Bayesian Selection. Trouble Brews.

All natural functional biological complexity arose through the mechanism of non-teleological heritable variation and natural selection. That’s the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, in a nut-shell, and it’s the cornerstone of biology. The Neo-Darwinian synthesis may be divided into two professions, so to speak, the union of which constitutes the orthodoxy. Jacques Monod called them “chance” and “necessity,” and it’s a useful shorthand. Monod’s “chance” means absence of design. Chance means random in the sense of lacking teleology. There is no purpose in the raw material of Darwinian evolution. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the “random heritable variation” generator doesn’t obey natural laws. It does, like everything else, but it has no foresight. It’s random like flipping a coin is random. The Read More ›

Materialist Science Fiction Promoted to Students at a Local Public Library

Recently I went to a public library to do some work, and I saw a book featured on top of a reference desk titled Life on Other Planets (by Rhonda Lucas Donald, Watts Library, 2003). The title page featured little green men with big alien bug-eyes, the kind of picture you might see on some nutty UFO website. The book and its display were clearly aimed at students — perhaps junior high or high school-aged. Fun and silly pictures don’t bother me if they get kids interested in reading about science. The problem here was that when I opened the book, what I found was not science, but science-fiction. Where Does Your Information Come From? The second page of the Read More ›

Who Would Connect “the Legacy of Darwin,” Medicine, and Eugenics?

P.Z. Myers and I finally agree on something! In a recent post, I described several actual Darwinian medicine “theories”: ‘Children Hate Vegetables Because of Ancestral Reproductive Advantage of Avoiding Toxins’ or ‘We Will Evolve Oiler Skin Because of Frequent Bathing’ or ‘X-Linked Color Blindness Evolved to Help Paleolithic Male Hunters See Camouflage.’ As I pointed out in my original post, these theories are real, and in fact represent the cutting edge of Darwinian medicine. Myers refers to these Darwinian medicine research projects as “silly”: No, none of those very silly talks were given. And he’s right. What he fails to note, however, is that these theories differ little in substance from the ephemeral corpus of Darwinian just-so stories. These silly Read More ›