Rejected letter to NCSE in response to the awful polemic by David Morrison in NCSE Reports 31(5), along with some preliminary commentary
Guest post by Pat Frank
Most everyone at WUWT knows that the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has turned their mission into an irony by a big-time entry into AGW-alarmism. They’ve hired Mark McCaffrey as their climate program director. Mark has degrees in education and worked previously at the “Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was Associate Scientist III,” and where he apparently took a “leadership role in the development of Climate Literacy” Mark’s background makes him not particularly trained in climate science itself, but distinctly trained to promulgate his views about it.
Mark is probably responsible for such scientifically indefensible NCSE statements that,
“Many independent lines of evidence show that human activity is responsible for most of the climate change in recent years, particularly the warming of the atmosphere and ocean in the last 150 years,… that we’re “ seeing … dramatic changes in … climate and … ecosystems, including the distribution of rainfall, storm activity, extinction of plant and animal species, and seasonal change.”
Not to mention responsible for factually indefensible statements such as that,
“climate change deniers [are] people and organizations who deny or doubt the scientific consensus around climate change, [in] order to derail, delay, or degrade public policies on climate [and who] frequently seek to obscure or disparage the scientific consensus around climate change.”
Anyway, Volume 31(5) of the NCSE Reports, NCSE’s house journal, featured an article by Dr. David Morrison, modestly titled, “Science Denialism: Evolution and Climate Change.”
I’ve been a member of NCSE for many years, and that issue of NCSE Reports was my first notice that they had drunk the AGW kool-aid. “Shocked and dismayed” insufficiently conveys my feelings.
David Morrison is Director of the SETI Institute, and is a very reputable astronomer with a distinguished career. Nevertheless, his article is 4.5 pages of sloshing through the scientific shallows concerning climate (such as “today’s warming is taking place far faster than any historical cycles” and “we don’t need numerical [climate] models to tell us that the world is rapidly warming”), followed by another 4.5 pages of ankle-deep polemics equating AGW skeptics with creationists and tobacco lobbyists (such as, “The counterpart of the Marshall Institute … is the Discovery Institute” [a creationist organization – PF] and “strategies used by the opponents of both evolution and global warming are based on sowing misinformation and doubt… often called the “tobacco strategy”.” The article is full of global warming “denialists,” “denialism,” and “denial.” Dr. Morrison tells us that, “The only way [warming denialists] can make their case is to deny the international scientific consensus on the causes of climate change.” I’ll bet no one at WUWT knew that.
After reading so much misinformation, and after exchanging got-nowhere emails with Eugenie Scott (Executive Director of NCSE) and Andrew Petto (Editor of NCSE Reports), I decided to submit a letter to “NCSE Reports” in response to David Morrison’s article.
It went in on 16 January, 2012 and was rejected on 14 March. NCSE editor Dr. Petto wrote that, “Our decision is to: decline the piece as a response to Morrison’s piece, since it does very little to engage or refute Morrison’s main argument in the case which had to do with how those who opposed current climate change models present their information to the public and government officials.”
With extensive quotes to back me up, I pointed out in response that, “Dr. Morrison’s main argument is about climate science, and only secondarily about “denialists” who are then said to misrepresent, ignore, or lie about it. My submission concerns the first part — the main part — of Dr. Morrison’s thesis; which is a valid restriction of focus.” And that, “if Dr. Morrison’s science is false, his thesis about communication is pointless and irrelevant.”
Dr. Petto was not moved.
That’s the background. Here’s the (rejected) letter, forthwith. Honestly? I think it was rejected on a pretext. You’re invited to decide for yourself whether it “does very little to engage or refute Morrison’s main argument.”
==============================================================
When is Purported Science not Science?
by Patrick Frank
In his excellent book, “Galileo,” [1] Stillman Drake points out Galileo’s very modern understanding of science praxis, writing, “In his book on Hydrostatics, Galileo remarked that the authority of Archimedes was worth no more than the authority of Aristotle; Archimedes was right, he said, only because his propositions agreed with experiments.” Galileo, writing this in 1612, conveyed an understanding of science identical to Einstein’s, expressed almost exactly 300 years later: “If the red-shift of spectra lines due to the gravitational potential should not exist, then the general theory of relativity will be untenable.”
Einstein’s statement about theory and observation is recounted by Karl Popper in his autobiographical “Unended Quest,” [2]. Popper goes on to say that Einstein’s critical observation was a revelation, and opened the way to his own career-spanning argument that science is the interplay of falsifiable theory and empirical results (conjectures and refutations). Theory must produce unique and falsifiable predictions by way of analytical deductions. Data, replicable by any and by all, pronounces its verdict. Only those two activities together constitute valid science. Either apart, is not science.
A corollary to this relationship is that the meaning of empirical data is found only within the context of a falsifiable theory. This is true, even if the meaning is that the data contradict the prediction and refute the theory. Only a falsifiable physical theory distinguishes the meaning of lightning away from the hand of god. Only the capacity of falsification produces a unique prediction and provides an unambiguous meaning to the data. [3]
In a recent NCSE Reports, Dr. David Morrison wrote an essay [4] about “Science Denialism,” which was one long effort to equate evolution deniers with AGW skeptics (Anthropogenic Global Warming). There was very little science in Dr. Morrison’s essay. Here’s most of it: “Climate models are indeed complex, and they do not always agree on details such as the timing of future warming. However, the evidence for warming is empirical, and its future trends are anchored in basic physics, such as the greenhouse effect and the heat capacity of the oceans.”
Those cognizant of meaning in science will immediately see the weakness of Dr. Morrison’s position: he grants causal meaning to climate warming while admitting the absence of a climate theory. The evidence for warming is certifiably empirical. But the meaning of that warming can come only from a falsifiable theory that makes unique predictions about climate. Is the warming due to the extra atmospheric CO2, or not? No amount of empirical data shuffling can answer that question.
Dr. Morrison claims that the greenhouse effect (a misappropriation of terms but let’s leave that alone) and heat capacity are enough to predict how the climate of Earth will react to rising levels of atmospheric CO2. But “the greenhouse effect” — essentially radiation physics — and heat capacity are not an adequate theory of climate. They predict nothing of how increased energy in the atmosphere will distribute itself into the all the climate modes, such as the ENSO cycles, and especially into the global hydrologic cycle of melting, evaporation, cloud formation, and precipitation.
Dr. Morrison made a remarkable demurral that, “we don’t need numerical models to tell us [that increased CO2 is] a harbinger of much worse climate disruptions to come.” But of course we do indeed need climate models to tell us that. How else are we to know? Climate models represent the physical theory of climate. It is only their predictive power that gives causal meaning to increased atmospheric CO2. This is the bedrock of science, and Dr. Morrison got it wrong.
Let’s take a short look at climate models. They do much less than, “do not always agree on [the] details” of future climate. They do not ever agree with the realities of past climate. For example, Demetris Koutsoyiannis and his group evaluated the advanced general circulation climate models (GCMs) used in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report issued by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). [5, 6] The IPCC used these GCMs to “retrodict” 100 years of 20th century climate, at all the points on a global grid. The reproduced trend in global average temperature looked great. As it should do because GCM climate models are adjusted to reproduce the known global average temperature. [7]
But the Koutsoyiannis group used the IPCC’s gridded 20th century global climate to reconstruct what these climate models said about the 20th century temperature record of the continental US. The GCM climate models got it very wrong. They also used the GCM retrodiction to reconstruct the 20th century temperature and precipitation records at 58 locations around the world. The reconstructions failed badly on comparison with the real data. This is a basic test of GCM reliability of that no one thought to carry out during 20 years of climate alarm; climate alarm ostensibly made credible by those very GCMs. Climate models cannot reproduce the known climate. Why should anyone believe they can reliably predict an unknown climate?
Dr. Morrison mentioned that climate models do not get clouds right, and then quickly dismissed this problem as irrelevant. But tropical and subtropical clouds strongly affect the amount of energy retained by the atmosphere. [8] Clouds have a net cooling effect on Earth. [9, 10] I evaluated the GCM cloud error as reported by the scientists of the “Coupled Model Intercomparison Project,” and found that the GCM cloud error, averaged over the globe, was at least ±10.1 %. [11]
This cloud error translated into a GCM error of at least ±2.8 Watts/m2 in energy. That ±2.8 Watts/m2 error equals all the extra forcing by all the extra greenhouse gases liberated into the atmosphere during the entire 20th century. That is, GCM cloud error alone equals ±100% of the increased “greenhouse effect.” It doesn’t take a very astute person to realize that when the error is as large as the effect, the effect itself becomes undetectable.
The scientists who use GCM projections to predict future climate do not take cloud error into account. Competent scientists would propagate that error into their predictions. But climate modelers do not. Neither does the IPCC. Propagating the cloud error would show that the growth of error quickly makes climate predictions no better than a random guess. [11] GCMs can’t predict the global temperature even one year ahead, much less 10 years or 100 years. But Dr. Morrison tells us that’s irrelevant, because rising CO2 is enough all by itself to certify a catastrophically disrupted climate.
Remember the criterion of science? Only falsifiable predictions yield the meaning of observations. Climate models do not give falsifiable predictions, especially not at the resolution of CO2-forcing. Therefore, they can give no causal meaning to increased atmospheric CO2. They cannot explain the warming climate. They can not predict the future climate. The observation of rising atmospheric CO2, alone, is not enough to certify anything except a rising level of atmospheric CO2. Knowing causality and predicting outcomes requires a falsifiable theory. Dr. Morrison hasn’t one, and neither does anyone else. Those who predict torrid climate futures literally do not know what they’re talking about. But that hasn’t stopped them from talking about it anyway. Dr. Morrison’s position on climate is indistinguishable from an intuitive alarm grounded in subjective certainties.
Like the wages of sin among the believers.
A review of the scientific literature reveals plenty of papers testifying to the unreliability of GCMs. But those papers don’t play into alarm. A responsible scientist would study the relevant literature before making declarative public statements. AGW-conclusional studies are mere causation-mongering because there is no falsifiable scientifically valid uniquely predictive theory of climate.
Much more could be written. But the general message should be clear so I’ll stop here. The answer to the question, by the way, is, ‘When it’s tendentious.’ Such is AGW science, and that includes the surface air temperature record, [12, 13] on which Dr. Morrison puts such stock.
References:
1. Drake, S., Galileo: a very short introduction, Oxford University, Oxford 2001.
2. Popper, K.R., Unended Quest, Open Court (pbk), La Salle 1976.
3. Frank, P. and Ray, T.H., Science is not Philosophy, Free Inquiry, 2004, 24 (6), 40-42.
4. Morrison, D., Science Denialism: Evolution and Climate Change, NCSE Reports, 2011, 31 (5), 10.
5. Anagnostopoulos, G.G., Koutsoyiannis, D., Christofides, A., Efstratiadis, A. and Mamassis, N., A comparison of local and aggregated climate model outputs with observed data, Hydrolog. Sci. J., 2010, 55 (7), 1094–1110; see also http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/978/ Last accessed 13 March 2011.
6. Koutsoyiannis, D., Efstratiadis, A., Mamassis, N. and Christofides, A., On the credibility of climate predictions, Hydrolog. Sci. J., 2008, 53 (4), 671-684; doi: 10.1623/hysj.53.4.671.
7. Kiehl, J.T., Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity, Geophys. Res. Lett., 2007, 34 (22), L22710,1-4; doi:10.1029/2007GL031383.
8. Hartmann, D.L., Tropical Surprises, Science, 2002, 295 811-812.
9. Chen, T., Rossow, W.B. and Zhang, Y., Radiative Effects of Cloud-Type Variations, J. Clim., 2000, 13 (1), 264-286.
10. Hartmann, D.L., Ockert-Bell, M.E. and Michelsen, M.L., The Effect of Cloud Type on Earth’s Energy Balance: Global Analysis, J. Climate, 1992, 5 1281-1304.
11. Frank, P., A Climate of Belief, Skeptic, 2008, 14 (1), 22-30; open access: http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v14n01_climate_of_belief.html.
12. Frank, P., Uncertainty in the Global Average Surface Air Temperature Index: A Representative Lower Limit, Energy & Environment, 2010, 21 (8), 969-989; open access: http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Frank/uncertainty_in%20global_average_temperature_2010.pdf.
13. Frank, P., Imposed and Neglected Uncertainty in the Global Average Surface Air Temperature Index, Energy & Environment, 2011, 22 (4), 407-424; open access: http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/t8x847248t411126/fulltext.pdf (1 MB).
- NCSE accepts Gleick’s resignation (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Comments On “Defending Climate Science” In The January 31 2012 Issue Of EOS (pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com)
- Gleick and the NCSE (climateaudit.org)
- My warning about Gleick to the NCSE (noconsensus.wordpress.com)
- Why is NCSE Now Concerned with Climate Change? – – – National Center for Science Education (richarddawkins.net)
E M Smith – thanks for your thoughtful contribution. I agree that there is a lot of tilting at windmills in this debate. To put it in perspective, the climate wars are nothing compared to the endless, and bitter, brawls among biologists about taxonomy – which boils down to who is related to whom, and how. Anyone who is even a passingly keen student of the plants in their garden or their local area has probably had things reclassified and renamed at least once in the last decade or two. As a collector of Australian native orchids, I have had my knowledge of species boundaries declared obsolete twice in the last 30 years. I don’t stress about it any more – it makes no difference in practical terms to me as a grower. What I do know is that the boundaries are very fluid, and in a sense the attempts to draw lines are futile. My orchids, left to their own devices, are remarkably promiscuous and indiscriminate when it comes to reproduction!
I suspect that the ability to cross our human-created lines decreases as the organisms become more dissimilar, and that viable offspring capable of reproducing are less and less likely. But they undoubtedly do occur, and it is feasible that now and then a very small number of progenitors can create a large and viable population. It is unusual, but certainly not impossible.
So, like you, I am not sure what all the excitement and agitation is about.
Was some of Dr. Morrison’s quote omitted?
There. Fixed.
Patrick Frank, thanks for posting your letter, I thought it was very well written.
“But Dr. Morrison tells us that’s irrelevant, because rising CO2 is enough all by itself to certify a catastrophically disrupted climate…”
If this is really the extent of their understanding of the issues then I think that you’re talking way over their heads.
Over at slashdot they have an article on dysfunction in modern science
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/27/1640219/dysfunction-in-modern-science
Back to plate tectonics; is there such a thing as average heat transfer from the mantle upward to the surface? Does the modelling allow for earth temperatures at -1M, -2M, -5M? Of course not!
The planets surface heat isn’t just regulated by tropospheric air currents and sea changes in relation to incoming and outgoing solar power, but also the processes driven from the mantle corridor are in play.
The modelling lacks way to many inputs to be taken seriously, yet we of minimal knowledge and expertise are stuck on AGW.
Plate spreading, overrun and 100 day rifting (along with solar influences & the physical mechanics) explain every transition from ice-age to inter-glacial and visa-versa, yet we’re stuck in AGW mode…
I agree with E.M. Smith. One example of a very well documented transposon-mediated mutation in bacteria was reported more than 20 years ago. Bacteria with and without the transposon (but otherwise identical) were seeded at various ratios in a culture chamber and allowed to “compete”. The strain with transposons uniformly won the competition (became vastly predominant over time) and functional changes mediated by the transposon was apparently the cause. Nothing like this is available to establish that anthropogenic CO2 is the main driver of warming.
One other point. Evolution is a problem to many people because they don’t trust authority figures (a trait they share with most people who frequent this blog). This is particularly the case with regard to aggressively anti-religious authorities (e.g., Dawkins). There are rational ways to reconcile the Bible and evolution, and I think one of these would be the “consensus” opinion among Christians now, if not for the behavior of some evolutionary biologists and science teachers in lower grades who state that evolution disproves religion. Of course, it does no such thing; religion and science are fundamentally different. Religion relies upon faith and science upon evidence. Religion gives a basis for meaning and purpose, science explains the physical universe but says nothing about ultimate meaning or purpose.
There is an interesting parallel between evolution and climate science in that the “strategy” designed by believers to convince unbelievers (marginalize them and ridicule them) has yielded exactly the opposite result. You would think that perfectly rational people (which is the self image of most climate scientists and evolutionary biologists) would be able to discern this and opt for a more effective strategy.
Evidently, Green coloration of a professional society or association is a sure-fire indication of deep rot pustulating through to the surface.
>:-p
The CAGW adherents are very similar to creationists, The inability of the so-called “Models” to model clouds is so great as to invalidate the whole of their theory and the failure of their predictions is so great as to finish it off entirely. They say Denialists are like creationists, but they are looking in the Mirror of History.
Evolution is a problem to many people because they don’t trust authority figures (a trait they share with most people who frequent this blog). This is particularly the case with regard to aggressively anti-religious authorities (e.g., Dawkins).
Thank you, Stephen Pruett. At my core, I’m probably along the same lines as E.M. Smith. I don’t have a fundamental problem with evolution but I’ve found myself becoming more and more skeptical specifically because of people like Dawkins. Darwinism, since its inception, has been seen as the silver bullet to kill God. Evolution and religion don’t have to be mutually exclusive but Darwinians have framed the debate to make it so. If I’m forced to vote one way or the other, I won’t be voting with Dawkins. It becomes hard to see the science through the obvious agenda. Sound familiar?
“Evolution skeptics” bring up some very interesting questions, and many of them remain unanswered. That is goodness for science, at least in theory, because it should drive the curious to look harder. Instead, just like with climate science, the questions are summarily dismissed by those who own the consensus position. Science, the process versus Science, the institution.
copner says:
March 27, 2012 at 2:07 pm
Other than being very simplistic compared to the great complexity of life (not to mention a chromosome), one flaw with the dice game is that It is assumed that all higher scores are more fit than lower scores, that there are no roadblocks along the way that cannot be overcome. Another flaw is that a number is not a code but a chromosome contains a code. The nature of complex systems is that the more complex something is, the more likely a random alteration will destroy it.
Life on earth is incredibly complex. There are countless millions of different combinations of dice that are all “well-adapted” to the earth simultaneously. To introduce random variation into a well adapted organism is in almost all cases counter-productive to it’s survival. To suggest that life has evolved is to take a very rare event and multiply it trillions of times until the probabilities become vanishingly small. Yet we say the magic phrase “survival of the fittest” and everything suddenly becomes possible. Even the evolution of life itself from inanimate chemicals, quite contrary to the well-established chemical equilibria of the reactions involved, is easily accomplished with these words, although I can’t imagine what it means that an inanimate collection of chemicals can “survive”. Even Stephen Jay Gould called it a “glorious accident”, not a phrase scientists use very often to describe the more mundane laws of chemistry and physics.
My television set obeys all of the laws of physics and chemistry yet these laws acting in an undirected way are entirely insufficient to produce it. It does not matter how long you wait and how many permutations occur. No glorious accident can ever produce it. The Information required to manufacture a television cannot spontaneously arise through randomness yet the assembly and operating instructions for a human being is said to be the product of randomness. Randomness is antithetical to information. If I randomly change letters in this post, will I create information?
Suppose I randomly draw letters out of a hat. Eventually I may do so in such a way that produces the Gettysburg address. Has this random process generated the information contained in the Gettysburg address? What if the people on the planet where this experiment was performed have no concept of written language or of war or of government. This “information” is only meaningful if there is first a means of understanding it. In other words, the code itself is not the information, it merely encodes it. But the letters that make up the Gettysburg Address have no meaning at all except the meaning imparted to them by intelligent beings.
thereisnofear says:
March 27, 2012 at 12:34 pm
Precisely.
Who likes “falsifiable” as a word with a clear meaning to ordinary people. Why not use “testable” or “refutable” or various others.
Otherwise well written.
copner says:
March 27, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Or it might utterly destroy it. Natural Selection only works if the environmental perturbations are sufficiently small. But when they are small, it is postulated that there is basically no limit to how an organism can change. But your example doesn’t even require any genetic change at all, simply the expression of variability innate in the genes. I have no problem with Natural Selection, only that it has the power to turn one organism into an entirely different organism. That it has the power to create information through randomness
Mr. Frank nearly hits the nail on the head but misses it when he says: “The scientists who use GCM projections to predict future climate do not take cloud error into account” for GCM projections do not predict.
My thanks to everyone for your great comments. Sorry for the delay in responding — work has been intense. Thanks also for the votes of appreciation — alex, Allan, Jessie, and all the rest.
Anyway, jim karlock, one suspects the NCSE would just point to the IPCC and to the “consensus” as their evidence.
Eugenie Scott told me the NCSE board discussed for a year taking a position on climate. But the NCSE board doesn’t include a single physical scientist, so how’d they evaluate the evidence before making their decision? I know they never contacted John Christy or Dick Lindzen, because I asked them. Maybe the board consulted Peter Gleick. The way Eugenie expressed herself, I believe the board generally bought into the corrosive political climate and “knew” the only AGW stalwarts were trustworthy scientists.
KenB, good point with plenty of irony. I presently have a full article under review at NCSE Reports. We’ll see what happens with that.
John Shade, thanks for passing it on and I hope you get some hits. 🙂
Philip Finck, sorry you got bored. Galileo’s understanding of science was identical with Einstein’s 300 years later, and with ours another 100 years on. This demonstrates the constancy of its content.
Galileo therefore had a clearer understanding of science in the 16th century than David Morrison does in the 21st.
Also clearer than the leadership of the NAS, the APS, the ACS, the AGU, the AMS, and now the NCSE. Don’t you find that interesting?
I was struck by the clarity of Galileo’s understanding, and it’s worthy to communicate that at a time when science is so under attack and so deliberately misconceived.
More to the point, how is it possible to show that David Morrison’s article violated science without laying out what science is? But you found all that boring. Oh, well.
I’m not writing for people with nit-sized attention spans. Neither was David Morrison.
copner, you’re supposing I expressed knowledge of intent, i.e., to stifle
However, I made no such claim. I took Dr. Petto’s reason for rejection at his word. But Dr. Petto’s reason didn’t withstand scrutiny, and so I supposed it was a pretext. The pretext was about his reasoning, which was in evidence, not about his intent, which was not.
None of the reasons you suppose were mentioned by Dr. Petto. We also have the evidence of David Morrison’s article and the NCSE decision about climate that none of them have a clear understanding of the interplay of theory and result that is science.
You’re also proposing to know what I assumed (“some evil conspiracy”); another mistake in presuming what you cannot know. Your reasoning is just a pastiche of unfounded speculation.
Richard Wright don’t get caught up in the superficiality of equating AGW with Evolutionary Theory. It’s easy to refute Evolution: find any mammal fossil prior to the Cretaceous. Or any dinosaur fossil prior to the Permian. Consult Francis Collins: fervent Christian; very clear on the evidence supporting Evolutionary Theory.
Gail Combs, I agree with you and John A that when all is said and done in AGW, the chief injury will be to the general reputation of science and scientists. The fallout from that to delay progress in knowledge and technology, to health and welfare, could be large.
Richard Wright, the problems you describe about predictability in Evolutionary Theory plague every historical science. Geology has the same problem. It can’t predict the future morphology of mountains, where exactly to find mineral ores, where aquifers will run, or how the continents will spin around or collide. There’s a huge amount of contingency in geological processes that interferes with deterministic predictions. The same is true of natural selection in Biology. Your objections don’t take complexity into account.
johanna, thanks and you could be right. Maybe it’s that nit-level attention thingy. 🙂
jerry, it would be great to find out my life has been exciting after all! 🙂
alex verlinden, you got it.
atheok, thanks for your kind advice. I was writing for the readership of NCSE Reports, who tend to be thoughtful and generally science-minded. They’re not “people [who] skim first and read later.”
But tell you what: you write your letter to the NCSE and best wishes.
Chuck L good idea, but I suspect WUWT has a higher readership that the WSJ.
Gail your last sentence hits a central point.
Bill Parsons, you called it. It’s all about signs and portents. Haruspices would find a good living in AGW climate science, and many science reporters fit that haruspex bill very closely.
Mike Blackadder, you’re right, and have put your finger exactly on why the first three paragraphs seemed so necessary to me.
Terry Oldberg, everyone here knows GCMs don’t predict, but the IPCC seems to forget at every opportunity and the common rhetoric of AGW scientists and reporters alike is that the torrid futures projected by GCMs are physically real and highly likely. What’s a skeptic to do but call it the way it’s presented?
Whenever I hear the tired old ploy of equating climate sceptics with creationists ,particularly from commentators use arguments revolving around “the consensus” or authoritative statements by scientific bodies, I am minded to enquire if they have ever asked a biologist why they ought to accept Darwinian evolution, and reject creationism (or intelligent design).
Do you think that, if you did, you would be told of the overwhelming consensus of biologists in favour of evolution? Would your eminent biologist refer to statements by various august bodies in support of evolution? Will you be informed that you are incapable of forming an informed opinion, and that you must just trust the experts?
I doubt it! What you will hear is recitation of the vast amount of evidence, from the geological column, fossil evidence of continuously changing forms, the morphological tree, DNA evidence etc etc, all pointing to the same evolutionary tree, with no exceptions. What you will hear about is evidence, nothing else. Because nothing else is required to make the case.
And if CAGW alarmists had convincing evidence to support their case, thats what they would talk about too.
@Patrick Guinness Frank:
I didn’t mean to imply you thought there was an evil conspiracy. Rather I was pointing it out as a trap for us all to avoid. My apologies, if those comments were taken by anybody as being directed at you personally.
I do think your letter is very good, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be further improved.
@richard Wright:
The dice game was only intended as a narrow illustration that the filtering is mechanism that can impose direction on random change. Yes it is vastly simplified. But it is intended to illustrate just that narrow point.
As to your counter that most mutations will make things worse, absolutely. That’s just a question of having enough time.
Imagine the dice game when you get to 9 out 10 dice showing a six. At that point 9 out 10 mutations (actually strictly 5/6 of 9/10) will make the simulated organism worse, less fit. However, eventually you’ll get lucky and hit the 1/10 that could lead to an improvement. The logic is know different if there are 1000 dice or 1,000,000 – just the odds are that much smaller, and the time taken that much longer.
There are other games that show more complex, and more open-ended, evolution. Ones where there is no in-built directionality except for survival of the fittest, and things such as parasitism, immunity to parasitism, cooperation, and hyper-parasitism spontaneous emerge. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl5rRGVD0QI for one example.
copner says:
March 28, 2012 at 1:09 am
And what if every value between 5555555555 and 9999999999 are unviable and cannot reproduce? Your game assumes that there is some smooth progression along the road where every higher number is not only closer to your goal but also more fit than every lower number. But the fact that we’re talking about simulations instead of equations demonstrates the similarity between climate science and evolution. Climate science also uses simulations to “prove” it’s validity but who proves the simulations are correct? We don’t have these discussions about Newton’s law of gravity, although I think it is interesting that we have to resort to simulations even in gravity once we get beyond two masses because last I heard no one has figured out how to solve the equations in those cases.
Pat Frank says:
March 27, 2012 at 9:21 pm
Nonsense. They will simply revise the theory. It happens all the time. And, if need be, they will resort to life having been seeded on the earth from another planet, as Richard Dawkins has done.
Pat Frank says:
March 27, 2012 at 9:21 pm
copner, you’re supposing I expressed knowledge of intent, i.e., to stifle
Complexity is precisely my point. Climate science also tries to understand, model, predict, whatever, a very complex system. At it’s heart are very sound scientific principles, e.g., the greenhouse effect, evaporation, condensation, energy balance, etc. But the complexity is beyond our ability to grasp and so we resort to simulations. But the interactions are so immense that we must make a variety of assumptions (like forcings) to have any hope of predicting anything. And what do we end up with? Something that can never be proved because we cannot do controlled experimentation on a planetary scale. And controlled experimentation is a hallmark of the scientific method.
Natural Selection is well established but the assumptions and extrapolations used to say that it can change one organism into another are even more extreme than those used in climate science. Even the term “historical science” is misleading. The only thing scientific about them is that scientific tests and principles are used to analyze evidence. After that, it’s deductive reasoning fraught with assumptions. You can analyze tree rings scientifically but the interpretation of what they “tell us” about the climate is an entirely different matter. Evidence never “tells us” anything; rather, we tell ourselves what it means.
> And what if every value between 5555555555 and 9999999999 are unviable and cannot reproduce? Your game assumes that there is some smooth progression along the road where every higher number is not only closer to your goal but also more fit than every lower number.
That’s exactly the sort of scenario envisaged by programs like Tierra.
Even in the simplified programming language of Tierra, nearly all computer programs can not self-reproduce, nearly all mutations lead to results which are mostly non-reproducing, rarely less fit, and only very very rarely more fit.
I’d urge you to watch the video link I posted, or better yet read the summary of Tierra in Stephen Levy’s book, Artificial Life. It’s a great story, whatever you think of biological evolution.
> But the fact that we’re talking about simulations instead of equations demonstrates the similarity between climate science and evolution.
Back in the world of biology, there’s a lot that can be done with fruit flies, and even more bacteria, and a lot has been done. The problem with larger animals is the generation time is too long for observation that doesn’t last generations.
copner says:
March 28, 2012 at 10:04 am
Thanks, I’ll check it out. Sounds interesting.
Evolution stuff
Back around 1970 when the Git was studying biology, Susumu Ohno hypothesised that in order for evolution to occur, gene duplication had to occur else the originating genes would lose their functionality when they mutated. The original gene remains performing its regular function, while the duplicate undergoes mutation. But the mutating duplicate gene would no longer be performing a function and natural selection would tend to weed such duplicates out of the population. AFAICT research into Ohno’s hypothesis is ongoing.
EM Smith hit a particular nail on the head above by pointing out that contra Dawkins’ assertions, genes do flow between species. In plantae, the flow is ubiquitous; less so but still noticeable among animalia.
The only evolutionary experiment I know of is Richard Lensky’s E. coli long-term evolution experiment. You can draw your own conclusions from that one.
An interesting read about evolution is Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris. For those who have read Stephen Jay Gould’s excellent Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History may recall Conway Morris as the English paleontologist who painstaking revealed the form of many Cambrian creatures.
I’d love to stick around and discuss the philosophy of biology, but I am not at all well, though I have managed to avoid hospitalisation on this occasion and am taking to my own bed.