The river of ideas

Posted on 23/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

 I posted a piece about my old edition of The Cambridge Natural History a week or two ago, including a reference to the section on man. Yesterday I was browsing through a very nice collection of quotes on evolution on bevets.com (quite a labour involved there), and noticed some familiar words and concepts. See what you think of this series. Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

More on protein synthesis

Posted on 22/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

Another interesting paper, again brought to my attention by an ID website (sorry). But again, I was interested in looking at the original in PLoS Genetics, which fortunately for us all has open access. The basic finding is a surprisingly high number of de novo protein-coding genes in the human genome, to the tune of 60. This was compared to chimpanzee and other primate sources. This, they say, is three times more than what was found hitherto – but then they looked harder.

Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Prior commitments – 2: theistic

Posted on 21/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

My last post showed the prevalent, and crippling, metaphysical bias of those who assess the evidence for evolution with a materialistic prior commitment. Richard Lewontin makes the case eloquently. Despite the popular rhetoric, though, theism as such has very much less at stake in the matter. Not to put too fine a point on it, God could have created using evolution, or in pretty much any other way. In practice things are not that simple, if we look at specific examples.

Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 6 Comments

Prior commitments – 1: atheistic

Posted on 21/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

In some e-mail correspondence over the weekend I mentioned the unwillingness of biologists to engage seriously with mathematical challenges to random mutation in protein synthesis. My correspondent replied that he didn’t share a theist’s need to prove the biologists wrong. I answered that the issue might equally involve materialist biologists’ need to prove the mathematics wrong.

The exchange got me to thinking about prior commitments in relation to evolution, especially as I happened to turn up the original source  for Richard Lewontin’s much-quoted statement on the matter. Indeed, only today it is cited in an excellent article by David Berlinski . Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

Spotting design

Posted on 21/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

I caught the last few minutes of The Natural World on BBC Radio 4 as I woke up yesterday morning. The naturalist being interviewed was talking about the way a species of ladybird only reaches sexual maturity after several days of cold weather. He explained that it was an evolutionary strategy, for a purpose I didn’t quite catch.

But “evolutionary strategy” is surely an oxymoron. The whole point of evolution is that it has no strategy. So did he intend to say that the behaviour pointed to evolution, or that it was a strategy? It can’t be both if Neodarwinism is true.

The context actually made it clear that he meant to point out what clever little blighters ladybirds are. He had not previously said anything remotely relevant to evolution. He might just as well have said the ladybird was fit for purpose – or even that it was well-designed, which is what “strategy” necessarily implies. The only reason to mention evolution at all was … well, to make sure he mentioned evolution.

Because as Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Even oxymorons.

Posted in Creation, Science | Leave a comment

Here’s who

Posted on 21/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

The quote in the previous post is actually by zoologist and leader in the field of population genetics, Richard Lewontin. It comes from Testing the Theory of Natural Selection  published in Nature on  March 24, 1972,  p.181.

Lewontin’s other famous quotation about science’s prior commitment to materialism comes from a book review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, which is posted in full  at http://www.drjbloom.com/Public%20files/Lewontin_Review.htm. It says quite a lot about Neodarwinism, quite a lot about Lewontin, a fair bit about Sagan and even a little about Richard Dawkins. I’ll return to it in a future post.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Who said this?

Posted on 20/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

“Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in particular is hopelessly metaphysical, according to the rules of etiquette laid down in the Logic of Scientific Inquiry and widely believed in by practicing scientists who bother to think about the problem. The first rule for any scientific hypothesis ought to be that it is at least possible to conceive of an observation that would contradict the theory. For what good is a theory that is guaranteed by its internal logical structure to agree with all conceivable observations, irrespective of the real structure of the world? If scientists are going to use logically unbeatable theories about the world, they might as well give up natural science and take up religion. Yet is that not exactly the situation with regard to Darwinism? The theory of evolution by natural selection states that changes in the inherited characters of species occur, giving rise to differentiation in space and time, because different genetical types leave different numbers of offspring in different environments… Such a theory can never be falsified, for it asserts that some environmental difference created the conditions for natural selection of a new character. It is existentially quantified so that the failure to find the environmental factor proves nothing, except that one has not looked hard enough. Can one really imagine observations about nature that would disprove natural selection as a cause of the difference in bill size? The theory of natural selection is then revealed as metaphysical rather than scientific. Natural selection explains nothing because it explains everything. ”

Bill Dembski? Steve Meyer?  Dave Berlinski? Ken Ham? Albert Mohler? Clearly someone who is part of the conspiracy to get creationism taught in schools, trying to impugn the scientific credentials of evolution. Will they stoop to anything?

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Genesis, genre and Paul Simon

Posted on 17/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

A recent documentary on the making of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Paul Simon talks about writing Cecelia. I’ve always thought this was a great song with a fantastic groove, but with uncharacteristically tawdry lyrics which I found vaguely embarrassing. Why would far-from-simple Simon write a typical “adolescent sex” song? And then Simon has a throwaway line: “St Cecelia is, of course, the patron saint of musicians.”

And suddenly it falls into place, after 40 years – it’s not a song about the traumas of adolescent lust at all, but about the fickleness of the creative muse. It’s part of a small but distinct genre: “Laments of Songwriters Seeking Inspiration”. This genre also includes another of my more esoteric favorites, (Further Reflections) in the Room of Percussion  by the quintessentially English psychelic cult band, Kaleidoscope. Amusingly, a comment on the YouTube clip says this is probably about a bad LSD trip. But Peter Daltry, the writer, was never fuelled by anything stronger than Bulmer’s cider and said in an interview that it was about fruitless songwriting sessions at his friend’s house.

Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

Philosophy and the ship of fools

Posted on 15/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

Here’s my last comment (for now at least) on Gordon & Dembski’s The Nature of Nature. The last chapter is by William Lane Craig, who starts uncontroversially enough by noting the decline of scientific naturalism in philosophy. He catalogues the ascendancy of positivism and verificationism in the field throughout the middle of the twentieth century, and particularly notes the influence of A J Ayer’s book, Language, Truth and Logic. In this Ayer developed (though he didn’t invent) the concept that any sentence not subject to empirical verification is simply meaningless.

Thus any statement dealing with “God” is not simply untrue, but devoid of any significance. Craig indicates, and there seems no reason to doubt him, that such considerations more or less excluded any metaphysical discussion during this period within philosophy. Science became the arbiter of truth in this field as in so many others.
Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards

Posted on 14/11/2011 by Jon Garvey

Another set of artistically-minded visitors this weekend, and another trip to our nearest Jurassic coast village and its small art galleries. For my wife and I another look at nice stuff we can’t afford, and probably wouldn’t if we could because we’d only come back next time and want something else. There aren’t enough walls in the house.

It never ceases to amaze me how much variety and ingenuity is on display in such places. There are dozens of different visions even of the local landscape, but beyond that a plethora of approaches to interpreting reality, to representing the human form or to abstract expression. Photographic realism, hazy impressionism, bold colour, subtle taste, quirkiness, humour, brooding solemnity… somebody’s putting all these and more into their art somewhere, and moreover producing a thrill of empathy when someone like me or you sees it.

Continue reading →

Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | Leave a comment