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why? man, philip Mar 31, 2006

why is it important for you all to continue to lie and spread these lies?
evolution is an invented illogical , pagan doctrine. why continue with this
lie of evolution?

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Behe & Snoke Varela, Victor Mar 30, 2006

Behe & Snoke are slammed again! Masel, J., Cryptic Geneteic Variation is
Enriched for Potential Adaptations. Genetics 172: 1985-1991 (March 2006).

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great artcile, but caution Nigh , Ronald Mar 30, 2006

A great piece by Levitt and a well-deserved trouncing for Fuller. But I would urge caution here. I question Levitt’s dismissal of the motivations of all who might be suspicious of the notion that our current scientific image of nature has settled once and for all our fundamental questions about what exists and how we know about it. To question creationism as ideological nonsense is not to accept that Darwin’s Victorian view of life and the universe full tilt.

A candle in the dark does not illuminate the entire cosmos and indeed may give us a highly misleading view of reality if we try to project what we think we know beyond the glow of our current knowledge into the dark beyond. Though our science provides no unequivocable evidence for a universe of “moral equity and ultimate justice”, say, it does not deny the possibility either, nor can atheists legitimately claim their ideology to be fully ‘science based’. Another trap is to believe that American wingnut Christiantity is representative of all, or even most, religious thought.

I don’t think that refraining from arrogance about what science teaches us about our world, or from believing that our current science is the sole source of such knowledge, is necessarily motivated by a reactionary desire to reinstall ‘supersitition’ and theocracy. Knowledge is always situated, to use Haraway’s accurante phrase, it exists from a point of view and this is always its limitation, but also the source of its ultimate legitimacy.
>And from our own point of view, we must view the whole universe, including those parts which the candle of our scientific knowledge does not reveal.

In this effort, religion, understood as the rational ordering of our values, ethics, wisdom and compassion, is an indispensable guide. (posted at Gene Expression)

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Steve Fuller and The Hidden Agenda of Social Constructivism

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Book just out: "Richard Dawkins : How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think" Dondero, Luciano Mar 26, 2006

A new book has just come out in Britain, "Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think", edited by Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley.

It is meant as a celebration for the thirty years of "The Selfish Gene" which Dawkins wrote in 1976.

I recommend this book for everybody who would like to understand better the significance of this scientist's contribution to our understanding of the world we live in.

In particular, for those who regard Dawkins as "just a vulgarizer", it might be interesting to read Grafen's essay, which ends saying:

"The Selfish Gene was a work of immense scientific creativity in 1976, providing the conceptual foundations and unifying framework of modern Darwinian biology, and remains unsurpassed, whether by word or by mathematics, to this day".

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Does Irreducible Complexity Imply Bad Design? Vend Mar 20, 2006

This letter is about my objetions about Mark Perahk's article "Does Irreducible Complexity Imply Intelligent Design" that appeared on the Skeptical Inquirer, which seems to be similar to "Beyond suboptimality: Why irreducible complexity does not imply intelligent design".

I'have already discussed this with Mark but I think that our discussion come to a stale, so I'm posting here to get other opinions.

In his article Perahk claims that any designed IC system is poorly designed, so if living systems are IC and designed, they are and example of bad design.

His reasoning can be formalized as:

All IC systems are vulnerable to damage.
All designed system vulnerable to damage are poorly designed.
Thus, all designed IC systems are poorly designed.

I think that this argument is unsound because the second premiss is false.

First, IC systems can be parts a of larger, non-IC system.
If such a system has a set of IC parts (or "sub-systems" if you prefer) which perform the same function, it can withstand the loss of one of the part because its function is replaced by another one.

While each part is IC and hence doesn't have redundancy, There can be a redundant amount of IC parts in the larger system, making it robust against damage.

For example, many machines contain screws.
Let's assume that screws are IC. If a screw is broken, it doesn't perform its function (of holding pieces together) anymore, but since machines usualy contain a redundant number of screws, the failure of one of them does't break the machine.

Screws are designed systems. They are IC, or at least they are vulnerable to damage. But this doesn't make them poorly designed.

This makes the second premiss of the syllogism stated above false. (Since it's a categorical premiss, a single counterexample proves its falsity).

Similarly, living cells may be examples of non-IC systems containing a lot of IC subsystems which exist in many copies.
(Maybe ribosomes or ribosomal sub-units can be an example of IC subsystem that exists in many copies).

Also, note that even a designed IC system that exists in a single copy so its function can't be replaced can be well-designed.

In fact, engineering is all about trade-offs between different desiderable qualities.

While redundancy is a desiderable quality, it conflicts with other ones like low energy consumption, low raw materials needs, etc.

So engineers, while entailing some redundancy, cannot duplicate every system's function.

For instance, cars usually have a single crankshaft in their engines. If it breaks the car stops working. This is obviously a lack of redundancy, but doesn't make the car poorly designed.

As an example of an IC system whose function cannot be replaced, Perahk offered the blood clotting system (probabily quoting Behe).

[continued]

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Beyond suboptimality: Why irreducible complexity does not imply intelligent design

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