New look for microraptor

Scientists now believe that microraptor (a pigeon-sized dinosaur) was actually blue/black in colour--similar to a crow! That is really cool and quite interesting.

This could have some interesting implications for evolution too, as scientists are realising that the dinosaur may not have behaved as they originally believed. Originally thought to be nocturnal, having this colouring suggests that it wasn't. If we look at modern day birds, we only see this colouring on diurnal birds--those active during the day--such as crows and magpies.

Below is a reconstruction of fossil data to show how it looked:

One other interesting point is it's tail--the reconstruction suggests that it is very fine, as opposed to modern day birds' rudder-like tails. This may mean it was used for displays and courtship rather than function. However, given that it has 2 pairs of wings, rather than a single pair, it may not have needed a rudder tail, as the second pair of wings may have granted it the same level of mobility.

Here is the article I found the picture and information from if you'd like more of a read: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120308143209.htm

I am disappoint.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/13-of-us-biology-teachers-advocate-creationism-welcome-to-2011/4471


That's a massive number of people who really aren't doing their job properly. It would be interesting to see where their samples were taken from, and how the influence the geographic areas these people were sourced from could skew the results...

Religion of it all

If ID is truly non religious as it claims to be, religion should never come into the debate.

Yet, it still happens that Intelligent Design will call those who accept evolution atheists to give a negative appearance (especially in religious America). Even in the face of many Christian churches (including the Catholic church) accepting evolution as being able to co-exist with their beliefs.

Also, as I said in my last post, they claim that ID should be taught because of the widespread acceptance of creationism--yet if someone draws parallels between the two they are very quick to dismiss any links existing.

It just seems to me that religion shouldn't even be a factor here at all, but the IDers cite religion only when it suits them--again having their double standards.

On a side note, I think everyone should try and get a hold of the paper I just read. Citation below!

ROSENHOUSE, J. & BRANCH, G. 2006. Media Coverage of “Intelligent Design”. Bioscience, 56, 247-252.

Interesting quote

I was reading a paper about including ID in the science curriculum and came across something that amused me. It talks about Michael Behe (the guy who thought up irreducible complexity) and his reasoning for including ID. In the first paragraph he is quoted, this is written:

He also asserted that “the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea” and that “intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.” He added that intelligent design is an elegant theory that is overwhelmingly and sensibly embraced by the public.

Right after this in the next paragraph he says:

Behe invoked the popularity of this idea as justification for its truthfulness. Because opinion polls  (Newport 2004) demonstrated that 45 percent of the American public believed in creationism and one-third were biblical literalists...

So basically he is saying ID is not religious, but it should be taught in schools because the religious concept of creation is believed by 45% of Americans, and 33% believe in taking the bible literally. Yep. Good logic, guy. 

Bill Nye!

Bill Nye won the Humanist of the year 2010 award just recently. It makes me happy!

This is an adaptation of the speech he gave. I think it's fantastic, and it does have some relevant arguments for the Evo ID debate, which is worth a read. I think some of the other points he makes are fantastic too.

Bill Nye is a secret hero of mine. Even living in Australia I still saw some of Bill Nye the Science Guy and I could probably say that it played a small role in where I am today. In fact, I think when I started doing my SciComm degree I said at one point "I could be Bill Nye!". He really is awesome, and we need more people like him in the world.

Quick update

I know I said I'd talk about Gross's frameworks, but I've been very busy with life things, so haven't have a chance to finish off last one and put it into context. Life should be slowed down and whatnot next week though, so hang tight until then! It's a total cliffhanger, I know.

In the meantime, read this. Because it is awesome, and true.

http://www.cw.ua.edu/2010/11/08/a-course-on-evolution-should-be-required-for-every-ua-student/

Has some great quotes too.

Evol-ID in Gross's framework--Part 3

Today's post is about Turner's framework of controversies coming about from social dramas.

Human beings act in a ritualistic way. They repeat different acts and place special meanings on these acts without even really thinking about it. These rituals become a sequence of our daily lives, and function to prevent conflict. When these social rituals are deliberately challenged, this is when drama, or controversy, occurs.

So when IDers try and and have ID taught in science classes this is challenging a few social norms. They are challenging the idea of teaching good science in science class. They are challenging the first amendment (ie not teaching a single religion (if you accept the idea that ID is religion)). They are even challenging science's social norms by circumventing the normal methods of science.

These are all factors that can lead to the controversy starting/continuing.

Next will be Habermas and his framework.

Evol-ID in Gross's framework--Part 2

The first part of Gross's 3 frameworks is Gusfield's 'Controversies as clashes of moral orders'.

Now remember here, morals are more on a social scale... So this is basically saying controversies happen when two (social) differences of opinions clash, or when one moral becomes more of a norm and is challenged. I think it can also come about from people having different interpretations of the same moral norm.


So if we look at this just in terms of teaching ID in the science classroom, we find a clear clash of morals. One group believes that ID should be kept out of science, and one believes it should be taught next to genetics 'to be balanced'. You could even say that this is a challenge of the social norm too, because ID has been banned from schools.


Now this is just the beginning of the frameworks, and as I explain more about them the relations will become clearer and you can see why you need all three to analyse.


Before I finish this post though, I want to look at a couple of quotes.


The first quote comes from The Wedge  Strategy document that I talked about many posts back. The quote basically says that ID needs to "defeat [the]materialist world view" represented by the theory of evolution and replace it with "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”


That basically gives very good evidence for a clash of moral norms where one really wants to overtake the other (especially when you consider they say they just want a balanced discussion).


The second quote is the one I mentioned last post from the Gross paper:

‘There is a more insidious effect of moral orders: by substituting displays of high feelings for reason, they distort and suppress public debate over the issues that are their concern.’

Now nearly all of this is true for Gusfield in this sense, except for one point. Rather than suppressing public debate, ID proponents are actually creating debate where none exists (or shouldn't). Well, there's no debate in science, but they're fuelling public debate but telling people that there is.

Turner's up next.

Evol-ID in Gross's framework

For the next few posts I thought I'd do a version of the analysis I did the controversy in for my class presentation.

I analysed the controversy using Alan Gross's three interlinking frameworks for examining controversies (the paper is titled Scientific and technical controversy: Three frameworks for analysis if you wanted to find it somewhere).

Basically Gross uses three controversy frameworks made by others, and show how they all interlink to give a greater understanding of a controversy (although he states that these three would still not encompass everything needed for some).

So the three frameworks are:

1. Gusfield framework

This framework says controversies are all about clashes of moral orders. That when people change, challenge, or adapt moral orders different from the norm, controversies arise.

He also makes this statement at one point, ‘There is a more insidious effect of moral orders: by substituting displays of high feelings for reason, they distort and suppress public debate over the issues that are their concern.’ I'll come back to this later.

2. Turner framework

Turner's framework suggests that controversies are all about social drama. When the norms in societies are challenged drama is the result, and this is where controversies arise.

3. Habermas framework

Habermas says that controversies can be broken down into five categories, each which needs a different type of communicative action to be solved.

The five categories with their resolutions are:

• Political--Negotiation

• Ethical--Mutual tolerance

• Moral--Understanding and agreement

• Intellectual--Understanding and agreement

• Scientific--Experiment and controlled observation (with some understanding and agreement)

He also points out the difference between morals and ethics. Ethics are an individual's ideas or choices on what they accept of believe to be true. Morals are on a social scale, as in what is overall accepted socially (social ethics, I guess).

cdesign proponentsists

I promised to talk about this a couple of posts ago and just realised I never got around to it. So it's going to be a bit of history, and a bit of a laugh.

ID came into existence around December of 1987. This was after creationism was banned for violating the Establishment Clause of the US constitution in June of 1987. The court that ruled this decision said that 'alternate science theories could be taught' or something along those lines. Hence the birth of the 'science' of Intelligent Design.

The book Of Pandas and People was being written while all this was going on, and in its drafting stages when the final verdict came out. The book was written by people with relations to the Discovery Institute, and when finally published was the first documentation containing information on ID as we know it.

Unfortunately, this wasn't always the case.

As I stated earlier, this book was having its draft edited when the final verdict banning creationism came out. The book had originally been filled with words like creationism, creationists, and creator. After the ruling, the book was edited again to put a new slant on the creationist movement. That's right, all those creation terms were changed to ID terms... Intelligent Design, design proponent, and designer respectively. No change to the creation content of the book, just putting a new term on it so they could eventually claim that ID wasn't religious and was actually scientific.

But if they changed what the book said during before the second draft, then how do we know that?

Well in one case the word 'creationists' wasn't edited completely correctly. It was only half replaced and ended up as 'cdesign proponentsists'.

This clear link between creationism and ID eventually played a big role in the 2005 court case that banned ID from science classes.

Talk Design

TalkDesign is a website that gives a 'critical analysis Intelligent Design'. It is a subsite of TalkOrigins and, while a bit old, has some interesting and useful posts up about ID.

I thought I'd put up a couple of links to ones I like to get you all started.

Firstly, this is a brief analysis of how the ID movement is basically making a controversy where none exists.

http://www.talkdesign.org/cs/node/42

This second link is a good satire of some of the common ID arguments.

http://www.talkdesign.org/cs/quixotic_message

Enjoy!

Nice little summary of ID in science class

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827833.000-creationism-lives-on-in-us-public-schools.html


This article shows a few of the key points since the 2005 court trial that banned ID from being taught in science class. It shows that they clearly haven't given up, but I love the last line in the article because it's so true. I just wonder when the Discovery Institute will realise they're not fooling anyone (stay tuned for a post soon on 'cdesign proponentsists' because I only recently found out about this and it's fantastic)


Now I just wish that story had come out a couple of days ago, so I could have integrated it into my presentation last night on the Evol-ID controversy in relation to being taught in schools

What if they got their proof?

So imagine somehow that ID got proof, beyond any doubt, that an organism was designed. They came up with a perfect definition of what to look for in a designed organism, and found it in something.

What would happen then?

So what? It was designed, great. Who designed it? You'd have all the religions claiming it was their god who created/designed it. You'd have the UFO conspirators claim advanced races of aliens designed them and us and everything else and that we should hail our alien designers and overlords. There'd probably even be a war or something (although maybe I'm going a little over the top there).

You might even get a new type of religion or pseudo-science along the lines of 'God must have been intelligently designed--hail God's God'.

And from all this, what would science do? Probably just have lots of debate, undergo a paradigm shift, and start looking for those traits in other organisms and look at the world with new knowledge.

Interesting thought

I found this article on the web today that brought up an interesting point.

The author of the article suggested a shift in paradigm to look at evolution in a new way. Rather than the simple, single directional 'survival of the fittest' paradigm, he suggested that the evolutionary paradigm should be looked at as having two driving forces. These are (from the article):

• the individual/self-interest/survival of the fittest/genetic heritage; and
• the community/benevolence/mutual aid/cultural heritage.

The first point is the normal/current evolutionary paradigm I referred to above. The second point, however, suggests that natural selection is not driven solely by the suitability of each single organism, but that the community an organism lives within will also drive its evolutionary pathway.

I found this to ring true with humans especially. We've basically ruined the idea of natural selection applying to us by creating things like hospitals and seatbelts. If you consider culture within the definition of evolution though, then we would still fit under natural selection in some sense.

And these ideas apply to animals too really. Many species will help other animals in their population when they're sick or injured or young or if it gives them a mutual benefit as well. These populations may end up with a better chance of surviving then those who don't.

It's just a way of looking at evolution that I hadn't thought of before, but one that makes a lot of sense in some ways.

The last of risks... I suppose

I just realised that this post never went up even though it was supposed to go with my last post...

But yes, the final part of risk that I want to discuss is the idea of decisions under ignorance. Except I guess in this sense it is more of an argument under ignorance...

A large argument that comes from proponents of ID is the idea of irreducible complexity. This basically means that some organisms have parts that are made up of many systems working together, or a system with many different parts. The system is so set in how it works that there's no way that the trait could have evolved, as without one part of the system, it would be useless and non functional.

Evolutionary scientists have already shown how these types of traits can arise. For example, a component's original function may have been completely different, but was assimilated into a system to gain a new function. One part may be useful but not necessary, until other parts are removed. Most genes control more than one trait.

Yet even in light of these kinds of explanations, the arguments for irreducible complexity continue. No effort if made to find this information to see how true their claims are. This isn't the only ID argument where this happens either. I guess it really comes back a bit to the not being able to trust 'experts'.

More on Risks

I want to talk about this controversy in terms of the frameworks for controversy we discussed in the course, but before that I am going to do a couple more posts on risks.


I think one of the biggest risks I've failed to include in any posts on the topic is the one involved in Pascal's Wager. Of course, this makes the assumption that anyone who accepts evolution is an atheist (which a lot of ID proponents would argue to be true), and as I've stated, I don't agree with this. Ignoring that, however, I shall talk a bit about the risk involved here (and how you could consider it to be wrong).


So Pascal's Wager goes something like this (from our lecture):

	God Exists	God Doesn't Exist
Theist	Infinity	2
Atheist	0 (or negative infinity for hell?)	10000000 (or any finite value)

This says that no matter how much satisfaction you'd get as an atheist for being right about God not existing, it would never be as good as the infinite happiness granted by heaven, so you should believe in God.


Of course, then what happens when you consider that you might be worshipping the wrong god? Or that a God may reward atheists who have still led good lives? Or you consider the 'God Doesn't Exist' benefit to be highly negative, because you've 'wasted' your life worshipping. Perhaps it's as Richard Dawkins suggests and God may punish blind or feigned faith. Just makes you wonder where the risk really lies.

Science of evolution

After the last couple of posts on proofs, I wanted to examine the science used in evolution a bit.

It could be argued that the science behind evolution is equally non-scientific as the science behind ID. If you think about it, replicating the primordial soup (and the pre-life world conditions), creating life from scratch, and waiting around for it to evolve in some way would take far too long to feasibly be possible. Does that make it not testable? Not falsifiable? If so, then it's not really science...

Fortunately, as discussed before, we can design experiments in a different way that test evolution without having to resort to recreating life from scratch. We can observe current organisms and past organisms and from these make falsifiable hypotheses. We can make models from our ideas and use them to make predictions about the future. If they don't correctly predict what happens, we can then look and see what's wrong to change the hypothesis.

This is what separates evolution science from ID science.

More on proofs

After the last post talking about proofs, I found something else I'd made a note of in my book to mention on the subject.

Another reason non-proofs may necessarily not be disproofs depends on the experimental design. An experimenter may be flawed in their thinking when creating the experimental parameters, or they may simply be testing the wrong thing without realising it. Or hey, I guess they could be realising it and doing some dodgy stuff to make it seem like their testing the right thing. Sometimes it really pays off to examine the experiment design closely and make sure scientists are really doing what they're saying, and that the results support their claims.

Especially when the science is coming from sources that are a bit questionable or lacking in credibility.

Non-proof != Disproof

In our last class we discussed a bit about proofs and the idea that a non-proof isn't the same as a disproof. Disproofs can be very difficult, because you have to show something will never happen under any conditions. A non-proof is just shows that it doesn't work/happen under the conditions you tested. It does not mean it never happens. It could just mean you failed at experimenting. Unfortunately a lot of science can be lost like this.

Once I thought about it a bit though, in relation to the evo-ID debate, I realised this same sort of idea can be applied. If there is proof a creator of some kind exists, then that still doesn't rule out evolution. As stated back in the first post, s/he may have created life, and then decided to let it evolve on it's own. Unless of course we can talk to it and are scolded for considering evolution...

 The reverse also applies. If every piece of evidence for evolution ever needed was found (fully complete fossil record, every genome in existence sequenced and compared, etc.), it still would not disprove a creator. That would need proof of the origins of life, because evolution is only the mechanism for change and speciation.

What is ID really looking for?

While reading some of the stuff on Talk Rational I had an idea... Or maybe I read it there... Can't quite remember. But basically my thoughts were something like this. 

All the ID experiments observe aspects of nature and life and suggest that the only way these could come about is by design: Such complex body parts, such diverse life, and even using 'junk' DNA as evidence for a creator. Now I thought 'Well if that's the evidence that indicates there's a creator, what would you be looking for if there wasn't one?' To me, most of the evidence they give is anti-creator. The receptors in our eyes are back to front and the image is received upside down (with only the brain to compensate). There's a lot of DNA that seems to be leftover from having a use in other (more ancient) species, but serves no function in humans. Why even create fossils if dinosaurs never existed? You really need to go to those kind of lengths to 'test faith'? (Although I think that's more creationist than ID, so that's cheating a little.)

My point is, if things were designed intelligently, there would be nothing redundant. You don't see human designing cars or electronics with cords or motors that don't connect to anything or serve a purpose. Our car seats don't face backwards and have mirrors there for us to see forwards.

I just feel that if things were indeed designed, they could have been designed better.