Rabbi Dr. Dovid Gottlieb

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:01:00 +0000

September 10, 2012 Monday 23 Elul 5772 15:07 IST

Photo by: REUTERS

Don't throw away 'Junk DNA'

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH06/09/2012

Human genome found to be a control panel switching disease-related genes; could revolutionize diagnostics, treatments.

Geneticists looking for the origin of heritable diseases “now have a new sandbox to play in,” said Shaare Zedek Medical Center’s medical genetics director, Prof. Ephrat Levy-Lahad, following the discovery that so-called “junk DNA” in the human genome has an important purpose after all.

Instead of 99 percent of the genome being “irrelevant filler” – as had been thought – and only the remaining 1% of the genome of 3 billion base pairs encoding for vital proteins, the “junk DNA” serves as millions of DNA switches that power the human genome’s operating system. It thus comprises a massive control panel; without these switches, genes would not work and mutations in these regions might lead to human disease.

The locations of some four million switches were discovered and published Thursday in three journals: Nature, Genome Biology and Genome Research by an international research team of hundreds of scientists led by the University of Washington in Seattle.

The University of Washington’s ENCODE project stands for “ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements.”

The on/off switches controlling genes were encrypted within the remaining genome. Without these switches, named “regulatory DNA,” genes are inert.

Researchers around the world have been focused on identifying regulatory DNA in order to understand how the genome works. The researchers created the first detailed maps showing where regulatory DNA is located within hundreds of different kinds of living cells. They also compiled a dictionary of the instructions written within regulatory DNA in the genome’s programming language.

Levy-Lahad told The Jerusalem Post that “scientists haven’t called the 99% ‘junk DNA’ for years, because it became clear that it wasn’t wasted. These parts of the DNA that don’t encode for protein must have had a reason to be there, but geneticists didn’t know the purpose.”

The ENCODE team have now made it possible to understand the process much better. In general, researchers are beginning to understand how genes are regulated – turned on and off. Many diseases are not due to protein-coding regions but switches that turn genes on and off, she continued.

“I would anticipate that many diseases that we don’t understand well will become clearer. For example, there is a large heritable component to type II diabetes, but [we] haven’t yet found specific genes responsible for it,” the Shaare Zedek geneticist said.

Although the onset of diabetes occurs usually due to overweight, poor diet and lack of exercise, there is a much greater likelihood of developing the disease if one parent had it, Levy-Lahad said.

“The defective genes could have been there, but in previous generations, people were leaner than now, she explained, so it might have not showed up. Autism also has a genetic component, and so do many other diseases. Now, with this discovery, we will have more places in the genome to look for genetic changes that matter. So far, we geneticists haven’t fished around even in the whole 1%.”

The ENCODE discovery, Levy-Lahad continued, “will in the long term lead to better diagnostics and then to improved treatments and cures.”

Just as the Human Genome Project revolutionized biomedical research, ENCODE will drive new understanding and open new avenues for biomedical science, said the research leaders from the US National Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the UK.

“Our genome is simply alive with switches: millions of places that determine whether a gene is switched on or off,” says Ewan Birney of EMBL-EBI, the lead analysis coordinator.

“With ENCODE, we can see that around 80% of the genome is actively doing something. We found that a much bigger part of the genome – a surprising amount, in fact – is involved in controlling when and where proteins are produced, than in simply manufacturing the building blocks.”

“ENCODE data can be used by any disease researcher, whatever pathology they may be interested in,” said Ian Dunham of EMBL-EBI, who played a key role in coordinating the analysis.

“In many cases, you may have a good idea of which genes are involved in your disease, but you might not know which switches are involved. Sometimes these switches are very surprising, because their location might seem more logically connected to a completely different disease. ENCODE gives us a set of very valuable leads to follow to discover key mechanisms at play in health and disease. Those can be exploited to create entirely new medicines or to repurpose existing treatments.”

Until recently, generating and storing large volumes of data has been a challenge in biomedical research. Now, with the falling cost and rising productivity of genome sequencing, the focus has shifted to analysis – making sense of the data produced in genome-wide association studies.

ENCODE combined the efforts of 442 scientists in 32 labs in the United Kingdom, United States, Spain, Singapore and Japan. They generated and analyzed over 15 trillion bytes of raw data – all of which are now publicly available.

ENCODE combined the efforts of 442 scientists in 32 labs in the UK, US, Spain, Singapore and Japan. They generated and analyzed over 15 trillion bytes of raw data – all of which is now publicly available. The study used around 300 years’ worth of computer time studying 147 tissue types to determine what turns specific genes on and off, and how that ‘switch’ differs between cell types. All of the published ENCODE content, in all three journals, is connected digitally through topical ‘threads’, so that readers can follow their area of interest between papers and all the way down to the original data.

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noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 12:04:00 +0000

The evolution wars - if you are following the action, these articles are very worthwhile:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/read_your_refer_1063841.html

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/04/caught_in_candi058301.html

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/12/a_new_article_i054031.html

Casey Luskin is, in my opinion, a very good researcher in the style of meta-studies, a very logical thinker, and a very clear writer.

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:47:00 +0000

From RealClearScience

Published on ScienceNordic (http://sciencenordic.com)

Ants in supercolonies defy evolution

Natural Sciences [1]

Some invasive ants create supercolonies which eliminate other ants in an area. But the supercolonies cannot continue to exist, since evolution doesn’t allow for this social behaviour.

First there was one; then there were two – and before long there were billions of them. Invasive ants have managed to form supercolonies that can grow indefinitely.
Ants normally form colonies with only one nest and one queen. But for 15-20 of the world’s 12,643 known ant species, this isn’t enough: they form supercolonies with several nests and several queens. This enables them to spread over large areas and wipe out other ant species.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has compiled a list of the 100 invasive species that are most harmful to Earth’s biodiversity. This list includes five of the supercolony-forming ants.
“It looks as if the ants defy evolution, and we’re eager to figure out how that’s even possible,” says Jes Søe Pedersen of the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen.
“According to the laws of evolution, you only need to help out your relatives. But we’re seeing ant colonies so big that all the ants cannot possibly be related. So why are they helping one another? That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” he says.

One nest and one queen is the norm

Ants usually live in fairly isolated nests, consisting of a single queen which lays eggs that end up as worker ants. At a certain time of the year the queen lays eggs that turn into new queens and males, which subsequently fly off into the world to build new colonies.
In the colony it makes good sense for the workers to work for the entire colony and not just for themselves. When the queen lays eggs, the same genetic material that constitutes the worker ants is promoted, so it makes evolutionary sense that they spend their lives slaving for the queen.
“We have no trouble with understanding how evolution has created the classic ant colony,” says Pedersen. “The workers work for their sisters – new queens – and their brothers – males. It gets a bit trickier to understand when the workers work for other ants' sisters and brothers, as is done in supercolonies.”

Supercolony stretches 6,000km

Ants that form supercolonies do not settle for flying off into the world to build new colonies a couple of times a year.
Sometimes, when the nests are starting to fill up, one of the queens takes a few workers out for a walk. They walk a relatively short distance away from the nest and form a new nest, which then becomes part of the same colony.
The ants walk back and forth between the various nests, and the workers work for any of the queens in the colony, regardless of whether they’re related or not.
A supercolony can grow at an incredible speed. From a single point, it can grow up to 30 metres in any direction per year. Within the supercolony, the individual nests can be packed as densely as one per square metre.
“Unless there are geographic obstructions in the way, these supercolonies can just continue to grow, as is exemplified by a colony that stretches 6,000km along the Mediterranean. That’s the largest co-operative unit in the animal kingdom,” says Pedersen.

Argentine Ant present on most continents

The ant species that formed this massive supercolony originates from Argentina. It has spread to Europe, the USA, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Hawaii from a supercolony that came from South America more than 100 years ago, partly via ship cargo.
Supercolonies have also spread to other parts of the world.
Although the Argentine Ant poses no risk to humans, it can soon become a nuisance when all of a sudden there is a ten-fold increase in ants in the garden.
Furthermore, the dominance of the ants can cause a ripple effect in the ecosystem as they eliminate other ant species as well as other insects. This could spoil the food base for species further up in the food chain.

Red fire ants cause grief in the US

The Argentine Ant is not the only supercolony-forming ant that causes trouble.
In the US the red American fire ant has had an iron grip on the country since the 1930s. This ant is also imported from Argentina, but unlike the Argentine Ant, it’s nasty for us humans.
The American red fire ant, also known as the ‘red imported fire ant’, has a sting equivalent to a bee sting. Since a supercolony can contain billions of these little creatures within a relatively small area, great efforts are being made to fight them.
“Trying to fight the red imported fire ant on a large scale is hopeless,” says the researcher. “It’s costing the US state billions of dollars every year to fight this ant, to compensate for losses of crops and to provide medication for people who have been stung. It’s a huge problem.”

Mutants can spell the end for supercolonies

Jes Søe Pedersen is part of a research group at the Center for Social Evolution. The group is trying to figure out how these supercolonies can persist, even though their existence defies evolution.
Lots of things could put a supercolony down. For example, a queen who is a mutant and only lays queen eggs would be able to spread her offspring quickly around in the colony. Since only queens lay eggs, one queen could become several thousand queens in a short period of time.
If this offspring also gives birth to queens only, it would be optimal for ants with this particular gene, which would soon become dominant in the colony. Eventually there would be no workers left to keep the colony going.

Ants can gradually melt down a supercolony

This would lead to a net genetic meltdown, explains Pedersen, since mutations accumulate in the supercolony over time. Even queens that don’t lay worker eggs will be cared for by other queens’ workers.
“Up to now the ants have been showing an extreme form of social behavior; we’re interested in seeing whether evolution will set a limit on how social a creature can get,” he says.
[9]

Two workers of the invasive ant species that is currently spreading through Europe (Photo: G. Brovad/ZMUC) [10]

Workers from two different Argentine Ant supercolonies fighting. In 98 percent of these fights, one of the ants dies within ten minutes. (Photo: C. Kønig) [11]

A swarm of invasive ants at the doorstep of a house in Barcelona. (Photo: X. Espadaler/UAB) [12]

ants.jpg [13]

Jes Søe Pedersen’s profile [17] Map showing how much invasive ants have spread in Europe [18] Video of the red imported fire ant [19] The Centre for Social Evolution [20]

The Evolution of Invasiveness in Garden Ants (PLoS one) [21]

Kristian Sjøgren [22]

Dann Vinther

February 2, 2012 - 05:06

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:45:00 +0000

From RealClearScience

Unknown Selective Force Shapes Bacterial Evolution

Posted by Alex Berezow at Fri, 24 Aug 2012 03:25:47

« How to Examine Rocks 163 Million Miles Away | Newton Blog Home Page | Science Wants to Control Your Mind! »

Most organisms' characteristics are shaped by the process of natural selection. For instance, slow bunny rabbits get eaten by wolves, so nature has selected for the survival of fast bunny rabbits. But, not all traits are under such intense selective pressure. Indeed, some aren't under any selective pressure at all. Therefore, these traits may be random, and over time, differences between species can develop purely by chance.

In bacteria, one example of such a characteristic is called the "G+C content." Recall that DNA is made up of nucleotides: A, T, G and C. The A and T pair together (A+T) in the DNA double helix, as do the G and C (G+C). After a bacteria's genome is sequenced, the G+C content is calculated simply by adding up all the G's and C's and dividing that number by the total number of nucleotides. The percentage, which can range from 13% to 75%, tends to be characteristic of the bacterial species. Why one species is, say, 47% and another is 58% is thought to be due solely to chance. Luck of the draw.

Or, at least that's what scientists thought until a few years ago when evidence emerged that random mutations were biased: they were more likely to generate A's and T's. But, now, a new paper in PNAS shows that an unknown selective force appears to nudge bacteria in the other direction. Bizarrely, simply possessing genes with a higher G+C content makes the bacteria grow faster.

To determine this, researchers from Yale University used many different versions of a gene called GFP which were identical in amino acid sequence, but differed in DNA sequence. (Because the genetic code is degenerate, different DNA sequences can yield identical proteins.) They found that bacteria given GFP genes with a higher G+C content grew faster -- even though the protein they produced was identical to the proteins the other bacteria produced.

It gets weirder. The GFP gene itself is completely useless to bacteria. GFP stands for "green fluorescent protein" and it was isolated from a jellyfish. It is irrelevant to the health and welfare of bacteria.

What exactly is going on is rather a mystery. If all other things are equal (e.g., if a phenomenon known as codon bias has been accounted for), then it really shouldn't matter what the exact DNA coding sequence is for any given protein -- particularly if the protein sequence isn't altered (and especially if it's useless!).

But, what is perhaps clearer is that what was once thought to be randomly generated DNA sequences, in actuality, was the subtle craftsmanship of the ever-present force of natural selection. [My emphasis - D.G.]

Source: Rahul Raghavan, Yogeshwar D. Kelkar, and Howard Ochman. A selective force favoring increased G+C content in bacterial genes. Published online before print August 20, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1205683109 PNAS August 20, 2012.

(Image: DNA via Shutterstock)

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:40:00 +0000

3,000-year-old wheat traces said to support biblical account of Israelite conquest

Archaeologist Amnon Ben-Tur claims find at Tel Hazor is a remnant of Joshua’s military campaign in 13th century BCE

By ASHER ZEIGER July 23, 2012, 10:58 pm

Ancient city at Tel Hazor (photo credit: CC BY ritculio, Flickr)

Traces of burnt wheat found in Israel’s Upper Galilee are evidence of the 13th-century-BCE Israelite conquest of the Promised Land, an archeologist said.

Tel Hazor, a national park, has long been recognized as one of the country’s most important archaeological sites. From the 18th to the 9th centuries BCE, it was the largest fortified city in the country and had commercial ties with both Babylon and Syria. The Book of Joshua describes Hazor as the “head” of several kingdoms that united to fight the Israelites. In 2005, Tel Hazor was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In recent years, the archaeological digs at Tel Hazor revealed a monumental structure, which scholars believe was the royal castle of Hazor, dating back to the Canaanite Period (third to second millennium BCE).

Map

Satellite

This season, the excavation, which is being conducted under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, uncovered a storage room in the castle. In the room were 14 large clay jugs containing seeds of burnt wheat.

Professor Amnon Ben-Tur of the Hebrew University has been in charge of the Hazor excavations since 1990. In an interview with Ynet, Ben-Tur said that the jugs were destroyed around the 13th century BCE, a period, he said, which coincided with the biblical account of Joshua’s capture of Hazor. According to Chapter 11 in the Book of Joshua, Hazor was the only city in the Land of Israel that was destroyed by fire during the conquest.

Ben-Tur’s assessment regarding the destruction of Hazor is far from being a foregone conclusion in the archaeological world. Scholars are at odds as to when Hazor was destroyed and by whom. While the most widely accepted school of thought accepts the theory that Hazor was destroyed by the Israelites in or around the 13th century BCE, there are many scholars who hold that Hazor was destroyed by either the Egyptians, the Sea Peoples, or nomadic tribes that wandered the region at the time.

Ben-Tur disagreed, noting that Hazor was not included in any of the lists of Israelite cities destroyed by the Pharaohs. Furthermore, Ben-Tur holds that the Sea Peoples traditionally stayed close to the coastline, and would not have conquered a city as far inland as Hazor.

Ben-Tur said that the recent discovery at Hazor “sheds even more light on Israelite history.”

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 11:45:00 +0000

Video: To Dawkins's Dismay, a "Darwinian Physician" Goes Off-Message

David Klinghoffer July 12, 2012 4:32 PM | Permalink

Here's a very amusing video -- unintentionally so. Richard Dawkins interviews "Darwinian medicine" advocate Dr. Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan. Dawkins starts off primed to have his strident Darwinism reflected back to him by Dr. Nesse, a genial fellow who wrote a book called Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine.

But almost immediately Nesse goes off message, and you can hear the tinge of concern in Dawkins's voice. In his face, you can see his doubts about Nesse grow as they talk. Even as he repeatedly reaffirms that natural selection alone lies behind the body's seeming "design," Nesse says all kinds of things that are delicious for viewers who are open to seeing actual, intelligent design in nature.

Nesse, for one thing, keeps using the word "designed" to describe physiological features. This gets Dawkins nervous: "You used the word design," he interrupts, "and we need to obviously interpret that in a special Darwinian sense."

Nesse allows that Dawkins is right, but in a way that raises awkward doubts:

You know I always end up using the word design and someone in the audience always says "You shouldn't do that, Dr. Nesse, because you don't really mean design." And they're obviously right of course.

He goes on,

But when you look at how the mechanisms of the body work, it's almost automatic to talk about them being designed, but what really gives the proof [otherwise] is when you look at how badly designed they are. No sensible person would ever have left the body the way it is.

You can imagine Dawkins's relief at hearing that.

As a first example of "bad design" that comes to mind, Nesse speaks about our forearm with its two slender bones, the radius and the ulna. If those bones were thicker we wouldn't be so vulnerable to a kind of fracture, a Colles fracture, that besets skateboarders -- who when they fall forward off their board, catch their weight on their extended forearms. That does sound painful, yet the same feature allows us to rotate our arms in countless delicate ways, with a fine dexterity that makes it possible to play the piano or the violin, or paint portraits.

It's a trade-off between sturdiness and mobility, explains Nesse -- a "historical legacy," an example of "path dependence": "Everything in the body...is trade-offs all the way down." He seems not to notice that this is true of all design, in the human context, that you can possibly think of. It's in the nature of the physical world that every good must be somehow bought at the expense of something else. Only in pure creativity, which happens in the mind, is no compromise necessarily exacted. Translate your creative idea into matter, and it's a different story.

Nesse goes on to speak of "six possible reasons...why the body isn't better designed." He catches himself yet again: "I'm using the word design over and over again. I can see why other people do, you know. It's very hard to find another word to refer to these mechanisms that work so well."

That work so well? I thought they were all so badly designed?

Dawkins interrupts again, and this time he sounds almost cross: "Once and for all, it looks like design. Natural selection produces a powerful illusion of design."

Nesse accepts the correction, with the same winning smile he wears throughout the interview: "I'm talking about natural selection as if it has a mind. It's so easy to talk that way, isn't it?"

Finally he makes a design argument -- not that he intends it as such -- that I for one hadn't heard before:

I am amazed, Richard, that what we call metazoans, multi-celled organisms, have actually been able to evolve, and the reason [for amazement] is that bacteria and viruses replicate so quickly -- a few hours sometimes, they can reproduce themselves -- that they can evolve very, very quickly. And we're stuck with twenty years at least between generations. How is it that we resist infection when they can evolve so quickly to find ways around our defenses?

"Amazing" is the right word. He's talking about the origins of multi-celled organisms like us: How did we ever survive, under a Darwinian view, long enough to escape being consumed by creatures that reproduce so much more quickly?

What exactly that transition was between one-celled organisms or few-celled organisms and multi-celled organisms -- the ability of an immune system to protect us from things that evolve so much faster than we do, that want to have us for lunch -- must be very crucial in the origins of life.

"Crucial"! Yes that's the word all right. This leaves Richard Dawkins with a frown on his face, as well it might. Watch the whole thing for yourself. It repays the investment of time.

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 18:40:00 +0000

The only siyum hashas that I am scheduled to attend is at Met-Life Stadium in New Jersey on August 1.

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 11:59:00 +0000

Mind and Cosmos

Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

Thomas Nagel

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 16:32:00 +0000

On the Origin of Everything

‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=1

Illustration by Andy Martin

By DAVID ALBERT

Published: March 23, 2012

REPRINTS

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.”

A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING

Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

By Lawrence M. Krauss

Illustrated. 202 pp. Free Press. $24.99.

Times Topic: Science and Technology

Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explainsomething, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.

Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that everything he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?

Never mind. Forget where the laws came from. Have a look instead at what they say. It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electromagnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and allthe fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.

The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

What on earth, then, can Krauss have been thinking? Well, there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world — and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument — or thinks he does — that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.

But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements ofelementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absenceof the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy. A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as “nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of science — if we understand it correctly — gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise.

And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience.”

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 16:54:00 +0000

Another Darwinian Pillar Falls - Bateman's Sexual Selection:

Evolution News & Views June 18, 2012 5:28 AM | Permalink

It was a classic experiment supporting Darwin's theory of sexual
selection. It generated a catchy phrase -- Bateman's Principle -- and
launched a paradigm. But this year, a replication of Bateman's
original 1948 experiment showed his methods were so biased and flawed
that none of his conclusions are valid.

Angus John Bateman, working on fruit flies in 1948, published his
findings which became known as Bateman's Principle: the idea that
males tend to be promiscuous (because sperm is cheap) while females
tend to be choosy (because eggs are expensive). This principle, so
impressive with its math, jargon, and presumed application of the
scientific method, seemed to support Darwin's theory of sexual
selection.

It took on a life of its own, especially after R. L. Trivers in 1972
and S. J. Arnold in 1994 brought attention to it. According to Gowaty,
Kim and Anderson, who decided to test it, citations soared and
"Bateman's Principle" took on paradigmatic status. They note that
"legions of graduate students" have read the paper since it was
published.

The Wikipedia entry on Bateman's Principle acknowledges that many
biologists have found exceptions to it; some even doubt its status as
a scientific principle. But now, for the first time, Gowaty et al.
have replicated the experiment using Bateman's own methods -- but with
the added advantage of 64 years of advances in genetics.

In short, they found that the experiment was useless. Bateman failed
to take into account biases inherent in his methods, failed to measure
factors that discounted his conclusions, and left a mess of data that
is perfectly hopeless for making predictions about fitness due to
sexual selection.

Here we show that inviability of double-mutant offspring biased
inferences of mate number and number of offspring on which rest
inferences of sex differences in fitness variances. Bateman's method
overestimated subjects with zero mates, underestimated subjects with
one or more mates, and produced systematically biased estimates of
offspring number by sex. Bateman's methodology mismeasured fitness
variances that are the key variables of sexual selection. [emphasis
added]
Their open-access paper, "No evidence of sexual selection in a
repetition of Bateman's classic study of Drosophila melanogaster," is
available at PNAS for those who want the details.
Of overarching concern is how a 64-year-old classic that influenced
"legions of graduate students" (and uncounted legions of undergrads,
too) was fatally flawed yet went unchallenged all those years. Thomas
Kuhn was right: paradigms govern a scientific program until anomalies
accumulate that require a new paradigm.

In this case, though, Gowaty et al. offered no new paradigm. They did
not specifically falsify the 1948 paper; as charitably as they could,
they suggested ways to test Bateman's principle (or "Bateman's
hypothesis") with better-designed experiments. Even, so, they
recognized, it would require snooping on the little fruit flies'
sexual activity, not just measuring viable hatchlings, because
"absence of offspring is not necessarily absence of mating." Their
last paragraph was more far-reaching and less charitable:

We are left wondering why earlier readers failed to spot the
inferential problems with Bateman's original study. The main
implication we take from the present study is one earlier critics
made: The paradigmatic power of the world-view captured in Bateman's
conclusions and the phrase "Bateman's Principles" may dazzle readers,
obscuring from view methodological weaknesses and reasonable
alternative hypotheses....
Many ID supporters have undoubtedly felt the same incredulity at how
so many scientists fail to spot the inferential problems in Darwinism.
They have shared the same bewilderment at the paradigmatic power of
world-view behind other Darwinian notions and catch-phrases that,
while dazzling to readers, obscure their view of alternative
hypotheses like intelligent design. The more Darwin pillars that
crumble, though, the more the view may improve.

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 11:35:00 +0000

Ancient walking mystery deepens

By Helen BriggsBBC News

Reconstruction of the body of Ichthyostega

One of the first creatures to step on land could not have walked on four legs, 3D computer models show.

Textbook pictures of the 360-million-year-old animal moving like a salamander are incorrect, say scientists.

Instead, it would have hauled itself from the water using its front limbs as crutches, research in Nature suggests.

The move from living in water to life on land - a pivotal moment in evolution - must have been a gradual one.

Ichthyostega is something of an icon in the fossil world. Living during the Upper Devonian period, it was dubbed a "fishapod", with its mixture of fish-like and amphibious features.

“Start Quote

Our reconstruction demonstrates that the old idea, often seen in popular books and museum displays, of Ichthyostega looking and walking like a large salamander, with four sturdy legs, is incorrect”

Prof Jenny ClackUniversity of Cambridge

Although it probably spent much of its time under water, at times it was thought to have crawled halfway up onto land on limb-like flippers.

Exactly how it moved on land has been a matter of much debate, however.

Now, a team from The Royal Veterinary College, London and the University of Cambridge, has spent three years reconstructing the first 3D computer model of Ichthyostega from fossils.

It enabled them to study how ancient vertebrates made the "monumental transition" from swimming to walking.

Study author Dr Stephanie Pierce, of The Royal Veterinary College, said the 3D skeleton allowed them to calculate the range of movement in the joints of its limbs for the first time.

The research suggests the animal shuffled on land using hind limb movements similar to that seen in seals rather than moving its limbs in the familiar walking pattern seen today.

Dr Pierce told BBC News: "We're almost bringing the animal back to life by doing this.

"What we've discovered is that some early tetrapods definitely did not have the ability to walk on land. We at this stage are not actually sure which animals - or group of animals - were the first to do this."

Co-author Prof Jenny Clack from the University of Cambridge added: "Our reconstruction demonstrates that the old idea, often seen in popular books and museum displays, of Ichthyostega looking and walking like a large salamander, with four sturdy legs, is incorrect."

Fundamental question

Commenting on the study, Dr Susannah Maidment of London's Natural History Museum, said understanding where we came from, or where all the things that live on the land came from, is one of the most fundamental questions.

"What this study suggests is that this animal, which has been traditionally thought of as the first four legged animal to walk on land wasn't walking on land at all.

"It sends us almost back to the drawing board...I guess it even sends you back to the field to look for more fossils."

The research, reported in a paper in Nature, was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Thu, 31 May 2012 15:53:00 +0000

When 'minority' is a trick of definition

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
May 27, 2012

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/11758/when-minority-is-a-trick-of-definition

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WHEN THE CENSUS BUREAU this month issued a press release headlined "Most Children Younger Than Age 1 are Minorities," the media snapped to attention. News outlets nationwide covered the announcement, hailing it as a "historic demographic milestone" (CNN), as the "dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority" (Washington Post), and as an "important turning point for the nation" (McClatchy) that would "starkly … change the face of America's next generations" (Time).

None of that was true.

None of that was new, either. The Census Bureau keeps dangling commonplace demographic data as if they were a dramatic racial revelation, and the press keeps taking the bait. The stories this month about minority births becoming the majority could have been recycled from a year ago, when the same thing was being reported -- and with the same air of history in the making. "For the first time," an AP story declared in June 2011, "minorities make up a majority of babies in the US, part of a sweeping race change … that could reshape government policies." Three months earlier, The New York Times had told its readers that babies born to minorities were "on the verge" of becoming the majority of all US births.

For years Americans have been hearing about the coming nonwhite majority. With every fresh tranche of census data, the issue is raised anew. "Minorities, now roughly one-third of the U.S. population, are expected to become the majority in 2042," the Census Bureau forecast in 2008, "with the nation projected to be 54 percent minority in 2050." Savor the absurdity of the phrase "54 percent minority." It isn't the only thing about this issue that is irrational.

To begin with, all the ballyhoo about America's impending metamorphosis from white to nonwhite makes sense only if white Hispanics aren't what they say they are. Census Bureau guidelines specify that "Hispanics may be of any race" and that "The federal government treats Hispanic origin and race as separate and distinct concepts." In the 2010 US Census, 50.5 million Americans identified themselves as ethnically Hispanic; of those, more than half -- 26.7 million -- were white. The only way to conjure up a looming nonwhite majority is to arbitrarily subtract whites of Hispanic origin from the nation's overall white population.

That "sweeping race change," in other words, is a trick of definition. Maybe you relish the prospect of whites becoming a minority of the American population or maybe you dread it -- or maybe, in an era when more newlyweds than ever are marrying across racial lines, you wonder why anyone is still obsessed with race and color.

But whatever your attitude, there is no point waiting up for The End of White America. It isn't coming. Drill down into the Census Bureau's latest population estimates, for example, and it turns out that of the 3,996,537 babies younger than age 1, nearly 72 percent are white. The only way to shrink that very hefty majority to less than half is to exclude the nearly 900,000 white babies whose ethnic background is Hispanic.

The same is true of the "54 percent minority" scheduled to arrive by 2050. What the data in the bureau's spreadsheets actually project is that white Americans, who now constitute nearly 80 percent of the population, will make up 74 percent by midcentury. Only if tens of millions of white Hispanics aren't counted as white will America in 2050 be anything other than a majority-white nation.

There may be those who simply refuse to regard Hispanics as white, perhaps because of bigotry or ignorance or because they never saw Rita Hayworth, Martin Sheen, Raquel Welch, or Andy Garcia. But then, there have always been Americans with curious ideas of who could and couldn't be "white." Benjamin Franklin was sure that German immigrants were not only non-white but unassimilable;Henry Cabot Lodge said the same thing about Russians, Poles, and Greeks. There was a time when US immigration policyclassified Irish, Italians, and Jews as non-white, and when state laws required any resident with "one drop of Negro blood" to be listed as black.

To us, looking back, all those distinctions today seem ludicrous. A generation or two down the road, it will doubtless seem just as ludicrous that anyone would ever have thought of Hispanics as anything other than part of the broad, "white," American mainstream. Perhaps by then the very idea of race -- white, black, or anything else -- will finally have been discarded, and children will marvel at the idea that color of skin or shape of eye could ever have mattered so much.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His website is www.JeffJacoby.com).

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:35:00 +0000

Archeological evidence from time of King David http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/155579#.T6k__MWi2Sq

Evidence of Canaanite Jewish Rituals in Reign of King David

An archaeologist finds spectacular evidence confirming the reign of King David and that non-Jews believed in one Creator.

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By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

First Publish: 5/8/2012, 4:21 PM

Prof. Yosef Garfinkel with a stone shrine model

Israel news photo courtesy of Hebrew U.

A Hebrew University archaeologist has uncovered spectacular evidence confirming the reign of King David and that there were groups who believed in one Creator at the time. Architecture that was uncovered pre-dates the First Temple built by King Solomon.
Prof. Yosef Garfinkel announced on Tuesday the discovery of objects found in the ruins called Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified border city in the Kingdom of Judah adjacent to the Valley of Elah, less than 20 miles southwest of Jerusalem and five miles west of Gush Etzion.
The archaeologist and colleagues uncovered rich assemblages of pottery, stone and metal tools, and many art and ritual objects. The architecture and discoveries correspond to the biblical description of a local, organized group that observed the second of the 10 Commandments prohibiting belief in graven images.
The absence of cultic images of humans or animals in the shrines provides evidence that the local inhabitants practiced a different cult than that of the Canaanites or the Philistines.
This discovery is the first time that shrines from the time of early biblical kings were uncovered. The village of Khirbet apparently existed for only about 40 years and was violently destroyed.
The People of Israel conducted their lives according to a religion different from all other nations of the ancient Near East by being monotheistic and banning human or animal figures. The Bible describes this in detail.
The findings at Khirbet Qeiyafa also indicate that an elaborate architectural style had developed as early as the time of King David. The construction is typical of royal activities and indicates the establishment of a state and of urban life in the region in the days of the early kings of Israel.
“These finds strengthen the historicity of the biblical tradition and its architectural description of the Palace and Temple of Solomon,” Hebrew University stated.
“This is the first time that archaeologists uncovered a fortified city in Judah from the time of King David,” according to Prof. Garfinkel. “Even in Jerusalem we do not have a clear fortified city from his period. Thus, various suggestions that completely deny the biblical tradition regarding King David and argue that he was a mythological figure, or just a leader of a small tribe, are now shown to be wrong.
“Over the years, thousands of animal bones were found, including sheep, goats and cattle, but no pigs. Now we uncovered three cultic rooms… but not even one human or animal figurine was found. This suggests that the population of Khirbet Qeiyafa observed two biblical bans – on pork and on graven images – and thus practiced a different cult than that of the Canaanites or the Philistines.”
The three shrines are part of larger building complexes, different from the style of Canaanite or Philistine cults, and Prof. Garfinkel pointed out the Biblical verse in the time of King David: “He brought the ark of God from a private house in Kyriat Yearim and put it in Jerusalem in a private house” (Chapter 6 in the Second Book of Samuel).
Parts of the structures, such as the doors, help explain obscure technical terms in the description of Solomon’s palace as described in the First Book of Kings 6.
“For the first time in history, we have actual objects from the time of David, which can be related to monuments described in the Bible,” the archaeologist said.

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:40:00 +0000

Claims of observed speciation are very common in Evolutionist literature. A survey of such claims by Casey Luskin is found here: http://www.discovery.org/f/8411. It serves as a very useful antidote to the fantasies in the claims.

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:45:00 +0000

Having met RabHaving met |Rabbi Klatzko personally, I highly recommend shabbat.com:

About Shabbat.com

You say "Shabbos", I say "Shabbat"..... How ever the Jewish people pronounce it, it remains a peaceful oasis of holiness and tranquility in our tumultuous times, that we wouldn't miss for the world!

Have you ever wanted to go away for a Shabbat, or perhaps experience one for the very first time, but did not have a Shabbat home to join?

Do you wish you had a special guest to share the beauty of your family's Shabbat experience, but do not know where to find them?

Shabbat.com was established to help you find your "perfect challah"!

Traveling for business or pleasure? Backpacking across the country or around the world? Find your perfect challah!

Studying abroad or in Israel? Or perhaps you just came back from Israel and want the taste to linger a while longer?
Find your perfect challah!

Want to network in your profession, meet cool people, make lifelong friends and expand your social horizons (and perhaps meet your Bashert)? Find your perfect challah!

Come from a limited Jewish background and would like to experience a traditional Shabbos? Find your perfect challah!

Families who wish to host set up profile pages with basic information and up to four family pictures. (After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a warm family photo is worth a whole lot more than that!) In addition, each page has a guest book, which allows the guest to offer feedback from the experience and gives the potential guest a better idea of what it’s like to spend a Shabbat with that family. This will also indicate to a potential guest where the "happening" Shabbat homes are and encourage them to seek an invite.

Each guest also fills out a profile page so the host can acquaint themselves with the potential guest. Two references are requested so that the host will feel comfortable inviting his "future friend" into his home.

Guests can find a host by searching the pages by country, state and city. There are other search fields as well which will allow the guest to find the perfect host with whom they would feel comfortable spending the Shabbos. They can then contact the family to make arrangements using the contact information provided.

Safety and Security

We at Shabbat.com are thrilled to be launching a service that will provide Shabbat placement to Jewish travelers around the world. We are very excited about all the site will accomplish, and we want you to know that your safety is our primary concern. The following precautions have been taken by our site for your protection:

You are able to see your potential guests' photo before accepting them.
Each person who registers as a guest must have 2 references. It is up to you to call these references and decide on the comfort level they inspire in you.
You can review a guest's "guestbook" for feedback from their past Shabbos hosts on the site.
You can see the person's friends and their history as a guest with other registered hosts, and can contact a previous host if necessary.
Lastly, your contact information will not be released to your potential guest until you have viewed and approved the guest's profile, based on the measures listed above.

We hope that our policy will help create a secure and positive experience for all hosts and their guests. We welcome your feedback and any concerns you might have, so feel free to be in touch with us!

Features

Shabbat.com offers other helpful features. The Shabbaton/Simcha mode allows Balei Simcha and Shabbaton organizers to search for many guests in a given area at once.

Each week, a page is updated with relevant changes, such as Divrei Torah (a speech or story incorporating words of Torah) for that week’s Parsha (weekly section of the Torah) and upcoming holidays. For people with a limited Jewish background, they will find a page with explanations regarding laws, customs, and expectations of Shabbos so they can be better prepared and educated.

Shabbat.com is still a work in progress; our goal is to make Shabbat.com a global resource. We believe there is a challah with every person’s name on it out there and we welcome your feedback to help us in our mission.

The warmth of the Shabbat home, the smell of chicken soup with matzoh balls and freshly baked challah wafting through the air, the beautiful sounds of Zemirot (songs), all blend together in a harmonious experience that rejuvenates the spirit and re-energizes us for the week ahead. We can't wait to... See you on Shabbat!

Back to Shabbat.com

About The Site I Our Team I Terms and Safety I Shabbat Facts I In The News I Contact Us I Donate I Advertise With Us I I

This site has been dedicated L’ezecher Nishmas Refael Chaim Simcha Binyamin ben Shlomo Mordechai– a sweet five year old boy who taught us all what Simcha truly is.

The Shabbat.com Team

Rabbi Benzion Klatzko, Founder

The conceptual founder of Shabbat.com, Rabbi Klatzko brings over two decades of visionary leadership, staunch support of Israel, and Jewish activism to the project.

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Rabbi Klatzko received his rabbinic ordination from the prestigious Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn, New York. At the Mir, he was known for his exceptional diligence in his studies and sterling character traits- both of which garnered him the respect and admiration of the famed Dean of the Yeshiva, the world-famous sage, Rabbi Shmuel Berenbaum, ZTL. After completing his studies, Rabbi Klatzko accepted an offer to serve as Rabbi of the historic Agudath Israel synagogue of Brooklyn, New York. After seven years of galvanizing the community towards greater levels of Jewish living and expression, he began a three year stint as the Rabbi of a distinguished congregation in Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

In what at the time was perceived as a bold move, 1999 saw the Klatzko family move to California so that he could accept the position of Campus Rabbi at UCLA. As a hands-on and loveable ambassador for the Jewish faith, he reconnected literally thousands of young Jewish men and women to their heritage. He also made an impressive splash in the broader Jewish community, earning the moniker “The Hollywood Rabbi.” Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars and producers,including cast and staff from Friends,

Rabbi Yehudah Koblick, Co-Founder

Rabbi Yehudah Koblick is a co-founder of Shabbat.com. As the lead developer, Rabbi Koblick oversees all technical operations and is responsible for the development of its core technology and infrastructure. He was formerly a software engineer and consultant to the Elfnet project and worked for Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories.

Rabbi Koblick holds a bachelor’s degree in information systems from Pace University. He received his rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Bezalel Rudinsky and is a longstanding member of the Kollel at Yeshivas Ohr Reuven. He is also the director of Yeshiva Hockey, an ice hockey organization for kids. Currently he is the founder of Tribex Technology, a new software company.

Lavi Needleman

Lavi Needleman, a Monsey, N.Y. businessman, heard of Rabbi Benzion Klatzko’s visionary dream and was inspired to assist him in getting this unique website off the ground and running! Lavi is a Tree Surgeon & Landscape Designer by day, and in his free time, he continues the innovative educational methods that he started implementing in Israel 20 years ago.

After attending Yeshiva University, Lavi spent two years in Israel involved in forming an innovative pilot program at Ohr Someach Israel. This afternoon learning program paired up religious, but not motivated students with Baalei Teshuva who were weak in textual skills but brimming with enthusiasm, thus creating a win/win situation both for those being tutored and for those doing the tutoring.

After returning to the U.S., Lavi learned in Yeshivas Mir in Brooklyn and developed a close relationship with Rav Avigdor Miller who lived right next door. In 1995, he and his wife Peshie were members of the kollel in Boca Raton which was the community's successful tryout of a fulltime Kollel. Always looking for unique ways to make a difference, Lavi joined the staff at Camp Moodis where he bonded with and influenced amazing personalities from NASA and other high visibility professionals who were looking for higher meaning in life.

Ahuva Shabtai, Business Systems Analyst

As a Business Systems Analyst for Shabbat.com, Ahuva provided invaluable support to the team by detailing processes and requirements in keeping with the project’s objectives and scalability.

She was formerly a business analyst for Donovan Data Systems & MediaOcean as well as several small start ups in Montreal, Quebec. Ahuva Shabtai holds a bachelor's degree in information systems from McGill University.

Ahuva's love for Shabbos and appreciation for this revolutionary project is what made her jump right into the Shabbat.com team. In her free time you can find Ahuva curled up reading a non-fiction book, cooking healthy, practicing yoga, or with family and friends.

Reuven Koblick, Systems Architect

As a Systems Architect for Shabbat.com, Reuven Koblick brings several years of technical experience to the table. Mr. Koblick worked for the prestigious Bell Laboratories where he was the Project manager for Unix System V. He also developed Unix to run on Intel and Motorola processors in addition to other innovations for Unix and networking. Reuven Koblick was an active participant in the commercialization of the World Wide Web. He has participated in several standards committees including the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and WWW Consortium. At Mitsubishi Electric, Mr. Koblick was involved in several large scale commercial projects including the development of a network storage backup system which was sold to Veritas (now Symantec) and became their flagship product. He founded Formcentric, an infrastructure tool, and used it to develop several Web Apps.

In addition to English, Reuven Koblick speaks fluent French, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and some Japanese. He is an accomplished flamenco guitarist, playing professionally in Spain. Also, a professional ski patrolman, accomplished pilot, and has fought several forest fires with the Crested Butte Hotshots fire team.

He lived for several years in Spain and France and obtained a Masters degree in computer science at the University of Paris.

Reuven Koblick was a student at Yeshivas Netzach Israel in Jerusalem and studied under the illustrious Torah giant, Harov Israel Gustman, as well as Rabbi Moshe Lipke.

Yakov Vershubsky, User Interface Architect

Yakov Vershubsky brings his years of experience as a User Interface Architect to shabbat.com in order to ensure that the site is intuitive, easy to use, and attractive, so as to make it accessible and inviting to as many users as possible.

As a User Interface Designer & User Experience Consultant for big firms such as Microsoft, LexisNexis, ESPN and other Fortune 500 companies, he gained extensive knowledge and hands-on experience in areas such as Internet marketing, search engine optimization, GUI planning & design, Web 2.0 design & development, landing page design & optimization, and branding and identity. Additionally, Yakov is highly regarded as the industry leader in an area called Design to Convert.

Yakov was born in Russia and moved to the United States as a child. He has spent the last ten years of his life traveling to far flung countries, adding languages to his ever growing list while joining and contributing to various Jewish communities around the globe. As a teenager, he spent 2 years volunteering as a full time Big Brother at a Jewish orphanage in Russia. Now he gives back by volunteering for various worthy causes such as shabbat.com, working with youth-at-risk, and by visiting Jewish inmates at various prisons around New York. Currently Yakov works as a UI architect at HugeMedium and does freelance consulting on the side.Connect with Yakov on Linkedin

Back to Shabbat.com

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:21:00 +0000

Nothing comes from nothing:

March 23, 2012

On the Origin of Everything

By DAVID ALBERT

A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING

Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

By Lawrence M. Krauss

Illustrated. 202 pp. Free Press. $24.99.

Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.

Never mind. Forget where the laws came from. Have a look instead at what they say. It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electromagnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.

But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absenceof the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience.”

Auld Times

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:06:00 +0000

Shocking critique of science:

SCIENCE NEWS

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In cancer science, many "discoveries" don't hold up

By Sharon BegleyPosted 2012/03/28 at 1:05 pm EDT

NEW YORK, Mar. 28, 2012 (Reuters) — A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

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During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.
Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"It was shocking," said Begley, now senior vice president of privately held biotechnology company TetraLogic, which develops cancer drugs. "These are the studies the pharmaceutical industry relies on to identify new targets for drug development. But if you're going to place a $1 million or $2 million or $5 million bet on an observation, you need to be sure it's true. As we tried to reproduce these papers we became convinced you can't take anything at face value."
The failure to win "the war on cancer" has been blamed on many factors, from the use of mouse models that are irrelevant to human cancers to risk-averse funding agencies. But recently a new culprit has emerged: too many basic scientific discoveries, done in animals or cells growing in lab dishes and meant to show the way to a new drug, are wrong.
Begley's experience echoes a report from scientists at Bayer AG last year. Neither group of researchers alleges fraud, nor would they identify the research they had tried to replicate.
But they and others fear the phenomenon is the product of a skewed system of incentives that has academics cutting corners to further their careers.
George Robertson of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia previously worked at Merck on neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's. While at Merck, he also found many academic studies that did not hold up.
"It drives people in industry crazy. Why are we seeing a collapse of the pharma and biotech industries? One possibility is that academia is not providing accurate findings," he said.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT
Over the last two decades, the most promising route to new cancer drugs has been one pioneered by the discoverers of Gleevec, the Novartis drug that targets a form of leukemia, and Herceptin, Genentech's breast-cancer drug. In each case, scientists discovered a genetic change that turned a normal cell into a malignant one. Those findings allowed them to develop a molecule that blocks the cancer-producing process.
This approach led to an explosion of claims of other potential "druggable" targets. Amgen tried to replicate the new papers before launching its own drug-discovery projects.
Scientists at Bayer did not have much more success. In a 2011 paper titled, "Believe it or not," they analyzed in-house projects that built on "exciting published data" from basic science studies. "Often, key data could not be reproduced," wrote Khusru Asadullah, vice president and head of target discovery at Bayer HealthCare in Berlin, and colleagues.
Of 47 cancer projects at Bayer during 2011, less than one-quarter could reproduce previously reported findings, despite the efforts of three or four scientists working full time for up to a year. Bayer dropped the projects.
Bayer and Amgen found that the prestige of a journal was no guarantee a paper would be solid. "The scientific community assumes that the claims in a preclinical study can be taken at face value," Begley and Lee Ellis of MD Anderson Cancer Center wrote in Nature. It assumes, too, that "the main message of the paper can be relied on ... Unfortunately, this is not always the case."
When the Amgen replication team of about 100 scientists could not confirm reported results, they contacted the authors. Those who cooperated discussed what might account for the inability of Amgen to confirm the results. Some let Amgen borrow antibodies and other materials used in the original study or even repeat experiments under the original authors' direction.
Some authors required the Amgen scientists sign a confidentiality agreement barring them from disclosing data at odds with the original findings. "The world will never know" which 47 studies -- many of them highly cited -- are apparently wrong, Begley said.
The most common response by the challenged scientists was: "you didn't do it right." Indeed, cancer biology is fiendishly complex, noted Phil Sharp, a cancer biologist and Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Even in the most rigorous studies, the results might be reproducible only in very specific conditions, Sharp explained: "A cancer cell might respond one way in one set of conditions and another way in different conditions. I think a lot of the variability can come from that."
THE BEST STORY
Other scientists worry that something less innocuous explains the lack of reproducibility.
Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.
"We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure," said Begley. "I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning."
Such selective publication is just one reason the scientific literature is peppered with incorrect results.
For one thing, basic science studies are rarely "blinded" the way clinical trials are. That is, researchers know which cell line or mouse got a treatment or had cancer. That can be a problem when data are subject to interpretation, as a researcher who is intellectually invested in a theory is more likely to interpret ambiguous evidence in its favor.
The problem goes beyond cancer.
On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent.
Ferric Fang of the University of Washington, speaking to the panel, said he blamed a hypercompetitive academic environment that fosters poor science and even fraud, as too many researchers compete for diminishing funding.
"The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high-profile journal," said Fang. "This is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior."
The academic reward system discourages efforts to ensure a finding was not a fluke. Nor is there an incentive to verify someone else's discovery. As recently as the late 1990s, most potential cancer-drug targets were backed by 100 to 200 publications. Now each may have fewer than half a dozen.
"If you can write it up and get it published you're not even thinking of reproducibility," said Ken Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. "You make an observation and move on. There is no incentive to find out it was wrong."
(Note: Amgen researcher C. Glenn Begley is not related to the author of this story, Sharon Begley)
(Reporting By Sharon Begley; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Maureen Bavdek)

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:57:00 +0000

More reason to shudder:

Declaring War on Newborns

The disgrace of medical ethics.

Weekly Standard Mar 19, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 26 • By ANDREW FERGUSON

On the list of the world’s most unnecessary occupations—aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States—that of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job is to advise the boss to go ahead and do what he was going to do anyway (“Put it on the market!” “Pull the plug on the geezer!”). They also attend conferences where they take turns sitting on panels talking with one another and then sitting in the audience watching panels of other medical ethicists talking with one another. Their professional specialty is the “thought experiment,” which is the best kind of experiment because you don’t have to buy test tubes or leave the office. And sometimes they get jobs at universities, teaching other people to become ethicists. It is a cozy, happy world they live in.

But it was painfully roiled last month, when a pair of medical ethicists took to their profession’s bible, the Journal of Medical Ethics, and published an essay with a misleadingly inconclusive title: “After-birth Abortion: Why should the baby live?” It was a misleading title because the authors believe the answer to the question is: “Beats me.”

Right at the top, the ethicists summarized the point of their article. “What we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” The argument made by the authors—Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, both of them affliliated with prestigious universities in Australia and ethicists of pristine reputation—runs as follows. Let’s suppose a woman gets pregnant. She decides to go ahead and have the baby on the assumption that her personal circumstances, and her views on such things as baby-raising, will remain the same through the day she gives birth and beyond.

Then she gives birth. Perhaps the baby is disabled or suffers a disease. Perhaps her boyfriend or (if she’s old-fashioned) her husband abandons her, leaving her in financial peril. Or perhaps she’s decided that she’s just not the mothering kind, for, as the authors write, “having a child can itself be an unbearable burden for the psychological health of the woman or for her already existing children, regardless of the condition of the fetus.”

The authors point out that each of these conditions—the baby is sick or suffering, the baby will be a financial hardship, the baby will be personally troublesome—is now “largely accepted” as a good reason for a mother to abort her baby before he’s born. So why not after?

“When circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortionshould be permissible.” (Their italics.) Western societies approve abortion because they have reached a consensus that a fetus is not a person; they should acknowledge that by the same definition a newborn isn’t a person either. Neither fetus nor baby has developed a sufficient sense of his own life to know what it would be like to be deprived of it. The kid will never know the difference, in other words. A newborn baby is just a fetus who’s hung around a bit too long.

As the authors acknowledge, this makes an “after-birth abortion” a tricky business. You have to get to the infant before he develops “those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.” It’s a race against time.

The article doesn’t go on for more than 1,500 words, but for non-ethicists it has a high surprise-per-word ratio. The information that newborn babies aren’t people is just the beginning. A reader learns that “many non-human animals … are persons” and therefore enjoy a “right to life.” (Such ruminative ruminants, unlike babies, are self-aware enough to know that getting killed will entail a “loss of value.”) The authors don’t tell us which species these “non-human persons” belong to, but it’s safe to say that you don’t want to take a medical ethicist to dinner at Outback.

But what about adoption, you ask. The authors ask that question too, noting that some people—you and me, for example—might think that adoption could buy enough time for the unwanted newborn to technically become a person and “possibly increase the happiness of the people involved.” But this is not a viable option, if you’ll forgive the expression. A mother who kills her newborn baby, the authors report, is forced to “accept the irreversibility of the loss.” By contrast, a mother who gives her baby up for adoption “might suffer psychological distress.” And for a very simple reason: These mothers “often dream that their child will return to them. This makes it difficult to accept the reality of the loss because they can never be quite sure whether or not it is irreversible.” It’s simpler for all concerned just to make sure the loss can’t be reversed. It’ll spare Mom a lot of heartbreak.

Now, it’s at this point in the Journal of Medical Ethics that many readers will begin to suspect, as I did, that their legs are being not very subtly pulled. The inversion that the argument entails is Swiftian—a twenty-first-century Modest Proposal without the cannibalism (for now). Jonathan Swift’s original Modest Proposal called for killing Irish children to prevent them “from being a burden to their parents.” It was death by compassion, the killing of innocents based on a surfeit of fellow-feeling. The authors agree that compassion itself demands the death of newborns. Unlike Swift, though, they aren’t kidding.

They get you coming and going, these guys. They assume—and they won’t get much argument from their peers in the profession—that “mentally impaired” infants are eligible for elimination because they will never develop the properties necessary to be fully human. Then they discuss Treacher-Collins syndrome, which causes facial deformities and respiratory ailments but no mental impairment. Kids with TCS are “fully aware of their condition, of being different from other people and of all the problems their pathology entails,” and are therefore, to spare them a life of such unpleasant awareness, eligible for elimination too—because they are not mentally impaired. The threshold to this “right to life” just gets higher and higher, the more you think about it.

And of course it is their business to think about it. It’s what medical ethicists get paid to do: cogitate, cogitate, cogitate. As “After-birth Abortion” spread around the world and gained wide publicity—that damned Internet —non-ethicists greeted it with derision or shock or worse. The authors and the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics were themselves shocked at the response. As their inboxes flooded with hate mail, the authors composed an apology of sorts that non-ethicists will find more revealing even than the original paper.

“We are really sorry that many people, who do not share the background of the intended audience for this article, felt offended, outraged, or even threatened,” they wrote. “The article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were already familiar with this topic and our arguments.” It was a thought experiment. After all, among medical ethicists “this debate”—about when it’s proper to kill babies—“has been going on for 40 years.”

So that’s what they’ve been talking about in all those panel discussions! The authors thought they were merely taking the next step in a train of logic that was set in motion, and has been widely accepted, since their profession was invented in the 1960s. And of course they were. The outrage directed at their article came from laymen—people unsophisticated in contemporary ethics. Medical ethicists in general expressed few objections, only a minor annoyance that the authors had let the cat out of the bag. A few days after it was posted the article was removed from the publicly accessible area of the Journal’s website, sending it back to that happy, cozy world.

You’d have to be very, very well trained in ethics to see the authors’ argument as a morally acceptable extension of their premises, but you can’t deny the logic of it. The rest of us will see in the argument an extension of its premises into self-evident absurdity. Pro-lifers should take note. For years, in public argument, pro-choicers have mocked them for not following their belief in a fetus’s humanity to its logical end. Shouldn’t you execute doctors who perform abortions? Why don’t you have funerals for miscarriages?

As one pro-choice wag, writing about the Republicans’ pro-life platform, put it in the Washington Post a few years ago: “The official position of the Republican Party is that women who have abortions should be executed.”

And now we know the pro-choice position is that children born with a facial deformity should be executed too, as long as you get to them quick enough. Unwittingly the insouciant authors of “After-birth Abortion” have shown where pro-choicers wind up if they follow their belief about fetuses to its logical end. They’ve performed a public service. Could it be that medical ethicists really are more useful than aromatherapists?

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:16:00 +0000

Read and shudder:

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LIFE & CULTURE
Updated March 12, 2012, 10:16 a.m. ET

What You Lose When You Sign That Donor Card

Giving away your organs sounds noble, but have doctors blurred the line between life and death?

By DICK TERESI

Photo Illustration Joel Holland, Gallery Stock (photo)

Doctors don't have to tell you or your relatives what they will do to your body during an organ harvest operation because you'll be dead, with no legal rights.

The last time I renewed my driver's license, the clerk at the DMV asked if she should check me off as an organ donor. I said no. She looked at me and asked again. I said, "No. Just check the box that says, 'I am a heartless, selfish bastard.'"

Becoming an organ donor seems like a win-win situation. Some 3.3 people on the transplant waiting list will have their lives extended by your gift (3.3 is the average yield of solid organs per donor). You're a hero, and at no real cost, apparently.

Journal Community

But what are you giving up when you check the donor box on your license? Your organs, of course—but much more. You're also giving up your right to informed consent. Doctors don't have to tell you or your relatives what they will do to your body during an organ harvest operation because you'll be dead, with no legal rights.

The most likely donors are victims of head trauma (from, say, a car or motorcycle accident), spontaneous bleeding in the head, or an aneurysm—patients who can be ruled dead based on brain-death criteria. But brain deaths are estimated to be just around 1% of the total. Everyone else dies from failure of the heart, circulation and breathing, which leads the organs to deteriorate quickly.

The current criteria on brain death were set by a Harvard Medical School committee in 1968, at a time when organ transplantation was making great strides. In 1981, the Uniform Determination of Death Act made brain death a legal form of death in all 50 states.

The exam for brain death is simple. A doctor splashes ice water in your ears (to look for shivering in the eyes), pokes your eyes with a cotton swab and checks for any gag reflex, among other rudimentary tests. It takes less time than a standard eye exam. Finally, in what's called the apnea test, the ventilator is disconnected to see if you can breathe unassisted. If not, you are brain dead. (Some or all of the above tests are repeated hours later for confirmation.)

Here's the weird part. If you fail the apnea test, your respirator is reconnected. You will begin to breathe again, your heart pumping blood, keeping the organs fresh. Doctors like to say that, at this point, the "person" has departed the body. You will now be called a BHC, or beating-heart cadaver.

Still, you will have more in common biologically with a living person than with a person whose heart has stopped. Your vital organs will function, you'll maintain your body temperature, and your wounds will continue to heal. You can still get bedsores, have heart attacks and get fever from infections.

"I like my dead people cold, stiff, gray and not breathing," says Dr. Michael A. DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "The brain dead are warm, pink and breathing."

You might also be emitting brainwaves. Most people are surprised to learn that many people who are declared brain dead are never actually tested for higher-brain activity. The 1968 Harvard committee recommended that doctors use electroencephalography (EEG) to make sure the patient has flat brain waves. Today's tests concentrate on the stalk-like brain stem, in charge of basics such as breathing, sleeping and waking. The EEG would alert doctors if the cortex, the thinking part of your brain, is still active.

But various researchers decided that this test was unnecessary, so it was eliminated from the mandatory criteria in 1971. They reasoned that, if the brain stem is dead, the higher centers of the brain are also probably dead.

But in at least two studies before the 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act, some "brain-dead" patients were found to be emitting brain waves. One, from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in the 1970s, found that out of 503 patients who met the usual criteria of brain death, 17 showed activity in an EEG.

Even some of the sharpest critics of the brain-death criteria argue that there is no possibility that donors will be in pain during the harvesting of their organs. One, Robert Truog, professor of medical ethics, anesthesia and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, compared the topic of pain in an organ donor to an argument over "whether it is OK to kick a rock."

But BHCs—who don't receive anesthetics during an organ harvest operation—react to the scalpel like inadequately anesthetized live patients, exhibiting high blood pressure and sometimes soaring heart rates. Doctors say these are simply reflexes.

What if there is sound evidence that you are alive after being declared brain dead? In a 1999 article in the peer-reviewed journal Anesthesiology, Gail A. Van Norman, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Washington, reported a case in which a 30-year-old patient with severe head trauma began breathing spontaneously after being declared brain dead. The physicians said that, because there was no chance of recovery, he could still be considered dead. The harvest proceeded over the objections of the anesthesiologist, who saw the donor move, and then react to the scalpel with hypertension.

Organ transplantation—from procurement of organs to transplant to the first year of postoperative care—is a $20 billion per year business. Average recipients are charged $750,000 for a transplant, and at an average 3.3 organs, that is more than $2 million per body. Neither donors nor their families can be paid for organs.

It is possible that not being a donor on your license can give you more bargaining power. If you leave instructions with your next of kin, they can perhaps negotiate a better deal. Instead of just the usual icewater-in-the-ears, why not ask for a blood-flow study to make sure your cortex is truly out of commission?

And how about some anesthetic? Although he doesn't believe the brain dead feel pain, Dr. Truog has used two light anesthetics, high-dose fentanyl and sufentanil, which won't harm organs, to quell high blood pressure or heart rate during harvesting operations. "If it were my family," he said, "I'd request them."

—Mr. Teresi is the author of "The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating-Heart Cadavers—How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death."

A version of this article appeared Mar. 10, 2012, on page C3 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: What You Lose When You Sign That Donor Card.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

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noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:27:00 +0000

Paul Boghossian on relativism http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/the-maze-of-moral-relativism/?scp=1&sq=boghossian&st=cse]:

The Maze of Moral Relativism

By PAUL BOGHOSSIAN

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

TAGS:

ETHICS, MORAL RELATIVISM,PHILOSOPHY

Relativism about morality has come to play an increasingly important role in contemporary culture. To many thoughtful people, and especially to those who are unwilling to derive their morality from a religion, it appears unavoidable. Where would absolute facts about right and wrong come from, they reason, if there is no supreme being to decree them? We should reject moral absolutes, even as we keep our moral convictions, allowing that there can be right and wrong relative to this or that moral code, but no right and wrong per se. (See, for example, Stanley Fish’s 2001 op-ed, “Condemnation Without Absolutes.”)[1]

When we decided that there were no such things as witches, we didn’t become relativists about witches.

Is it plausible to respond to the rejection of absolute moral facts with a relativistic view of morality? Why should our response not be a more extreme, nihilistic one, according to which we stop using normative terms like “right” and “wrong” altogether, be it in their absolutist or relativist guises?

Relativism is not always a coherent way of responding to the rejection of a certain class of facts. When we decided that there were no such things as witches, we didn’t become relativists about witches. Rather, we just gave up witch talk altogether, except by way of characterizing the attitudes of people (such as those in Salem) who mistakenly believed that the world contained witches, or by way of characterizing what it is that children find it fun to pretend to be on Halloween. We became what we may call “eliminativists” about witches.

On the other hand, when Einstein taught us, in his Special Theory of Relativity, that there was no such thing as the absolute simultaneity of two events, the recommended outcome was that we become relativists about simultaneity, allowing that there is such a thing as “simultaneity relative to a (spatio-temporal) frame of reference,” but not simultaneity as such.

What’s the difference between the witch case and the simultaneity case? Why did the latter rejection lead to relativism, but the former to eliminativism?

In the simultaneity case, Einstein showed that while the world does not contain simultaneity as such, it does contain its relativistic cousin — simultaneity relative to a frame of reference — a property that plays something like the same sort of role as classical simultaneity did in our theory of the world.

By contrast, in the witch case, once we give up on witches, there is no relativistic cousin that plays anything like the role that witches were supposed to play. The property, that two events may have, of “being simultaneous relative to frame of reference F” is recognizably a kind of simultaneity. But the property of “being a witch according to a belief system T” is not a kind of witch, but a kind of content (the content of belief system T): it’s a way of characterizing what belief system T says, not a way of characterizing the world.

Leif Parsons

Now, the question is whether the moral case is more like that of simultaneity or more like that of witches? When we reject absolute moral facts is moral relativism the correct outcome or is it moral eliminativism (nihilism)?

The answer, as we have seen, depends on whether there are relativistic cousins of “right” and “wrong” that can play something like the same role that absolute “right” and “wrong” play.

It is hard to see what those could be.

What’s essential to “right” and “wrong” is that they are normativeterms, terms that are used to say how things ought to be, in contrast with how things actually are. But what relativistic cousin of “right” and “wrong” could play anything like such a normative role?

Most moral relativists say that moral right and wrong are to be relativized to a community’s “moral code.” According to some such codes, eating beef is permissible; according to others, it is an abomination and must never be allowed. The relativist proposal is that we must never talk simply about what’s right or wrong, but only about what’s “right or wrong relative to a particular moral code.”

The trouble is that while “Eating beef is wrong” is clearly a normative statement, “Eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus” is just a descriptive remark that carries no normative import whatsoever. It’s just a way of characterizing what is claimed by a particular moral code, that of the Hindus. We can see this from the fact that anyone, regardless of their views about eating beef, can agree that eating beef is wrong relative to the moral code of the Hindus.

So, it looks as though the moral case is more like the witch case than the simultaneity case: there are no relativistic cousins of “right” and “wrong.” Denial of moral absolutism leads not to relativism, but to nihilism.[2]

If there are no absolute facts about morality, “right” and “wrong” would have to join “witch” in the dustbin of failed concepts.

There is no half-way house called “moral relativism,” in which we continue to use normative vocabulary with the stipulation that it is to be understood as relativized to particular moral codes. If there are no absolute facts about morality, “right” and “wrong” would have to join “witch” in the dustbin of failed concepts.

The argument is significant because it shows that we should not rush to give up on absolute moral facts, mysterious as they can sometimes seem, for the world might seem even more mysterious without any normative vocabulary whatsoever.

One might be suspicious of my argument against moral relativism. Aren’t we familiar with some normative domains — such as that of etiquette — about which we are all relativists? Surely, no one in their right minds would think that there is some absolute fact of the matter about whether we ought to slurp our noodles while eating.

If we are dining at Buckingham Palace, we ought not to slurp, since our hosts would consider it offensive, and we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts. On the other hand, if we are dining in Xian, China, we ought to slurp, since in Xian slurping is considered to be a sign that we are enjoying our meal, and our hosts would consider it offensive if we didn’t slurp, and we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts.

But if relativism is coherent in the case of etiquette why couldn’t we claim that morality is relative in the same way?

The reason is that our relativism about etiquette does not actually dispense with all absolute moral facts. Rather, we are relativists about etiquette in the sense that, with respect to a restricted range of issues (such as table manners and greetings), we take the correct absolute norm to be “we ought not, other things being equal, offend our hosts.”

This norm is absolute and applies to everyone and at all times. Its relativistic flavor comes from the fact that, with respect to that limited range of behaviors (table manners and greetings, but not, say, the abuse of children for fun), it advocates varying one’s behavior with local convention.

In other words, the relativism of etiquette depends on the existence of absolute moral norms. Since etiquette does not dispense with absolute moral facts, one cannot hope to use it as a model for moral relativism.

Suppose we take this point on board, though, and admit that there have to be some absolute moral facts. Why couldn’t they all be like the facts involved in etiquette? Why couldn’t they all say that, with respect to any morally relevant question, what we ought to do depends on what the local conventions are?

The trouble with this approach is that once we have admitted that there are some absolute moral facts, it is hard to see why we shouldn’t think that there are many — as many as common sense and ordinary reasoning appear to warrant. Having given up on the purity of a thoroughgoing anti-absolutism, we would now be in the business of trying to figure out what absolute moral facts there are. To do that, we would need to employ our usual mix of argument, intuition and experience. And what argument, intuition and experience tell us is that whether we should slurp our noodles depends on what the local conventions are, but whether we should abuse children for fun does not.

A would-be relativist about morality needs to decide whether his view grants the existence of some absolute moral facts, or whether it is to be a pure relativism, free of any commitment to absolutes. The latter position, I have argued, is mere nihilism; whereas the former leads us straight out of relativism and back into the quest for the moral absolutes.

None of this is to deny that there are hard cases, where it is not easy to see what the correct answer to a moral question is. It is merely to emphasize that there appears to be no good alternative to thinking that, when we are in a muddle about what the answer to a hard moral question is, we are in a muddle about what the absolutely correct answer is.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Pinning a precise philosophical position on someone, especially a non-philosopher, is always tricky, because people tend to give non-equivalent formulations of what they take to be the same view. Fish, for example, after saying that his view is that “there can be no independent standards for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one,” which sounds appropriately relativistic, ends up claiming that all he means to defend is “the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else might want to wear them.” The latter, though, is just the recommendation of empathetic understanding and is, of course, both good counsel and perfectly consistent with the endorsement of moral absolutes.

Another view with which moral relativism is sometimes conflated is the view that the right thing to do can depend on the circumstances. There is no question that the right thing to do can depend on the circumstances, even on an absolutist view. Whether you should help someone in need can depend on what your circumstances are, what their circumstances are, and so forth. What makes a view relativistic is its holding that the right thing to do depends not just on the circumstances, but on what the person (or his community) takes to be the right thing to do, on their moral code.

In this column, I am only concerned with those who wish to deny that there are any absolute moral truths in this sense. If that is not your view, then you are not the target of this particular discussion.

[2] Some philosophers may think that they can evade this problem by casting the relativism in terms of a relativized truth predicate rather than a relativized moral predicate. But as I have explained elsewhere, the problem of the loss of normative content recurs in that setting.

Paul Boghossian is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author of “Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism,” “Content and Justification: Philosophical Papers,” and co-editor of “New Essays on the A Priori,” all from Oxford University Press. More of his work can be found on his Web site.

ID and retinal design

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 13:03:00 +0000

The "poor design" of the retina has long been a standard objection to the efficiency of the design of the eye. Here is an answer. Casey Luskin is an excellent scientist, and very generous in answering queries.

http://www.discovery.org/a/18011

Eyeballing Design
"Biomimetics" Exposes Attacks on ID as Poorly Designed

By: Casey Luskin
Salvo Magazine
December 20, 2011

Link to Original Article

At least since the ancient Chinese tried to produce artificial silk, people have turned to biology for inspiration when designing technology. A 2009 article in the world's oldest science journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, authored by Ohio State University nanotechnology engineer Bharat Bhushan, explains how this design process works:

The understanding of the functions provided by objects and processes found in nature can guide us to imitate and produce nanomaterials, nanodevices and processes. Biologically inspired design or adaptation or derivation from nature is referred to as "biomimetics." It means mimicking biology or nature.¹

Perhaps the most familiar example of biomimetics is the body shape of birds serving as the inspiration for aircraft design. But the list of fascinating cases where engineers have mimicked nature to develop or improve human technology goes on and on:

• Faster Speedo swimsuits have been developed by studying the properties of sharkskin.
• Spiny hooks on plant seeds and fruits led to the development of Velcro.
• Better tire treads were created by understanding the shape of toe pads on tree frogs.
• Polar bear furs have inspired textiles and thermal collectors.
• Studying hippo sweat promises to lead to better sunscreen.
• Volvo has studied how locusts swarm without crashing into one another to develop an anti-collision system.
• Mimicking mechanisms of photosynthesis and chemical energy conversion might lead to the creation of cheaper solar cells.
• Copying the structure of sticky gecko feet could lead to the development of tape with cleaner and dryer super-adhesion.
• Color-changing cuttlefish have inspired television screens that use a fraction of the power of standard TVs.
• DNA might become a framework for building faster microchips.
• The ability of the human ear to pick up many frequencies of sound is being replicated to build better antennas.
• The Namibian fog-basking beetle has inspired methods of desalinizing ocean water, growing crops, and producing electricity, all in one!

Disclaiming Design

The purpose of Dr. Bhushan's paper was to encourage engineers to study nature when creating technology. For some reason, however, he felt compelled to open his article with the following disclaimer:

Nature has gone through evolution over the 3.8 Gyr [Gigayear, equal to one billion years] since life is estimated to have appeared on the Earth. Nature has evolved objects with high performance using commonly found materials.

Why did Bhushan feel this was necessary?

The answer is hard to miss. The widespread practice and success of biomimetics among technology-creating engineers has powerful implications that point to intelligent design (ID). After all, if human technology is intelligently designed, and if biological systems inspire or outperform man-made systems, then we are confronted with the not-so-subtle inference that nature, too, might have been designed.

To prevent ID-oriented thoughts from entering the minds of readers, materialists writing about biomimetics have long upheld a tradition of including superfluous praise of the amazing power of Darwinian evolution.

For example, when explaining how the unique bumpy shape of whale flippers has been mimicked to improve wind turbine design, a ScienceDaily article reminded readers that "sea creatures have evolved over millions of years to maximise efficiency of movement through water."²

Similarly, in 2008, Business Week carried a piece on biomimetics noting that "ultra-strong, biodegradable glues" have been developed "by analyzing how mussels cling to rocks under water," and that bullet-trains could be made more aerodynamic if given "a distinctly bird-like nose." But the story couldn't help but point out that these biological templates weren't designed, but rather "evolved in the natural world over billions of years."³

It's uncanny how predictable this theme has become. In another instance, MSNBC explained how "armor" on fish might be copied to improve battle ware for soldiers. Yet the article included the obligatory subheading instructing readers that "millions of years of evolution could provide exactly what we need today."⁴

Well, aren't we lucky?

Better Keep the Disclaimers

Dr. Bhushan was wise to include his disclaimer promoting unguided evolution: From an ID-based view, it's unsurprising that designers of human technology would find so many solutions to problems within the biosphere. ID-friendly implications permeate the field of biomimetics, and they are dangerous to materialism.

Evolutionary thinkers, of course, will assert that these finely tuned biological systems evolved by blind natural selection preserving random mutations. Over billions of years, they imagine, this unguided process perfected these systems, ultimately besting the inventions of our top engineering minds.

Such deeply held convictions might be hard to unseat from the minds of materialists. But consider this: When human engineers want to create technology, do they use unguided processes of random mutation and natural selection? No. They use intelligent design.

In fact, whenever we understand the origin of a piece of technology, we see that intelligent design was always required to generate the system. How then, is Dr. Bhushan so confident that the elegant systems in nature that surpass human designs—including multi-component machines—resulted from unguided evolutionary processes?

Poorly Designed Objections

Some materialists attack design arguments not by alleging that biological systems lack high levels of specified complexity, but by alleging that they are full of "flaws." Yet anyone who has used Microsoft Windows is painfully aware that flawed designs are still designed. But theistic evolutionist biologist Kenneth Miller argues that evolution would naturally lead us to expect the biological world to be full of "cobbled together" kluges that reflect the clumsy, undirected Darwinian process.⁵

For example, Miller maintains that the vertebrate eye was not intelligently designed because the optic nerve extends over the retina instead of going out the back of the eye—an alleged design flaw. According to Miller, "visual quality is degraded because light scatters as it passes through several layers of cellular wiring before reaching the retina."

Similarly, Richard Dawkins contends that the retina is "wired in backwards" because light-sensitive cells face away from the incoming light, which is partly blocked by the optic nerve. In Dawkins's ever-humble opinion, the vertebrate eye is "the design of a complete idiot."⁶

A closer examination shows that the design of the vertebrate eye works far better than Dawkins and Miller let on.

Dawkins concedes that the optic nerve's impact on vision is "probably not much," but the negative effect is even less than he admits. Only if you cover one eye and stare directly at a fixed point does a tiny "blind spot" appear in your peripheral vision as a result of the optic nerve covering the retina. When both eyes are functional, the brain compensates for the blind spot by meshing the visual fields of both eyes. Under normal circumstances, the nerves' wiring does nothing to hinder vision.

Nonetheless, Dawkins argues that even if the design works, it would "offend any tidy-minded engineer." But the overall design of the eye actually optimizes visual acuity.

To achieve the high-quality vision that vertebrates need, retinal cells require a large blood supply. By facing the photoreceptor cells toward the back of the retina, and extending the optic nerve out over them, the cells are able to plug directly into the blood vessels that feed the eye, maximizing access to blood.

Pro-ID biologist George Ayoub suggests a thought experiment where the optic nerve goes out the back of the retina, the way Miller and Dawkins claim it ought to be wired. Ayoub finds that this design would interfere with blood supply, as the nerve would crowd out blood vessels. In this case, the only means of restoring blood supply would be to place capillaries over the retina—but this change would block even more light than the optic nerve does under the actual design.

Ayoub concludes: "In trying to eliminate the blind spot, we have generated a host of new and more severe functional problems to solve."⁷

In 2010, two eye specialists made a remarkable discovery that showed the elegant mechanism found in vertebrate eyes to solve the problem of any blockage of light due to the position of the optic nerve. Special "glial cells" sit over the retina and act like fiber-optic cables to channel light through the optic nerve wires directly onto the photoreceptor cells. According to New Scientist, these funnel-shaped cells prevent scattering of light and "act as light filters, keeping images clear."⁸

Ken Miller acknowledges that an intelligent designer "would choose the orientation that produces the highest degree of visual quality." Yet that seems to be exactly what we find in the vertebrate eye. In fact, the team of scientists who determined the function of glial cells concluded that the "retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images."

ID-theorist William Dembski has observed that "no one has demonstrated how the eye's function might be improved without diminishing its visual speed, sensitivity, and resolution."⁹ It's therefore unsurprising that optics engineers study the eye to improve camera technology. According to another tech article:

Borrowing one of nature's best designs, U.S. scientists have built an eye-shaped camera using standard sensor materials and say it could improve the performance of digital cameras and enhance imaging of the human body.

The article reported that the "digital camera has the size, shape and layout of a human eye" because "the curved shape greatly improves the field of vision, bringing the whole picture into focus."¹⁰

It seems that human eyes are so poorly designed that engineers regularly mimic them.

Repeat After Me . . .

Bhushan ends his article on biomimetics by paying more lip service to evolution, declaring that "nature has evolved and optimized a large number of materials and structured surfaces with rather unique characteristics." His chosen blindness to the pro-ID implications of biomimetics does not negate the fact that, intriguingly, nature routinely inspires and outperforms the best human technology.

Biologists and engineers who still want to believe that life's elegant complexity results from neo-Darwinian processes may find that the only way to do so is to keep repeating Francis Crick's mantra—"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved"—over and over to themselves. •

Endnotes 1. Bharat Bhushan, "Biomimetics: lessons from nature—an overview," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, vol. 367 (2009), pp. 1445–1486.
2. "Whales and Dolphins Influence New Wind Turbine Design" ScienceDaily (July 7, 2008): www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080707222315.htm.
3. Matt Vella, "Using Nature as a Design Guide," Bloomberg Businessweek (February 11, 2008):www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2008/id20080211_074559.htm.
4. Jeanna Bryner, "Incredible fish armor could suit soldiers" (July 28, 2008):www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25886406.
5. Kenneth R. Miller, "Life's Grand Design," Technology Review (February/March 1994), pp. 25–32.
6. Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (Free Press, 2009), p. 354.
7. George Ayoub, "On the Design of the Vertebrate Retina," Origins & Design, vol. 17:1 (Winter 1996): www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od171/retina171.htm.
8. Kate McAlpine, "Evolution gave flawed eye better vision," New Scientist (May 6, 2010):www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627594.000-evolution-gave-flawed-eye-better-vision.html.
9. William Dembski & Sean McDowell, Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language (Harvest House, 2008), p. 53.
10. Julie Steenhuysen, "Eye spy: U.S. scientists develop eye-shaped camera," Reuters (August 6, 2008): www.reuters.com/article/2008/08/06/us-camera-eye-idUSN0647922920080806.

fetal learning

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 17:43:00 +0000

Think of all the traditional sources concerning the effect of the behavior of a pregnant woman on her fetus. And then read this: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/11/opinion/paul-ted-talk/index.html?hpt=hp_c4

Editor's note: Annie Murphy Paul is the author of "Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives." She's now working on a book about learning, and writes a weekly column at Time.com called "Brilliant: The Science of Smart." TED is a nonprofit organization dedicated to "Ideas worth spreading," which it distributes through talks posted on its website.

(CNN) -- When does learning begin? As I explain in the talk I gave at TED, learning starts much earlier than many of us would have imagined: in the womb.

I was surprised as anyone when I first encountered this notion. I'm a science writer, and my job is to trawl the murky depths of the academic journals, looking for something shiny and new -- a sparkling idea that catches my eye in the gloom.

Starting a few years ago, I began noticing a dazzling array of findings clustered around the prenatal period. These discoveries were generating considerable excitement among scientists, even as they overturned settled beliefs about when we start absorbing and responding to information from our environment. As a science reporter -- and as a mother -- I had to find out more.

This research, I discovered, is part of a burgeoning field known as "fetal origins," and it's turning pregnancy into something it has never been before: a scientific frontier. Obstetrics was once a sleepy medical specialty, and research on pregnancy a scientific backwater. Now the nine months of gestation are the focus of intense interest and excitement, the subject of an exploding number of journal articles, books, and conferences.

What it all adds up to is this: much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life -- the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels -- are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. The fetus treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside.

By attending to such messages, the fetus learns the answers to questions critical to its survival: Will it be born into a world of abundance, or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life, or a short, harried one?

The pregnant woman's diet and stress level, in particular, provide important clues to prevailing conditions, a finger lifted to the wind. The resulting tuning and tweaking of the fetus's brain and other organs are part of what give humans their enormous flexibility, their ability to thrive in environments as varied as the snow-swept tundra in Siberia and the golden-grassed savanna in Africa.

The recognition that learning actually begins before birth leads us to a striking new conception of the fetus, the pregnant woman and the relationship between them.

The fetus, we now know, is not an inert blob, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will soon enter. The pregnant woman is neither a passive incubator nor a source of always-imminent harm to her fetus, but a powerful and often positive influence on her child even before it's born. And pregnancy is not a nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a crucial period unto itself -- "a staging period for well-being and disease in later life," as one scientist puts it.

This crucial period has become a promising new target for prevention, raising hopes of conquering public health scourges like obesity and heart disease by intervening before birth. By "teaching" fetuses the appropriate lessons while they're still in utero, we could potentially end vicious cycles of poverty, infirmity and illness and initiate virtuous cycles of health, strength and stability.

So how can pregnant women communicate to their fetuses what they need to know?

Eat fish, scientists suggest, but make sure it's the low-mercury kind -- the omega-three fatty acids in seafood are associated with higher verbal intelligence and better social skills in school-age children. Exercise: research suggests that fetuses benefit from their mothers' physical activity. Protect yourself from toxins and pollutants, which are linked to birth defects and lowered IQ.

Don't worry too much about stress: research shows that moderate stress during pregnancy is associated with accelerated infant brain development. Seek help if you think you might be suffering from depression: the babies of depressed women are more likely to be born early and at low birth weight, and may be more irritable and have more trouble sleeping. And -- my favorite advice -- eat chocolate: it's associated with a lower risk of the high blood pressure condition known as preeclampsia.

When we hold our babies for the first time, we imagine them clean and new, unmarked by life, when in fact they have already been shaped by the world, and by us. It's my privilege to share with the TED audience the good news about how we can teach our children well from the very beginning.

summary of main issues in evolution

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 12:45:00 +0000

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/berlinski_on_darwin_on_trial053171.html

Majestic Ascent: Berlinski on Darwin on Trial

Richard Dawkins published The Blind Watchmaker in 1985. The appearance of design in nature, Dawkins argued, is an illusion. Complex biological structures may be entirely explained by random variations and natural selection. Why biology should be quite so vested in illusions, Dawkins did not say. The Blind Watchmaker captured the public's imagination, but in securing the public's allegiance, very little was left to chance. Those critics who believed that living systems appear designed because they are designed underwent preemptive attack in the New York Times. "Such are the thought habits of uncultivated intellects," wrote the biologist Michael Ghiselin, " -- children, savages and simpletons."

Comments such as these had the effect of raw meat dropped carelessly among carnivores. A scramble ensued to get the first bite. No one bothered to attack the preposterous Ghiselin. It was Richard Dawkins who had waggled his tempting rear end, and behind Dawkins, fesse à fesse, Charles Darwin. With the publication in 1991 of Darwin on Trial Phil Johnson did what carnivores so often do: He took a bite.

Johnson was at the time a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, a man whose training had given him what great lawyers so often have and that is a shrewd eye for the main chance. Darwin's theory, Johnson observed, is hardly in need of empirical support: It is its own best friend. "The prevailing assumption in evolutionary science," he wrote, "seems to be that speculative possibilities, without experimental confirmation, are all that is really necessary."

This is wrong only to the extent that speculative possibilities without experimental confirmation are often all that is really possible.

Every paleontologist writing since Darwin published his masterpiece in 1859, has known that the fossil record does not support Darwin's theory. The theory predicted a continuum of biological forms, so much so that from the right perspective, species would themselves be seen as taxonomic artifacts, like the classification of certain sizes in men's suiting as husky. Questions about the origin of species were resolved in the best possible way: There are no species and so there is no problem. Inasmuch as the historical record suggested a discrete progression of fixed biological forms, it was fatal to Darwin's project. All the more reason, Darwin argued, to discount the evidence in favor of the theory. "I do not pretend," he wrote, "that I should ever have suspected how poor a record of the mutations of life, the best preserved geological section presented, had not the difficulty of our not discovering innumerable transitional links between the species which appeared at the commencement and close of each formation, pressed so hardly on my theory."

This is, as Johnson noted, self-serving gibberish.

Few serious biologists are today willing to defend the position that Dawkins expressed in The Blind Watchmaker. The metaphor remains stunning and so the watchmaker remains blind, but he is now deaf and dumb as well. With a few more impediments, he may as well be dead. The publication in 1983 of Motoo Kimura's The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution consolidated ideas that Kimura had introduced in the late 1960s. On the molecular level, evolution is entirely stochastic, and if it proceeds at all, it proceeds by drift along a leaves-and-current model. Kimura's theories left the emergence of complex biological structures an enigma, but they played an important role in the local economy of belief. They allowed biologists to affirm that they welcomed responsible criticism. "A critique of neo-Darwinism," the Dutch biologist Gert Korthof boasted, "can be incorporated into neo-Darwinism if there is evidence and a good theory, which contributes to the progress of science."

By this standard, if the Archangel Gabriel were to accept personal responsibility for the Cambrian explosion, his views would be widely described as neo-Darwinian.

In Darwin on Trial, Johnson ascended majestically above the usual point of skepticism. It was the great case of Darwin et al v. the Western Religious Tradition that occupied his attention. The issue had been joined long before Johnson wrote. But the case had not been decided. It had not been decisively decided and like some terrifying cripple, it had continued to bang its crutches through all the lower courts of Hell and Dover, Pennsylvania.

A few nodding judges such as Stephen Jay Gould thought to settle the matter by splitting the difference between litigants. To science, Gould assigned everything of importance, and to religion, nothing. Such was his theory of non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA, a term very much suggesting that Gould was endowing a new wing at the Museum of Modern Art. Serving two masters, Gould supposed that he would be served by them in turn. He was mistaken. In approaching Darwin's theory of evolution, theistic evolutionists acquired a posture of expectant veneration, imagining hopefully that their deference would allow them to lick the plates from various scientific tables. They were in short order assured that having settled for nothing, nothing is what they would get. From the likes of Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, Gould got what he deserved.

And from Phillip Johnson too, but in a different way and with different ends in mind.

The scientific establishment had long believed that in res Darwin et al v. The Western Religious Tradition, Darwin would prevail. They expected to be assigned governance over the ideology of a democratic society. Their palms had collectively commenced to itch. Newspapers hymned Darwin's praise, and television documentaries -- breathless narrator, buggy jungle -- celebrated his achievement. Museum curators rushed to construct Darwinian dioramas in which human beings were shown ascending, step by step, from some ancient simian conclave, one suspiciously like the faculty lounge at Harvard. A very considerable apparatus or propaganda and persuasion was put at the disposal of the Darwinian community.

And, yet, no matter the extent to which Darwin's theory was said to be beyond both reappraisal and reproach, the conviction remained current that it was not so, and if so, not entirely so.

"Why not consider," Johnson asked, "the possibility that life is what it so evidently seems to be, the product of creative intelligence?"

The question is entirely reasonable. It is the question that every thoughtful person is inclined to ask.

So why not ask it?

No standard by which science is justified as an institution rules it out. The ones commonly employed -- naturalism, falsifiability, materialism, methodological naturalism -- are useless as standards because transparent as dodges.

The geneticist Richard Lewontin -- Harvard, oddly enough -- provided an answer to Johnson's question that is a masterpiece of primitive simplicity. It surely deserves to be quoted at length and quoted in full:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

There is much in these remarks that is analytically defective. The "commitment to materialism" that Lewontin defends is hardly clear enough to merit rebuttal. The history of physics suggests the maxim that anything goes if something works. It is as useful a maxim in mathematical physics as it is in international finance.

Nonetheless, Lewontin, as Johnson understood, had properly grasped the dynamics of the Great Case, its inner meaning. What remains when materialism (or anything else) is subtracted from Lewontin's prior commitment is the prior commitment itself; and like all such commitments, it is a commitment no matter what. Had they read the New York Review of Books, mullahs in Afghanistan would have understood Lewontin perfectly. They would have scrupled only at the side he had chosen.

Darwin's theories are correspondingly less important for what they explain, which is very little, and more important for what they deny, which is roughly the plain evidence of our senses. "Darwin," Richard Dawkins noted amiably, "had made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

But the Great Case, Johnson reminded his readers, has not yet been decided in the only court that counts, and that is the considered reflection of the human race. Efforts by one side to absent themselves from judgment are somewhat premature. Too much is at stake.

That much is at stake explains a good deal about the rhetoric of discussion in the United States, its vile tone. Biologists such as Jerry Coyne, Donald Prothero, Larry Moran or P.Z. Myers are of the opinion that if they cannot win the argument, they had better not lose it, and what better way not to lose an argument than to abuse one's antagonist? If necessary, the biological establishment has been quite willing to demand of the Federal Courts that they do what it has been unable to do in the court of public opinion. If the law is unwilling to act on their behalf, they are quite prepared to ignore it. Having been spooked by some tedious Darwinian toady, the California Science Center cancelled with blithe unconcern a contract to show a film about the Cambrian explosion. Spooked by some other Darwinian toady, the Department of Physics at the University of Kentucky denied the astronomer Martin Gaskell an appointment in astrophysics that he plainly was due.

The California Science Center paid up.

The University of Kentucky paid up.

As Philip Johnson might well have reminded them, the law is a knife that cuts two ways.

At the Discovery Institute we often offer an inter-faith Prayer of Thanksgiving to the Almighty for the likes of P.Z. Myers, Larry Moran, Barbara Forrest, Rob Pennock and Jeffrey Shallit.

For Donald Prothero, we are prepared to sacrifice a ram.

And now? Both critics and defenders of Darwin's theory have been humbled by the evidence. We are the beneficiaries of twenty years of brilliant and penetrating laboratory work in molecular biology and biochemistry. Living systems are more complex than ever before imagined. They are strange in their organization and nature. No theory is remotely adequate to the facts.

There is some evidence that once again, the diapason of opinion is being changed. The claims of intelligent design are too insistent and too plausible to be frivolously dismissed and the inadequacies of any Darwinian theory too obvious to be tolerated frivolously. Time has confirmed what critics like Phil Johnson have always suspected. Darwin's theory is far less a scientific theory than the default position for a view in which the universe and everything in it assembles itself from itself in a never-ending magical procession. The religious tradition and with it, a sense for the mystery, terror and grandeur of life, has always embodied insights that were never trivial.

The land is rising even as it sinks.

And this, too, is a message that Phil Johnson was pleased to convey.

no explanation of consciousness

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:24:00 +0000

See http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/post_33052491.html:

Darwinian Psychologist David Barash Admits the Seeming Insolubility of Science's "Hardest Problem"
Evolution News & Views November 1, 2011 12:03 PM | Permalink

Our local U. of Washington psychology professor and Darwin advocate David P. Barash comes from the "My Back Hurts Therefore It Wasn't Designed" school of evolutionary thought, as he wrote in an L.A. Times op-ed a few years back ("Does God Have Back Problems Too?"). It's a nice surprise, then, to find him confessing what he regards as the seeming impossibility of imagining a material explanation for the "hardest problem in science."

Which is? "How the brain generates awareness, thought, perceptions, emotions, and so forth, what philosophers call 'the hard problem of consciousness.'" Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Barash concedes that to say the problem is "hard" considerably understates the problem. He writes as "an utter and absolute, dyed-in-the-wool, scientifically oriented, hard-headed, empirically insistent, atheistically committed materialist, altogether certain that matter and energy rule the world, not mystical abracadabra." Yet:

It's a hard one indeed, so hard that despite an immense amount of research attention devoted to neurobiology, and despite great advances in our knowledge, I don't believe we are significantly closer to bridging the gap between that which is physical, anatomical and electro-neurochemical, and what is subjectively experienced by all of us ... or at least by me. (I dunno about you!)
...

To be sure, there are lots of other hard problems, such as the perennial one of reconciling quantum theory with relativity, whether life exists on other planets, how action can occur at a distance (gravity, the attraction of opposite charges), how cells differentiate, and so forth. But in these and other cases, I can at least envisage possible solutions, even though none of mine actually work.

But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can't even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don't even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run. Let's say that a particular cerebral nucleus was found, existing only in conscious creatures. Would that solve it? Or maybe a specific molecule, synthesized only in the heat of subjective mental functioning, increasing in quantity in proportion as sensations are increasingly vivid, disappearing with unconsciousness, and present in diminished quantity from human to hippo to herring to hemlock tree. Or maybe a kind of reverberating electrical circuit. I'd be utterly fascinated by any of these findings, or any of an immense number of easily imagined alternatives. But satisfied? Not one bit.

Barash can get away with saying this, but we congratulate him for doing so all the same. Our friend James Le Fanu said it already, however, with his characteristic elegance in his wonderful book Why Us? ENV's David Klinghoffer summarized in our review:
[P]hysical explanations of how [the brain] gives rise to the mind consistently explode upon takeoff. The brain is no computer, where every operation can be traced to physically describable events: "Neither the findings of the PET scanner nor Professor [Eric] Kandel's scientific explanations can begin to account for the power of memory to retain...visual images over decades and retrieve them at will, any more than they can account for remembering the words of a familiar hymn or recalling a telephone number."
That's just for starters. The brain-computer analogy utterly fails to clarify how "just a few thousand genes might instruct the arrangement of those billions of neurons with their 'hardwired' faculties of language and mathematics."

And a good thing that is, too. Because if the mind really did reside entirely in the brain, if the mind were genuinely reducible to the brain, that would mean the end of free will -- a computer ultimately can do only what it's programmed to do (in this case, programmed by a mindless nature) -- and that in turn would spell the end of moral responsibility.

Of course Barash says he's confident that a solution will be found, and that would have to be so, since he's also said that science compels us to reject a belief in free will: "There can be no such thing as free will for the committed scientist."
We've long thought that the issue of whether men and women are free and thus morally responsible is the real nub of all the issues that divide materialists from theists.

the death of Steve Jobs

noreply@blogger.com (DG) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:33:00 +0000

Written by my brother:

Steve Jobs -- Rest In Peace, But Let's Not Overdo It

Amid the spasm of media hype about Steve Jobs -- I've heard people say he was our Edison, our Disney and as important as JFK, that he shaped our lives, changed our lives, improved our lives. I want to offer a dissenting voice.

Now I have nothing against Jobs, who certainly was brilliant and highly creative, combining incredible business sense with a unique intuitive grasp of how people relate to gadgets. And I have nothing against computers, of which I've owned several and in front of which I spend far too much time; or against, for that matter, gadgets. I'm on my 5th mp3 player, which is packed to the gills with my favorite music.

But it is a sign of the incredible spiritual poverty of our time that gadgets like an iPhone or an iPod can be thought of as things which fundamentally change our lives, for they do not. They make for some conveniences and some pleasures, certainly, but conveniences and pleasures are not really the center of our lives; or if they are, that tells us something deeply sad in and of itself.

For example: now that I can carry a hundred and fifty hours of music on a device slightly bigger than a fat credit card, do I understand the music any better? Do I appreciate it more than when I had to take an old LP out of cardboard sleeve, put it on the turntable, and place the needle on the grooves? Having all that glorious sound at my disposal, in three seconds to be able to choose from thousands of tracks of classical, Jazz, new age, pop, or folk -- does it make me love it more? Or just trivialize the experience so that I take it all for granted?

More important, far more important: now that I have a cell phone and can "reach out and touch" anyone of my contacts with a quick call or quicker text, do I care about any of them more deeply? Am I any better at keeping in touch with people I haven't talked to for awhile, or healing wounds from the past, or dealing with differences that arise within my family? Am I more honest about what I feel? More compassionate about other people's suffering? Any less likely to show off when I get an article published or gossip about some third party who both my phone pal and I dislike?

If you have a cell phone (which, unlike mine, is a stripped down model which pretty much just makes and receives phone calls) which takes videos, plays games, reads bar codes, provide instant maps to anywhere, and can use the half million or so apps available, are you a better person than you were before you got it? Any more able to handle questions of life and death, to face aging or illness, pain or disappointment? Is a world of terrorism and imperialism, environmental blight and staggering debt, hunger and poverty and sexual violence less frightening?

I heard all about "there's an app for that." Is there one for wisdom?

The answer, it seems to me, to just about every one of these questions is a resounding 'No.' And in just that sense our lives have been barely touched by anything Jobs did. They are the same as they have always been. Perhaps, in fact, they are a little worse: we are more distracted, less able to focus on what is important because we are too busy filling our mp3 players, surfing the web from our smart phones, or doing god knows what on our iPads. Having so much, we have too much. Having so much to do, we do too little that matters.

Is life 'easier' with all these 'conveniences'? In many ways, again, the answer is "not really." Because I have email and wireless connection, I can work anywhere, anytime. Gee, that's... really... great. Except now "time off" is virtually impossible. Because I can talk on the phone anywhere, people can be pissed off if I don't answer their calls. Because I have so much music available on my satellite radio (slogan: everything, all the time) I can switch stations until I find something I like instead of actually listening to something new and developing my taste. The machines replace our memories, our capacity to amuse ourselves if there are no batteries around and our face to face engagements with other humans.

Some convenience.

The essential tasks of life -- how to be kind, good, and wise; how to control one's mind and order one's emotions and desires; how to connect to other people and other species with compassion -- no machine will take away the essential difficulty of such things. In a time when we are constantly offered things to "make life easier" it might do us good to remember, as Kierkegaard was fond of saying, that sometime what's needed is a little more difficulty.

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs, and thanks a lot for the toys. And now let's get back to the essential task of being better human beings.

Rabbi Dr. Dovid Gottlieb

Ants in supercolonies defy evolution

One nest and one queen is the norm

Supercolony stretches 6,000km

Argentine Ant present on most continents

Red fire ants cause grief in the US

Mutants can spell the end for supercolonies

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On the Origin of Everything

‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss

By DAVID ALBERT

Published: March 23, 2012

A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING

Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

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On the Origin of Everything

By DAVID ALBERT

A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING

Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

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