02 May 2008

Weekly sampler 16

Well, no sampler last week, so here are the answers to the last DNA content quiz.
  • Top row: the beluga whale has a slightly larger genome than the brine shrimp (3.29 vs. 2.91).
  • Second row: the damselfly, in all its beauty and intricacy, sports a genome half the size of that of the woodlouse hunter (1.50 vs. 3.00).
  • Third row: the aardvark needs more than twice as much DNA as the American cockroach (5.87 vs. 2.72). Ah, now that must be due to "degree of advancement." Just what a well-conceived biblical creation model would have predicted. NOT.
  • Bottom row: the chameleon's genome is almost 10 times the size of the leech's (2.24 vs. 0.23). Another victory for junk science!
Just don't speak of the mountain grasshopper (16.93) and the bald eagle (1.43).

So, what's been keeping me so busy that I can't attend to my blog?

1. I've made a lot of dumb decisions in my time, but one magnificent success covers for all of them: a quarter of a century ago, I somehow convinced Susan Massee to enter into a long-term collaboration which has been enormously fruitful. We have four great kids (two teenagers, one of whom has a blog of her own) and lots of stories, but only recently have we started collaborating professionally. We'll be teaching two classes together in the next several months, with the most exciting one taking us (we hope) to London and Edinburgh next January. The idea is to explore the Christian roots of the Scottish Enlightenment, with Harry Potter as a theme (you know, to get us in the mood), and superstars like Hume, Reid, Burns and Smith as favored ghosts. It'll be a blast; now we just need to get about 20 students to sign up. We've been working on promotion and planning, trying not to emphasize Scotland's January climate. (Which, of course, is a heck of a lot better than Michigan's.)

2. Susan did change her name (it was a long time ago), so you'll need to add my Scottish surname to hers when looking for her work online. Start at the fascinating online magazine Catapult, then check out Calvin's television program, Inner Compass.

3. John Farrell passes along an interesting take on Michael Behe and his weird new book that I've been discussing here; see Laelaps for discussion of Behe's curious absence from a recent propaganda film. Key point: the Discovery Institute seems unenthused by the book, probably because Behe gave away the store. Here's Richard Dawkins in his review in the New York Times:
Behe correctly dissects the Darwinian theory into three parts: descent with modification, natural selection and mutation. Descent with modification gives him no problems, nor does natural selection. They are “trivial” and “modest” notions, respectively. Do his creationist fans know that Behe accepts as “trivial” the fact that we are African apes, cousins of monkeys, descended from fish?
Well, heh, maybe now they do.

4. Sorry I'm late on this, but a week and half ago D.W. Congdon at The Fire and the Rose presented Four theses against Intelligent Design. Please check it out. I'm particularly interested in his comments on natural theology and his blunt equation of ID with a "god of the gaps." My friend and colleague Del Ratzsch has convinced me that design arguments need not evoke god-of-the-gaps fallacies, but I find the ID movement to be rife with that malignancy, and Congdon's harsh judgment of such errors is spot-on. When I comment further on Behe's The Edge of Evolution, I'll claim that the book is nothing more than a single, flawed, ignorance-based argument, with the desperate aim of creating a gap.

5. I recently heard Stephen H. Webb, American Theologian, give a talk and thereafter concluded that his web site is not the parody I initially took it to be. I won't say much about the talk, for various reasons. But after hearing him speak, and looking at some of his other writing, I was unsurprised to see that he wrote a comically uninformed positive review of The Edge of Evolution. The comments reveal that not all of the readers of Christianity Today are as gullible as Stephen H. Webb, American Theologian. That's encouraging, eh?

6. John Derbyshire is a columnist at National Review, which makes him a conservative. (I used to refer to myself in that way, but I really don't know what it means anymore.) You thought I can't stand ID? Check out his remarkable condemnation of the movement, Henry V-like in its merciless passion. The high point:

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

I don't know what Derbyshire has against Apaches, but that's beside the point.

7. I've mentioned Francisco Ayala before: he's a real evolutionary biologist, the kind who performs research and co-authors scientific papers as opposed to the kind who keeps a blog or leads a religious crusade. Read about him and his new book at the New York Times, and let me know your thoughts on the book, which I'll read and review sometime in the next...year. :-)

8 comments:

John Farrell said...

25 years! Congatulations--and the Roots of Scottish Enlightenment course sounds fantastic (oh, to be a student again...)

Martin LaBar said...

Congratulations on 25, and thanks for the links.

Gordon J. Glover said...

Steve, this one from NRO is also good.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWI5Mzk4YzMxMTNjM2UxZGZlMGMzNTUzN2QwMTU3ZTY=

Gordon

Brandon said...

The Scottish Enlightenment class does look like a lot of fun; there are lots of superstars in Scotland at that time -- not just Hume, Reid, Burns, and Smith, but also Beattie, Campbell, Witherspoon, Blair, and Boswell; the hard part will be just cutting it down to a selection, because there's so much to choose from!

Unknown said...

Is there a place where Ratzsch has published the claims design arguments need not be god-of-the-gaps? I ask b/c I heard him give a talk a few years ago (when he was the Calvin traveling scholar, or whatever you call it) where he tried to make this claim, but (and I admit it could be my own misunderstanding) I had a very hard time distinguishing his position from god-of-the-gaps thinking. I was particularly underwhelmed when I asked him the rather simple question of how one knows "design" when one sees it (b/c he didn't present a very coherent definition of "design"), and his only answer was the very ID/Paley-esque sounding claim that if one found a diesel tractor in the wilderness then one would assume it was designed by a designer and that the existence of flagella presented an analogous case (he didn't use the words "irreducible complexity" but the argument sounded almost identical to the typical ID ploy). Perhaps this comment was the result of off-the-cuff remarks not reflecting a more nuanced position, but I came away from the talk without any real sense of how talking about "design" outside of a god-of-the-gaps context really made any difference for how we think about the natural world (i.e., if a "design" argument doesn't lead us to god-of-the-gaps thinking, I don't see in what ways does it actually allows us to do science better, or differently, than it is already currently done). It struck me more as one of those "this word isn't really as bad as people think" arguments without a clear sense of the audience to which one is trying to justify the word (in this case, the word "design").

Brandon said...

Ratzsch has a book, called Nature, Design, and Science which lays out different notions of design, and probably would clarify things a little. It's actually a decent book; but it mostly leaves you with a lot of distinctions about the different sorts of arguments you might be making with a design arguments, without full development of the conditions for any of them.

Stephen Matheson said...

John and Martin and others--
Heh. It's been 25 years since I convinced her, but we were married 23.5 years ago :-)

Brandon--
We'll be in touch re recommended topics for our course, and if you know folks in Edinburgh or Glasgow or elsewhere who would be good candidates for guest lecturers, please chime in.

Kyle--
Nature, Design, and Science is a good place to read more, but I would first recommend Science & Its Limits, a required text for this blog. The diesel bulldozer on Mars is one of his favorite thought experiments, but the metaphor in S&IL involves a meteor shower that hits the moon, creating craters that spell out a message. The "design" in that event is evident due to what Del calls "counterflow" and not to any gaps in the causal history of the phenomenon. In other words, if a superscientist were able to show convincingly that no super- or non-natural "gaps" could be found in the causal history of the meteor shower, all the way back to the big bang, she would not therefore have proven that the shower does not evince design. Here is Del's conclusion:

"What our story indicates is that design and gaps are not necessarily linked and that the charge that design cases must of necessity be gap cases is mistaken. A gap has to do with the causal history of a phenomenon. Design has to do with whether or not the phenomenon has characteristics (however produced, whatever the immediate means of production) exemplifying a specific type of agent-dependent, mind-resonating pattern. Thus to claim that any design theory has to be a gap theory is simply to confuse two quite distinct issues." (p. 127 of S&IL)

Does that help?

Brandon said...

I don't have too many ideas in the guest lecturer department. If you can get him up to where you'll be, Peter Millican (Hertford College, Oxford) would be an ideal guest lecturer on Hume. Another great catch (although he might be hard to get) would be John Haldane (St. Andrews).