain such a phenomenon, should it occur (scientists don’t mind testable mechanisms and hypotheses, even when they are “heretical”).

Nothing stimulates science better than a good heresy, I always say.

Cervical cancer jab ‘in a year’

From the “It’s fun to be a Luddite” file, witness this bit of news from the BBC that Merck’s new vaccine to prevent cervical cancer might be available within the year.

Cervical cancer is associated with the human papillomovirus. The drug Gardasil was apparently 100% effective at preventing early stage cancers and pre-cancerous abnormalities, which account for 70% of all cervical cancers, and over a quarter of a million deaths world wide each year.

So why is filed under the “I Kid You Not Section” of my blog?

Researchers believe a vaccine could work best if given before adolescence, but critics fear this could encourage under-age sex.

Yeah, getting stabbed by needles really makes me want to go out and have sex. Who are these critics?

Well, apparently they include Scott Phelps, executive director of Abstinence and Marriage Education Partnership. His comment:

“Sexually transmitted diseases in the United States will not be contained by injecting vaccines into pre-adolescents in anticipation of promiscuous behavior,” Scott Phelps, executive director of Abstinence & Marriage Education Partnership, wrote in a recent statement.

Of course, Scott has yet to tell us exactly how these diseases will be contained.