A Tip O' The Beer Mug To Mike Gene

This is sad news. Mike Gene is retiring from Telic Thoughts to spend more time with his family.

Mike is that unique voice in the ID/evolution debate who will not be pigeonholed into an extreme position and whose views are well-thought and demand to be taken seriously on their merits alone. Mike's posts at TT have helped to influence my views; his inputs will be sorely missed.

(raising a mug of Grasshopper)

Here's to Mike Gene. May God bless your time with your family and allow to keep following the Rabbit wherever it goes.

Should We REALLY Be Surprised???

On second third thought, perhaps I was right the first time around: PZ's Pharyngula definitely should have been rated lower than high school:

But then again, based on this (HT: FtK), that would be an insult to elementary kids. Maybe "High School Bathroom Wall" is more appropriate.

The real surprise is that any one is shocked at this. This is just PZ being PZ. Cut him loose already, sez I.

"Readability" of EE

According to this site, EE has a reading level of Undergrad.

What this means exactly, I have no clue and I don't put much stock in it either. However, it is nice to have one's ego stroked once in a while (oh yeah! Right there! Ahhhhhhh!)

UPDATE 09July2008: Results from the other blogs were deleted.

Grandma's Universe

The "grandma" of ID, Denyse O'Leary, has "recently" created a new blog called "Colliding Universes" to complement a book project of hers on multiple universes. Seeing as how astronomy is of special interest to me*, I have spent some time checking it out, and Grandma O'Leary has some cool posts there**.

While I am more interested in the articles she refers to, Grandma's comments are interesting too. Take for example a recent post on the recent findings on Mercury by the MESSENGER probe (not only does Mercury appear to have an active magnetic field, but it also appears like it has volcanic vents!):

"Does the planet Mercury need to exist? - I mean in the business sense. Does it do anything? Or is it like those souvenir shells that persist forever on the mantelpiece? They have no use, but that's not the same thing as saying that they are not there for a reason. There is a difference between use and reason."

I like Grandma O'Leary. Everyone should have a grandma like her. That said, I don't think Mercury is "useless". To provide one possible answer, perhaps Mercury is there to increase our understanding of how the solar system and universe works and thereby employing many talented nerds astronomers to gather data and interpret. Granted, there is no physical law that demands Mercury be there, but there it be, so I sez let's examine it and learn from it.

One thing I must note from the referred article: why are astronomers always surprised that the solar system/universe is different than expected? The Voyager missions should have taught us by now to expect the unexpected.

*When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer; can you say "NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD!!!"? But hey, nerds are OK and are sometimes cool. There, that's the extent of my olive branch. Take it or be swatted by it ;)

**Some other interesting Colliding Universes posts with article links can be found here, here, and here.

Reflections on Body Worlds

Well, despite all nagging concerns I had, I went to Body Worlds (BW) on Monday.

Before I comment on the actual display, I wish to address the concerns I had:

1. I found the allegations that BW received human bodies through suspicious means groundless. No concrete evidence was uncovered since the allegations were made. On top of that, BW went out of their way to show the process and consent forms for accepting bodies via donations to science. In short, I was satisfied the donors had given their informed consent.

2. The consent forms include a box to check if the donor consents to his/her organs being sold to educational institutions, with proceeds going to covers the costs of the plastination process, not for profit. I found this to be a reasonable request.

3. The BW display did not show the donors in a demeaning fashion. The poses were mainly for educational purposes, although I would recommend not taking children under 12 to the show (of which there were quite a few, unfortunately).

To sum up, I am satisfied most of my concerns were adequately met and I felt more comfortable viewing most of the displays.

That said, for those who feel comfortable, I fully recommend seeing Body Worlds. The exhibit I went to organised the displays by the different systems of the body which included (not an inclusive list) skeletal, muscular, nervous, circulatory, respiratory, digestive, urination and kidneys, reproductive, etc. The only room I didn't spend a lot of time in was the fetal development room. I took a quick scan, found I wasn't entirely comfortable with viewing it, and waited outside for my wife (who found it very interesting and would recommend all teenage girls see it in order to give them a more complete picture of what goes on during pregnancy).

Also included were banners showing the history of anatomy. One of the most intriguing (IMO) was the viewing theatres from Renaissance times were the rich and poor would mingle amongst each other while viewing autopsies/dissections (I would have thought there would have been a section set aside for the rich and another for the poor).

The displays showed both a "normally functioning" body and how diseases affect the function (there were a lot of smokers who donated their bodies!). The "normal" bodies displayed many impressive features, including (and forgive me for not remembering the proper names) four arteries going from the heart to the brain that connect in a circle at the base of the brain, helping to ensure sufficient blood flow in the event one of the arteries gets blocked.

The main thing I took from this is that a "normally functioning" body gives the strong appearance of an efficiently designed system*. By efficient, I mean that each discrete system (i.e. skeletal, circulatory, etc.) appeared "designed" to provide optimum function of that system given certain constraints and requirements from other discrete systems and/or the larger system (i.e. the human body). Each discrete system works together to provide a larger multi-functional and adaptive system. Take away or significantly change a component of a local system, the larger system can still function, but not at the efficiency of the "normal" body.

All in all, I found Body Worlds to be a fascinating exhibit that treated the donated bodies with dignity and respect while providing an educational aspect that the layman can grasp.

*Efficient System Design is a concept I will be dealing with in more detail in the near future, but feel free to comment on it. I enjoy and appreciate everyone's point of view (thus far).

Random Thoughts About Body Worlds

I am going to see the Body Worlds exhibit on Monday. It has piqued my curiosity and interest and I am expecting a fascinating display.

From the website:

"The BODY WORLDS exhibitions are first-of-their-kind exhibitions through which visitors learn about anatomy, physiology, and health by viewing real human bodies, using an extraordinary process called Plastination a groundbreaking method for specimen preservation invented by Dr. von Hagens in 1977.

"Each exhibition features more than 200 real human specimens, including whole-body plastinates, individual organs, organ configurations and transparent body slices. The specimens on display stem from the body donation program that Gunther von Hagens established in 1983.The exhibitions also allow visitors to see and better understand the long-term impact of diseases, the effects of tobacco consumption and the mechanics of artificial supports such as knees and hips. To date, more than 25 million people around the world have viewed the BODY WORLDS exhibits."

It is apparent that this exhibit is not for everyone. As for myself, I love watching live operations, can tend to be a violence junkie, and don't get queazy very easily, so Body Worlds should be right up my alley.

Or will it?

There is something bugging me about this, and I believe C.S. Lewis puts it best in Abolition of Man:

"...a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to `body-snatchers' is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.

"From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may `conquer' them. We are always conquering Nature, because `Nature' is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity. It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all. It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man's power to treat himself as a mere `natural object' and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one's first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners." (emphasis mine)

Before commenting, I would encourage you to read Lewis's lecture, The Abolition of Man (and for the adventurous, the previous two lectures: Men Without Chests and The Way) so you can get a better idea of his overall argument.

Don't get me wrong. This looks like a fascinating exhibit from which one can learn a lot. The donors gave consent, so that is not the issue either. IMO, the tie-in to Abolition of Man is whether charging people a fee to see human corpses and body parts on display is part of the process of humankind becoming raw material.

Football Season Is About To Start

I bet most of you are going, "What football? It ain't September yet!" Ah, that is a great time of year when I have four teams (at max) playing any given weekend.

But for the end of June, that means the Canadian Football League 2008 season is about to start! The official start is Thursday, June 26th, but the real start is Saturday when the Edmonton Eskimos visit the DEFENDING GREY CUP CHAMPIONS, SASKATCHEWAN ROUGHRIDERS!

RiderNation is alive and kicking and still recovering from that hangover from last year's Grey Cup.

Open Discussion on "Confirmed Prediction" of ID

I am an equal-opportunity critic.

On the one side, UCD still causes a little "niggle" to go off in the back of my head that tells me something ain't quite right. I may not know how to describe it at this time, but eventually I may. The discussion of the confirmation of UCD from the previous post is one example.

On the other side is a recent post by Patrick at Uncommon Descent entitled "ID-Compatible Predictions: Foresighted Mechanism Identified?".

First the positive. A recent experiment showed that the genes in E.Coli "reacted" to changes in temperature:

"Indeed, upon transition to a higher temperature, many of the genes essential for aerobic respiration were practically turned off.

"To prove that this is not just genetic coincidence ..., the researchers then grew the bacteria in a biologically flipped environment where oxygen levels rose following an increase in temperature. Remarkably, within a few hundred generations the bugs partially adapted to this new regime, and no longer turned off the genes for aerobic respiration when the temperature rose"
-PhysOrg article

To sum up, inactive genes were activated and active genes were rendered inactive due to a change in environment.

Patrick claims this is an example of a prediction he made: foresighted mechanism/front loading. A foresighted mechanism, if identified conclusively, should be considered an objective sign/aspect of design, and thus confirmation of "ID-Compatible Prediction" (side note: dontcha just love the term ID-Compatible?).

Don't misinterpret what I'm saying here. This is NOT conclusive evidence of fore-sighted mechanism/front loading. However, just like the partial confirmation of "junk DNA" having function from the ENCODE project, it is a tantalising first step (Patrick does acknowledge this in the opening of his post regarding junk DNA and other "ID-Compatible predictions").

So what now? It is obvious that further research is required, or as Dr. Heddle so nicely puts it, "Show Me the Experiment[s]!" The prediction needs to be refined and focused.

Also, IMO, too much emphasis was placed on intelligence in Patrick's post when - according to Sal Cordova and others - we do not have a solid definition of intelligence. However, as Sal nicely puts it, design is more tractable and this is where the focus should be on. Objective aspects of design exist (passive design) and can be universally observed. Developing and defining passive design* (or something along those lines) should be the focus.

Bottom line, the experiment is a good start, but much more needs to be done.

The "asylum" is now open.**

*I know I keep dropping hints of this thing called "passive design". I can only say "stay tuned" and "please be patient"; it is coming. :)

**This is just my unique way of opening the floor for comments ;)

Open Discussion on Confirmed Prediction of Common Descent

Dr. David Heddle - no fan of ID and no advocate of evolution - recently posted a comment at Telic Thoughts referring to a confirmed prediction of common descent. I asked him for a source and he kindly directed me to this site which also provided this paper, which described the fusing of two primate chromosones to form 1 human chromosone. This provides strong evidence of common descent, going from 24 primate chromosones to 23 human chromosones.

Being an engineer and not being a biologist/geneticist, some honest questions have come to my mind after reading through the references above:

1. Are the remaining 22 chromosones identical between humans and primates?
2. Are the experiment conditions listed in the paper comparable to "actual" conditions? [I'm still trudging my way through the paper, but I find reading biologist-ese difficult; I require a translator ;) ]

This an open invitation to civil discussion on the above references. Ad hominem comments are not welcome and will be deleted.

Side note: this appears to be along the lines of what Dr. John A. Davison is proposing, that macroevolution occured in the chromosones, not the genes.

It's Like We're in a Detective Novel...

I recently made the comment:

"Your argument is analogous to arriving at an automated assembly plant for cars and stating that the robots "assembled" the cars and there was no need for human engineers when in fact it was human engineers who designed the robots to assemble the cars which were designed by human engineers."

The problem with this analogy is the origins of the robots: it could very well be possible that something else rather than human engineers "designed" the robots or the robots could have always existed. That said, the analogy does do a fairly good job of describing the situation we find ourseleves in. It is like we have entered an "automated" world full of machinery, assembly plants, and factories. So how do we make sense of it all?

A similar analogy was recently put forward by Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts where he more broadly and skillfully illustrates the predicament we find ourselves in:

"Consider some movie where you, the viewer, know that Jones killed Smith, because you watched it happen. Jones, of course, subjectively knows that he killed Smith. The police investigator doesn’t know this, he simply believes that Jones killed Smith because of some clues. The investigator then privately confronts Jones and accuses him of murder. Jones, privately knowing the investigator is correct, simply replies, “There is no evidence and you can’t prove it” and the investigator knows this is true.

Right there, in that scene, we see the difference between evidence and truth. Relying solely on the evidence may very well deliver only a superficial, or even false, understanding of the world."

So let's open up the comments with this: how do we determine whether design is an illustion or not, and perhaps more interesting, should we be making that judgment at all?

Note: I am a supporter for a side-by-side paradigm where those who believe design is an illusion can work productively with those who think design is not an illusion. Both side have interesting things to bring to the table while keeping each other in check.