IDiot Rundown

Dacook of UncommonlyDense quote-mines a recent National Research Council report:

On Page 8 of a Report from the National Research Council there is an interesting admission:

“Natural selection based solely on mutation is probably not an adequate mechanism for evolving complexity.”

Of course the report itself supports the concept of Darwinian evolution. But I think the admission that mutation is an insufficient mechanism is significant. They invoke lateral transfer of genes as the alternate explanation:

“More important, lateral gene transfer and endosymbiosis are probably the most obvious mechanisms for creating complex genomes…”

Of course this begs the question; where did the genes come from that are being laterally transferred?

The genes come from mutation. The report admits that mutation alone is not sufficient for evolution (not a new revelation), but it's certainly necessary. The point is, you're not looking at one single genome being continuously mutated over time. You have a bunch of different genomes mutating, and then mixing and matching the parts that work to create entirely new genomes.

Meanwhile, turnabout is fair play. Several months ago, Time magazine made the insulting decision to have Michael (Fucking) Behe write Richard Dawkins' profile for their list of the year's 100 most influential people. Now, Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute is flustered because the New York Times Review of Books chose Dawkins to review Behe's The Edge of Evolution. Let me give it to you straight: Dawkins is respected in the scientific community. Behe is not. It's dishonest enough to pretend that they're equals without going further to say Behe is above Dawkins.

Next, the media made a hubbub over recent hominid fossils, and DI's Casey Luskin wasn't going to let the sensationalism go by untouched. Rather than write about everything that's wrong with his interpretation of the fossils, I'll just let you choose from a few other bloggers: 1 2 3 4 5. I'll just add that I found scordova's (UD) remark on the matter highly ironic:

It [sic] understandable that scientists make mistakes, but one would hope an entire scientific discipline could get at least one fact right once in a while.

Strong words, from someone who thinks ID counts as a scientific discipline.

We've got a transcript of a 2005 speech by creationist Don McLeroy, now head of the Texas State Board of Education. Texas is screwed. That might deserve a post of its own.

William Dembski apparently thinks animated .gifs and Beatles lyrics are accurate representations of evolutionary theory. This is a problem.

Finally, our old friend Michael Egnor still insists that questioning evolution in schools is a federal crime:

It’s a federal crime to violate a federal court ruling, such as the
ruling by federal judge John E. Jones banning criticism of Darwin’s
theory in the curriculum of biology classes in Dover, Pennsylvania
public schools.

There's just one problem with Egnor's logic: Judge Jones' ruling doesn't ban questioning of evolution. Questions are a good thing. It does, however, ban teaching of intelligent design, on the grounds that ID is rehashed creationism bent on sneaking religion into science curricula. (Don't believe that? Check out the Don McLeroy transcript.)

Why Intelligent Design is Creationism

There's been a lot of buzz lately over the distinction (or lack thereof) between creationism and intelligent design.

Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute wrote last week that ID wasn't just a protestant Christian movement: an orthodox Jew was in on it, too! (I'll give you a second to get over the shock that Xians and Jews could agree on the origins of life.)

Denyse O'Leary once again mumbles praise of the Creation Museum under her breath. Notice how she praises the museum for not aligning itself with ID, rather than condemning it for using false science. That's because O'Leary doesn't give a damn about real science. As long as the CM helps her undermine evolutionary biology, it's okay in her book. She just doesn't want her version of creationism to be

Mike Dunford at the Panda's Thumb agrees (reluctantly) with O'Leary that Creationists and IDiots are different; the difference being, Creationists aren't afraid to admit that their ideas come from their faith, whereas IDiots like O'Leary are afraid to admit to the metaphysical beliefs at the foundation of ID.

Larry Moran doesn't want to let O'Leary off the hook so easily. Creationism, he says, encompasses Young Earthers, Old Earthers, IDiots, and even Theistic Evolutionists (to varying degrees). I agree. If you think God created us, whether you think you can prove it or not, then you're a Creationist.

Meanwhile, Michael Egnor took offense to Dunford's post. Mark Hoofnagle gave Egnor a thorough thrashing.

For my part, I'm convinced that Intelligent Design is a subspecies of Creationism. The only way you can make a reasonable design inference is if you have reason to believe there could have been a designer present. I don't care how unlikely you think a pattern is. If I pour a bowl of alphabet soup and find the phrase "You're a douchebag, and by the way we're almost out of milk," I'm still going to have to chalk it up to coincidence unless you can give me some other evidence that I have pantry gremlins. Suppose we find artifacts such as stone tools and crockery at a new site in Wisconsin, dated confidently to 7000 years old. We could make the reasonable inference that people had left them behind, because we have other evidence that tool-making people existed on Earth 7000 years ago.

Even if you don't have evidence for a designer apart from whatever it is you think has been designed, you sure as hell would normally look for more evidence of the designer to back up your design inference. Imagine if we found what we thought were stone tools dated with all confidence to 125 million years old. We'd variously be questioning our dating techniques, looking for toolmaking dinosaurs, looking for evidence of time travelers, or coming up with natural explanations for the stones' appearance. If we found "tools" on Mars, we wouldn't sit back in our recliners and take that as unequivocal proof of Martians, we'd keep on looking.

The Intelligent Designers time and again deny being interested in who their designer is, how he did it, or why he did it the way he did. Every single thing that humans identify as "designed" has been accompanied by at least a vague guess based on our best evidence as to who the designer was. After all, how can you have design without a designer? No, the truth is, IDiots already have an idea who the intelligent designer is, and they don't want to admit it because that intelligent designer is God (or Rael, or whatever your faith of choice dictates). They have no evidence of the designer, nor will the seek it, because they have their faith. That's why ID is Creationism, and decisively not science.

Egnor fails to grasp either Evo Psych or Quantum Mechanics

PZ Myers gave a talk Sunday entitled "There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief." If I lived in Minnesota, I totally would have been there. (Maybe I should have tried to convince my brother to take a day off from bear-wrangling and go in my place, though he might not have appreciated it as much.)

Anyway, everyone's favorite logically-challenged creationist neurosurgeon has taken it upon himself to offer PZ some advice on giving future talks. Never mind the fact that Egnor didn't attend PZ's talk.

Egnor, as usual, just makes one bad point after another. It's painful to read, I won't even bother linking it. But I would like to address two particular points that stood out.

First, Egnor revisits one of his recent favorite inane points:

Although you can’t expect a whole lot of real skepticism from atheist ‘skeptics’, there may be a few in the audience who aren’t gullible enough to accept the assertion that ‘religion is an evolved adaptation’ without noting the obvious corollary: ‘atheism is an evolved adaptation’.

Um, no. A while back he tried that same trick on evolutionary psychology, noting that evolutionary psychologists like to look at the origins of religious belief, but never the origins of evolutionary psychology. Egnor, of course, has never hinted at what his idea of the origins of a materialist worldview would be, or what relevance it would have to such a worldview's credibility. He's just trying to launch a smear campaign, discarding an evolutionary account of religion as mere persecution of the faithful. He doesn't address the facts at all. He doesn't address a single claim made by evo psych; he just tries to write it off as mean and hypocritical.

But if Egnor really wants to know how atheism arose, here's the answer: reason. Human beings evolved a fantastic capacity for reason, and through that capacity we found that the religious beliefs shaped over generations by our cognitive biases didn't jibe with reality. It's as simple as that.

The other bit of idiocy I wanted to address:

Because you are promulgating 19th century materialist ideology, avoid any reference to quantum entanglement and the ‘observer effect’ in quantum mechanics. Material reality at the quantum level only sharpens into focus when it is observed by a mind. The implication is that the mind, in an important and fundamental way, is distinct from matter, and in fact is a prerequisite for discrete physical reality at the quantum level. The observer effect in quantum mechanics adds credence to the dualist theory of the mind. Don’t remind the audience.

Well, we can all rest easy knowing that, in addition to being inept in evolutionary biology and neuroscience, Egnor is a few credits shy of a quantum physics degree.

The "observer effect" to which Egnor alludes goes something like this: objects on the quantum scale tend to exist as wavelike probability distributions rather than discreet particles. However, when an observer looks at such an object, the object collapses into one of its available states. A favorite example is the double-slit experiment. Imagine a point light source projecting light through two parallel thin slits onto a screen. If the photons are acting like waves, then each photon-wave can pass through both slits at once, forming an interference pattern on the screen. However, if we set up a sensor to observe which slit the photon goes through, then it collapses into a photon-particle and can only pass through one slit or the other, and we end up with two bright blobs on the screen instead of the interference bands.

That's all well and good. But Egnor uses this phenomenon to suggest the observing mind has some magical wave-collapsing power, which is ridiculous. The photon in this instance collapses into a particle because of physical interaction with the observing mechanism. If we hook up our sensor to observe which slit the photon passes through, then we won't get an interference pattern, whether or not a human being looks at the results. The photon (or electron or atom or buckyball or what have you) doesn't give a damn about whether there's a grad student reading the output from the sensor; the photon only cares about the sensor itself. So unless Egnor wants to say our lab equipment has a mind of its own (wouldn't surprise me, given some of the stuff I've seen in the lab in my day), his argument for dualism from quantum physics is entirely, utterly wrong.

It'll be entertaining to see whether PZ decides to grace Egnor's "advice" with a response.

EDIT: PZ has responded. Apparently a video of the talk is on its way, so stay tuned for that.

FURTHER EDIT: Welcome, Pharyngula readers! Please enjoy your stay!

Egnor, to Myers: "Prove there's no teapot"

Michael Egnor keeps fighting the good (well, mediocre) fight in defense of dualism. In the latest installment, he pulls a classic creationist tactic, a version of the impossible expectations/moving goalposts tactic so often employed by denialists; he shifts the burden of proof to his opponent:

How, from a scientific standpoint, could we resolve our disagreement? We would have to show, empirically, whether matter alone could, under the right circumstances, give rise to a mind. This is an experimental question, and it turns on the ability to create artificial intelligence (A.I.). If we could build machines that have first-person ontogeny, which is self-awareness, we could show conclusively that matter alone is sufficient to cause the mind. A conscious computer would have a mind that emerged from matter, and Myers would be vindicated. If we can’t create A.I., my viewpoint would seem more credible.

Egnor still has offered no evidence whatsoever for the existence of some soul or spirit to accompany the brain in generating the mind. The burden of proof is on him to provide some evidence for the soul. But instead, he claims the burden is on PZ Myers to create A.I. as evidence that matter can generate the mind without spirit.

It's the same argument I heard Michael Behe use (in person) just over two years ago in his defense of Intelligent Design. Behe proposed that it was up to biologists to disprove ID by observing a bacterial flagellum evolve from scratch in a controlled laboratory setting.

This is the sort of argument that insists Russell's teapot is orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars, and that the burden of proof is on the skeptic to launch thousands of satellites to monitor that entire interplanetary track for drifting china. A claim is made without any evidence in support, and worded so as to be unfalsifiable except by increasingly more absurd evidence.

We already have evidence to contradict the claims made above. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and modern psychology has proved evidence for the mind's being a property of the brain. But Behe and Egnor, without any evidence in their favor, take refuge in the unfalsifiability of their claims and set the bar higher, saying that there isn't enough evidence against them.

And even if their impossible expectations were to be met, you can bet that the goalposts would move again. The gravitational pull of a passing comet must have pulled the teapot off course; better start searching everywhere between Mars and Uranus. The Intelligent Designer must have snuck into your lab at night; put a combination lock on those test tubes, and call us when the bacteria have evolved into bony fish. Artificial Intelligence must not be as good as real intelligence; cobble together an intelligent being out of spare corpses, Dr. Frankenstein, and then I'll concede that no spirit is necessary.

One more point about the end of Egnor's latest essay:

Imagine that teams of the best computer scientists, working day and night for decades, finally produced a computer that had an awareness of itself. A conscious computer, with a mind! So, finally, P.Z. Myers and I could agree on something. Myers would be right. If a computer had a mind, we could infer two things:

1) Matter is sufficient, as well as necessary, for the mind. The mind is an emergent property of matter.
2) The emergence of mind from matter requires intelligent design.

It’s not easy being a materialist.

My, my, how clever, sneaking in an endorsement of ID. Unfortunately, sir, regarding your second point, we could only infer that the emergence of an artificial mind from computers under the given conditions requires design. Sorry, but the human brain isn't exactly a computer, and we don't take kindly to overextended analogies here.

Egnor's brain radio (dualism part deux)

Michael Egnor has said something stupid again. PZ Myers has already given him a good thrashing. All that I'd like to add is this:

Egnor wants to say now that the brain is a receiver for some transmission that the mind is sending out. But previously, Egnor said that the brain can't be responsible for thoughts because thoughts aren't material, and so there's no way for thoughts and matter (the brain) to interact.

Make up your mind, Egnor. Can thoughts and the brain interact (a la the cell phone and the transmission), or can't they? If they can't, then how are thoughts supposed to receive sensory input from and control behavior of the body? If they can, then how do you justify postulating some unknown non-material mind transmitting information to the brain via an unknown channel, when all the evidence favors a behavioral program hard-wired into the brain itself?

Michael Egnor needs no brain

Michael Egnor of the Disco Institute wrote:

I have argued that the mind is not completely caused by the brain. By that, I mean that there are properties of the mind, such as ideas, that are not caused by brain matter alone. Brain matter cannot be the complete cause for ideas because matter and ideas share no properties. Cause and effect can’t be ‘linked’ between substances that have no properties in common. I pointed out that the materialist view that matter alone causes ideas is substantially the same as the view that ideas alone move matter, which is the pseudoscience of ‘telekinesis’.

Wrong. Put aside for a second the idea that the mind is something tangible, but non-material (neither matter nor energy). With his telekinesis example, Egnor wants to say, "Mind cannot affect matter (rocks), so matter (brain) cannot affect mind." Notice, though, that the kind of matter changes; rocks are very different from the brain.

To make this an accurate comparison, it should read like this: "Mind cannot affect matter (rocks), so matter (rocks) cannot affect mind." That is, if mental events cannot alter the physical world without using the body as a go-between, then the physical world cannot alter mental events without using the body (i.e. the senses) as a go-between. At best, Egnor's allusion to the absence of telekinesis can be used to argue against clairvoyance. We can't move things without pushing them, and so we shouldn't expect to see things without looking at them. Surprise, surprise, the telekinesis reference doesn't get us anywhere with respect to real cognitive psychology. Egnor's argument hinges on a non sequitir.

I could spend all night tearing Egnor to bits, but I don't want to, especially since it's already been done. Go read someone more articulate instead.

Parting thought: I would just like to take this opportunity to remind our readers that Michael Egnor is supposedly a neurosurgeon.

The DI cries discriminification and conspiracity!

The Discovery Institute's treatment of ISU's denial of tenure to Guillermo Gonzales is embarrassing. Their cries of discrimination and conspiracy remind me somewhat of this recent comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: