The Inverted Bowl

2011-09-11T15:05:00.000-04:00

The Museum of Dumb

The ineffable dumbness of The Creation Museum.

2011-09-11T14:36:00.000-04:00

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

Oliver Sacks is sympathetic, erudite, and thought-provoking in this slight volume, just shy of 250 pages. Each of the 24 chapters is a case history describing neurological problems and the humanity of those who suffer from them. They're organized thematically into four units - Losses, Excess, Transports, and the World of the Simple.

Though on rare occasions the conditions just disappear as in chapter 18, "The Dog Beneath the Skin," most of the stories address how the individuals come to compensate for or accept incurable conditions and remain fully human (most of them). The book prompts questions about what it means to be a human being and what makes a human existence.

People with no memories, too perfect memories; people of limited intelligence; people who have difficulty processing their experiences - common themes from popular movies the last few decades, maybe a few episodes of "House."

The people, their experiences, their lives - are all remarkable, but strange, hopeful - and also a little terrifying. Highly recommend it.

2011-08-28T18:43:00.000-04:00

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Last night I finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. One reviewer wrote that it read like a novel. He was right. I first heard the story on NPR's Fresh Air some months ago.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor, black woman who came to Johns Hopkins for treatment. She received treatment, but they eventually figured out she had an extremely nasty form of cervical cancer.

Doctors needed cells that could live and multiply in culture so they could use those cells in studies. They couldn't get human cells to do this, until they took samples from Henrietta Lacks. They biopsied both her normal cells and her cancer cells. The normal cells died, but the cancer cells lived - and still live. They are referred to as HeLa cell or the HeLa cell line - are among the most important "discoveries" in the history of medicine.

I mentioned the name Henrietta Lacks to my youngest daughter who interned at NIH two summers. She did not recognize the name. But when I mentioned HeLa cells, she instantly knew the term and understood where the term had come from.

The book tells the interwoven stories of Henrietta, her family, and the researchers who developed her cell line. It highlights a number of ethical issues - patient consent, patient confidentiality, justice. Her cell line is a billion dollar industry and yet her family can't even get health insurance.

Popular Science wrote a brief article on her back in Feb 2010 explaining how she's the most important person in medical history.

Skloot did an excellent job of explaining things from everyone's point of view, explaining enough of the scientific history that the reader would understand the importance of the cells and of the research, and also enough of the legal and ethical history that we can follow the wider implications.

If you're a HS teacher and you want to give an extra credit assignment to some students, I highly recommend this book. I'm tempted to think it should be read by all students, as an introduction to scientific ethics. On the one hand, the issues seem very abstract. For example, is one person's consent as important as the lives of tens of thousands of people? Abstract - except this really happened!

Interesting. Well-researched. Clear. Sympathetic. Fair.

2011-08-13T20:05:00.002-04:00

Global Warming a Hoax? I think not.

I keep hearing that global warming is a hoax, but the people I hear this from do not strike me as dependable in their judgment.

Several times I have been asked, "If global warming is true, then why has it not been warming for the last N years?" or perhaps "... why has it been cooling for the last N years?"

What does NASA say?

‎"NASA Research Finds 2010 Tied for Warmest Year on Record"

"2009: Second warmest year on record; end of warmest decade"

The second article says, "January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record."

The rejoinder is along the lines of "Oh, yes, it may be hot now, but it's always hot in summer. We had record cold temperatures and will again this winter." But that rejoinder misses the point. There are record highs and lows every year. According to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in the 1950s the ratio of record highs to record lows was about one to one; now the ratio of record highs to lows is about two to one.

But then the skeptics insist that while it might be warming, that warming is due to solar activity. But we have been approaching and in a Deep Solar Minimum while simultaneously in the hottest decade in recorded history.

I always accepted anthropogenic global warming because I accepted what I perceived was the collective opinion of the best experts on the subject. I had no strong feeling other than that the experts are probably correct. However, as I was arguing with creationists, many of them would assert that "I was just gullible and probably believe that global warming nonsense, too." And so I tried to look into it - and discover, unsurprisingly, that they don't know any more about that subject than the former.

Moreover, I cannot avoid a comparison between the techniques used by the global warming deniers and the creationists - it's as if they they are using the same play book. This is not altogether surprising, because there is considerable overlap between these two groups. For example, creationists maintain a list of "scientists who doubt evolution" and AGW skeptics have a similar list. Creationists have signal words and phrases - shibboleths that convey their common, mistaken beliefs regarding certain events. A creationist will start listing, "Piltdown man, Nebraska man, Lucy, Archaeopterix are all hoaxes!" An AGW skeptic will say, "Climate-gate! Al Gore!" every bit as knowingly.

And yet they are not equal sets. Creationists are generally fundamentalists - mostly Christian fundamentalists, but increasingly commonly fundamentalist Muslims. On the other hand, many of this same are Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) skeptics / denialists. Their view is expressed by the Cornwall Alliance's Declaration:

We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.

For these fellows, the disbelief in AGW derives from the conviction of faith. AGW can't possibly be true, because God made the world self-regulating. But fundamentalists of this stripe are not the only members of their skeptical group. They are joined by other fundamentalists - Libertarians and other followers of Ayn Rand. These fellows start with the principle that powerful governments are bad - and should not have too much power, particularly not power over individual liberties and economic liberties. And so there can't be any problems whose solutions might require collective effort or strong government enforcement.

2011-08-05T21:04:00.002-04:00

I'm Fond of Dogs
Science Now had an interesting article a few weeks back on German shepherd police dogs being able to distinguish identical twins. I'm not that surprised. According to a blog article over at Psychology Today, dogs as we would expect have a great many more scent receptors than humans do. Here's a summary of the info they give:

Breed	Number of Scent Sensors
Dachshund	125 Million
Fox Terrier	147 Million
Beagle	225 Million
German Shepherd	225 Million
Bloodhound	300 Million
Humans	5 Million

So even a Dachsund has 25 times as many receptors as a human being, while a German shepherd has 45 times as many! Makes perfect sense. When I take my Jack to the park, she can instantly tell who has treats in their pocket and commences to sitting pretty for them until I notice and call her away.

Dog's can hear from further away than humans. According to this, dogs can hear sounds 4 times further away than we can.

2011-07-30T20:04:00.004-04:00

The Museum of Dumb, Exhibit #8

What a maroon! I'm trying to stay away from religious kooks like Harold Camping, William Tapley, as well as political pundits like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly - except to the extent they talk about science. But I've been listening to this fellow Alex Jones - and seriously, it's like stupidity on steroids.

His Youtube channel alone has 186,000 subscribers! Probably a million or more regularly listen to him spew his patriotic "wisdom" onto the airwaves. Well-articulated stupidity can be quite persuasive, but it is still stupidity.

"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." -- Anatole France

2011-07-30T01:03:00.000-04:00

Common Sense

Common sense does not exist. Or if it does exist, it is not desirable. What is wanted is not common sense, but good sense, and all the experiences of my life have left me with the inescapable conclusion that insofar as sense is good, it is seldom very common, and insofar as it is common, it is seldom very good.

In an interview with WIRED magazine, Simon Singh said:
Science has nothing to do with common sense. I believe it was Einstein who said that common sense is a set of prejudices we form by the age of 18. Inject somebody with some viruses and that’s going to keep you from getting sick? That’s not common sense. We evolved from single-cell organisms? That’s not common sense. By driving my car I’m going to cook Earth? None of this is common sense. The commonsense view is what we’re fighting against. So somehow you’ve got to move people away from that with these quite complicated scientific arguments based on even more complicated research. That’s why it’s such an uphill battle. People start off with a belief and a prejudice—we all do. And the job of science is to set that aside to get to the truth.

2011-07-28T19:53:00.000-04:00

The Museum of Dumb, Exhibit #7

Bandershot explains the mechanism that makes homeopathy work.

I almost peed myself the first time I watched this.

2011-07-27T20:44:00.000-04:00

My Backyard - Wild Carrot

Looks a lot like poison hemlock, but the foliage is different.

I took dozens of photos, but have only kept a few. I also document the stuff. I'm not sure what you call the leaves other than leaves - or perhaps foliage. So much to learn!

2011-07-26T23:21:00.002-04:00

The Museum of Dumb, Exhibit #6

As with the other entrants, Colesakick is really funny. The "about me" section of her YT profile reads,

Home health Administrator turned physicist on 2-14-2010 when the Holy Spirit/Divine Love opened my mind to the physics of creation

Pay special attention at time t=0:20-0:26 ... an antimatter-emitting dwarf star in our solar system currently between our location and the sun and is "heading inward."

Then at t=2:48 - 2:55 ... confused stuff and then "it has about a 24,000 year orbital cycle.

Apparently her "spiritual education" about physics did not include Kepler's Laws.

We can safely conclude that the events referenced at t=1:53 - 1:55 aren't going to happen, because they were never going to happen anyway.

She has more than 4,000 subscribers!

2011-07-26T10:28:00.001-04:00

Excellent Website - Stackoverflow.com

I'm usually the last guy to find out about anything, but just in case there is a programmer on the planet who is unaware, I can't say enough good things about this site. Whether you're a generalist programmer (like me) or a specialist programmer, these guys can probably help.

Have you been in this situation? You google some topic you get thousands of hits:

1. People wanting to sell you completely irrelevant stuff?
2. People wanting to sell you a "solution" that teaches you nothing and is quite the right match anyway?
3. Solutions that don't work so you spend extra hours chasing Alice down the rabbit hole?
4. Solutions that don't even make sense?

5. Get pointers to links that aren't active any more?

Or you post a question on a board that seems to be relevant and you
1. Get ignored, or
2. Get a snotty or irrelevant response.
3. Can't figure out where your question even goes in their hierarchy.

Stackoverflow is not perfect. You get the occasional useless response. That's okay. Someone is pushing himself. He's learning. And so do you, because
1) your messages are tagged and titled with relevant info, so people who are especially interested in those topics can find them.
2) the answers are almost always relevant.
3) even the wrong answers are educational (because they get corrected by guys who know more) and even the wrong answers are not dumb answers.
4) they're generally pretty polite, even when they're pointing out how you're doing something dumb.
5) they often give you the extra information of how you might better think of or approach the problem, things you had not considered, and philosophy, BUT (and this is really important) they answer the frigging question you asked!

One thing I noticed - google returns some stackoverflow results, but they are usually interspersed with a lot less helpful stuff - and not everything useful shows up. I get better results if I search Stackoverflow directly.

This site has improved my productivity more than almost anything I've ever done. Seriously. Give a whack.

I have to say I don't quite "get it." I don't understand the nuances of the site. I figure that'll come as I use it more. For now, I post average of 2 questions a month - and I frequently get initial answers within 5 minutes. Usually I've been toiling on something for a few hours, before I post.

When I post work-related problems, I change table names, server names, some of the variables - and remove code that is not specifically related to the problem. That's probably a good idea for anyone else.

If you program professionally or for a hobby and you have not been to stackoverflow.com, do yourself a huge favor and give it a try. I was a member for a few months, before I started using it in earnest. It's fair to say that it's now among the most important tools I use.

2011-07-24T23:43:00.001-04:00

Useful Vocabulary

From wikipedia,
Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.

2011-07-24T23:32:00.000-04:00

My Backyard

I've been thinking about my project to document with pictures the objects in my vicinity and been wondering if I could hook up with some bigger project. I've found two groups that seem to be have very similar objectives: Encyclopedia of Life and Discover Life.

From Discover Life's site:
Our mission is to assemble and share knowledge about nature in order to improve education, health, agriculture, economic development, and conservation throughout the world.

From Encyclopedia of Life's site:
The Encyclopedia will be an online reference and database on all 1.9 million species currently known to science and will stay current by capturing information on newly discovered and formally described species. The Encyclopedia of Life will help all of us better understand life on our planet.

I'm not sure which of these I ought to try. Either? Both? Neither? Could be interesting.

I don't know that my information could be useful to anyone else, but I would hope to cut down on the clutter and make it potentially useful. So what kind of information is potentially useful and how is the best way to present the information without cluttering so that it might be useful?

Could be that just belonging to the forums on these two groups might be helpful. I wonder - are they aware of each other? How could they not be? Why are they not partnered themselves?

Could either of these sites help me learn more on my interests? Use the information I'm collecting? Provide tools and insights into making my contributions more generally useful? Increase the fun of the project? Potentially hook up with others of similar interests? Serve as a long-term, high quality general resource?

Are there others sites with similar objectives?

2011-07-17T22:12:00.000-04:00

The Museum of Dumb, Exhibit #5

GoodScienceForYou demonstrates confidence in his subject knowledge despite abject ignorance.

There's nothing I can say that clarifies his ineptitude better than he does in his own words. Watch and enjoy. But be sure to empty your bladder beforehand; otherwise, stay off the good sofa.

2011-07-17T19:09:00.001-04:00

My Backyard Project

I've started a project for no other reason than I want to do it. I call it "My Backyard." I have this vision of taking photos, maybe videos and/or audio of things - particularly organisms near my house and trying to identify them. I've been contemplating the project for months, but the impetus to actually start came when my friend came back from the Galapagos with some great pictures on his 12 megapixel camera. I don't have such a good camera at the moment. Using my daughters' cameras for now.

I'm collecting pictures along with and index that includes metadata. It's a much more challenging project than I thought. I'm spending a lot more time taking pictures than I thought and vastly more time identifying the species. I've discovered a number of problems that I had not anticipated. I'm not complaining. I'm actually excited to discover these twists.

Problem Class 1. It's really hard to take a good photo! I thought you just take your camera, point and snap - and you CAN do that with some cameras in some circumstances. I'm using a Kodak EasyShare CX4300. The zoom is limited which makes it difficult to take pictures of things in situ. I prefer not to tear leaves off the tree, for example. I have done that a couple times, but it's not my first choice. If my interest in this project continues long enough, I'll consider getting a decent camera - maybe several for different purposes. Keeping the camera still also contributes to difficulty. My wife used to be an amateur black and white photographer and is letting me use her tripod. Very handy, but even that can be an issue when the wind pushes the leaves. Lighting can also make pictures come out not so well.

Problem Class 2. Identification is harder than I thought! I can tell from the kinds of pictures I see on the web that many people who take pictures are not so concerned with others being able to use their photos for help in identification. Many pictures are blurry, are taken from a distance too far to discern relevant detail, or are at a bad angle. By now, I've taken hundreds of pictures and have only posted a handful of them. I don't want to amplify the problem by adding "contributions" that will further flood the net with useless pictures making it that much more difficult for other people to find the good stuff.

Anyway, slow as it is, the project is even more interesting than I thought. I'm doing a lot of reading, comparing, etc. I'm slow to make decisions - and I hope to include some indication in the metadata about my level of uncertainty - particularly with regards to identification.

Problem 3. I'm not sure how to organize and present the information. I know I want pictures and other data. Problably geocoordinates would be useful, but to what precision? Date will be useful. Should I take pictures of every object or should I consolidate images and indicate number or density? Should I include trees that were planted by my HOA? I'm thinking also links to references I used to help me identify and the criteria I specifically used to identify the object. Anyway, several decision to make. I've made tentative decisions, but I only have a few items so far. I probably should finalize my decisions before I get too many items. OTOH, that will probably be a very long time considering my present slow accretion of identified objects!

Would also be good to have a way to get feedback from anyone who happens to look at it - "Hey, Buddy, that's not a poison sumac!" for example.

I recently found an interesting site called Encyclopedia of Life. It's not clear to me how helpful they can be to me or I to them, but I'm perusing their site. I would hate to put stuff into their system and then have them go out of business - but I guess I would have the same problem no matter where I put the data.

The project is a joy so far.

2011-06-25T17:21:00.002-04:00

Museum of Dumb, Exhibit #4

"Universalclass" offers only courses in UFOs, angel healing, Tarot reading, and "paranormal investigation," but also writing, science, etc.

It's best to let them speak for themselves. From their web page:

This course provides a complete study of paranormal investigations. Central material is collected in one course that will provide students with a meaningful look into the world of paranormal investigation.

We will begin by supplying information that will prepare you to establish yourself as a leading authority for paranormal investigations.

Their graduates can establish themselves as leading authorities on paranormal investigations!

2011-06-08T20:56:00.004-04:00

Museum of Dumb, Exhibit #3

Ron Wyatt dazzles with his explanation of chromosomes and DNA and how he found blood from the actual Christ Savior, Jesus! He also found the ark of the covenant, the stone tablets on which God wrote the original ten commandments, Noah's ark, and chariots from when the Red Sea swallowed up the pharaoh's armies!

2010-01-09T02:59:00.007-05:00

Museum of Dumb, Exhibit #2, NephilimFree, possibly the dumbest guy on YouTube!

He thinks because he spent TWO YEARS studying videos on the web that he knows a more than PhD scientists who have spent their entire lifetimes studying the subject. We can be sure of one thing - whatever activity that NF engaged in for two years, it's not something that a professional researcher would recognize as research.

Check this video out at about time t=7:19

Yes! He's a geocentrist! And guess what! The fact that he's an ex-photographer means he understands a LOT about the geometry involved with star photos! Vastly more than mere astronomers! In fact, NF knows more about all areas of science than the actual scientists who spent many years getting their Ph.D.s in those subjects. It's no accident that the stupidest guy on YT is also the most smug. He has a a number of videos in which he claims to "educate" the actual scientists - and in each one exhibits such a profound ignorance of the subject matter that one almost feels embarrassed for him.

Check out the following critique by Andromeda's Wake

And I've got my own refutations here and here.

2010-01-08T11:46:00.013-05:00

Museum of Dumb

Exhibit #1

Dr. Charlene Werner is advertised as a "Developmental Vision Specialist." Here's her again.

P.Z., Randi, and others have already blogged about her.

Compare this to The Mitchell & Webb sketch below.

How weird is it when a homeopathist makes less sense than a sketch lampooning homeopathy.

2009-11-10T10:43:00.003-05:00

Science: The Missing Manuals

There's a series of O'Reilly books called "The Missing Manuals." We need something like that for science writ large to help address claims of the denialists.

Use "Evolution" as the paradigm. There are different kinds of science sites about evolution. NCSE keeps us informed about the latest happenings - upcoming talks, recently published items in the popular press, court cases, etc. Understanding Evolution at Berkeley is one of several great sites that explains evolution. But a very important website is talk.origins that started out as a Usenet group. TalkOrigins gives the canonical list of refutations of creationist pseudo-arguments. Why is that important? Because creationists flood the "marketplace of ideas" with false facts, poor reasoning, etc. The impression on the unwary is that they must have something important to say, because so many people are saying it. TalkOrigins systematically examines nearly every claim that creationists have made - and while they are not peer-reviewed, most of their articles have citations to primary literature.

Of course there are other sources of good and important information: Blogs like Pharyngula, or The Panda's Thumb are invaluable for giving in-depth analysis and background information.

Additionally, sites like Darwin Online has made the complete works of Darwin available to the entire world. Frank Lambert's site on thermodynamics examines and explains that subject in
clear detail for the layman.

These are all great sites, but TalkOrigins is an ace in the hole. The entire case for creationism depends on a thorough misrepresentation of the facts, laws, theories, history, methods, and philosophy of science. And TalkOrigins addresses those misrepresentations head on.

I think this kind of paradigm could be useful to address other kinds of denialism - in particular, HIV/AIDS denialism, anti-vaccination, anti-Global Warming and perhaps others. Probably these should be individual sites - and not one big denialist-refutation site. But the details are unimportant at this point. What's important is the recognition that such sites can serve a unique function. They are not complete solutions. They are not perfect solutions. But they are very important pieces to a solution. And their contribution is different than that of blogs, etc.

Now, I'm not the guy to actually build a site like this. But we ought to acknowledge that such a thing could be helpful OR explain why these other situations are sufficiently different that an analog to TalkOrigins would not help. And there are crucial differences - for example, the anti-vaccination groups are much more prone to inducing hysteria than the evolution-deniers.
But so far, I can't think of any good reasons not to have such a site - and some very good reasons for having them. What do you think? If you think, it would be helpful, take the idea and run with it - or talk it up. The canonical list of refutations of denialist arguments for X could be a boon for the community of non science-deniers.

2009-10-24T17:51:00.015-04:00

The Second Law of Thermodynamics Refutes Evolution

Students of Kent Hovind understand thermodynamics better than any other humans. They explain clearly that the second law (hereinafter referred to as 2LOT) refutes evolution, because the second law says that everything tends towards disorder, but evolution is a process that increases order. This is a thoroughly damning argument and all the scientists of the world should feel deeply ashamed of themselves for overlooking the consequences of such an obvious and fundamental law on their theory.

Let's clarify the depth of scientific depravity exhibited by these EVILutionists. 2LOT requiresw that entropy must increase. Entropy is a measure of disorder. Therefore, 2LOT is a statment that disorder must increase. Let's look at a definition of second law from the scientists. There are several statements of 2LOT and while they are all equivalent, we should pick one that talks explicitly about entropy, so we can be sure that we understand how it relates to this devastating creationist argument.

According to the Division of Chemistry Education at Purdue:

"Second Law: In an isolated system, natural processes are spontaneous when they lead to an increase in disorder, or entropy."

A more common way of saying this is "In an isolated system, Entropy cannot decrease." But what is an isolated system? An isolated system is one in which neither matter nor energy are exchanged with the surroundings (of the system). So, this is a system that is not "connected to" anything else. In this sense our intuition of the term isolated corresponds fairly closely to the scientific denotation.

Dr Hovind's students inform us that entropy is a disorder. Is that correct? Not quite. The world order has a very specific meaning here. Thermodynamic order refers to the availability of energy for doing work. Recall the first law says that energy cannot be created or destroyed. 2LOT says that the even though energy is not destroyed, it can still become unavailable for doing work. Modern chemistry texts are beginning to eliminate the use of the words order and disorder altogether to describe entropy. Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Frank Lambert, university chemistry texts are giving more rigorous (and correct) explanations of the concept. Dr. Lambert is unambiguous in his criticism of equating entropy with disorder . Here's a sample:

"Shuffled Cards, Messy Desks, and Disorderly Dorm Rooms — Examples of Entropy Increase? Nonsense!"

from the Journal of Chemical Education, Vol. 76, pp. 1385-1387, October 1999."

If that were not sufficiently clear, Dr. Lambert further explains "Changes in the arrangement of ordinary objects do not change their entropy. Entropy depends on the dispersal of energy at a specific temperature, not on a pattern."

Entropy is not at all about disorder in the way that people commonly think. It's about the dispersal of energy; that is, it's a measure of the energy in a system that is no longer available to do work.

Of course, it's incredible to suggest that Dr. Hovind could be wrong about this. Let's go on, though. Again, 2LOT says the entropy of an isolated system cannot increase. The Earth, however, is not an isolated system. It gets matter in the form of space debris and it gets massive amounts of energy from the sun. So the basic premise for applying this definition to the biological evolution on Earth is not correct.

Hovind acolytes respond with quotes from scientists who assert that the second law applies to all systems. Those scientists may be correct, but their comments are irrelevant and misapplied. There may be definitions of the 2LOT that apply to other kinds of systems, but the particular statement of 2LOT that they are attempting to employ specifically states that it applies only to isolated systems. The definition itself says that it applies to isolated systems!

How is this possible? The entropy locally (on Earth) decreases at the expense of creating greater entropy in the universe at large!

Hovind and his standard bearers help us explain this by noting that, yes, while entropy CAN decrease in a system, that there must be some kind of engine for this to happen. But they are referring to a phantasmal definition of 2LOT in this case - one that exists only in their own minds, because 2LOT makers no mention of such an engine. That isn't what 2LOT says and that isn't what 2LOT means.

Tragically, Hovind has no better understanding of the second law of thermodynamics than he does of the first. This is unsurprising, because he is not a scientist and has never been a scientist; nor does he have any particular understanding of science. And here's a scary thought. One of Dr Hovind's great bragging points it that he taught high school science for 15 years. With such a poor understanding of actual science, one wonders what he could possibly have had to teach his students on the subject. Here's a problem - in some cases, any idiot can call himself a teacher and start "instructing" students. In the same way any deluded imbecile can make YouTube videos. Tragically Hovind has apparently instructed his own son, Eric, who seems to be following in his father's ignorant footsteps.

2009-09-16T09:40:00.010-04:00

The Laws of Thermodynamics Refute Evolution

Kent Hovind and his devotees know, of course, vastly more about thermodynamics than the people who have studied it, and teach it, and write books about it, and apply in their jobs to solve real-world problems or provide insight into scientific investigations.

I would sooner consult Hovind for tax advice than science advice, but that, of course, is my materialistic bias speaking. His followers know The Truth, namely that Evolution is refuted by the first and second laws of thermodynamics (1LOT and 2LOT).

How so? The first law says that matter can't be created out of nothing. And since evolution does not explain where matter came from, it must be wrong. As my nemesis Edward Current would say, "Checkmate, Evolutionists!"

Also the second law states that everything tends to disorder. Since evolution means things are getting getting more orderly and more complex, it violates this law. Once again, evolution does not fair well.

Okay! We're done! The scientists can go home 'cause Hovind and his bleeting flock have figured it all out and have carefully articulated it to the layman. Thanks, Kent! I'm convinced!

Let's see if this reasoning checks out, though. Just a formality.

Regarding 1LOT, Kent has really nailed it. The evolutionist scientists are probably peeing their pants right about now. Biological evolution does not explain where matter came from. Nor will it ever explain where matter came from. Of course, explaining where matter came from was not the intent of those who formulated evolutionary theory. How could they have overlooked this obvious fact? Probably they were trying to pull a fast one! On the other hand, what about atomic theory, germ theory of disease, relativity, maxwell's equations, Boyle's law? None of those things explains where matter comes from either! Are those theories and laws also false because they don't explain where matter came from? Are they bad theories? Well, either they ARE bad theories, in which case all of science needs an overhaul, OR it could be that Kent has made an implicit assumption about what theories are and what they are supposed to do that isn't quite correct.

Does a theory have to explain everything? How many theories do you know of that explain everything? When Kent's minions point out, correctly, that evolution doesn't explain the origin of matter and energy, it's not any more relevant than the fact that Newton's laws don't explain the origin of matter or the first law itself doesn't explain the origin of matter.

No theory has to explain everything. No law has to describe everything. Creationists who spend even a few moments in reflection will realize this. It isn't the scientists who have misrepresented the facts in this case. It's Kent Hovind, the non-scientist, and Kent's zealous followers who keep repeating the same uninformed claim, despite the fact that it's nonsensical, who are misrepresenting the facts.

In summary, while evolution does not explain the origin of matter (or energy), there is no reason to expect it should. It's a bizarre and inconsistent way of thinking to insist that evolution must or ought to explain the origin of matter.

2008-01-06T02:56:00.000-05:00

Creationism: Are all PhDs created Equal

Semi-transcript of my latest vid:

So I got mail from a creationist the other day. I don’t know to which of my videos he was responding, but he said something along the lines that 1000s of scientists were converting to 6 day creationism and gave me a link to statements by 50 of them at creation ministries who believed in literal 6 day creationism. I suppose he thought I would just bend over and drop trow.

But there was something immediately curious about the thing. Several of the 50 weren’t scientists – they was a geographer, several engineers, a few doctors, and one guy among the first 2 or 3 on the list who didn’t even have his PhD from an accredited school! Several of the others were associated with a particular religious school. When I pointed this out and compared them to “real experts,” the fellow as expected responded that I was closed minded because I didn’t consider his experts as real experts.

Okay. Let’s completely toss out creationism and evolution for a minute. I’m going to tell you about a few people I have actually known and a few experiences I have actually had. First, I took 2 courses from a guy who was considered (not by scientists), but by local authorities to be an expert in chemistry. This guy was the department chairman, had written a few papers, and had gotten a few awards. But I had him for 2 semesters and in all that time he was never ever – even one time – able to solve a single problem in class. He attempted nearly ever class, but could never quite manage it. It was mind-boggling.

Second, I knew a guy – I worked for him – who had a PhD in mathematics from perhaps the most prestigious university for that subject in the world. Certainly, it would be on everyone’s top 10 list. He was indeed a smart guy who knew very well how to manage projects and put together teams, etc. But one day we were working late and he started arguing with me over a piece of code. It was this huge program (order of a million lines of code) and he wanted me to go in and change the velocity of a particular thing. We were looking at the code and he told me to change this matrix…I said, “Uh…that’s a matrix… velocity is a vector … that looks like a rotation matrix.” To which he responded to me as if I were a complete idiot, “Velocity isn’t a vector.” Okay, I’m not going to go into a lot here. This guy really was very smart at a number of things – it’s just that calculus wasn’t among them.

Neither of these has anything whatsoever to do with Creationism or Evolution, but they illustrate an important point. A person isn’t an “expert” just because they have PhDs or are department chairmen or win awards. They’re not even experts if they write papers on things. So how then can you tell if a person is an expert?

Well, if the person has published peer-reviewed papers on the subject he’s writing about, then he might be an expert on that subject. It’s easy to check that kind of thing these days. There’s a service called EBSCOHost (among others) that allows you to look up every paper the person has published and even find out how many times it’s been cited in other works. That’s a good thing to know. What has the person actually contributed to the subject seems like a natural thing to ask.

So back to creationism, I was looking briefly at this fellows list of 50 and it was really weird – one of the guys gave Henry Morris’ book on young earth creationism as an example of a well-researched book that promoted creationism. Nobody who is actually familiar with this book and with science would say anything this stupid. Another fellow talked about how he believes because of what the Bible says and would believe regardless of any scientific evidence to the contrary. One of the scientists was Werner Gitt who wrote a creationist book on information theory claiming that it supports creationism. This is considered pseudoscience by those who are familiar with information theory.

It’s very strange. I have no idea how many times people on the net have tried to tell me what ‘real science’ who were theologians or poly sci majors or used car salesmen. Not a lot of them were well-versed in science, but most of them eventually get around to talking about all the PhD “SCIENTISTS” who believes in creationism, as if that fact alone should be sufficient to scare me into believing they might have a point. They apparently think that because they don’t understand the various subjects that no one else can either. The ideas of these creationist PhDs just MUST be considered legitimate science, because these guys are legitimate scientists. We’ll ignore for the moment the guy who doesn’t have his degree from an accredited university. Just because the others have PhDs doesn’t make them experts in the fields about which they’re pontificating. In fact, it was clear from their own words that some of them were just amateurs in the subjects that convinced them of 6 day creationism. Not all PhDs are created equal. Contrary to what this fellow and others said, I don’t reject a scientist’s opinion just because he disagrees with me even though that’s exactly what THEY themselves do. That’s why they ascribe this character to me – because they themselves posses it! No, what I maintain is that various people who are called experts aren’t experts just because they claim to be experts or because they wrote a bunch of religious manifestos on a particular subject.

Another of his “scientists” admitted he was not taught how to do science or what science was in university and he had to figure this out later. He then goes on to give a completely foolish view of what science is. “Science is about what can be observed…” I’ve addressed this in previous videos, but I might make one or even a series just about this subject.

My emailer also used AiG as a link which I thought was amusing. The planetarium of their new creation museum is run by a PhD named Jason Lisle who said that the difference between creationists and evolutionists is that creationists assumed the bible is true and evolutionists assume it’s false. This statement shows him to be either a liar or an idiot. Creation scientists make it very clear that they assume the Bible is true, but it is NOT true that scientists assume the bible is false. Rather, they don’t assume it’s true. Huge difference. Still, as usual, creationists just read this stupidity and pass it on as if it were itself the word of God.

NOTE: The service I was thinking of was not EBSCOHost, but SCOPUS.

2007-09-04T13:23:00.001-04:00

New Video on Creationist Use of Probability

I've made a number of videos on the creationist misapplication of thermodynamics (maybe I should replace these with a single video that puts in all in one place). The central problem is that the creationists are using scientific principles they do not understand. I think I've said everything that needs to be said for the time.

I want to do a video now on probability. Hopefully I can say everything that needs to be said in one video. My sources will be essays by Ian Musgrave (at talkorigins.org), Murray Gell-Mann, Heisenberg, NKS, mathworld, and a few others. As with the thermo videos, it could be that this will turn into a series of videos. There's quite a bit of material.

2007-07-23T13:15:00.000-04:00

Thermodynamics: Request for Criticism

So I read stuff - and I read really, really slowly - and I try to figure out what is being said and to the degree I'm capable of doing it, I try to explain it to other people. Unfortunately, I'm not actually an expert in the stuff I talk about. Of course, I'm not an expert in anything of consequence, but I'm particularly uninformed about certain topics that I blog and vlog about. As with most ignorant people, however, my ignorance is no deterrence to my opining on the subject. I take small comfort in the fact that most of the people debating creationism seem to be even more confused. Besides, Qui docet, discet. The more I try to figure it out and explain it, ideally the better I'll come to understand it.

So I'm trying to discuss the second law of thermodynamics (2LOT) and I'm reviewing and thinking about it. It's a non-trivial subject, of course, easy to be confused about.

I've tried to explain what I think I know a few times on youtube:
(Not necessary to view these to understand my point below)

"Using Scientific Definitions: Evolution and Thermodynamics"
"Abiogenesis does not violate the second law"
"Creationism vs Thermodynamics part 1"
"Creationism vs Thermodynamics part 2"

But there's something I'd like an opinion on - a fair opinion from someone who actually has a detailed understanding of the subject and not just someone with an opinion.

I want to explain thermodynamics in a way that people can really understand the issue and not just get confused about it. It would be better if a more knowledgeable person explained, but I think that sometimes the more knowledgeable people have explained things in metaphor - and have unintentionally murkified the subject.

Let me start by saying that some terms in science are not well-defined: or rather, there are multiple definitions that are not all equivalent.

There are numerous statements of 2LOT, but they are all equivalent (when you account for slight differences in vocabulary). But there are other words that are not so well-defined. There are several different definitions of randomness - and I'm pretty sure they're not all equivalent. In any given case, the definition is probably clear. Another word with multiple definitions is complexity: there are two definitions just in computer science which are not equivalent (namely computational complexity and algorithmic complexity). These are very different from what people mean when they talk about organizational complexity or about organic complexity (at least they are not clearly equivalent to the other two).

Finally, there is the word "order" that keeps cropping up as a common metaphor for 2nd law:
2nd law says that order decreases - life dies and decays is a clear example.

To me this is ONLY a metaphor. Order, I think, in 2LOT refers ONLY to thermodynamic order and not to any other kind of order. Thermodynamic order may have no relation at all to other kinds of order - biological order, various lay conceptions of order, etc.

Suppose we have three cases:

1. an elephant
2. a mass of protons (equal in mass to the elephant), but in the general shape of the statue of liberty
3. a mass of protons (equal in mass to the elephant, but in a sphere the size of a pea

Now we ask which of these 3 cases displays the most order - and we ask three different people: a biologist, an artist, and a thermodynamicist. I think it's very possible - and even likely - that these 3 different people could give 3 different RIGHT answers.

However, the 2LOT can only be applied using ONE of those answers. What I'm trying to point out is what I think is a less misleading analogy - one that is less metaphor.

1. Is my analogy above correct, slightly flawed, or completely wrong?

I think that people have come to misunderstand the metaphor as a reality. It's not even clear to me that some scientists make the distinction - which leads me to question my own understanding. Unlike the creationists who keep saying the same stupid thing over and over, I would genuinely like to be corrected, if I'm wrong. (Bear in mind I'm not going to believe I'm wrong just because someone tells me I'm wrong.)

In a recent and otherwise lucid and informative article at Scientific American, titled "A Simpler Origin of Life" , Robert Shapiro says:
"Life is distinguished by its great degree of organization, yet the second law of thermodynamics requires that the universe move in a direction in which disorder, or entropy, increases."

This sentence is in two parts, both of which I agree:
"Life is distinguished by its great degree of organization"
and
"yet the second law of thermodynamics requires that the universe move in a direction in which disorder, or entropy, increases."

What I think is misleading is the conjunction of these two phrases. The relation between thermodynamic order and biological order is not obvious. I would like to know what thermodynamicists think.

Note that I don't discount the importance of trying to explain the origins of complexity in nature. Surely this should be a primary concern of researchers in abiogenesis. My only problem is in conflating biological order with thermodynamic order.

Thermodynamic order, if I understand correctly, relates to only one thing: How much energy in the system is available for doing work. And I'm pretty sure that any other explanation is just wrong. I think we should avoid using words like "order" and "complexity" - not because they're wrong, but because they're too apt to be confused with the lay conceptions of those terms. I'm not saying the word "order" is wrong (particularly in statistical mechanics ... seems to make perfect sense there), but only that when it's used in explanations to lay people (like myself) that it's a term that is so laden with preconception that it's bound to be misunderstood.

2. Is Robert Shapiro's sentence misleading or is his implication clear and correct?

I thank anyone who responds in advance.

2007-06-15T11:53:00.000-04:00

Nature's guide for mentors

There's a feature article in the 14 June Nature about the importance of good and early mentoring for the career of a young scientist, and the hallmarks of a good mentor. I'm the division coordinator for interns at work and I try to hook each intern up with a good mentor. Although not all of the interns are actual scientists, they are all doing research of some kind and I think the lessons of the article are largely directly transferable, including respect, encouragement, enthusiasm, being well-read, and picking the right kind of projects for them. Of particular interest was the idea that good mentors don't just mentor their designated mentees, but generally of people who are junior. A lot of companies could benefit from reading this article.

A problem in for-profits is it can often be a hard sell to invest time in junior people who might be destined to go on to bigger and better things - seeding the environment, as it were.

2007-06-01T11:20:00.001-04:00

Attempt to Explain Evolution

A "tuber", Octamed, over at Youtube issued the challenge to evolution-deniers and to evolutionists to explain evolution. I must have read this challenge some time ago, because I notice that I commented in the thread a long time ago, but I don't recall that. I rediscovered this challenge a few nights ago and decided to spend a few hours developing a response which I include here. Not perfect. I was rushed trying to fit in so much explanation in so small a time frame, but I'm sure I could do a lot better if I wrote a regular script. Also, I could include more relevant details if I didn't feel obliged to spend several minutes discussing exactly how asinine creationist criticisms are.

I did this with MS Moviemaker, which is a handy, free tool, but which I handle quite clumsily. Using this tool eliminates a lot of dead time in my videos with the "um...ah..um..ah" bit. But I lose the spontaneity. The problem is I can't get really into the subject and my lack of excitement definitely comes across in the videos. Very similar to the prelude to CS series I'm putting together from my daughter. Despite my numerous flaws, I'm actually a pretty good lecturer (at least sometimes) in a classroom where I can pace, write on the board, screw up, redo in real time.

Anyway, I can see myself redoing a lot of these things at a later date when I'm more comfortable with it and I have my procedures down. I consider all of this good practice for the Darwin Redux project.

2007-05-16T10:31:00.000-04:00

Lesson about VLOG

It's really not my 'thing', but it seems such a natural way to convey some kinds of information. I'm actually a pretty good speaker despite the fact that I'm always clearing my throat and say, "um ... um" a lot. The problem is worse in that I can't get into a rhythm for some reason.

I'm glad I decided to do my Prelude to Computer Science series before the Darwin series. As I thought I'm learning a bit by doing this. I've started using Moviemaker (free download from MS). It's not bad software, but it does take a little effort to put things together. AND it makes it VERY difficult to keep the interest going (my own) and not drift off into droning. Still, I think with practice, I can eventually produce something that's useful.

I want to put something out that is not just a rant or a stating of opinions, but something that might actually help increase understanding - of computer "science," of evolution, and of science in general. Effort and practice is what it takes (and a crapload of time).

2007-05-09T14:27:00.000-04:00

Philosophy is not Science

I made a Youtube post on this subject last night and have gotten some pretty strong responses so far. Philosophy uses science, but it is not science, per se. Results from philosophy should not be considered equal to those we derive from science. This is not to say that philosophy has nothing to contribute - to science or any other search for knowledge. But they're not the same things. Seems obvious. There are people who would put ethics (or law) on the same level as physics - and I think this is a mistake.

2007-04-20T06:55:00.000-04:00

Math Honor Society Induction

So my oldest daughter got inducted into the Math Honor Society last night. They seem to have an honor society at her high school for everything. I have mixed feelings about having 20 different honor societies, but I try to support my kids and their teachers even when I'm not quite with them 100%.

So I go there and I'm listening to the society officers speak to us and this jackass behind me has a cell phone or a blackberry or something and he's reading through and maybe deleting crap and I keep hearing this ringing ... not once or twice ... or even ten or even 20 or 30 times...but over and over and over. I almost started to turn around and threaten Mr. Dumbass, but this is the kids' night - not mine. I get up out of my seat before I say something stupid and walk to the back of the audience seating. I had been sitting very close to the front.

It's rude enough that anyone would actually have their stupid noise on in public. I have a cell phone myself - but it is ALWAYS on mute. It is never acceptable to allow your cell phone to interrupt another person. Still, since I pretty much figure many Americans think they have the right to intrude on other people in public places, I can not understand, but at least reluctantly accept, a simple act of the phone ringing and the bonehead turning it off. But this is just staggeringly rude - he CONTINUES to make these annoying noises throughout the ENTIRE presentation. Even when I moved as far from him as possible, I could still hear the blasted beeping. Dumbass.

2007-04-13T23:25:00.000-04:00

A Challenge

The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin is among the most important books ever written and yet it is surprisingly accessible as far as science books go. Yet the vast majority of people have not read it - very few evolutionists, an almost no creationists. I think we could try to make it accessible to people.

It seems unjust and silly to me that so many millions of people in the world (perhaps 10s of millions!) have read the entire Quran and Bible and yet so few have read OOS. Anyway, I would like to make OOS even more accessible. I have this idea after being on Youtube for a while. I'm going to make a start at a Darwin's OOS Redux. I've got an outline for chapter one. I have more work to do before I'm ready to record, but when I do I'm sure it will suck.

Perhaps someone will see it and feel sufficiently embarrassed on my behalf and on behalf of evolutionists everywhere that she will feel compelled to offer a replacement video to ameliorate the effects of my misrepresentations. Perhaps several people will do chapters I - XIV and then maybe we can vote and discuss which are the best passages and maybe someone can then put together a collage of these things.

In this way, we can create something of value for ourselves - and for successive generations, perhaps something of lasting value. Anyway, if you're reading this - and your appreciation for Darwin and for this great work as great as my own, and particularly if your understanding is greater than my own, please consider contributing to this effort, not with your money, but with your time and your beautiful faces and voices.

I don't know. I'm pretty insignificant on Youtube. It could be this fizzles out and goes nowhere, but I can hope. If I'm the only guy to do it, then it might take me 2o years to do it, but it's my time to waste. Still, if people give it a try, it could be a lot of fun I think.

2007-03-31T16:26:00.000-04:00

Bashing Religion

Strange thing. Many religious people have no trouble at all saying really nasty things about other people and yet, the slightest criticism of them or their beliefs often results in charges of "christian bashing" or "god bashing." For example, on numerous occasions I've read and heard christians berate homosexuals and then scream "god bashing" when one rightly points out that the bible is a flawed book. What they apparently want is the right to be obnoxious with impunity.

I've been threatened with eternal damnation and told that "I've been warned" and so forth for rejecting religion. When I respond that there are reasons I reject the divinity - or even the divine inspiration - for certain religions, there's that immediate charge again.

If religious people don't want any criticism of their holy books, then they should lock those books in a closet somewhere and not present them to other people with the expectation that they be believed.

2007-03-20T19:04:00.000-04:00

Apologetics is Antithetical to Science

I often summarize the nature of the disagreement between religion and science by by noting that science is an attempt to discover truth so far as we are capable of determining it, while religion is an attempt to define it. This characterization is not exactly true, but it's accurate enough.

The nature of science is to discover, to find out. Scientific debates are focussed on determining which of competing ideas is correct. But apologetics is an attempt to defend the faith - to win at any cost.

I'll just give one example of this. Some years ago, when I had already begun to be swayed away from religion, I mentioned to some older, religious fellows that I had a serious problem believing that any real god would condone slavery. Immediately they offered explanations which did not appear to actually explain anything to me.

The general tenor of our conversations became quickly confrontational.

The first argument generally offered in this type of conversation is that all societies had slaves in those days. It would not have been reasonable, they say, for God to command the Israelites to abandon this widely held practice and the best they could hope to do was ameliorate it. Now many believers are quite convinced by this explanation. In the years since my conversion I have posed this problem to several believers who have talked it over with their spiritual advisors and have returned with exactly this answer and have been very much relieved. But to me this is answer is not even remotely reasonable. The Bible told people to stop doing a lot of repulsive things that were common in those days. God can make whatever rules he wishes and the faithful will follow. God, through Moses, can command that a man can be put to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, but he can't find time to say, "Don't have slaves. It's a nasty habit, don't do it."?

From the KJV:
32] And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day.
[33] And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation.
[34] And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him.
[35] And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.
[36] And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.

At first I was just confused that people would take this as a rasonable answer. Later I was appalled and saddened. Now I'm simply revolted.

The second explanation is that slavery was better than the alternatives of that period. And that answer suffers the same problem. It would have been very easy for God to make simple rules that would have allowed people to work off debts or be freed from bondage (as "SOME" were).

The third explanation is that slavery was a different thing back then. It's not what we have come to think of it - it's not the same kind of slavery that existed for say blacks in America and that, for example, all of the slaves were freed during Jubilee, but this is contrary to what the scriptures actually say:

39] And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant:
[40] But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubile:
[41] And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return.
[42] For they are my servants, which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: they shall not be sold as bondmen.
[43] Thou shalt not rule over him with rigour; but shalt fear thy God.
[44] Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
[45] Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
[46] And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.

In some translations they use the term "harshness" instead of "rigour." This passage implicitly says that they can rule over certain slaves with harshness and EXPLICITLY says that certain slaves may be kept forever as an inheritance to your children. How can one find this anything but repugnant?

The last main argument is that this is all parabolic - that what the bible is talking about is actually the relationship between a servant and his master, as in an employee and and employer. There are some passages from the NT that I could read that explanation into - but it doesn't make sense in terms of these particular passages in the OT. Moreover, it would have been so simple for God to have included an 11th commandment - "Though shall not own another human being."

The final argument is simply that anyone who asks these kinds of questions and doesn't think these "explanations" are reasonable is just a godless humanist, as if this were not a completely legitimate concern.

This is one subject, but the general principle of apologetics is that they already have Ultimate Truth and they have to defend it any way possible. Anyone who disagrees is doing Satan's Work or some such. One great ramification is in the subject of evolution, where certain theists have made up their minds to defend their revealed Truth no matter how utterly stupid it might appear to a more careful scrutinizer. They reject modern science in favor of philosophy. Modern Science, they insist, can only be improved by the intellectual rigor of theology.

2007-03-17T22:17:00.000-04:00

Mr Boring Goes Tubing

I took the plunge. Bought a web-cam, made my first video and uploaded it to youtube. No idea how it'll turn out. Could be a giant waste of time, but it's my time to waste. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to be saying on these things (assuming I keep up with it). There's some really, REALLY stupid stuff out on youtube. But there's some pretty clever stuff in there, as well. There are videos on there from Eugenie Scott and Ken Miller, Carl Sagan, and Richard Dawkins. And there are a couple of youtubers who have very well-articulated presentations.

2007-03-15T09:31:00.000-04:00

Really Nice Parody on Guitar

This is really quite well done. Very funny, flows nicely, "pokes the rib of joy" (a line from one of my favorite poems).

2007-03-11T19:03:00.000-04:00

Many People Reason Poorly

This fact is greatly exacerbated by the fact that people who reason poorly often believe themselves to be very logical, clear-thinking, no-nonsense individuals. Now any stupid people can say any stupid thing and the Internet allows the immediate dispersal of stupidity at the same rate that it does genius, so I should say a few words to at least establish that my title statement is more than just my personal opinion.

There was a scientist named Peter Wason who tested subjects against a very trivial logic problem called the THOG problem. According to that second link only about "10% of the educated adult population gets the right answer." If I tell someone that they are mistaken, or that their opinion is not logical, I'm not saying they are stupid or that they're incapable of being logical (though that might be true). It turns out that most educated adults are not perfect logicians.

I very often hear people or read people who say that logic is simple, but I always think, "If you think logic is simple, it's probably because you've only worked with simple logic problems." There are many logic problems that are a good deal more complicated than the Wason problem. Nevertheless, I think most people are capable of understanding most things - including logic - if they are patient enough and careful enough.

The American philosopher John Dewey wrote in his book How we Think, "Natural intelligence is no barrier to the propagation of error, nor large but untrained experience to the accumulation of fixed false beliefs. Errors may support one another mutually and weave an ever larger and firmer fabric of misconception. "

Dewey distinguished idle thought (casual thought) from reflective thought. He wrote "Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposedform of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought." (ibid.)

Now let me nip something in the bud. When I start talking about logic and reason, among the first criticisms I often get is that I worship science or I think that only logic is important. That's absolutely untrue. I think there are a lot of important things that are unscientific and illogical. I even think there are cases when logic fails and you need to go with your gut. But that's a very different issue than what I'm talking about - specifically when a person believes his opinions are logical, but they are not. Nor do I "worship science or scientists." I hold science in very high regard. I revere it as one of the most important things humanity possesses. As one of the definitions of revere is "to worship," that statement can be a bit confusion. Suffice it to say that when you use a word in the dictionary, not all of the definitions are necessarily in effect at once; otherwise, for example, words whose various definitions include mutually exclusive antonyms (such as "cleave" and "sanction") could never find occasion for use. So, yes I do revere science and scientists - even the 10th tier nobodies - to the extent that they have provided and continue to provide humanity one of it's most precious endowments. But I do not worship them in the sense of believing them to be infallible or worthy of deification.

So the next question is - why do people reason poorly? Clearly some people are capable of profound acts of reasoning and insight - George Boole, Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, and many others. Perhaps these fellows might have no trouble with Wason's problem, but most of us do. Part of discrepancy, I think, is that we take logic for granted. Many people just assume that "whatever they think" or "whatever makes sense" to them is necessarily logical.

Dewey really pegged this when he wrote, "Most persons are quite unaware of the distinguishing peculiarities of their own mental habit. They take their own mental operations for granted, and unconsciously make them the standard for judging the mental processes of others."

"Logic," writes Steven Pinker in his book How the Mind Works, "in the technical sense, refers not to rationality in general but to inferring the truth of one statement from the truth of other statements based only on their form, not their content." Pinker is talking about formal logic, what we often call First Order Logic, or Predicate Calculus. Note he implies that logic is a subset of rationality.

There are several factors at play here.

First, humans are geared more for pattern matching than for logic (first opined to me by Professor Sean Luke at GMU).

Second, we are not really taught logic very well. Often when we ARE taught logic, we are taught it by people who do not themselves understand it very well.

Third, because most of us have not spent a lot of time reflecting on what is involved with careful, logical thinking, we misunderstand how difficult the problem really is. There are those people who have gone through some very specialized experience or training, for example, philosophers or some scientists, who have had some practice at careful thinking. These sorts of people might do very much better on Wason's test than the average educated adult - not because they are educated, per se, but because they have specific education and experience that has caused them to give consideration to things that those with a different background may not have.

Fourth, pure logical reasoning, such as predicate calculus has some vocabulary and facts that are non-intuitive for those who lack a very special education. One obvious example is the case of the phrase, "only if," which does not mean what most people would intuit it to mean. Another thing that might be confusing is, say, the boolean conditional. Say you have a conditional statement, S: "If P, then Q." If P is false, and Q is true, then S might still be a true statement!

Fifth, and this might be the most important issue, is the problem of translation. Whenever we try to solve a problem with symbolic logic, we have to be very careful how we translate it. Several years ago, I took a review course in AI and we had an entire set of problems devoted to translating regular English statements into predicate logic. It turned out to be much more difficult than most students thought it would be. But oftentimes English (or Russian or Chinese) language is ambiguous, contradictory, or downright nonsensical. It takes some effort to reduce a problem down to a sequence of Aristotelian syllogisms, even when it can be done.

Pinker writes, "One reason [why people often don't do so well at logic] is that logical words in everyday languages like English are ambiguous, often denoting several formal logical concepts. "
This entire problem is a special case of the issue from several weeks ago, that ignorance begets confidence. You have people who might otherwise be quite educated, but who are not very strong on logic and reasoning, and they have such a poor grasp on logic that they are incapable of deducing their own shortcomings in that regard.

Previously, I mentioned a quote from the philosopher William James, "A great many people think they're thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." I hope that I have given enough information to convince a thoughtful reader that James was probably correct in that regard.

There's so much more to say, so much that has already been thought about and said before, and maybe lost to history or as needles in the Great Haystack of Cacophony called the Net. I don't know that I'll ever get to writing the more thorough analysis that a subject like this deserves. But I would like to leave you with a few words Lucretius wrote in his The Nature of the Universe, "As children in blank darkness tremble and start at everything, so we in broad daylight are oppressed at times by fears as baseless as those horrors which children imagine coming upon them in the dark. This dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shining shafts of day, but only by an understanding of the outward form and inner workings of nature." (Book III, Life and Mind.)

It's not necessary for us humans to always be logical or rational. But it's vital for us to understand what logic is and when we're correctly applying it.

2007-03-10T16:26:00.000-05:00

Feeling Overwhelmed

I recall reading a while back an account of someone who had been to visit Charles Babbage. He said it was a very sad experience. All over the lab there were so many things that Charles had started, but never finished. I need to try not to be a Charles Babbage.

I've got a number of half-done or just-started projects under way. I think some of them have a lot of potential. For example, I'm working on a paper I hope to get published. I did some research, wrote my outline, and then I got wind of some other salient stuff and it's causing me to rethink, rearticulate, refocus my article. I don't mind spending whatever time it takes on this to get it right; however, I've already discovered that this idea I thought was so novel is actually something that others have been promoting for a long time. If I take my time and think it through, I will get scooped. If I rush, I think I might leave out some supporting (or critical) issues.

Another project - I wanted to write a blog entry about the difficulties of logic; namely why it's more difficult than most people think. I went right away and started reviewing John Dewey's "How we think" and was rereading parts of the Organon and Boole's "the Laws of Thought." I also started to review Goedel's theorem and a few other things. But this is getting out of hand. If there was a person who would have the patience to read that sort of paper and appreciate it, that person would probably already be aware of the issues. Kinda defeats the whole purpose of the thing.

I don't have time to turn this into a big research project. Maybe one day a more detailed paper might be worth the effort, but for now, I need to make a good intuitive case for this - something no more than a few hundred and certainly not more than a few thousand words. I don't need to make it a "paper." I want people to read it who really need to read it and think, "Hmmm...maybe I need to reconsider whether I'm actually thinking."

Same for some of the other projects. I've been doing a bit of research on the coelacanth thing - that's turned into a bit of a project too. I have a very strong intuitive sense that the fellow over at UD is blowing smoke - what he says seems clearly at odds with what the paper says. But I'm having to do a crapload of reading in other places to figure out what this stuff means. I completley left off this a few weeks ago. This one irritates me because I don't get the sense the other fellow is devoting much time to trying to understand what the article actually says. I need - without turning this into a research project - to cut to the chase on it.

I had another project - I wanted to write a paper about a conference I attended a few months back. I put that on hold for a while. Yesterday I got a DVD in the mail containing all of the presentations. I've been waiting for this. I've written a summary of some of the major ideas, but I needed more material to show how the different presentations were thematically related. Anyway, I think I might drop most things to make some progress on that one - I'd be happy for a rough draft.

On the good side, the tutoring is going pretty well. Mostly I help run the tutoring program where I work and I haven't actually been out to the school very much. But they asked me to help out with a girl who is quite advanced. I met with her this past Tuesday. It's very clear what her problem is - she's too smart for high school. This girl should probably have been in college last year. She's a senior this year. I'm helping her prepare for the AP CS exam - the AB (more advanced) portion. But these tests are very highly specific to java and I'm not a java programmer. Fortunately, I think I've gotten some guys at another company to come and help tutor her on the java specific stuff. Our first session went pretty well. Mostly we sat and talked for 2 hours. I gave her part of my own personal intro to CS that I like to give to all my students (or that I used to like to give when I was a TA at U of L).

Taking care of the dog and the kids are projects themselves, although I'm sure my kids would not care for that characterization. At least I'm not dropping the ball on those.

2007-03-09T12:29:00.000-05:00

Simple Evidence Earth is older than 6K Years

Not everyone at Youtube is a big dope. This guy has a very good video showing how tree ring data very simply refutes the creation of the world less than 11K years ago.

2007-03-09T12:09:00.000-05:00

Another Dumbass

Another bonehead speaking with great authority about a subject of which he is poorly informed.

1. The problem for creationism is this: Why are there ANY transitionals (intermediates) at all?

2. No, we should NOT find all of the intermediates that he lists.

3. When he quotes from Darwin near the beginning, concerning the paucity of fossils, he makes the same dishonest presentation as other creationists. That's a quote from a chapter that explains WHY there are so few fossils!

4. This guy is spouting stuff that he doesn't know anything about. He's not a scientists. Near as I can tell, he was NEVER a scientist.

5. It is not a "supposition" that the Earth is more than 4 billion years old. That is derived from strong empirical evidence.

6. There ARE LOTS of transitions! As many as we'd like? Surely not. As many as we expect? I don't know. A sufficient number to make a clear inference? ABSOLUTELY!

In short, Mike Riddle from the Answers in Genesis is a dumbass.

2007-03-05T13:29:00.000-05:00

Evolution vs Creation at Youtube

The facts of evolution by a dumbass:

Stupid woman making assertions about evolution that are provably false.
1. There is no evidence at all that the Wholly Babble can be trusted as a scientific reference.

2. She comments that someone isn't to be trusted just because he has a lab coat or has Dr in front of his name! This is correct! But it applies to the creationists themselves!

3. She's using an argument through explicit threat. (There's no excuse for not knowing and God will punish you if you come to the wrong conclusion.)

4. She blathers about preconceptions of scientists, but the true preconceptions are from her and her dishonest cohorts.

5. She says there's no evidence for evolution and talks about Kent "jail bird" Hovind's offer of $250K reward to anyone who offers ANY evidence for evolution. This fake reward is not an argument. Also, I'm curious to know how Kent's going to pay for this now that he's behind bars for tax evasion. Is this reward some of the money he stole from the government or is it money he bilked from his followers?

6. No one has to "observe" evolution to know it is fact any more than we have to observe electrons.

This is a very brief response to some of the stupid statements. This woman is an idiot. In her we have a person who is grossly ignorant who is asking others not to follow to the herd and to think for themselves. Nearly every word she speaks is not just wrong, but stupid.

2007-03-02T14:32:00.000-05:00

Conservapedia

A poster on one of the websites I read pointed out an article called The US religious right's answer to Wikipedia. Readers should check out the section on evolution. It's quite funny.

I do not consider myself a conservative or a liberal. I don't consider evolution a conservative/ liberal issue, because the issue isn't about values and opinions. It's about facts, science, and correct reasoning.

Wherever you find a person who rejects evolution, there you also find a person who is ignorant of the subject on which he is pontificating.

For example, the above c-wiki article says, "Evolutionists have no real evidence that macroevolution occurs and there is no consensus on how it allegedly occurs as can be seen below:"

and "Creationists can cite material showing that there is no real fossil evidence for the macroevolutionary position and that the fossil record supports creationism:"

This is truly hilarious stuff. They'll sway a lot people who can't distinguish reasoning from rhetoric. It's tempting to think they might have a Stephen Colbert thing going on, but you know things have gotten seriously weird when the parody isn't as funny as the reality.

2007-02-28T16:15:00.000-05:00

John Pendleton, Chemist

I'm really curious about the exact curriculum vitae of John Pendleton, Chemist. On the one hand, you're tempted to think that nobody could possibly say anything this stupid, and on the other hand you still think that nobody could possibly say anything this stupid. Anyway, if anyone can find a bio or c.v. for this joker, please leave a comment here.

Near as I can tell he's not a scientist at all. He has a B.S. in chemistry, but no evidence that he's an actual scientist.

2007-02-28T11:27:00.000-05:00

Frances Allen wins the Turing Prize

There is no Nobel Prize for Computer Science; however, the Turing Award is widely regarded as the equivalent in our field. This year it goes to the first female winner, Frances (Fran) E. Allen. I'm not familiar with her work, but the particulars of parallel processing is not my area of expertise.

Previous winners include notables such as Minsky, Hamming, Codd, Backus, Dijkstra, Ritchie, and Thomson. Hey, I just noticed something ... Backus got his back in 1977, but Naur only got his last year. Backus-Naur Form (BNF) is a formal notation for specifying the syntax of programming languages. Typically we would learn this in a class called "Theory of Automata" or perhaps "Compiler Design."

Anyway, congratulations to Frances Allen.

A final word to the Magical Thinkers:

"Comparing oneself with Galileo or Einstein is certainly good for the ego - provided one refrains from going into too much detail."
-- John McCarthy, 1971 recipient of the Turing Prize

2007-02-27T12:50:00.000-05:00

Interns

I've been the intern coordinator for my division for about the past 10 years. Did it in my old division and when we merged with the new division, they asked me to continue doing it. Love doing it, but it's pretty exhausting. I have a small bit of money for the time I spend on it, but there's still a bit of volunteer time associated with it. It's a wonderful thing to talk with people who still largely believe that damned near anything is possible, whose idealism has not yet been crushed by corporate reality.

I've worried on several occasions that they might take it away from me and give it to someone who does not view it with the same importance that I do; nevertheless, I have a feeling that I am unable to shake that there are a few people who are not all that happy with what I'm doing. Moreover, there's a newer fellow in the division who seems to be enthusiastic and conscientious about it. He is a recent Yale graduate and perhaps next year would be a good time to let someone else have a try at it.

I think giving interns a good experience is important for a number of reasons. Since we use our program as a recruitment mechanism, we could well be honing our own peers and even our future bosses. Also, we're seeding people back into the workplace and giving them a good word to take back with them, increasing the pool of good future candidates. Also, we're seeding some of them back into academics - people with good experience to disseminate and diffuse among their current peers.

2007-02-24T02:05:00.000-05:00

Credentialism and Ad Hominem

Does arguing against the false credentialism of people like Jonathan Wells and William Dembski constitute an Ad Hominem fallacy? I don't think so. This is not to say that nothing that is said against these fellows is abuse, only that arguing against their credentials is not necessarily ad hominem.

Typically one finds one's self arguing with a creationst / ID advocate and one is using accepted scientific principles as described in accepted scientific texts and then a creationist suddenly says something with no foundation, such as "information theory disproves evolution" or "probability disproves evolution." Typically when they discover that you are not intimidated by "information theory" or "probability" and demolish their arguments on fact, they then resort to stating that their argument must be correct, because they read in some extensive scientific treatise by Ann Coulter that great scientists like Dembski and Berlinski say their argument is correct. So they themselves have convoluted the argument away from an argument of the facts to an argument from (false) authority.

And now a second argument immediately follows to determine whether the expert opinions of these authorities is really worthy of special consideration. At this point, the issue of credentials is important, not because of anything the evolutionist has said, but because of the direction the creationist has taken the argument.

Had the creationist kept to discussing the actual science instead of resorting to an appeal to false authority, then the weak credentials of Wells and Dembski would be irrelevant. Unfortunately, because most of them don't actually understand much science beyond what they learned in 3rd grade, they are quickly out of their depths on the subject. False credentialism is an alluring fallback position when you don't know what you're talking about.

2007-02-21T17:43:00.000-05:00

Just Messing Around

I've discovered a number of pretty cool videos at YouTube now that I know to look there. Was wondering how the fella over at Tainted Ideals inserted the video and it turns out it's not difficult. When I view a video in YouTube, it has the "embed" code right next to it! I just copy that into the Edit Html box here at blogspot.

This is a pretty good video. I don't follow every step, but I get the general idea. Further, it uses a principle that Darwin advanced in his Origin of Species; namely, that organ functions might evolve from previous functionality. When we look at, say, a flagellum, we don't ask "was every step getting to a flaggellum a useful as a flagellum." Rather, we ask, "Did it have any use at all?"

Ernst Mayr also talked about this sort of thing in his book. Anyway, this is a cool video.

2007-02-21T12:58:00.000-05:00

Does Belief in Evolution Require Faith?

No and maybe a little yes. I don't expect anyone to wake up one morning and decide that they will believe in evolution. I think I've said before, "People don't decide what they want to believe, only what they are going to profess."

I think there are people who accept evolution who do not understand it very well. I suspect many people who are taught evolution are not taught it very well, or do not learn it very well. There are some people who will accept evolution without actually understanding it, simply because they're atheists who are often not immune to the certainty bug that afflicts so many true believers.

However, belief in evolution only requires faith from those who do not understand. There are people who do not understand String Theory or Quantum Mechanics (I'm one of them) and for a person to accept these things would, I suppose, require some sort of confidence in the findings of people whom they have every reason to believe are more knowledgeable than they are. Namely, they're trusting scientists who have actually studied the issues.

But should we really call this confidence in the opinions of experts "faith"? If so, then at least it is a justified confidence. Should I actually call the confidence I place in my doctors "faith." I'm not a person to obsess over definitions and word usages, but sometimes words can be used in ways that detract from their intention. Using 'faith' in this way is a good example of this.

I don't know if this is an argument so much as an observation at this point, but I think this observation could support an argument that 'faith' should not include this sort of justified beliefs.

Next point - there are indeed people who have done a lot of studying on the subject of evolution. I include evolutionary scientists, of course, but also scientists in related fields whose work supports and is supported by evolutionary research. And there are a number of interested lay people (like myself) who have spent considerable time trying to actually understand what evolution is and how it works. We may not have as developed a view as the scientists, but I think we have a belief that rests not on faith, but on the evidences we have gathered, and the necessary inferences from the study we have done.

If you understand evolution, you don't need faith in it any more than you need faith in gravity or the germ theory of disease.

ID advocates and other creationists often insist that they have done their homework as well and they conclude that evolution requires at least as much faith - or even more - than their views. I think this is modest evidence that they haven't done as much homework as they believe themselves to have done, because belief in evolution only requires faith from those who don't understand it.

2007-02-20T23:23:00.000-05:00

Finished Rereading OOS the other Day

I've just about convinced myself that appreciation for Origin of Species is a proxy, if gross, measure for intellect. I can believe an intelligent person could read OOS and not be impressed, if he were incautious and read it fliply and with no attempt to understand. However, if a person of moderate intelligence reads it diligently and critically, he is rewarded with many times his investment, and having done so has earned a stripe for intellect.

Regardless of beliefs, if a person cannot read this book and appreciate the complete genius of its author, then that person is an incautious reader. He might be smart in some trivial sense, but he is not a very clear thinker. I mean it's easy now to think it so obvious, but considering the impediments he had, and the things he did not know, and the use he put to the VAST array of evidence he actually did have available to him - I mean, this guy is brilliant.

I have to say that I did not really appreciate it the first time I read it more than 20 years ago, even though when I read it I had already read enough that I was a firmly convinced evolutionist. I spent several months reading it this time, taking several days to read, re-read and digest each chapter. And I still think I could read this again and get even more out of it!

Trivia: I note that Darwin was aware of Ice Ages and land bridges. He states this clearly in Chapter XII. He was not, however, aware of continental drift.

One grave disappointment, though, is in numerous passages Darwin mentions a later book he intends to write that will expand on OOS, but he never gets around to writing it. Considering his other output, though, I don't hold this against him. It's still disappointing though.

I still say that the best book I've read so far for clearly articulating what evolution is is Ernst Mayr's "What Evolution Is." But for some silly reason I actually found OOS to be very exciting, almost like an adventure book. Can't say that about Mayr's book. And I can't believe I missed Darwin's excitement the first time through.

Ah, well. I'm glad I got this. Hope I'm around 25 years from now to do this again.

2007-02-19T19:15:00.000-05:00

Out of Context Rubbish from Denyse O'Leary

I came across a 2005 post by Denyse O'Leary on the subject of Intelligent Design where she mentions an quote from Stuart Kauffman apparently supporting ID science. She quotes a Washington Post article that included a quote from Kauffman.

"Give Johnson and the intelligent-design movement their due -- they are asking terribly important questions," says Stuart A. Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity at the University of Calgary. “ To question whether patterns and complexity, at the level of the cell or the universe, bespeak intelligent design is not stupid in the least."

I've heard similar (probably echoed) versions of this quote many times before and it's always been a little problematic for me. I have not read any of Kauffman's books, but I know very well who he is and part of what he has done. He's a *real* scientist. I know several people who are good friends of his - one person who studied under him. If Kauffman supports ID, I would consider that a pretty serious coup. I have immense respect for my colleagues who in turn have immense respect for Kauffman. Even if I were not aware of Kauffman's deep expertise in this area, the fact that I know some pretty smart guys who think Kauffman could one day win the Nobel is enough to give me some pause. But.

By chance I just picked up a new book today, Intelligent Thought, by John Brockman. This book contains essays from a number of scientists on the subject of ID, Stuart K. among them. I always wanted to read Kauffman's exact argument, so here goes:

"I am to present a rather nuanced view of intelligent design. I will argue that intelligent design is, at best, hardly science, and that insofar as it can be construed as science, the evidence that has accumumlated runs strongly against it. Thus, it is obvious that intelligent design should in no manner be taught in schools as a creditable alternative to Darwinian evolution. This is, were it needed, made evident by the passionate support of intelligent design by the religious right, whose suspicions as to the identity of the unspoken designer are all too obvious. No other body of ill-posed science, with no supporting data, has been shoveleed into the American school system. At base, the current pressure is scandalous."

But wait! There's more! The very next paragraph starts:

"Nevertheless, there is a core of "could be" science in intelligent design which must be acknowledged."

He goes on to give an analysis of this that I don't entirely agree with, but his conclusion is very clear:

"And therefore, intelligent design should surely not be taught as "another theory" worthy of consideration. It is not logically impossible that intelligent design is correct, and American should be loath to give it credence."

So much for Kauffman supporting this stealth-creationism. There's a number of good essays in this book, but I'll leave you with a very short quote from Leonard Susskind, the physicist who codiscovered String Theory, and author of The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design.

"...we have been treated to the silly spectacle of the Kansas school board (and their attorneys) debating the scientific merit of one of the greatest products of the human intellect: Darwin's theory of natural selection."

It's so very odd that in a scientific world where there is so much apparent controversy about the merits of evolution that the very highest tiers of ACTUAL, PRACTICING scientists support evolution - and the dregs from the very lowest tiers - like Dembski, Wells, Berlinski, and other's with similiar "scientific" credentials - want to save the world from it.

2007-02-19T02:17:00.000-05:00

Comic-Book Science

Sometimes I read comments so completely stupid, I have to go back and read them again - several times - to convince myself that the person actually typed it. One of those statements is the claim made that while scientists in the lab may have created new species (with fruit fly experiments, e.g.), they have never created any "new kinds." Of course this is no more relevant than the fact that physicists have never created a neutron star in the lab. Nothing in evolutionary theory says that humans should be able to create "new kinds."

Firstly, as I've mentioned previously, the term "kind" is so vaguely applied by IDers and other creationists that it's not useful.

Secondly, even Darwin knew that humans tend to look at physical characters to the exclusion of important internal and quite invisible characters. From chapter I of Origin of Species, "Man can hardly select, or only with much difficulty, any deviation of structure excepting such as is externally visible; and indeed he rarely cares for what is internal." More recently, Nachman and Crowell in 2000 wrote "Many previous estimates of the mutation rate in humans haverelied on screens of visible mutants" in an article in the journal Genetics. Even though Darwin noted that there tends to be a lot more variation under domestication than under Nature (first sentence in OOS), it is doubtful we are near so good as nature at extending variation in the direction of new genuses.

Thirdly, nobody who understands evolution in the slightest would expect that deviations on the level of genus could come about in a single generation or even in dozens - especially given the fact that humans so far concentrate on visible characters.

Fourth, there is plenty of deviation in Nature that is extreme and yet apparently creationists would call these deviations the "same kind." To wit, we have found whales with vestigial boney legs! Now either those legs are newly developed OR they are vestigial. Either way, no reasonable person could fail to acknowledge that evolution can produce macro-level changes. They would call these legged whales the same "Kind" as the parent stock, but they're substantially different. Presumably creationists would consider all trilobytes of the same kind and yet there is greater difference between some species of trilobytes than there is between humans and chimpanzees! Here's a quote form a eurekalert article "The vast differences between humans and chimpanzees are due more to changes in gene regulation than differences in individual genes themselves, researchers from Yale, the University of Chicago, and the Hall Institute in Parkville, Victoria, Australia argue in the March 9 issue of the journal Nature."

2007-02-18T04:24:00.000-05:00

Mom's Horse

My youngest daughter riding her grandma's horse, being led by my brother. It's a Kentucky quarterhorse, also known as an Appalachian quarterhorse.

Not much into horses myself. Haven't ridden one for decades (and didn't ride this one). Oldest daughter didn't try either. This is my parents' front yard. Mom's friend gave her this horse. I hope mother doesn't ride it - she's far to frail to chance it.

This horse hates dogs. This being the country (well, sorta), people often let their dogs roam wild. Also, there's a crapload of coyotes around this area. I heard them every day and night there (Southern TN). Anyway, some dogs have gone after the horse - and the horse came right back at them. The horse now will jump the fence to get at a dog it thinks is threatening and attempt to make canine mush by stomping it to death.

Mom believes in angels. My family follows native beliefs, though only my dad (step-dad, but I consider him my real father) is actually indian. All my brothers get into that stuff, but I don't. My dad is interesting. Extremely conservative, but he's a strong evolutionist.

He's spent a huge chunk of his life wandering the woods. When he was much younger, you could drop him naked in the middle of the woods and 2 weeks later he'd show up at your doorstep ready to kick your ass. I was out deer hunting with him once. The snow melted when we were out and the paths back to the car were overrun with water. It was night and it was drizzling and I pretty much figured we were gonna freeze to death. Everything was soaked and he started a really nice fire in about 5 minutes by taking tiny little twiglets from the very base of some pine trees. Neat trick. Anyway, he's pretty familiar with animals and plants. Everytime someone tries to bring up creationism to him, he rolls his eyes. Most people where he comes from are creationists.

Interestingly, I never knew he was an evolutionist until I was in high school. At the time, I was a creationist.

2007-02-16T18:51:00.000-05:00

Kent Hovind

There has been some good blogging done on Kent Hovind, but a while ago I found an interesting blurb from YouTube. I thought it was at tainted ideals, but I can't find it now. Maybe I saw it somewhere else and got confused. Anyway, I went to YouTube and did a search on Hovind and found another interesting video, this one a bit longer.

This is great stuff!

But there's also this retarded nonsense which is frankly a little scary. Any complete idiot can go out and say any stupid thing. The Internet has made it a lot easier for knowledge to be disseminated, but it's also enabled stupidity to be disseminated a lot easier.

2007-02-16T14:13:00.000-05:00

Science Unrestricted

Just had a lunchtime meeting for volunteers helping to plan for the Science Night at work. It's good to work with people who are smart and involved. A number of good ideas came out of it.

I would like to start calling "Science Night" just "Science Unrestricted" and then come up with a theme every year. My cohort thought of that last year and it's a danged good title. We'll see how that goes.

I would kinda like to put on an evolution exhibit, but wouldn't want to make things controversial. However, there's a way of doing this that might go under the radar. I wrote some code to implement an evolutionary program to solve TSP a few years back. I don't have the old code, but I could come up with something pretty quick I think. Would need to find someone who would present it, though, as I'll be too busy to present. Maybe next year.

2007-02-15T10:26:00.000-05:00

Information Loss

One thing that worries me is the thought that knowledge and information might be lost. It's not that I think my own musings are worth preserving, but things like snopes and talk.origins, as well as various blogs. It's not clear how much new information bloggers are adding, but I think we are helping in the sense of synthesizing information.

Despite ReasonableKansan's assertion that "evolution is NOT rocket science," my experience has taught me very clearly that many people do not understand it very well - including a number of people with very firm opinions about it. I'm not just talking about creationists and ID advocates. I've met some evolutionists who have some important misconceptions about it. In fact, I myself have had some misconceptions about things - and never would have realized my mistake had not someone corrected me.

So I think there's real value to blogs and other web sources - not mine, but someone's. But it's not a given that these sources will always be around. Some people may have taken years of conscious, but also unconscious thinking to come up with just the right way to phrase something to make a particular distinction clear or to develop just the right analogy - and the thought that this could be lost is a burden.

It's not just that certain observations might be lost, but that they might become overwhelmed that bothers me. So what if certain knowledgeable people devote substantial amounts of their time and effort to clarifying certain confusing things if they are dwarfed by the number of complete idiots and incompetent authorities. People looking for answers will tend to look at the quick answers they think they can understand, rather than the more complicated answers that require some effort.

Humanity has lost and forgotten knowledge before. Knowledge comes slow and sure, so we will probably regain whatever is lost, but in the meantime, we may be adrift.

2007-02-14T16:29:00.000-05:00

Data Analysis

Someone at work sent a link to this presentation that shows an attempt to make sense of publicly available data. This is seriously cool. Also this guy is pretty funny.

2007-02-14T11:29:00.000-05:00

Correlation

There seems to be a very high correlation between those who understand science and evolution and those who accept evolution, and an equally high correlation between those who accept ID and creationism, and those who fail to understand evolution or how science works.

IDers and other creationists will typically insist that they "know about" evolution and "have studied it extensively" and then they go on to make a bunch of silly assertions about it that are so stupid that no one who has done an honest day's research into the subject would make. It becomes immediately apparent that their "research" consisted of browsing carelessly through a few sentences of OOS, reading a "scientific" handout they got at Sunday School and a numerous hours of perusing political blogs and web sites.

The fact is that people like ReasonableKansans have a "knowledge" on the subject of evolution that amounts to nothing more than barbershop gossip. On the one hand, if evolutionists say nothing at all to them, they howl about how we're silent because we can't answer them. OTOH, if we do respond, they make utterly stupid statements that nobody who has done an honest day's research would make. If we say, "You haven't done your homework," they respond, "AHA! You've proved our point! We win the argument because you're all a bunch of name-callers!"

Where to begin:

1. It's nonsense to assert you've won an argument just because the other guy resorts to name-calling.

2. The evolution deniers are the ones who are actually doing the name-calling.

3. I don't know about other evolutionists, but I know I try to make VERY clear that I think creationists are often intelligent in the things they know about, but that their ignorance is manifest and clear in the area of evolution. That's not name-calling. That's a fact.

4. The deniers tend to conflate many issues. The biggest failing they have is that they don't recognize their own inability to judge. They tend to be knowledgeable in areas like politics and bible quotes, but not in scientific areas, so that when someone like Dembski or Wells comes along, they don't have any basis for determining their qualifications in comparison to actual scientists. They are so oblivious that they don't actually know what constitutes "doing your homework."

2007-02-14T11:05:00.000-05:00

The French Teacher

I finally got to have coffee with my daughter's French teacher, Mr. A., last Friday. We met at a Starbuck's near the school and talked for about 4 hours. Turns out his father is a professor of classics and they are about to read The Origin of Species together. When he was little, they did not leave the dinner table before the dad told a Greek myth. How cool is that?

I think maybe the dad is a creationist and the teacher is an ID advocate. We talked about it a little and I mentioned my web page. I also referred him to Ernst Mayr's book, What Evolution Is, as the best book I've found to explain exactly what the title indicates.

We talked about our kids - his is a multicultural home too! (I think he said his wife was from Rwanda.) We talked about our philosophies of raising kids. I'm thinking I may invite his family to our home some time.

I also talked about some of the work I do and how I'm interested in complex adaptive systems; how I work with interns in our division; how I'm working on the community outreach with the school system; how important I think it is for parents to convey to their children not just with words but with every nuanced action that they themselves believe how important school is. I probably got a bit tedious on that point.

I think I'd also like to do something to show appreciation for her Chemistry teacher. This is her last year with that chemistry teacher. I don't think she's ever loved any teacher so much as she loves Ms. E. This might be perceived as an attempt to suck up, but I'm thinking of doing it in the summer time, when the teacher might have more time available and after my spawn is no longer in her class.

2007-02-13T17:59:00.000-05:00

Evolution Deniers are Ignorant of Evolution

They may be - and I'm sure are - brilliant at many things, but they just don't know anything worth knowing about evolution or science.

Over at ReasonableKansans, we're informed that evolution is not rocket science and that macro-evolution is based on inference. This entirely overlooks the fact that the existence of electrons (of NUMEROUS examples) is also inferential. In fact there are plenty of subtleties in evolution. If it were easy, these guys wouldn't make such stupid statements about it.

The evolution deniers are not aware of the diversity of the evidence for evolution - either the scope, nor the depth of it. They are guided by their comic-book understanding of science and evolution to conclusions that are laughably nonsensical. Evolution doesn't just "explain the fossil record." It explains the distribution of the fossil record - why fossil animals found in Australia, for example, are closer to the living animals found in the same place than they are to the living animals found elsewhere. It explains the distribution of living animals we find today. Read chapter 11 of the Origin of Species - carefully, and not like a 10 year old reads his history assignment so he can get on to playing video games.

Evolution deniers - despite all their claims to the contrary - don't know what they're talking about. That fact is abundantly obvious to anyone who has done an honest day's research on the subject.

2007-02-13T15:19:00.000-05:00

HS Students asked to Swap Gum

Just read an article on MSN. A guest speaker to a Maryland HS health class, invited students to share gum. Irony alert: this was a health class, the subject was STDs, and the speaker was from the Rockville Pregnancy Center. They have a test to help you figure out if you're going to heaven.

2007-02-13T11:05:00.000-05:00

Chain Chain Chain

I've noticed a similar chain of reasoning that takes place in conversations with people who resort to magical thinking. It's not so much a chain of reasoning as an evolution of their thinking. It starts out by them saying, "Well, ANYTHING is possible and we don't now ALL the facts." Okay, bizarre explanations are possible.

Within a few sentences that becomes, "Well, without all the facts, ALL possibilities are equally likely!" At this point, they are saying that the most outrageous explanation is just as likely as the mundane explanation - after all, we don't know ALL the facts.

But somehow, as the conversation progresses, their statements are transmogrified to an insistence that the most outlandish explanations are somehow MUCH MORE likely than the prosaic ones. Usually, they throw in a quote from Sherlock Holmes about how "when you've looked at every place obvious" or by Einstein about "explanations needing to be as simple as possible, but no simpler." Often this is accompanied by a strong insistence on the reliability of human testimony.

Examples of this are the various claims about Big Foot, UFOs, and Lourdes.

2007-02-12T15:04:00.000-05:00

Kinds

Evolution deniers often use the term "kind" to distinguish micro- from macro- evolution. Evolution, they say, cannot create a new kind. This is a silly argument, but I disagree with counter-argument by some evolutionists, namely that the word 'kind' has not scientific definition.

I don't agree with this counter-argument at all. I can't think of any reason why creationists couldn't define the word in some useful way and see what happens. Either the scientific community would find it useful or they wouldn't. I think the real problem here isn't that creationists are using this "new" term, but that their use of the term is so vague. Essentially the term "kind" refers to any degree of genetic change that humans have not directly witnessed. That usage is vague and useless.

Creationists are very curious. On the one hand, they seem to deny any sort of inferential reasoning can result in facts. No one has ever physically seen a lungfish evolve into an amphibian; therefore, they constitute distinct "kinds." Humans and apes are different kinds, because no one has ever seen humans and apes evolving from a common ancestor.

As I've mentioned previously, this is a profoundly stupid argument. For example, no one has ever seen an electron and yet the existence of electrons and hydrogen atoms are not generally presented as tentative knowledge in any degree. We do not have to witness a thing to know it is a fact. The mistake here is due to the comic-book version of science promulgated by IDers and other creationists.

On the other hand, creationists are very quick to jump from vague understanding to steadfast, incontrovertible conclusion using very weak inference and very tenuous connections when it comes to proving the shortcomings of evolution as many science bloggers have pointed out.

2007-02-07T13:53:00.000-05:00

Curriculum Night

I attended curriculum night at the HS last night. Each department distributed brochures explaining what courses will be offered, what the advantages are of various courses, what the requirements are, what kind of topic and covered, and how much work students can expect to do. We also get to look at the texts and ask questions of the faculty.

I don't get a lot out of it, but I try to go to many school functions. I want my kids to have no mistake that I think school is important. Most parents value education the same way couch-potatoes value making a million dollars. Just saying, "Education is important" and writing nasty notes is not sufficient.

Anyway, I was talking to an English teacher about my oldest being board in regular English. I had suggested she take AP English, but she didn't want to take too many APs. Consequently, she's been bored in English and hasn't learned much of anything. This teacher suggested approaching her actual teacher and asking for extra work. I tried to explain, "She stays up till midnight doing homework. She doesn't need extra work."

"But you said she's bored in class."

"She doesn't need extra work. She needs different work. She's spent the whole year learning things she already learned in 8th grade." I don't think she ever got it. The approach seems universally to be to "reward" good students by loading them down with more drudge work. I don't know. On the one hand, I think teaching has improved a lot since I was in K-12. They have pretty good lesson plans, they have computer grading, they have interactive notebooks, and lesson planners - all really great stuff. But while the technology has changed a lot, as well as some of the processes, the mindset has been largely constant.

2007-02-05T20:37:00.000-05:00

Science Night

I don't know if I mentioned it, but I'm a "community outreach coordinator" where I work, which is to say that I organize the volunteers. We do tutoring, science fair judging, teaching classes, and a few other things. We also do catered lunches for teachers and invite them to share with us their ideas for how we can improve the program (very cheap); we hire one or two teachers in the summer as interns so they can apply the stuff they presumably know about; we hosted some meetings for the school; we had an essay contest ($300 prize, topic "relation of science and art"); and we put on a Science Night.

For Science Night (we call it "Science Unrestricted") we had exhibits put on by employees and some invited presenters (NASA, The Koshland Museum, etc.) - and then invited every K12 student in the city. We had over 250 students last year - about 200 more than I had anticipated. That doesn't include the parents, teachers, and administrators who came. This year we're inviting a few more outside groups in - generally government or professional organizations. My co-coordinator and I actually have a modest budget from the company to do all this.

If everyone there became a scientist or engineer, that would be great, but that's not my personal goal for the program. I think getting kids excited about it and having fun with it is a start. I think it's a success if a few of the kids leave realizing that science is accessible to them; that it's part of our common cultural heritage and they have a right to know it; and that they have a responsibility to learn it to be the best informed citizens they can be.

We have some other ideas for things we'd like to do, but I'd really like to buddy up with other companies like ours. A few ideas include:

1. Offering awards to teachers in the city - a smaller scale of the Olmstead prize.
2. Having teacher/student days where we have, say, 5 teachers and 5 students in various disciplines come out and be hosted half day by our company, have a breakfast, maybe a few interactive presentations; and then half a day at a similar company where that company gives them lunch, a few interactive presentations, etc. The details are sketchy in my head right now. We need to think through how this might work.
3. The ACMs of some local universities have programming contests, maybe we could work on brokering an arrangement with the universities where the students who won might get scholarships to any of the universities involved. Again, skimpy on the details here, but I think we could work something out.
4. Another thing still in the pre-pre-pre thinking stage, actually my cohort's idea, but very good. Don't want to talk about it, but it's a great idea and something we could maybe get a few other big companies involved with. We're not sure.

One of our big goals has been to create a sustainable program. My cohort was the one who first mentioned this goal to me. Never occurred to me. But once she mentioned it, I've commandeered the idea. Right is right.

We have so much on our plates - and we're also both research staff members where we work. That is, we get payed to do analytic work. And our real jobs are sufficiently difficult and time-consuming that we need to handle this extra-curricular stuff one step at a time.

Still, as we get better at it, I think we can gradually start evolving our focus and accreting new ideas about how best to help the school system.

2007-02-04T00:27:00.000-05:00

Faith is Darkness

I distinguish between faith and belief. People do not choose what to believe - only what they profess. I assume that most theists cannot choose to disbelieve in a god, any more than I can choose to believe in one. Faith, OTOH, is what you keep telling yourself is true, even when you don't believe it. My first brush with atheism, for example, is what I call today infantile atheism. I told myself I didn't believe, but I really did. I was simply angry with the religious people around me. That's very different from the profound atheism I experience today. I do not choose to be an atheist. I could not possibly choose to be a christian, for example.

"William James used to preach the 'will to believe' ... For my part I should wish to preach the will to doubt. What is wanted is not the 'will to believe', but the 'wish to find out', which is the exact opposite."
-- Bertrand Russell, Skeptical Essays
(Vaguely remembered from reading Carl Sagan's Broca's Brain more than 20 years ago)

I have opinions about humanity, our ability to know, our place in the Universe. My opinions are no better than anyone else's, but they are more important to me than those of other people in the sense that they have the strongest impact on my life. It's difficult to live by principles that you haven't internalized - and I'm not apt to internalize external opinions that I can't assimilate. This collection in my head of factoids, perceptions, reasonings, and conclusions is inchoate and fuzzy, and is undeserving of being called a 'philosophy', per se. It is what it is.

An acquaintance of mine once pointed out that everything alive today is descended from a long line of living things stretching back to the first one or the first few living forms. (Actually, Darwin said this before my acquaintance, but my acqaintance tends to think that everyone is stealing his ideas.)

While the whole of human existence doesn't amount to a flash in the pan in the scheme of things, it's what we have. It's what we've made of it. It's our heritage, if you will. And the vast majority of that time was spent with us crawling or climbing or jumping around like any other animal, huddled in damp caves, or clinging to branches, or clutching each other in some cramped, cold hut.

But we reached a point where we were not entirely like other animals. At one point evolution enabled us to acquire a language substantially more powerful than that of other animals, and to build and use tools, to organize ourselves and our activities in ways vastly different than those of other animals. There was probably not an exact moment when we became human. It was probably a gradual process. "Natura non facit saltum," was Darwin's motto in The Origin of Species.

We developed society and culture. We learned AND WE PASSED ON WHAT WE LEARNED. Probably for most of human pre-history, the ideas were transmitted orally: how to make a fire, build a hut, track game, tan a hide. How many hundreds or thousands of years it must have taken our ancestors to learn those secrets! Sadly, they may have had to learn these lessons more than once. There have been events even in recorded history of catastrophic losses of human knowledge. Examples include the elimination and criminalization of many chinese books in the Qin dynasty, the loss of the Library at Alexandria, and the loss of western knowledge that took place during what we now affectionately know as The Dark Ages.

Our ancestors knew failure and triumph, but fear and cold and struggle were the greater part of their existence. But something happened. There came a time when they could think outside of the next calorie. Our ancestors looked out into the world one day and realized the vastness - and were humbled. Things happened for reasons they could not begin to fathom and they simply made up explanations. Understand that I'm not relating what happened. I'm relating one of a myriad of possibilities. But something like this surely took place.

How long we struggled to figure out written language! And numerals! The movement of the stars! Age upon age we lived and learned and passed on our wisdom - or failed to do so. The simplest shard of knowledge we take for granted today took millennia for our ancestors to acquire. But then as now, much of what was considered knowledge was probably false or at least not always true. We had not developed formal reasoning yet!

The knowledge we have now is so puny compared to The Ultimate Truth, but it's ours. It's what we have. It's what we earned, or what our ancestors earned for us. And this knowledge, feeble though it is, is the heritage of every human being on Earth. Our ancestors struggled lifetimes to learn it and we are ungrateful not to take this knowledge and reverence it.

One of the techniques used by fundamentalist christians to convert people when they peddle their religion door-to-door is guilt. "But he died for YOUR sins!" Leaving aside the utter stupidity of this entire chain of "reasoning" that underlies such a technique, it's brilliantly manipulative. I think of these probably imaginary sufferings of a single guy and I stack that up against the real suffering of nameless individuals throughout history and prehistory, suffering that yielded eventually substantial fruits we enjoy today - and I'm honestly offended by the unfairness of it all.

All the while there has been knowledge, there has been anti-knowledge. There has been fear and jealousy. There has been ambition and longing and passion. These are not evil emotions. They're part of what we are. But we have to recognize the effect these emotions have on our collective search for knowledge. Our knowledge is our light. It's feeble, but it's not insignificant. Moreover, it's OURS. Our forefathers and foremothers have bequeathed it to us.

Faith, too, is a human response. Perhaps it's an emotion - I'm not sure. I don't think it's evil, though I think it often as that potential. It's not clear whether it is an integral part of what we are. It doesn't have a direct relationship with truth or knowledge, the way it is purported and believed to have. People can have faith in many things - other people, imaginary creatures, the laws of physics. Some forms of faith are justified and others are not. But we need to understand what faith is - not as some mystical force, but as a human response. God may be outside the scope of science, but faith appears to be a purely neurological activity and so faith should be amenable to scientific scrutiny. Maybe by learning more about how faith works in the brain, people will come to understand why they believe certain things. That alone might be enough. Or maybe not. The will to believe, and also the will to avoid understanding seem to be very common.

At a bare minimum, we collectively need to understand that faith doesn't have a lot to contribute in the realm of reliable knowledge. "Knowing by faith" should be a contradiction in terms to any reasonable person, but there are certainly people who know lots of things that are utterly false. We need to nurture a society that appreciates discovery.

I have long held and often stated that the central difference between the scientist and the religionist is that the scientist is attempting to discover the truth, while the religionist is attempting to define it. That is the primrose path. That is the path that allows knowledge to be conflated with anti-knowledge, or worse, to be lost altogether. That is the path of darkness.

(Most of this post is a reworking from something I posted on a bulletin board)

2007-01-31T22:44:00.000-05:00

Degrees of Silliness

People believe so many crazy things. There just doesn't seem to be any idea so utterly insane that you can't find a few people who will swear it must be true. However "fair" one might imagine one's self for positing the intellectual equivalence of all ideas, the least reflection will show that many strongly held believes are mutually incompatible. The only reasonable conclusion is that there are some people who are extremely certain that they know certain things that are false.

Magical Thinking permeates society. It's easy. It obviates the need for thinking too deeply or expending too much effort on rational solutions. Unfortunately, results obtained in this way are typically not very reliable.

Nevertheless, Magical Thinking is very common. There are people who, presented with any unfamiliar situation, will instantly eliminate a half dozen or more very reasonable explanations to favor of one that is as useless as it is incompatible with the known laws of science. It's like they're bobbing for apples and always come up with the one in twenty crawling with worms. At first, they present their fantastic explanation as if it were as likely as any other explanation. They then systematically and with great panache eliminate each more likely explanation using leaps of logic and evidence that would make any reasonable person blush. It's like you're watching Sherlock Holmes from the Bizarro Homework. By the end of their presentation, the most ridiculous possible explanation is posited as the only one viable.

But not all silly ideas are equally silly. ESP, faith-healing, shroud of turin, alien visitors, precognition, big foot, nessie, mind-reading, ghosts, fairies, and so on may all be hoaxes and they may all be silly, but not to the same degree.

For example, I'm pretty sure that Big Foot and Nessie are hoaxes, but the existence of neither of these things would conflict with any law of science I'm aware of. There's no evidence for these things, but Newton/Einstein are in tact. Alien Visitors, OTOH, are a bit different. There's a lack of convincing, non-exaggerated evidence, but moreso this would almost certainly entail a mistake in physics. These aliens would have to be from far away and would either be capable of FTL (faster-than-light) travel or live very long lives or maintain focus on a multigenerational crew and mission. Alien Visitors are, I think, much less likely than big foot. shroud of turin would be next, maybe, and then Mind-reading would be next, I think. Probably the most ludicrous beliefs would be precognition or ghosts.

2007-01-31T22:38:00.000-05:00

Hybridism

I've had trouble following chapter VIII in Origin of Species, Hybridism, but I think I've finally figured out what he's saying. I'm more convinced than ever that even if evolution were wrong, Darwin would still be considered a brilliant scientist. He's taken contradictory evidence from different experimentizers (hehe) and explained how they might have gotten such seemingly incompatible results. I've got some more reading in this chapter, but I'm very impressed at how he has solved this conundrum.

2007-01-30T22:39:00.000-05:00

Wasted Effort

There are a number of things that bother me about Intelligent Design and other forms of creationism. Of course, the fact that religionists are once again trying to abuse the law to pass off shakey philosophy as science is high on the list. The fact that they detract from the efforts of real scientists is also on the list. But the thing that nags me is the idea of all the wasted effort of the creationists themselves.

I've never met a creationist I considered a particularly scholarly person. Generally, they talk big words, but don't think deep thoughts. Most of the time, they haven't done anything remotely resembling an honest day's homework on the subject they're arguing about. However, they do put a lot of effort what they're doing. There are a crapload of anti-evolution sites on the web, from AiG to UD, to evolution-facts. While AiG and UD are pretty unscholarly, sites like evolution-facts and many others are just comicly stupid.

But the thing is the people who run these sites aren't completely stupid. They're grossly ignorant of evolution. They don't seem to actually understand anything of consequence about science. But many of them actually have considerable talent and would be considered intelligent, if not brilliant, in casual conversation about things they actually understand - web design, computer repair, training dogs, horticulture, ham radio, amateur astronomy, etc. But instead of applying themselves to things for which they actually have an aptitude, they have chosen to study and write about things they don't understand very well. Oddly, they write many gigabytes about things they don't understand. Frankly, some of them are just too stupid to ever understand much of anything, but I'm pretty sure that most of them are capable of understanding the subject. Some of them are just flat-out liars, but I think most actually mean well. They're capable of reading carefully, of understanding well, of connecting the dots, and even of articulating clearly and correctly. But somehow they've gotten sidetracked, stuck in a do-loop, if you will. Their logic circuits are broken on this subject and they're delusional. There are some people who look at television snow and see a signs from aliens or from God.

Some of them could probably do an admirable job teaching web design to inner city kids, or math to kids on the reservation. Instead, they do faux research on something they haven't spent an honest day trying to understand. They expend all their efforts and abilities into defeating a theory they don't understand, promoting anti-knowledge, when they could be improving society. And this is a tragedy.

2007-01-29T15:41:00.000-05:00

More on the Myth about Einstein's Wife

I wrote a blurb about the Urban Legend about Einstein's wife, Mileva Maric having done his homework for him. I was just over at the PBS website on Einstein's Wife.

There I saw the following note:
"Editor's Note - (December 19, 2006)
The contents of this site are currently under review by site producers in response to viewer concerns about the historical accuracy of the information presented here. You can read more about the dispute in the PBS Ombudsman's detailed article on the topic. Oregon Public Broadcasting, the producer of this companion web site, will be consulting with the broadcast program producer and outside experts to conduct a thorough review of the criticisms before determining what, if any, changes should to be made to the site content. Future notices on the progress of the content review will be posted here."

This is remarkable. This is no knee-jerk reaction, but they let their readers know that there are questions about the article and that they're checking into them. Congratulations to Allen Esterson for doing the research that I'm sure helped get this reviewed. Also congratulations to us and our children - the beneficiaries of his research into this subject.

I'm very impressed with PBS. This is the way good scholars conduct themselves, I think. I guess they're not scholars, actually, but a media outlet. Nevertheless, they're presenting documentaries as having a scholarly basis - and so broadly, they are presenting some of their opinions as scholarly opinions, i.e. they are assuming the role of scholars. This is the way you do it. You don't have to come out and say you're wrong, before you understand the facts. Just say,

"We're going to examine the issue." (And then, of course, have a very careful examination.) This is, I think, a sufficient warning to their readers.

I can't help but contrast this to the behavior of another site that presents itself as scholarly; namely, Uncommon Descent. Those guys just put post after post where they're shooting from the hip. You can spend a lot of time carefully trying to understand what they're saying and why they're saying it and then they give some glib answer in response, if they respond at all.

2007-01-28T02:57:00.000-05:00

Can't Sleep

Took Ginger to the dog park today, a normal thing for me to do on a Saturday when the weather is agreeable. Met a fellow there I had met a few weekends ago. He had a perfect miniature bull terrier, among my favorite breeds. And this one was quite amiable with other dogs. His parents send it to him from Korea where they had brought it from a breeder. They are breeders themselves, but not of bull terriers. Anyway, he's a busy guy and it turns out he's been trying to email me to let me HAVE the dog - not buy, HAVE. His parents payed equivalent of US$500 for it. I'm thinking it's worth a little over $1000. It has papers and both of its parents are champions. I don't care about that, though. She's such a cute little thing, and very good natured.

Anyway, my wife has agreed to let me keep the dog for 1 week and see if she can tolerate it. I'm very curious to see how well Suni gets along with Ginger. Ginger is actually my girls' dog, but she thinks she's mine. I think I'll alternate each one in the crate when no one's home. They're both females and they're both a bit headstrong, though they each get along with other dogs generally.

This is the breed I begged my dad for when I was in HS. I never asked for anything, but one of these dogs. I got a yellow lab instead. His name was domino. Excellent dog. He was the son of my dad's dog, Suki.

I would have talked to the guy all day, except my oldest had a district swim meet. Looks like she'll get a medal. She made it to regionals with her 50yd free and both of her relays. No idea how things will pan out there, but I'm so proud of her.

2007-01-26T10:41:00.000-05:00

Logic, Education, and Evolution

I don't have time right now to give a fair presentation of my thoughts on this subject, but I want a place-holder. Eventually I really want to write an essay on logic, how important it is, how it's valued incorrectly, how it's largely misunderstood even by people who believe they are teaching it, how it's a more complicated subject than most people believe. I hate bitching, though, and not making a positive recommendation. Any jackass can complain. So eventually I'll get around to this. I owe it to myself and to anyone silly enough to follow my ramblings.

Meanwhile, my oldest swims districts today. She's seeded second for 50yd free. When that stuff is over, I've got to get back on that Nature article comparing Coelacanth and human DNA that I promised to reread. I've been dreading it, because I know I'm going to have to keep a danged dictionary open. But in the back of my mind, I really need to think this logic thing through a bit.

There's a number of things we don't teach very well - evolution, statistics, logic, philosophy of science. The problem isn't just that those things aren't taught, but that in some cases what is taught is actually wrong. ID advocates and other creationists are right about some of their criticisms, but they're right for the wrong reasons and have drawn the wrong conclusions.

The cure for teachers who not teaching evolution well isn't to water down the education of evolution or to teach non-science like ID creationism. The cure is either to train the teachers better or to get teachers who understand the subject better.

Anyway, I need to organize my thoughts better on this.

2007-01-24T11:44:00.000-05:00

Teachers and DoDDS Schools

DoDDS stands for Department of Defense Dependents Schools.

I was pretty pleased with education in DoDDS schools and pretty annoyed by the experiences in the civilian schools. I never thought the DoDDS schools were all that much into telling us what to do and when. My recollection is I had more freedom there and less harassment than any other place.

I never cared for most of my teachers. I had a few really good ones, a lot of crappy ones, and a lot who were just mediocre. I did, however, later come to realize that some of the ones I didn't like all that much were really pretty good, but I wasn't smart enough to figure that out till it was too late.

In fact, I had some really sorry teachers and thanks to them I have a lasting loathing and general mistrust for teachers in general ... but the great ones, well ... what they gave me is ME.

I attended numerous schools. My parents moved around and I went to several in different places. I was born in Louisville, KY originally. Then we moved to New Hampshire. The teachers treated me like I was retarded. I couldn't do anything. All I can remember really (besides getting beaten up, humiliated, and continually rebuked) is that I was always - ALWAYS - unhappy. I failed the second grade. In 3rd, whenever they did math, they would take me out of class and walk me to the other end of the building to take math with the first graders. At the time I really hated this, but it might have been for the best in the long run. By the 4th grade, we had moved back to KY and I had begun to teach myself the rudiments of algebra. Those early teachers - well, they didn't seem to really understand what they were teaching. Even in retrospect, I think they just didn't understand what they were teaching very well.

But the thing I really hated about them was the fact that they were liars. They brainwashed you into not protecting yourself. "If someone tries to fight, don't do it. Come get us." Well, I did, and then they promptly did nothing. I was getting beaten up every single day in school until one day I brought a knife in and shoved it in a guy's face. The beatings stopped. I was still miserable. I began to eradicate every nuance of 'southern speak' from my habits of speech. It was bad enough that the kids at school were making fun of me without the teachers giving me 'the tone' every time I opened my mouth.

My first really good teacher was Mr. Devine in the 5th grade. He mostly just gave us SRAs and these block thingies with papers kinda like SRAs. Each paper had 3 views of an object constructed from the blocks and you had to make the object. I loved it. I was in the advanced reading group already. I tested at 12th grade reading level. I began to realize I wasn't so stupid after all. Probably I developed an inflated sense of my intelligence, but I have to say that felt a lot better than the opposite sense.

Mrs. Clarke, 7th grade math. When I took her class, I thought I only learned 2 things: canceling fractions and something else I've forgotten. Later, I realized the gift she gave me. Every morning, first thing, we would do math drills. As a result I've never met anyone who could do simple math quicker than I could. Well, back then..now the use of a calculator has dumbed me down, but that was a very useful skill at one time. Interesting sidenote: once in an assembler (computer science) class, there were only two 100s on the test. Both were from people who didn't use calculators!

Mrs Rich, 8th grade math. Let me start on algebra with two other kids in the back of the room. We were 'together' in the back of the room, but we never talked to each other and we each worked independently. Went through the whole book by myself. Worked atmy own pace. This was great.

Mr. Dewitt, 9th grade geometry. Taught the class without a book. (They were locked in storage just a few miles from the school! Some union shenanigans.) Was really off the wall. If we didn't want to work on a day, he would cancel class and we'd talk about anything we wanted. But we were all pretty highly motivated and interested. He was also very accepting of novel approaches to problems. No. That's an understatement. Actually he was very encouraging of them.

Mr. Sipes from 9th to 12th grade: algebra II, computer math, trig, analytic geometry, calculus. This guy was just plain great. Interesting, intelligent, very patient. Really tried to get in your mind and understand how you were thinking...didn't just say, "Well, you're wrong." but would help you understand how things went.

Mr. Hockensmith, 10th and 11th grade...latin I and II. "Bis dat qui cito dat." (He gives twice who gives quickly.) "Qui docet, discet." (He who teaches learns.) Another amazing teacher. Very gruff sounding man, but a regular softie. He really had a knack for bringing everything together. Frankly, I could do English, but I never really understood my own language's grammar till I studied Latin under him. He talked about History, Culture, and Language, daily life. I loved that class. Sadly, I don't remember much from those years, but I still like reciting sometimes "Nox erat, et terris animalia somnus habebat." (It was night and sleep possessed the animals of the forest) and "Quo usque tandem abutere Catalina patienta nostra?" (How long, Cataline, will you continue to try our patience?)

Mrs. Speck, 12th grade honors reading (a 6 wk course). She let us read just about anything we wanted to. There were three lists. You hadda pick two books from each list to read through the course. You could pick all six books from the last list, if you wanted, but then you couldn't go back to the easier lists. If you wanted to read something that wasn't on the lists, you could tell her and she would tell you to which list you could apply it. Before this class it didn't much occur to me that I would actually like reading stuff that wasn't either science or science fiction.

Mrs. Schlinker - here's one I didn't appreciate until it was far too late. Old school. Very old school. But she made us think about what we were saying - not just what we thought we were saying, but what we were actually saying. If there's one teacher I could go back and apologize to for having been a jackass, she's the one.

Coming out of high school, my father sat me down at the table and told me to give up any hope of going to college. There was just no way this was going to happen. I would have to get a job instead. Meanwhile I earned a presidential and a congressional appointment to West Point. I went for a short while and then decided I didn't care for the military. Left, came back to Louisville and got a master's at the local engineering school.

I'm moderately amused by my earliest recollections from school when it was very clear the teachers considered me a mentally retarded trouble-maker. Fortunately, I eventually had some outstanding teachers, most of whom I've listed above.

Every hope I had that I could succeed, I owe to these gems. Some people sport rubies and topaz and saphire, gold chains or silver bling. Everywhere I go, I too am adorned, not around my neck or wrist or crown, but around my soul, by precious jewels bearing names like Mrs. Rich and Mr. Sips and Mr. Devine.

2007-01-23T17:11:00.000-05:00

The Olmsted Prize at Williams College

This is an outstanding idea. I'm sure there have been smarter people who have brought this up on blogspot before me, but it's worth bringing it up again.

"Each fall, Williams invites seniors to nominate outstanding high school teachers for the George Olmsted Jr. Class of 1924 Prize, which awards $3,000 to each winning teacher and $2,500 to each teacher's school. Winners are also flown to campus for graduation weekend and honored at Commencement. Established in 1984, the prize is funded by an endowment from the estates of George Olmsted Jr. '24 and his wife, Frances, who wished to recognize excellence in secondary school teaching."

Thomas Friedman wrote an essay about this back in June of 2005.

I really wish U. of Louisville had given me the opportunity to nominate some of my teachers - my Latin teacher, Mr. Hockensmith and my Calculus teacher, Mr. Sipes would be potentials.

I wrote an essay some time ago about my experiences with various "education systems" that I'll post next.

2007-01-23T13:11:00.000-05:00

The French Teacher

So I'm trying to arrange a lunch (or coffee or breakfast or dinner) with my oldest daughter's French teacher. She's fond of him, even though she thinks he's a bit distrait. She likes him much better than some of the other students in the class - who are often disrespectful and downright nasty to him. Unfortunately, many of them believe that because they're only taking the class, because "colleges like to see at least three years of a foreign language" that they shouldn't actually be expected to have to work at the subject.

They think he's wasting time by talking about French culture and history. They think he's wasting time by going over less vocabulary and more verb conjugations. I think they've just gotten accustomed to pushing the guy around.

But my daughter likes him. She usually only likes her math and science classes, but she thinks he's a good teacher - with the potential to be a great teacher, if he'd stop letting the whiners in class steal all of the class time with their screwing around.

I tried to meet up with him a few months back, we just couldn't find a good time. Hopefully this week we can get together and just talk. I'd like to take all of my daughters' best teachers out to lunch, but that might be overdoing it. I'd just like to talk to them, find out what kind of people they, etc. Mostly, I'd like them to understand to their core how much I appreciate the fact that they are good teachers.

I'm not Mr. Smarmy. I can be a serious dick when I think they're incompetent or when they're screwing around or being bullies. I mean it. More than once I've drawn teachers to tears from blasting them. I believe in letting teachers know as clearly as I can what I think they're doing right and wrong. Sometimes they don't want to hear the bad stuff. That's when it ugly. But most of the time I've been impressed with the response I've gotten from the school system so far.

The key for me is learning how to not fire off an email when I'm not thinking clearly. I go the kid and really grill her to find out the exact details. It's not pleasant for either of us, but it's necessary I understand the Truth as well as I can before I unload both barrels. Usually, when I take the time to get the facts straight, and am careful in how I articulate things, there is a decent outcome.

The problem is that I don't feel like I'm conveying quite sufficiently to the good teachers exactly how much appreciated they are. I'm going to try to do something about that. If this goes well, I think I might try for lunch with my youngest daughter's orchestra teacher - who is a phenomenal woman. I'm not sure how to go about inviting her. Pretty younger, married woman. Homely, older, married dad. It's irritating to me that I even consider the potential awkwardness of the situation. Maybe I'll invite her and her husband to coffee some weekend.
Inviting her husband along is also appropriate since he often helps her with the performances.

Ah, well. There are worse things I could be worrying about.

2007-01-22T15:48:00.000-05:00

I Found It!

I'm usually reading about 5 or 6 books at a time. I keep them everywhere - and whenever I find myself with nothing to do, I whip one out. I've been carrying around TOOS in my jacket pocket. When I head home from work, I just toss my jacket on the front seat, before I jump in my little civic. It had fallen out and gotten lodged between the passenger seat and the door - and then something else had fallen on top of it, making it invisible to a casual inspection. When I discovered it, I ignored it at first, because I thought it was a copy of the Ibsen's plays that I keep in my car for when I'm waiting for my kids. I think I looked right over it last week, too.

I may just throw this copy away after I'm done with it, but I want to keep it for a while longer. I've got all these notes that I mean to transcribe to my notepad and then to an electronic summary. Hope I don't loose it for good in the meantime. That would be irksome.

I may write synopses for this blog, as I did for the first chapter. I don't want to commit to it just yet, though, as I'm overbooked right now.

Why do I read so many books at once? Hard to keep a single book at every place I'm likely to be. Also, I keep misplacing things. I had a teacher once, Mrs Schlinker, R.I.P., to whom I gave a lot of grief, but whom I respected. She used to say all the time, "No intelligent person is ever bored." At the time I thought it was kinda dumb. I mean, most of the really smart people I knew were bored, especially in school. OTOH, while I don't think her motto is exactly true, I do think it is approximately true; that is, it's a good heuristic. Intelligent people seldom have to be bored - because they are able to live in their minds. It doesn't work in school all the time, because schoolrooms are not often conducive to allowing people to use their minds. One of the tricks I've discovered is to always have something to read handy, as well as something to write on and with.

OTOH, one could ask if perhaps it's a little arrogant of me to assume that I'm among the intelligent people or that my opinion on the subject is as worthy as hers. That could be a long conversation. Yes, I am a little arrogant and yes I think I'm among the intelligent people; however, I don't have extremely high standards of what I expect of intelligent people. It doesn't come across as a general theme, but I even consider most creationists to be among generally intelligent. Some of them, I'm quite sure are much smarter than I am. I can give more on this later. Intelligent people can believe, say, and do very stupid things. As a friend of mine used to tell me, "What you have to understand is that intelligence and stupidity are not mutually exclusive."

This reminds me. I haven't spoken to Bob P. for years. I should call and see what he's up to. Really interesting guy.

2007-01-20T13:48:00.000-05:00

I Lost My Copy of Origin of Species

Well crap. I've been carrying the book around, reading and rereading and rerereading passages; annotating and marking certain passages for subsequent review and incorporation into my notes.
I feel a little sick - to my stomach. I looked all over for the danged thing. I'm hoping that maybe I left it at work and I'll find it Monday. I was just about to start the chapter on Hybrids.

God I'm such a slow reader. Both of my kids can read faster than me. Little kids can read faster than me. Also my memory sucks. It sucked pretty bad when I was much younger - nowadays it's the irritation is excruciating, so I've taken to making notes for myself. Only I keep misplacing the danged notes. Well, I don't recon it's going to get any better than this. I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

Interesting thing happened this morning. I took my oldest to an "It's Academic" tournament today. There was a boy on her team who remembered me from when the HS was being named, "Hey, aren't you the guy who suggested Charles Darwin High School for the new school."

"Yes, that would be me."

"Cool! I voted for that!"

Well, I'm glad it got some notes. I wasn't irritated that I didn't get my way, but I was very mildly irritated that we wouldn't name it after a scientist. (My oldest suggested Marie Curie High School.) In the end I'm just glad they didn't name it Ronald Reagan High School. I say that not out of meanness or ill-will: I would say the same thing were William Clinton HS suggested as a name. We have enough crowing about political leaders. We should recognize some of our genuinely intellectual leaders. Darwin would have been controversial. I could see people not going for that (even though I think that would be a really great name for a HS). But I can't think of a good reason not to name a school after Marie Curie. I think they named an elementary school (or maybe a middle school) in the county to Colin Powell. If they wanted to avoid controversy, they ought to avoid living or recently living political figures.

Anyway, reckon I need to go sleep for a while.

2007-01-19T17:08:00.000-05:00

Henry Morris, Creationist and Intelligent Design Advocate

Here's a few quotes from Henry Morris I picked up from two posters (Archaeopteryx2 and JGC-2004) over on Slate's Faith-Based forum:

"The only way we can determine the true age of the earth is for God to tell us what it is. And since he has told us, very plainly, in the Holy Scriptures that it is several thousand years of age, and no more, that ought to settle all basic questions of terrestrial chronology." -- The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, p. 94.

"No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture." -- Biblical Cosmology, p. 33.

Intelligent Design advocates fume at being identified as creationists. Skeptics, they say, are deliberately misrepresenting ID. However much they do not like it, Intelligent Design is neo-creationism. This is made plain to anyone who examines several facts.

1) In Icons of Evolution, Dr. Jonathan Wells, rehashes a bunch of creationist arguments that have already been thoroughly refuted. And he's not the only one. Time after time, ID advocates use recycled creationist arguments.

2) Most of the IDers have a very strong, fundamentalist religious bent. Wells is one example, but there are numerous others. There are some few, like David Berlinksi, who allege that they are agnostic, but it's not at all clear how sincere these fellows are, as they also perpetuate religious misinformation.

2007-01-18T22:36:00.000-05:00

Darwinism is a Theory in Crisis?

Nope. False alarm. It's perceived as being in crisis by people who don't know anything about science or evolution, but think they do. They point to a list of "scientists" who reject evolution as if that actually means anything. 1000 names on that list, the most prominent of which - Dembski, Wells, etc. aren't even scientists, even though they have PhDs! (See previous discussions.)

The remainder is not from the top tier of scientists. This is crazy. The controversy is imaginary. IDers and other creationists want it to seem to non-scientists that Darwinism is in crisis. They do this largely by pub-jacking, misrepresenting real science, quoting scientists out of context, and so forth. The weird thing is they're so blatant about it! They know the people who are likely to believe ID are too intellectually lazy to actually check out the facts! Now THAT's confidence!

2007-01-18T08:39:00.000-05:00

Lamentation

Between work and family, things are pretty busy these days. Taking kids to swim practices, listening to my wife cry about her dead father, helping with homework, going to concerts, other dadly deeds. My oldest is in AP Computer Science and her teacher doesn't seem to know the stuff very well - he's not alone. It seems to me very few HS CS teachers are up to speed with Java. The situation is a travesty, really. Anyway, she's doing a chemistry / computer project for her mandatory science far project (I'll rant on that later) and I've been teaching her about finite state automata so she can parse her chemical formulae. I didn't teach her the terms, FSA, but I showed her some simple automata for parsing integers and real numbers and how to translate the diagrams to code. Then I let her write the diagram for her project. I was surprised she got so close the first time. I taught the sophomore level algorithms class at U of L, back when I was a grad student, but I was out of practice. I'm sure I couldn't have done a very good job explaining it. Fortunately, she seemed to get it pretty quickly.

Work is also amazingly busy these days.

Also, I started a Complex Adaptive Systems Lunchtime Seminar where I work. Completely uncompensated, but with a lot of interest. I've got 55 people on my list (including two researchers from outside the company), about 2/3^rds of whom are PhDs. Almost every division is represented. We have a brown bag seminar during lunch about once every 3 to 5 weeks. So far we've had presentations by company people describing projects they have worked on as well as people from outside the company. Today, we're going to have two invited speakers on Genetic Algorithms from the Krasnow Institute at GMU give a talk.

I buy cookies for attendees and take my invited speakers for lunch at my own expense. I also have to spend my own time organizing stuff - which can be a challenge at times. Hopefully I can convince the company that this is worth a corporate investment. They invest in a lot more expensive things with payoffs a lot less tangible. Fortunately, I work with a bunch of very smart and very interesting people who want to learn more about this stuff and are willing to devote a lunch hour here and there to find out what they can. Also, there's a couple of people in the group who are already extremely knowledgeable - one of whom is also buying lunches for the invited speakers. This guy's a PhD who studied under Stuart Kauffman - and he knows quite a few other famous scientists. Anyway, I think that guys like him and a few of the others with strong experience in this area can help move the group forward.

I'm nearing the end of my real project and looking for my next one. That's always a little stressful because I don't have clear numbers to charge to. (I'm almost like a free agent where I work - people just come up to me and ask if I can help them, or I go out and ask around.)

Boy am I tired. I can't wait till the weekend. One of my favorite things in the whole world is just taking Ginger out to the dog park, reading a book, and sipping iced tea (or coffee, if it's cold, brr).

2007-01-16T13:43:00.000-05:00

Galilean Irony

This would be hysterical, if people didn't actually believe it. I keep seeing people compare the travails of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement to those of Galileo. The story is that the evil secularists are now doing the same thing to ID advocates that the pope did to Galileo, attempting to silence his ideas.

Guys like Dr. William Dembski are on the sidelines of intellectual discourse, not because of their opinions on ID, but because their contributions to actual science are less than mediocre. They keep saying that ID is not religious, and yet the VAST, VAST majority of their writings are religious. Most of their strongest advocates have much better credentials in the area of religion or philosophy or even politics or law rather than science.

People know - very vaguely - about Galileo and think maybe this was the only incident of its kind; however, in his book The Discoverers, Daniel Boorstin, relates how christianity, ofr example, stymied developments in medicine and cartography. I don't often recommend history books, but this is an exceptional one. Great read.

A secular counter-point would be the rise of Lysenkoism under Stalin; however, it's important to remember that they were an outside influence on the scientific community - just as ID is today, and just as the Catholic Church was in the time of Galileo. The scientific community ignores Dr. Dembski, because he's not a scientist, and he's not a mathematician, and he doesn't display very good knowledge of the subject on which he has elected to pontificate. He's much more of a polemecist than a philosopher. Certainly he's no expert in randomness, much less Information Theory. He's published very little in that realm and absolutely nothing of any consequence. He and others are trying to muster support from among the semi-educated lay public for his position. He can do this, because he knows that his intended audience is intellectually indolent, and won't actually check up on his claims. And even if they do, so what? They probably won't understand it!

2007-01-14T22:12:00.000-05:00

Why Children Should Learn Evolution

I'm actually pretty laid back when it comes to teaching evolution - and I would like to compromise with creationists and IDers when I can, because I don't want kids' educations being treated like a political football. Under certain circumstances that hold true today, I can see allowing some kids to opt out of evolution, although I think they have to face the consequences if they can't get into the colleges they want. And I truly believe that even parents who disbelieve evolution are doing a disservice to their children by not letting them learn the actual facts. Evolution is important.

Of course, scientific method can be taught without teaching evolution. It can also be taught without resorting to the theory of gravity, the germ theory of disease.

There are people who feel that evolution is not important. I say it very well could be. Here's a good story I found here that I've told my girls:
"There's an interesting anecdote, as told by Charles M. Vest, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during commencement on June 4th, 1999. "In the early years of this century, Steinmetz was brought to General Electric's facilities in Schenectady, New York. GE had encountered a performance problem with one of their huge electrical generators and had been absolutely unable to correct it. Steinmetz, a genius in his understanding of electromagnetic phenomena, was brought in as a consultant - not a very common occurrence in those days, as it would be now. Steinmetz also found the problem difficult to diagnose, but for some days he closeted himself with the generator, its engineering drawings, paper and pencil. At the end of this period, he emerged, confident that he knew how to correct the problem. After he departed, GE's engineers found a large "X" marked with chalk on the side of the generator casing. There also was a note instructing them to cut the casing open at that location and remove so many turns of wire from the stator. The generator would then function properly. And indeed it did. Steinmetz was asked what his fee would be. Having no idea in the world what was appropriate, he replied with the absolutely unheard of answer that his fee was $1000. Stunned, the GE bureaucracy then required him to submit a formally itemized invoice. They soon received it. It included two items: 1. Marking chalk "X" on side of generator: $1. 2. Knowing where to mark chalk "X": $999."

Now I tell my girls this story, as well as the kids I tutor every year, and then I say to them something like this:
When you grow up, you will inherit some problems from us; there will also be problems that will be unique to your generation - some of which we might be able to anticipate and others of which we cannot currently fathom. The reason you should want to go to school, and particularly why should care about learning all you can in the sciences is so that when your time comes, you know where to put the X.

Evolution is important because it's the best science we have - and contrary to what many people believe, it's not discussed very much even in classes where it IS taught.

The current crop of creationists is trying to undermine education, by 1) redefining science, and 2) promulgating false information and bad science.

If atheists and communists and a whole crop of others are evolutionists, that's no more reason to shirk our responsibilities than the fact that many members of those same groups also like violin concerti.

Now, is I.D. religion or science? I'll take that on in another post.

2007-01-14T21:04:00.000-05:00

Ignorance Begets Confidence

I found a link to an extremely interesting article over at Doppelganger's site, All-Too-Common Dissent. The article is titled, "Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments."

I think I also first found a pertinent Darwin quote there, but I can't locate it now, so I looked it up in The Descent of Man, over at Project Gutenberg.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - from the Introduction to The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin

I feel a bit zinged by this myself - not the Darwin quote, but the paper. It wasn't directed at me, but regardless I have to remind myself - and any potential reader - that I'm not a scientist of any kind, much less a biologist. I took biology in HS and that's the extent of my formal schooling. Everything else I think I know, I have learned on my own from listening to debates, from reading debate transcripts, from talking with preachers, scientists, friends, etc., from reading books and articles, and from generally trying to make sense of things.

But enough with the self-immolation. I'm not asking people to believe me. I'm asking them to be very careful in their reasoning and who they put their faith in. Science is important. Evolution is important.

A clear cut case where the Incompetence Paper applies is William Dembski, whose blog, Uncommon Descent, heralds the dawn of a new age for Intelligent Design. Despite the fact that his followers consider him brilliant (one of his fans calls him the Isaac Newton of Information Theory and Demski has said that he has become something of an expert on randomness), a real scientist has done a little research on him, and concluded that Dr. Dembski is not a scientist. If you want to understand why Dr. Dembski is laughed at by serious scientists, you you absolutely have to read this paper, by computer science professor Jeffrey Shallit of the University of Waterloo.

I think the same applies to a lot of the creationist intelligentsia. It clearly applies to many of the rank and file creationists - largely because they make the mistake of believing that they are logical, but their logical ineptitude makes it impossible for them to even understand how ignorant they are of the subject. The sad truth is that most people are a lot better at talking about logic than in practicing it. Logic is much more difficult than people understand, which is one reason, I suppose, that most people believe they are logical. An AI professor I know says that humans are good at pattern recognition and computers are good at logic. I agree with this, except that I think there is a sense in which logic can be reduced to pattern recognition. The proper application of logic requires to things - knowing how to translate a problem into logical statements and the proper application of logical principles to those statements to reach a sound conclusion. (Or to recognize that no conclusion is possible, if that is the case!)

Anyway, thanks to Doppelganger for providing all the real information in this post. It's important to get the stuff out there - accurate information to counter the nearly endless stream of irrational nonsense from those who advocate Magical Thinking.

2007-01-13T22:15:00.000-05:00

Urban Legend about Albert Einstein

There are two urban legends about Albert Einstein that have been addressed by Allen Esterson over at CosmicLog.

1) The claim is circulating that Einstein was bad at math. No idea how this got started, but it seems this is considered common knowledge by a lot of people. It's an idea that has no basis whatever in fact. Einstein was always gifted in math.

2) A linguist named Senta Trömel-Plotz started the second rumor, namely that Einstein's wife deserves equal credit for his discoveries, having "done his math for him." Again, this is an urban legend with no real evidence to support it. Esterson's site is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the issue. Esterson is physicist and not a linguist, so if things like evidence and logic are not relevant to the discussion, then one might as well skip what he has to say.

2007-01-13T00:20:00.000-05:00

Must Scientific Theories Explain Everything?

In the comic-book version of what science is that is promulgated by IDers and other creationists, yes. In the world of real scientists, no.

Examples:
The Germ Theory of Disease (GToD) doesn't explain genetic diseases.
The Theory of Gravity doesn't explain how airplanes fly.

NO THEORY EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!

Notice that the exsitence of both germs and gravity are facts and that doesn't preclude that they are also part of a theory. Facts and theories are not the same things, but they are not mutually exclusive either. Rather, they describe different kinds of properties.

2007-01-12T12:37:00.000-05:00

The Mistakes of Evolutionists

I left a comment over at Quantum Algorithms which I hope does not go unnoticed or ignored. Yes, I think evolutionists have made errors; not in the facts or in their conclusions, but in their method of trying to convey the ideas of evolution. I think evolution is difficult to understand. I say this largely because I've had to learn it on my own and started on the other side of the fence. And, yes, one could say that my education failed me; although I would prefer to think that my schooling failed me, but my education did not.

Schooling is what gets done to you. Education is what you do for yourself. It's true that my schooling did not help one iota in my understanding evolution. But my own study over the years has helped me a great deal - reading Darwin, Gould, and Mayr made a difference. Talking with people who actually understood things made a difference (thanks Frank Lovell, et. al.). Reading debates and articles has made a difference. The understanding that I have now, which is surely inferior to that of any evolutionary biologist, is nevertheless superior to the understanding that I had even a few years ago - and vastly superior to that I possessed when I first began trying to figure things out.

I'm very grateful that the state of VA mandates the teaching of evolution. This is a good thing. However, they don't get much education in the subject. Both girls have maintained not just As but very high As in their studies. Typically they have the best or close to the best understanding of any student in any of their science classes. They're very smart and very studious. And they really want to learn. However, as I've begun to ask questions of them, I see weaknesses in their understanding. And this is not unexpected as they get less than 10 hours of schooling on the subject - and probably less than 5. Considering the slow rate that things are covered in K-12, that's not very much. I really think that demonstrating genetic algorithms in biology classes would be a very good idea for helping kids to understand what's being talked about - and the power of selection over random mutations.

Kids don't need less education about evolution - but more. If it's true that "nothing in biology makes any sense except in the light of evolution," then evolution needs to be fully integrated into the curriculum and not just added on haphazardly to meet a state requirement.

2007-01-12T11:55:00.000-05:00

My Hamster Died

Well, heck. He was almost 3 years old. Hershey was a fat, little bastard. They call his type a blackbear hamster, though actually it's just a breed of the Syrian hamsters that are so common here in the U.S. I really liked the little bugger.

They're generally low maintnance. Great first pets for kids for that reason. I got a hamster for each of my girls, before I let them get the dog.

I remember my oldest daughter calling me at work one day when she was about maybe 11 or 12 and sobbing, "Daddy....I think...I got ... a bad ... hamster." "Why is that?" I asked her. "He just bit me and made me bleed!" This was a good opportunity, so I told her how rodents like Nibbles are very much like us - how they tend to lash out when they're scared. Eventually, she became very attached to him and he to her; he stopped biting her. She bawled like a little girl when he finally died at about 2.5 years old. Hers lasted a few months longer than her sister's hamster, Hammy. My youngest would lie on the couch watching television, and hold her hand out. Hammy would lie in her hand on his back - and sleep. Nibbles was much cuter than Hammy, though Hammy was always much more gentle. They, too, were siblings. All their brothers and sisters had died after less than 6 months (with different owners). Amy missed Nibbles doubly because we had lost a lot of photographs she had taken of him when our computer got hit by a virus. But Anna found a few scattered pictures here and there and put together a powerpoint slideshow for her.

Well, anyway, this is a pretty crappy week so far. I'm bogged down at work and now all this stuff starts happening. The kids think I'm heartless because I didn't cry when their grandpa died or when my own little Hershey was dying and finally expired. I'm not too worried about that. They're smart girls. I generally have confidence that they'll figure things out.

2007-01-11T19:43:00.000-05:00

Ashes to Ashes

My father-in-law, Xie Aichun died yesterday. He fell asleep in his chair and never woke up. He would have been 90 this July. I was not very close to him, though I liked him well enough. My wife and kids are pretty tore up, though, especially my wife and older daughter.

I recall when my oldest (now 17) was a very little girl. My father-in-law was would walk her to and from school every day. I went to a parent-teacher conference and the teacher related how she almost cried with happiness when she saw him pick her up. He'd take her hand and she would just look up at him and the teacher said her heart would almost break with joy.

Aichun (John) was an engineer in China most of his life - a civil engineer, not a drive-the-choochoo kind. He mostly designed railroad bridges, though he did do some work on the Burma Road. He graduated from Yale in China (that's a high school) and his teacher was Mr. Hutchins who later became president of Berea College in KY. Mr Hutchins and his wife later sponsored my wife to come to the US where she attended Berea College.

John was planning to come to Yale in the US (the university) when the sino-japanese war broke out and he lost his wife in the confusion - so he never got to go there, a fact which seemed to haunt him to the very end.

Several years ago, we brought him over to the US to live with us. His wife was supposed to come, too, but she had a stroke and died - this is what happens when you follow the rules.

He lived in our house for a number of years until he broke his hip. In fact, he lived with us a long time after he broke his hip, but eventually he got sick and went to a nursing home. He got better and I made an agreement with him - he could come back and live with us on the condition that he had to pick a floor and stay their during the day when no one was home. We had already purchased him his own refrigerator and microwave so he could cook food, but I just could not allow him to go up and down the stairs when no one was home. And so, stubborn as he was, he elected to stay in the home. I think my wife is grateful I made this rule and it wasn't just her trying to keep him from dying early. My wife went to see him almost every single week-end.

Anyway, I suppose life is going to be very different for us now. My wife took care of the details of his cremation today. I stayed home and listened to talk. I liked the guy well enough, but I was just never that close to him. In fact, I didn't think my wife was that close to him, but she's been constantly crying or on the verge since yesterday morning. I reckon she just needs a bit of time and a chance to talk things through.

2007-01-10T13:36:00.000-05:00

A Vocabulary Test at Blogthings

Your Vocabulary Score: A

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary!
You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

The test was too simple, but it reminds me there are some really neat sites about words, namely A Word a Day, and the Worthless Word for the Day.

2007-01-08T09:20:00.000-05:00

Is Dr. Jonathan Wells a Modern Galileo?

Intelligent Design (ID) advocates have a tendency of comparing their intellectual icons, for example William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, to great scientists of past eras, particularly Galileo, or Einstein or Wegener. Let's look at this comparison in a little detail.

The comparison goes something like this: The educated peers of these men (Galileo, Einstein, Wegener) scoffed at their ideas. The educated peers of Dembski and Wells scoff at their ideas. Therefore Dembski and Wells are like Galileo and Einstein and Wegener. Unfortunately for ID advocates, this comparison is very shallow and does not hold up well under even the most cursory inspection.

Galileo's peers held him in almost universally high regard. So did Einstein's. So did Wegener's. Not all of their peers may have agreed with them, but those peers did recognize their genius. And why would they not? Each of these fellows made excellent and profound contributions to science throughout their lives.

On the other hand, with very few exceptions, Dembski's and Wells' peers in the scientific community seem to hold them in poor regard, mainly because of the paucity of their output and general poor quality of that which they have produced. Certainly they are not luminaries.

TalkOrigins gives a thorough and crushing refutation of Wells' book Icons of Evolution. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has another devastating critique. In every instance, Wells has utterly misrepresented the facts. Of course, many non-scientific, religious people reject the information in TalkOrigins or NCSE (generally without have actually read any of it very carefully). Nevertheless, all evidence points to Dr. Wells having produced a book that demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of the subject upon which he has elected to pontificate. What else would one expect from a cult-member (he's a moonie) who set out to disprove evolution? He doesn't seem to have much actual scientific output, particularly in comparison to his religious output.

Take a look at this review of Wells' Icons of Evolution that appeared in Nature in 2001. Wells' reputation is as a mediocre scientist. Mr. Wells appears to have published almost nothing in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Certainly he seems to have published far more of a religious nature than he has of a scientific nature.

William Dembski doesn't have very impressive output either. He sure has a lot of degrees for someone who has contributed so little to science. Notice that he has far more contributions of a religious nature than a scientific bent. Dembski authored the book No Free Lunch in which he claims that the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems of Information Theory support Intelligent Design. It's not clear what Dembski's qualifications are as an information theorist. Certainly he is no luminary in the field. David Wolpert, co-discoverer of the NFL theorems, a recognized expert in the subject and by any criteria a man who has made a profound contribution to Information Theory has said that William Dembski's treatment of the No Free Lunch Theorems is written in Jello.

The point should be very clear here. While there were people who disagreed with Galileo, Einstein, and Wegener, the premiere intellectuals of their day considered each of these men to be a genius and held them in universally high regard. Not so at all with Wells and Dembski. Their peers largely consider them to be unworthy of response. Galileo, Einstein, and Wegener all made substantial contributions to science, before and after their controversies. The output of Wells and Dembski has been less than unremarkable.

The sad and unavoidable truth is that neither Wells nor Dembski is another Galileo. That they are continually compared to Galileo can only be attributed to the general ignorance of science history possessed by those would would make such a preposterous claim. This is not to say that there is no valid comparison between ID scientists and previous innovators. It could be that Ignaz Semmelweis might be closer to the mark, except that he produced data that actually supported his opinion. I'm reminded of Stephen Gould's statement to the effect that, "Yes, they laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo, The Clown!" (Well, except I doubt many educated people of his day actually laughed at Galileo.)

Unfortunately, most people are only going to look at the fact that Wells and Dembski have doctorates. "They have Ph.D.s! They must be really, REALLY smart! You can't possibly ignore what they have to say, if you're going to be fair! "

If scientists ignore Wells and Dembski, their fan club/posse claim victory, because the real scientists just can't refute such well-reasoned arguments. If scientists refute Wells and Dembski, the posse crows, "See! We must be on to something; otherwise, all those evilution scientists wouldn't make such a fuss." They're very good at changing targets like that.

Regardless, the average person is going to look at their impressive degrees and believe that their opinion is equal to or greater than that of the foremost experts in the field. So, for example, they will completely ignore Wolpert who is clearly among the foremost experts in NFL, and accept instead the pseudo-mathematical conclusions of Dembski whose contributions to information theory in general and NFL in particular are paltry, if not utterly insignificant.

2007-01-07T02:22:00.000-05:00

The Big, Big Lie

ID advocates and other creationists very often claim that they are criticized "if they so much as question evolution" or if they "merely question evolution." This is a lie. They are never criticized for merely questioning evolution. They are criticized for making repeated assertions about evolution that are so absurd that no one who has done an honest day's research on the subject could possibly make. It's not enough that they make one stupid statement. They make idiotic statement after idiotic statement. There really isn't anything so stupid that you can't find a few of them who believe it must be true.

A typical sort of example of this is when a creationist sneeringly asserts "Harrumphh! Evolution is refuted by thermodynamics!" In fact, the vast, VAST majority of competent scientists understands that evolution acts within the constraints of the second law of thermodynamics. Another example is when they assert that evolution doesn't explain how life arose. Evolution tells us how life diversified from one or a few source species. It's not intended to explain everything. This makes it no different than the theory of gravity or the germ theory of disease. NO THEORY EXPLAINS EVERYTHING! Yet another is when they assert that evolution is refuted by information theory. They can often get away with this if no one in the house knows anything about this abstruse field of study. But the knowledgable person knows they're claims here are also absurd.

So the next time you hear an "intelligent design" advocate or some other creationist tell you that they have been condemned if they "so much as question evolution," try not to roll you're eyes. They're just repeated the stupidity their keepers have told them to repeat. Direct them to the specific information (on talkorigins, e.g.) that refutes their assertion. And then tell them that they are not being criticized for their questions, but for making false and stupid assertions. Make sure their intended audience understands how they are employing this rhetoric. That's who they're really speaking to - their audience, not the knowledgeable skeptic.

2007-01-05T15:42:00.000-05:00

Tinlike

I once had a friend and colleague who related to me a game he had played with his kid brother. The little brother would say something along the lines of "Tinlike I really was big and a smacked you upside the head." My friend might perhaps respond, "Tinlike I got a ray gun that could shoot you before you could move." Then his brother would maybe say, "Tinlike I got a shield of infinite protection and a big boot to kick your fat behind!" And the game would go on.

This is what I would term harmless Magical Thinking. It's harmless because they both knew they were full of crap. There was a pretense, but it was easily acknowledge, and no attempt to deceive. But not incarnations of Magical Thinking are equally harmless. Some are genuine deptions.

Intelligent Design is an instantiation of the tin-like game. "Tinlike we done a lot of homework! Tin-like we're the next Galileo intead of the next Lysenko! Tinlike we're doing research instead of pubjacking!"

I've long maintained that if creationists would actually do some honest research there wouldn't be a debate. Doing actual research is considerably more difficult than playing tinlike. But while it may not yield the immediate gratification of tinlike, real research has the potential for producing a much more profound appreciation and a much more lasting joy - the joy of actual discovery and understanding.

2007-01-01T17:59:00.000-05:00

Rereading The Origin of Species

I'm rereading this for the first time in about 25 years. I'm actually reading the same copy that I previously read - a Pelican Classic. I'm getting a LOT more out of it this time than I did previously. There's a lot of stuff the significance of which was lost on me the first time around. Some of it I missed altogether. Amazing book. It reads like some nerdy kid telling you about his ant collection.

His expertise is thorough and wide-ranging. He derives his ideas not just from his voyages, but also from experiments he has done, his experience as a naturalist and breeder, his correspondence with professionals and scientists, a vast range of reading, and mostly a lot of very profound, very careful reasoning. Natural Selection isn't just something he pulled out of his backside. I think one of the central problems of this book is that Darwin is a Keen Observer and a Deep Thinker. Not many people can think so deeply as he does. I suspect not many could even recognize it.

True, Darwin suffers a bit from the long-winded, pedantic tendency of writing that was common in the mid-nineteenth century. But twice now I've started and put down George Boole's The Laws of Thought, which is indisputably brilliant, but nevertheless often as impenetrable as its sentences are interminable. Anyway, TOOS is not all that bad considering other scientific treatises from the period. He doesn't use very much jargon, and what he does use he explains - there's a short glossary in the back. For the most part, it's remarkably readable - partly because he is using relatively simple language and partly because he displays an absolute mastery of the subject.

When I first read it, I had the unshakeable impression that I was sitting at a table on which had been dumped a very complicated set of puzzles with all the pieces from all the different puzzles mingled together; and across from me was sitting an amiable and enthusiastic gentleman who takes up piece after piece in his hands, examines each on thoroughly, discusses it at length, and with some humor and love, and then smiling and winking, places the piece down firmly on the board - and you know, I mean you just know that this piece is exactly where it needs to be. By the end of the book, you feel like he's made some significant progress on the outline of the puzzle. And during this reading, that feeling is even more intense.

I'm about halfway through chapter V, The Laws of Variation, at the moment. He's very excited about this subject. For anyone not familiar with the basic outline of the book, here's the first six chapters from the table of contents:

I Variation Under Domestication
II Variation Under Nature
III Struggle for Existence
IV Nature Selection
V Laws of Variation
VI Difficulties on Theory

Let me quote the first sentence of chapter I:
"When we look to the individuals of the same variety or subvariety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us, is, that they generally differ much more from each other, than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature."

This is his first sentence and already he is conveying to his reader a very important observation. When we look at, say, pigeons in the wild and we compare them to domesticated pigeons, we see that the wild ones do not vary as widely as the ones that we humans have brought into existence. A few paragraphs later he writes, "...variability is the source of all the choicest productions of the garden" and a few paragraphs later, "Any variation which is not inherited is unimportant to us."

So right away he's setting the stage for us. Variation is an absolute requirement for breeders, but only those variations that are heritable are useful; however, he notes a bit later that "The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown." Recall from my previous post that Mendel didn't publish his work on plant hybridization until seven years after the publication of OOS!

But variation alone is insufficient for producing new breeds of plants and animals that are useful to men. "The key is man's power of accumulative selection: nature gives successive variations; man adds them up in certain directions useful to him." This is what he refers to as artificial selection of which their are two types: conscious and unconscious. This practice can a be a lot more difficult than one might suppose.

"If selection consisted merely in separating some very distinct variety, and breeding from it, the principle would be so obvious as hardly to be worth notice; but its importance consists in the great effect produced by the accumulation in one direction, during successive generations, of differences absolutely inappreciable by an uneducated eye - differences which I for one have vainly attempted to appreciate. Not one man in a thousand has accuracy of eye and judgement sufficient to become an eminent breeder." This to me is a very striking statement and one that is very important - the best breeders are looking for things that are largely unnoticed, perhaps even imperceptible to the untrained eye, BUT they are visible characteristics. This is an important fact to recall when reading chapter II, Variation under Nature, because Nature selects as well on innumerable characters that are completely invisible to human to any human eye.

He emphasizes this point a little later in chapter I when he writes:
"Man can hardly select, or only with much difficulty, any deviation of structure excepting such as is externally visible; and indeed he rarely cares for what is internal. He can never act by selection, excepting on variations which are first given to him in some slight degree by nature."

Furthermore, accumulative selection is a very gradual process and new breeds do not arise suddenly. "A breed, like a dialect of language, can hardly be said to have had a definite origin."

Near the end of chapter I, Darwin gives us a clue to other factors in artificial selection. First, we need to select a species that has characters which we actually care to modify. Secondly, it's better to have a large population of specimens so as to increase the likelihood of finding favorable variations. Thirdly, we have to maintain genetic separation once we start the process of selection. "Wandering savages or the inhabitants of open plains rarely possess more than one breed of the same species," because these humans do not prevent cross-breeding.

So there you have it. Chapter I in a nutshell, through the fiend-filter. Brilliant little book. I hope I don't get waylaid before I finish reading.

2006-12-31T18:20:00.000-05:00

An Incomplete Timeline of Scientific Discoveries

I may write more about this later, but I've been rereading The Origin of Species and got a little curious as to when certain things were figured out, so I put together a little timeline, which I share with you below, to help me put things in perspective.

1590 Janssens Discover Compound Microscope
1628 Harvey On the Circulation of the Blood
1665 Hooke Micrographia
1683 Leeuwenhoek reports on disc. of bacteria in letter to Royal Society
1735 Linnaeus Systema Naturae (presents system of taxonomy)
1789 Lavoisier Elementary Treatise of Chemistry
1807 Thomson presents Dalton’s atomic theory in his System of Chemistry
1809 Lamarck Philosophie Zoologique
1830 Lyell Principles of Geology
1835 Bassi Del mal del segno, calcinaccio o moscardino (posits Germ Theory of Disease)
1859 Darwin The Origin of Species
1866 Mendel’s Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden (presents theory of genetics)
1869 Mendeleev The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements
1895 Röntgen On A New Kind Of Rays (disc. X-rays)
Anyway, after I put this together, I found the site: http://www.timelinescience.org/

2006-12-30T19:57:00.000-05:00

Is ID Falsifiable?

The simple and incidently correct answer is, "no." However, over at Uncommon Descent, there is an article by GilDodgen titled Michael Behe on Falsification. He quotes Behe from his DVD, Case for a Creator, as follows:

Intelligent design is very open to falsification. I claim, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could not be produced by natural selection; it needed to be deliberately intelligently designed. Well, all a scientist has to do to prove me wrong is to take a bacterium without a flagellum, or knock out the genes for the flagellum in a bacterium, go into his lab and grow that bug for a long time and see if it produces anything resembling a flagellum. If that happened, intelligent design, as I understand it, would be knocked out of the water. I certainly don’t expect it to happen, but it’s easily falsified by a series of such experiments.

If Behe said this then either Behe doesn't understand Falsificationism or he is deliberately misrepresenting it. At this point, I really couldn't guess which of those two is more likely.

It well may be that Behe would reject ID, were a naked bacterium to develop a flagellum. If he does reject ID, it is through his own conviction, though, and not from practicing falsificationism. What has been falsified is one particular instance of supposed irreducible complexity. But just because this one case turns out to be wrong, that doesn't disprove specified complexity as a general theory. No actual scientist who understands falsificationism would make such a stupid statement as the above quoted text. I'm hoping that GilDodgen is mistaken about what Dr. Behe actually said.

A comparable leap of logic would be to reject evolution, because Piltdown was exposed as a hoax, or because Homo Sapiens turns out to be 100K years older than we thought. That's not correctly applying falsificationism; that's just being stupid. However, evolution, unlike ID or any other form of creationism, is falsifiable in the general case. If we were to find a fossil fish in pre-cambrian strata, that would pretty well disprove evolution. If we were to find a human fossil in the same strata that we find dinosaurs, evolution would be Kaput. If we really were to discover that genetically humans were more similar to a coelacanth than to mammals, that would surely disprove evolution.

But nothing, absolutely NOTHING can disprove ID in the general sense. If evolution is true, God can explain it. If evolution is false, God can explain it. If abiogenesis can ever be demonstrated, God can explain it. If it doesn't, God can explain that too. An explanation that explains every single possible outcome is not a real explanation.

Either GilDodgen or Behe or both are confused on the point of falsificationism. If they want to try to convince the NAS guys they're worth listening to, they need to make a careful study of the terms and ideas they purport to espouse; otherwise, they're going to sound like a coupla boneheads.

A better tack to take would be to argue against strict Falsificationism. Either way, they're going to have to learn what scientists mean when they use the word, if they expect to be taken seriously.

2006-12-29T13:48:00.000-05:00

Coelacanth and Humans

I posted about this a few weeks ago. Over at Uncommon Descent, they have misrepresented an article from Nature magazine. DaveScot asserts that according to the Nature article, the authors have determined that judging by an ultra-conserved segment of the DNA, humans are more closely related to coelacanths than to any other creature on Earth.

This is absolutely contrary to what the article actually says. After my post here, I posted to Uncommon Descent, informing them of the error. My post never showed up - and there was never a retraction. I just posted again.

I'm not expecting a lot of intellectual integrity from creationists, but this is remarkable. All they have to do is read the ABSTRACT of the article to see they are mistaken. Either they have not read the article which tells us something about their scholarship, or they have read it and do not choose to correct themselves which tells us something about their integrity.

OTOOH, it could be that I'm wrong and that I'm so obviously wrong that I'm not worth responding to. If that were the case it seems he could post a direct quote from the original Nature article that supports what he's saying - or a reference to a chart or diagram. Instead, he makes this strange claim, handwaves, and makes it seem as if things are different than they appear.

I just got back from vacationing myself and was expecting DaveScot would have posted a retraction. No such luck. Instead he's made another post in which he makes a similar claim.

He's had plenty of opportunity to correct himself, but chooses not to.

2006-12-14T18:03:00.000-05:00

Are Humans closer Genetically to Coelacanths than Mammalian Vertebrates?

In an article at Uncommon Descent DaveScot announces the imminent demise of the Tree of Life. After announcing an incendiary alternative title, says something is fishy because "Our closest relative on the tree of life according to ultra-conserved DNA is a fish that’s been around unchanged for at least 360 million years."

He then goes on to quote an article reputedly authored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

It's pretty clear that while DS references the original Nature article, he either did not read carefully or he did not understand it. The same could be said of the author at HHMI whom DS quoted.

1. Nowhere in the Nature article do the authors claim that ultra-conserved DNA in the coelacanth is closer to Humans than is any other animal.

2. The coelacanth has not been unchanged for 360 million years. That was a pretty obvious misquote. The fish was believed to have been around for 360 million years - some of it's ultra-conserved DNA has not changed much. Therefore DS thinks this means that the fish has not changed for 360 million years. This is wrong.

3. What the abstract of the Nature article actually says is: "One of these, a more than 200-base-pair ultraconserved region, 100% identical in mammals, and 80% identical to the coelacanth SINE ..."

Note this article CLEARLY states that the region is 100% identical in mammals and only 80% identical to the coelacanth.

4. Interestingly, the source article in Nature also says, "This region also has multiple homologues in coelacanth that are closer in sequence to the human ultraconserved element than many of its human paralogues." Now think about this for a second - what this means is that when they looked at this region which is copied multiple copies in both coelacanths and humans (and all other mammals) is actually more similar between coelacanths and humans than there is between the coelacanth region and OTHER COPIES (paralogs) of that sequence in humans! By the UD logic of Mr Scot, even if they had his facts correct (which he doesn't) coelcanths are also more closely related to humans than humans are to themselves!

I have to say that this article was tough reading for a non-biologist and that were parts of it that I didn't understand very well; however, there was nothing in the Nature article nearly so incendiary as what was suggested by the commentaries at HHMI or UD. It seems very clear that DS over at Uncommon Descent didn't bother to check his facts before he wrote that article. Nobody over at UD has bothered to check into his facts, or if they have, they don't appear to have called him on them.

I welcome any corrections or further comments anyone would care to make on the subject.

2006-11-27T17:51:00.000-05:00

Using Random Mutation and Selection to Evolve Solutions to NP-Complete Problems.

Belief in creationism requires its adherents to know a lot of barber-shop gossip about what evolution is and what the theory of evolution (TOE) actually predicts, as well as a comic-book understanding of what science is and how it works.

A perfect example is a post regarding random mutations that I came across recently at evolutionnews which points in turn to a http://www.randommutation.com/index.php

Examine the phrase “Something truly mimicking Darwinian evolution would begin with a meaningful sentence and attempt to move to another meaningful sentence and maintain some sort of meaning (function) all along the way.”

This is misleading. At this point, I believe he honestly doesn’t understand the issue.

In Darwinian evolution, “meaning” and “function” are not necessarily identical. In accordance with Darwinian evolution, numerous non-functional sequences are created along the way. These are sources of potential future function; that is, they have the potential to be helpful at a later date. Let’s check up on a few facts, first.

Writing a program to model a phenomenon requires one to come up with a proper coding scheme. The author of that random mutation site, Perry S. Marshall, clearly either didn’t know what he was doing or was deliberately misrepresenting the ideas. Probably he just doesn’t understand evolution well enough to do the modeling. Like most ID creationists, he’s likely very intelligent and knowledgeable about something, web-mastering, or some other technician level work. But he doesn't seem to know very much about evolution.

If you want to understand how “random mutations” being acted on by selection pressure can solve reasonably difficult problems, take a look at this . You’ll need to use IE. This applet uses a genetic algorithm to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem in very few generations. Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Evolutionary Programs (EPs) use random mutation and selection pressure to produce solutions to some very hard problems – in this case a particular type of problem from a class of hard problems known as NP-Complete.

2006-11-21T14:58:00.000-05:00

The Cruciverbalist's Curse

Carefully crafted list of words
Riles my educated urge to
Occupy my mind's hardware by
Squeezing letters into
Squares.
Whence Came I by this mad addiction
Of teasing fun from erudition?
Repeated blows to head have clearly
Damaged neurons quite severely.

Actually, I much prefer cryptograms to crossword puzzles.

2006-11-16T13:40:00.000-05:00

University Expectations

My oldest is taking a number of classes in high school. Many of her fellow students are "only taking" certain courses, because their counselors told them that colleges wanted to see those courses on applications.

The students are irate that the teacher expects them to actually learn things in the class when that's not the reason in they're in the course. Moreover, many of these students are honors students and many of the classes are honors and AP courses. For example, one kid wrote sarcastically on ratemyteachers.com that "... rehashed articles about Africa doesn't teach us about French ..." In another example, my daughter discussed a movie that the teacher showed a history movie in class that discussed the French influence on old English. Many other kids thought it was a waste, but my daughter was excited, "Daddy! This movie explains why French is an important language TODAY!"

The problem that these students have, besides the fact that the teacher is too soft, is that they are spoilt brats. First, they have learned how to manipulate the teacher and their parents. Second, the French language has had a strong influence outside of France - to include much of northern and west-central africa, as well as a general influence on the English language.

The students complain about the lack of vocabulary they are learning, but they ignore the fact that they spend a LOT of time talking in class and are extremely disrespectful to the teacher. They use their cell phones in class and then lie to the teacher's face. They get caught cheating and then lie to the teacher's face. They get asked not to talk when he's talking and they lie to his face.

This teacher covered more grammar and less vocabulary last year. That's fine. The learnt as many tenses as they had all 3 previous years combined. Also, it is common practice for language teachers to teach culture and history alongside grammar and vocabulary.

I would like to tell these kids something that their parents should have told them: Quit whining. Quit cheating. Pay attention. Do your work. Be respectful, if you want respect in return.

2006-11-14T13:34:00.000-05:00

We are the Wise Ones

impressive verbiage is strewn dramatically across the ether,
across the murky tangle, across the rhine, across the rhone,
across the yangtze and the missouri, across the room,
while ponderous intellects, massive collections of tenebrous
and brilliant neural pathways sit straining at each terminus
struggling valiantly against tenesmus, waiting patiently
for whatever brainfart happens to emerge

AHA! here it comes one exclaims in gleeful anticipation
and then softly grunts oh yes oh yea oh parse this baby
but wonders morosely whether the receivers will really
quite GET it

and moments later, to the farthest reaches of ethereal space,
in the crevices and corners, in the lofty open spires and in
the dank and cramped keeps, the signal is received and translated,
decoded, recoded to the immense joy of other collections of neurons,
other aggregations of self-replicating, self-adulating,
self-masturbating
sacks of protein and protoplasm, other connoisseurs of the
commonplace, other high priests of mundanity and mendacity

who signal back to the originator yes yes yes this is the wisdom
that we longed for, this is the dream that haunted, these are the
words we wanted to say bravo bravissimo

pardon me … i only made wind

and … silence

not like pins dropping, or leaves falling,
but deep space between the stars …

suddenly a whisper and this too is knowledge grunt
this too is knowledge … uh … this too is knowledge … uh …
yes we are the wise ones and this too is knowledge
and we are the wise ones who know and
we are the wise ones who have the neural capacity to digest it, and
we are the wise ones who have the perspicacity to appreciate it, and
we are the wise ones who have the sagacity to assimilate it

oh yes oh yes oh yes
we are the ones ... grunt
we are the ones ... grunt

we are the wise ones who know

grunt

2006-11-08T10:10:00.000-05:00

Ashes

At reunions, we dig a pit in my parents' yard
and build a campfire to roast a pig overnight.
My brothers and I stay up late around the fire,
drinking beer or branch water from mason jars,
singing songs, telling tales, catching our breaths.

We take turns spelling each other,
giving each a chance to rest for
the following day. My youngest brother
taps my arm and I know it's my watch.
Carefully, I extract my daughter from
the crook of my arm and myself from the cot,
and walk out to sit quietly beneath The Eternal
Clock - alone, I sway
my head towards the embers and my eyes float
into the fire and yet beyond. At once the center
of the fire is the Source of The Clock.

A cricket concerto, punctuated by pops from
the burning wood and coyotes' howls, augments
the smokey aroma of the wood and the pungent
sweet smells of roasting pig. I turn the spit, add
wood, and pull my blanket closer as a slight breeze
pushes the rising smoke towards my face. It stings
my eyes and feels sticky to my skin, but I greedily
accept these minor discomforts from the burning
oasis as I take another sip from the jar. The synergistic
effect produced by all my senses is at once overwhelming
and calming.

Then, into the deep of the fire I look, into the mound of
glowing logs and the bed of grey-white charred ashes
and the flowing, blue flames like Lethe.

From the depth of some supernal fire,
echoed in the pit of fire at my feet,
and the image of the flames in my eyes,
and the warmth of the blaze on my skin, and the pungency
of the smoke in my lungs, and the sounds of the crackling
in my ears, and the flickers of flames in my soul arises
the sense - the conviction, really -
that there are other eyes staring simultaneously
into that same blaze and feeling that warmth
and hearing those sounds and tasting some brew and
smelling that smoke, and sensing me at the other end -
hunters and gatherers, caravanners and pioneers – and more.
Amid the ashes, a faintly luminous thread appears -
a spider's web, a nexus, an infernal convergence of flames
and eyes and souls.

The Inverted Bowl

Then at t=2:48 - 2:55 ... confused stuff and then "it has about a 24,000 year orbital cycle.Apparently her "spiritual education" about physics did not include Kepler's Laws.

We can safely conclude that the events referenced at t=1:53 - 1:55 aren't going to happen, because they were never going to happen anyway.

She has more than 4,000 subscribers!

Then at t=2:48 - 2:55 ... confused stuff and then "it has about a 24,000 year orbital cycle.

Apparently her "spiritual education" about physics did not include Kepler's Laws.