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.”
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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)
Richard Wright, there is no way Evolutionary Theory could survive the discovery of the fossilized bones of modern mammals in the Cretaceous, of Cretaceous dinosaurs in the Permian, or of fish of any sort in pre-Cambrian sediments. Your dismissal of that fact is peremptory and wrong.
You wrote that, “It happens all the time.” Please present an example.
I heard Francis Collins speak. He described the fusion of human chromosome 2 as a clear example of evolutionary change.
Humans have 23 chromosomes. All apes have 24. Our chromosome 2 has centromere DNA in its center, which no other chromosomes have. Centromere DNA is always on the end-terminus of the chromosomes. The only way that chromosome 2 could have centromere DNA in its center is if it were the product of the end-on fusion of two shorter chromosomes.
In fact, those two chromosomes exist in chimpanzees and other great apes, and their sequence is nearly identical to human chromosome 2.
I’ve heard Francis Collins speak. He described human chromosome 2 as irrefutable evidence of evolution and common ancestry.
Richard Dawkins’ idea about panspermia concerns the origin of life elsewhere. The origin of life has nothing to do with biological evolution. Evolution is about what happens to species after life is established. The origin of life is about chemistry, and especially about the chemistry of self-organizing auto-catalytic systems.
The discovery of Hox (homeobox) genes has completely opened the door to understanding how species can arise quickly. Hox genes are upstream genes that control fetal development. They turn developmental genes on and off. Changing the time developmental genes are on or off is called “heterochrony,” and it can have very powerful effects on the juvenile animal that is produced. See “Shapes of Time,” by Kenneth McNamra.
Most people don’t realize that the first and most powerful arena of natural selection is inside the uterus (or egg). All mutations are tested there, and almost all of them are tossed out.
Among humans, between 50% and 90% of all conceptions end up as miscarriages. Most of those are very early and merely appear as late menses. Warmer blooded, higher metabolism mammals, such as mice, have even more developmental mutations. So many miscarriages is too expensive, biologically, and so they resorb unviable fetuses. That’s natural selection in action. Nature is profligate with unborn life.
But if a juvenile has some advantageous mutation, it will survive. If it’s a Hox gene mutation and is dominant, it will spread through the breeding population. If the population is isolated, a new species can arise in a few generations — a geological eyeblink.
Among humans, the Milano A mutation appeared in one man in one village in Italy about 200 years ago. It is dominant and merely put an extra cysteine on the outside of the human HDL lipoprotein. That cysteine caused the HDL protein to dimerize (A + A -> AA). Dimerization made it much more able to carry cholesterol, and Milano A humans have far less heart disease.
Not a new species, but an excellent modern example of a beneficial mutation and natural selection.
PG best wishes for a return to good health, with happiness and long life.
Pat Frank said @ur momisugly March 28, 2012 at 9:29 pm
Thanks Pat. I am afraid good health is but a memory at this end of life. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine however, I expect that my life will be considerably longer than my paternal grandfather’s. I’d be a lot happier if the attempt to return us to the days of my grandfather’s parents would cease. Still, I am happy enough while I still possess my marbles.
Wilhelm Busch
Pat Frank says:
March 28, 2012 at 9:24 pm
I think the best example is Punctuated Equilibrium that Stephen Jay Gould postulated because the fossil record is not gradual as predicted. If a dinosaur were found earlier then expected, it seems pretty easy to postulate that there were multiple simultaneous tracks of evolution and that one was ahead of the others and died out, for whatever reason.
When the Big Bang Theory was first proposed it was rallied against because of the very unsettling problem that if the universe had a beginning then it must have had a cause which leads inevitably to a supernatural agent. But the evidence for the Big Bang theory was too strong so it was accepted. And what has happened? It is now postulated that there are an infinite number of eternal parallel universes and what appears to be a beginning is really just an emergence into our universe’s version of reality, or some such unprovable nonsense.
Life starting somewhere else and landing here on Earth is the same. After many decades of unsuccessfully trying to create life in the laboratory – under any conditions – people are now suggesting that it originated somewhere else (and if we only knew where then we would no the chemistry and would of course we would know how!). The universe is a big place and so it’s very easy to imagine that anything could happen out there somewhere (like every episode of Star Trek). And if the universe isn’t big enough, we can imagine an infinite number of universes to draw upon. To me it seems much easier and more logical to believe in God.
The point is that it is human nature to find ways around inconvenient bits of evidence if they clash with one’s strong philosophical or religious beliefs.
Except, of course, on chromosome 2 where it isn’t.
Or maybe it was placed there intentionally. Just because we can only imagine one way something came to be the way it is does not mean it is the only possibility. In Newton’s view of the universe time was absolute and then Einstein showed it wasn’t. Newton thought gravity was a force, Einstein says there is not force; rather, space-time is shaped by mass.
That’s not an appeal to authority is it? 🙂 Seriously, the mere existence of something does not irrefutably prove anything about how it got to be that way. It can only be irrefutable if the assumption is that evolution occurred.
Of course, but my point was that there is no end to how theories will be worked around instead of thrown out when people embrace them so tightly.
We don’t have a single clue about the origin of life. None. We have absolutely no idea how it happened or how to make it happen in any sort of naturalistic way. People imagine lots of things but it is a total mystery. I doubt we know enough to duplicate an existing life form even if we had the technology. And I think it’s very interesting to consider how much intelligence and technology would be required to duplicate something “natural”?
It will be interesting to see if there are any negative consequences. And I think one has to wait until at least the majority of people have this mutation (and live longer or have more fit children) before one can conclude that this “beneficial” mutation will be naturally selected.
Gail Combs says:
March 27, 2012 at 1:16 pm
“However if mutations could not be produced by gamma radiation (a radiation seen in elevated doses near volcanoes) or by any other method then at least that part of the theory would have been brought into serious question and the specific hypothesis gamma radiation produces mutations would have been falsified.”
That really says nothing about evolution, but merely describes a mechanism which can only bring about a destructive/subtractive process. Upward evolution requires an increase in complexity, surely.
“Of course now with the ability to insert genes Monsanto and other companies ARE producing a particular perturbation and verifying whether the outcome is as predicted.”
What you are describing here, of course, is creation by intelligent design. Gene splicing is no accident, nor is a controlled focussed beam of high-energy photons or heavy particles a random event. So I fail to see what bearing it has on the falsifiability of the evolution hypothesis.
Richard Wright, Punctuated Equilibrium was merely Gould and Eldridge pointing out that the stasis was as much a part of the fossil record as speciation.
That wasn’t a modification of Evolutionary Theory, it just illuminated an area of neglected and misunderstood data.
Your best example is no example at all.
“Big Bang” wasn’t railed against because it requires a supernatural origin (it doesn’t). Some people, such as Fred Hoyle, opposed it (he invented the name to disparage the idea) because it contradicted his “Steady State Theory.”
Nothing in science requires a supernatural cause, or agent, because “supernatural” has no objective meaning, and never will do. One might as well say that Big Bang Theory was opposed because it required potrezebies as a cause. For every supernatural cause you can show me, I can show you a potrezebie cause.
Big Bang Theory was accepted almost immediately after the cosmic back ground radiation was discovered by Wilson and Penzias, because it had been predicted by that theory, 25 years earlier.
Quantum Mechanics has raised the likelihood that universes start from nothing because of a fluctuation in space-time. If ours started that way, any number of other universes could start that way. It’s no big deal, and it’s not untestable.
Science is almost always counter-intuitive, Richard. One can never dismiss a deduction from theory just because it seems like nonsense. Face it, atoms make no sense — itty-bitty nuclei surrounded by fuzzed-out electron clouds — except they exist.
Chemical biogenesis will be better understood when the very early Earth is better understood. Neither you nor I nor anyone else knows what future knowledge will bring. Dismissing something as impossible just because it hasn’t yet been done is dangerous business. You run the risk of looking foolish.
Five years ago, I co-authored a book chapter on the origins of chirality and the first steps in chemical biogenesis. In researching that chapter, I was impressed at how much progress has been made and how rich is that field.
If you (or anyone else) would like a copy of that chapter, email me at pfrank830_at_earthlink_dot_net. It’s a 6 MB pdf file, though, so you’ll want a fast connection.
If it seems logical to you to believe in god, that just implies you’ve not yet realized that “god” is a meaningless term. What can anyone say about the properties of “god”? What falsifiable theory predicts godness? What are objective god-observables? None, and none, are the answers. “God” is an empty set.
i’m not dismissing your faith, Richard, but disputing your suggestion that it’s logical.
You find god believable, an objectively empty concept that can’t be tested, and dismiss Evolutionary Theory, a objectively rich concept that has been tested and has passed every test (so far). How logical is that?
You’re right that it’s always possible to “save the theory” by inventing ad hoc excuses at every turn. But most of us know when that’s being done, and the strategy never works for long in science. On the other hand, it never fails to work in politics.
Let me add, Richard, that your dismissal of the evidence of telomere DNA in chromosome 2 as, “Except, of course, on chromosome 2 where it isn’t.” is exactly the sort of ad hoc scrambling you complained about, here, that scientists would do to “revise the theory” in order to dismiss inconvenient facts.
My reason for mentioning Francis Collins was not to argue from authority about science, but to illustrate a fervent Christian who has no trouble with Evolutionary Theory.
Pat Frank says:
March 31, 2012 at 12:45 am
Where did space-time come from? And why did it fluctuate? Science demands a cause before an effect. What was the first cause?
One of the clearest statements of faith in the naturalistic origin of life I have seen.
I never did that.
I always chuckle when I read about how much “progress” has been made in some area. This invariably means that the problem has not been solved because, if it had, then the solution would be the point of discussion, not how much “progress” has been made. If a man is blindfolded and dropped in the woods somewhere he may very well think to himself that he has made much progress because he has been hiking for many days. But in reality he has no idea if he is any closer to finding his way home than when he started. He may very well have been walking in circles or in the wrong direction altogether.
Has the problem been solved?
That’s the problem of a naturalistic world view – if it’s not accessible to science, then it doesn’t exist. We all have our beliefs or lack of beliefs. The scientific method is a means of inquiry based upon the idea that there are such things as laws of nature and, therefore, things are predictable. Scientific inquiry flows from the constancy of the laws of nature, not the other way around. Why should there be laws of nature in the first place? Science has no answer to that. It starts with the idea that they exist and it is an a priori assumption that all things are governed by them. When things are explicable by them, it is evidence for them. When things are not explicable by them, it is always assumed by the strict naturalist that we just don’t know enough yet. But this is a philosophy; a belief.
Richard, space-time itself started from a fluctuation in nothing. That’s nothing; no space, no time, no extension, no duration — nothing. The way I see it, all space and all time collapsed into a single zero-dimensional point provides the conditions of a delta function. All infinitely small probabilities are divided by zero time and so have a likelihood of 1. Universes have no choice but to appear.
Chemical biogenesis: the only rational deduction possible given the very clear evidence for appearance of bacteria about 3.5 billion years ago. Faith has nothing to do with it. “Naturalism” is philosophy. Science has nothing to do with that.
Yes you did: “After many decades of unsuccessfully trying to create life in the laboratory…” is a clear statement of ‘it can’t happen because it hasn’t yet.’
So is this: “I always chuckle when I read about how much “progress” has been made…” If you don’t understand the field, Richard, you’re in no position to evaluate whether progress has been made. Reproducing the conditions of Earth when life originated is not simple business. Your dismissal is just you taking refuge in being patronizing.
You wrote, “The scientific method is a means of inquiry based upon the idea that there are such things as laws of nature and, therefore, things are predictable. ”
Not correct. Science is an objective means of explaining the observable. When there are no observables at all, there’s no possibility of a theory and no evidence for existence. That’s “god.”
None of that has anything to do with “nature.” In general, “nature” is what people call the things that have been explained by science. That’s why god always moves out into the unexplained. Things that remain unexplained constitute the domain of the supernatural for those whose lives require religion and the ineffable.
Most of your posts are just you taking refuge in the unexplained, and averring that ‘here be god.’
Pat Frank says:
April 2, 2012 at 10:01 am
My goodness, I mention God once (that I consider is easier and more logical to believe in God then to believe in an infinite number of eternal universes popping up as a means of avoiding the problem of first cause) and suddenly “Most of your posts are just you taking refuge in the unexplained, and averring that ‘here be god.”
If you want to believe that “nothing” fluctuated into something, go right ahead. But I don’t consider that scientific or rational. I consider that absurd.
It is not the only rational deduction. It is perfectly rational to deduce that God created them. Or maybe they fluctuated into existence from nothingness. It is not scientific, but it is most certainly rational unless you presume that everyone who believes in God is irrational, and you are perfectly free to believe that.
No, I didn’t. Here’s what I said:
Yours is a straw man argument. I did not say it couldn’t happen. What I clearly said was that after many unsuccessful decades of trying, people are resorting “explaining” it by saying it happened somewhere else. There are other valid reasons for believing it couldn’t happen naturalistically but I never argued it couldn’t happen because we haven’t figured it out yet. Maybe your confusing me with someone else.
Oh, please. You’re statement is as patronizing as it gets. It’s classic. I don’t understand the field but you do, therefore I’m not qualified. A classic appeal to authority and ridicule of the minority. By your lack of response I take it that the problem of chirality in life has not been solved. You may be the world’s foremost expert on the subject but you are just as unqualified in pronouncing progress as anyone else – simply because it cannot be proven that it is solvable. Therefore there can be no objective measure of progress. Is it possible to make progress in solving something which is unsolvable. I am not saying it is unsolvable, I’m saying that we don’t know if it’s solvable, therefore we cannot know if we’re making progress.
I think you’ve proven one of my original points. Tactics used by the global warming “faithful” against the “deniars” are also used by the evolutionists against the creationists or Intelligent Design theorists.
You can’t possibly mean that.
Sounds like the University of Victoria and Royal Roads University, in the Victoria BC area.
A supposed journalist who claims to translate between scientists and the public turns out to be an alarmist. Apparently follows Andrew Weavers definition of scientist (as in his pals, not his critics).
The little ball called planet Earth (Bob McDonald) http://www.goldstreamgazette.com/news/143835546.html
oh, ok – i’ll touch this tarbaby. what the heck…
richard and pat –
the notion of ‘first cause’ or ‘anything proceeding from nothing’ is self contradictory.
they are the same error – ‘first cause’ means it proceeded from nothing.
it is an ordered universe because self contradiction is false. false means ‘it does not exist’, the same as the word ‘nothing’
you can get into trouble attempting to use the negation of an absolute as if it were an absolute, itself. it is not. you can not fill yourself full of holes. you can abuse logic that way, though – very thorougly.
logic is not religion. it is the science of non-contradictory identification.
denying the absolute fact that existence exists is the nature of belief in the supernatural. there is nothing supernatural. it’s a word to describe that which does not exist.
anything which is true can be proven by some means. if it can not be proven it is false.
the law of implication works that way – it’s not a matter of opinion and can’t be wished away- and nothing is supernatural. that’s your ‘mystery of mysteries’, the ineffable, noumenal, supernatural, unprovable = lie.
and i’ll add that any 3 yr old child of 2 knows this until his parents and teachers corrupt his mind so he can no longer perform logic. you’ve both succumbed to this corruption. i’ve rarely seen a spontaneous recovery. once crippled to that point, the prognosis is not good, for having lost the ability to reason, one has lost the ability to protect himself from further irrationality. having lost the capacity for objective judgement neutralizes the ability to defend against falsehood.
not knowing what’s true allows falsehood to have equal weight.
being able to define truth is the primary tool that is taken when a slave is made. they are made, not born. neither of you thought up the lies you believe. you didn’t get that way without interference. you didn’t lose the ability to perform logic by the application of logic. you didn’t lose the ability to conceive of reality by virtue of understanding anything about reality. you didn’t fail to reason by means of reason.
you accepted the judgement of somebody else as superior to your own and you submitted. that was a form of suicide. somebody must have abused you real bad. for it is this way: a human being, H. sapiens, by name, has as his basic tool of survival – his reason. living things face this alternative: to be or not to be. for a human being, to reason or not to reason is the alternative by which he will affirm his primary virtue or contradict his nature, as a monster does.
monstrosity or man? it is the nature of a human being to define himself. he then fulfills his self definition. if a man defines himself as inferior in judgement and properly submissive to the judgement of another, he has become a monstrosity. how’s life with monsters workin out these days? don’t you wish there were more men around? i do.
“Most of your posts are just you taking refuge in the unexplained, and averring that ‘here be god.”
You take refuge in the unexplained here, “Has anyone formulated [Evolutionary Theory] mathematically so that we could predict how one organism would change into another and, thereby, test it?”
You do it here, “what does the theory of evolution predict will happen in the future to FOXP2 gene?”
Newtonian Mechanics can’t predict where Earth will be a couple of billion years, because of orbital chaos. Even Newton knew that. But your logic says that this inability refutes the theory. Chaos can also reign in the details of the genome. And your choices of test are not particularly valid.
More appropos to the local subject, though, you wrote that, “Global Warming did actually make such a prediction, i.e., the earth would warm according to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
That wasn’t a prediction in any scientific sense. It was merely an assertion. A set-piece composed with mathematics. Climate models are unable to resolve anything at the level of excess GHG forcing. The error bars are far larger than a few W/m^2. Climate science is literally blind to doubling of CO2.
But soldiering onward, you do it here, “What has not been observed is mutation causing a deer to change into something else.“, except in this case your appeal to the unexplained has stepped over the border into the ludicrous.
Natural selection, by the way, couples mutation into environmental information.
You do it here, “although I can’t imagine what it means that an inanimate collection of chemicals can “survive”.”
You do it here, “After many decades of unsuccessfully trying to create life in the laboratory – under any conditions – people are now suggesting that it originated somewhere else…”
And in the same post, “We don’t have a single clue about the origin of life. None. etc.”
That’s wrong, of course. We know that life originated under anaerobic reducing conditions. We know that organics and amino acids were delivered by comets and meteorites. We know that local carbonaceous meteorites, such as the Murcheson, can have excess L-amino acids. These, delivered to Earth, could induce chiral amplification. Chemical mechanisms achieving this are known, so the process is not speculative.
Evidence for a very early emergence of life on Earth is in the excess of 13C found in 3.8 billion year old rocks. The best explanation of that isotopic excess by far is a biological kinetic isotope effect. The 12C gets preferentially used, leaving excess 13C behind.
You did it here, “I always chuckle when I read about how much “progress” has been made in some area.”
And in the same post, “Has the problem been solved?”
And in the same post, “Why should there be laws of nature in the first place? Science has no answer to that.”
All you taking refuge in the unexplained, with “God” as your ever-ready alternative. It’s not a question of your specific mention of “God,” Richard. Your entire strategy is standard creationist argumentation. You’re engaged in a general defense of the “god” idea using an appeal to ignorance as the province of the supernatural.
Fluctuations in nothing to produce something is not a mere belief. It’s a direct prediction and consequence of Heisenberg uncertainty. And, in fact, the appearance of something from nothing is observed in the Casimir effect, and in the evaporation of black holes. Both are evidence of particles appearing out of nothing due to electromagnetic QM fluctuations in space-time.
You wrote, “It is perfectly rational to deduce that God created [bacteria].”
But it isn’t, because god has no known properties and no known attributes. They’re all subjectively asserted (and then fought over among religions). Your claim of “God” is you supposing far more something from nothing than anyone else around here. I could claim that the potrezebie influence produced bacteria, and have as much claim to the rational as you do — which muchness would be zero.
You wrote, “Yours is a straw man argument. I did not say it couldn’t happen. What I clearly said was that after many unsuccessful decades of trying, people are resorting “explaining” it by saying it happened somewhere else.”
Your argument would have no power if you didn’t mean to imply that a successful outcome to an Earth-based origin of life theory was impossible. You’re proposing panspermia as the fall-back position of a failed enterprise.
Absent your supposition that it is a kind of scientific sour-grapes option, pamspermia is a viable idea. It’s known that meteorites containing interstellar material have landed on Earth; the Allende, for example. It’s very reasonable that bacterial spores could have arrived on Earth with meteorites during the early bombardment phase. So the panspermia idea is not entirely far-fetched, and has more observables supporting it than your purportedly ‘rational deduction’ of divinity.
The only way you’re able to use “panspermia” as a stick to beat origin of life is to rest the argument on the supposition that it’s an obvious desperation move. But it’s not.
And chemical biogenesis is a rational supposition given the very early appearance of bacterial life, and the earlier appearance of what appear to be biochemically modified isotope ratios.
You wrote, “Oh, please. You’re statement is as patronizing as it gets.” And what is your putting ““progress”” in quotes, if not a textual smirk? Isn’t that you being patronizing? And isn’t that patronization about a field concerning which you are ignorant?
You wrote, “By your lack of response I take it that the problem of chirality in life has not been solved. You may be the world’s foremost expert on the subject but you are just as unqualified in pronouncing progress as anyone else – simply because it cannot be proven that it is solvable. Therefore there can be no objective measure of progress.”
You’re wrong, Richard. We know what life looks like, and know what kind of chemistry it involves. We can show how it could have originated. On that front, progress can be, and has been made. No one will ever know exactly how it happened, because it happened ~4 billion years ago. That kind of ignorance is a fact of the historical sciences that you deride.
I’ve already pointed out that amino acids and organics arrive on meteorites and comets. Some meteorites have small excesses of L-amino acids. Chiral amplification is known, catalyzed by quartz, for example. A small excess of one enantiomer is all it takes for chiral take-over. That excess could have been delivered from space. And produced in space by the polarized synchrotron x-radiation around neutron stars.
Here’s some obvious progress for you. Notice the date:
M. Eigen, W. Gardiner, P. Schuster, R. Winkler-Oswatitsch (1981) The origin of genetic information Scientific American 244, 88-92 (12 ff.)
Abstract: Consideration is given to the laws governing the evolution of prebiotic molecules. Following a brief review of the conditions on the early earth, considerations of the chemical properties of the current biological informational molecules, DNA and RNA, are used to deduce that the first genes were most likely short sequences of RNA which could both lead to stable secondary structures and be reliably reproduced. Experiments with the de novo synthesis of RNA from nucleotide triphosphates and enzyme demonstrating the preferential amplification of a changing nucleotide sequence are discussed as high-efficiency models of prebiotic selection and evolution, and enzyme-free studies showing that RNA can replicate itself without enzymes are indicated. Attention is then given to the quasi-species model of competition (for free monomers) in molecular self-replication, and to the necessary invention of DNA, proteins and genetic recombination processes in order to permit the reduction of the error rate and lengthening of replicable RNA sequences, which is explained in terms of a hypercycle model of second-order autocatalysis. The compartmentation of the hypercyclically organized quasi-species is then discussed as a means for evaluating the information in genetic messages, leading to evolutionary improvement. Problems remaining to be solved before experiments on the self-organization of protein translation can be designed are then indicated, with particular attention given to the evolution of the genetic code.”
And here’s an interesting update: K. Tamura and R. W. Alexander (2004) Peptide synthesis through evolution Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences 61(11) 1317-1330
Abstract: Ribosome-catalyzed peptide bond formation is a crucial function of all organisms. The ribosome is a ribonucleoprotein particle, with both RNA and protein components necessary for the various steps leading to protein biosynthesis. Evolutionary theory predicts an early environment devoid of complex biomolecules, and prebiotic peptide synthesis would have started in a simple way. A fundamental question regarding peptide synthesis is how the current ribosome-catalyzed reaction evolved from a primitive system. Here we look at both prebiotic and modern mechanisms of peptide bond formation and discuss recent experiments that aim to connect these activities. In particular, RNA can facilitate peptide bond formation by providing a template for activated amino acids to react and can catalyze a variety of functions that would have been necessary in a pre-protein world. Therefore, RNA may have facilitated the emergence of the current protein world from an RNA or even prebiotic world.
So, progress is quantifiable in terms of a coherent hypothesis. That hypothesis suggests what sort of experiments should be done, and how to evaluate them.
There’s no such thing as “Intelligent Design theorists,” by the way, because “intelligent Design” is not a theory. It makes no predictions and has no objective content. I’ve published on that, too, and will be happy to send you the article. If you can refute it, you may have a case. Otherwise, forget it. Here’s a run-down of the ID claim at TalkOrigins, a site you should consult often.
You wrote, “You can’t possibly mean that.” But I do mean it. Science is not about “nature.” Science is about observables. “Nature” is just what people call the coherent body of knowledge science has given us about what we observe and experience. I’ve published on that, too, with Thomas H. Ray. Scroll down to “Science is not Philosophy, here. I can send you a pdf of that, too.