ADVICE FOR PARENTS AND EDUCATORS

The following scenario has recently come to my attention: A person in his [or her – below understood] late teens or early twenties expresses an idea to a parent or educator [below P/E] that is entirely new to P/E. This idea contradicts some key belief or value of P/E. The idea is from a subject with which P/E is unfamiliar. The idea is expressed in terminology with which P/E is unfamiliar. Impressive authorities are cited as supporting the idea.

The typical reaction of P/E contains the following elements. In terms of feelings and thoughts: surprise and confusion, embarrassment that P/E is unfamiliar with the subject, fear of the cited authorities and [especially from parents] a compensating thought that the child must be very bright to have understood this idea on his own. In terms of action: sometimes P/E reacts in a defensive manner by rejecting the idea in an overly aggressive fashion and criticizes of the child’s intelligence and/or midos. Sometimes P/E is cowed into submission in front of the child and cannot respond at all.

In my opinion, none of the above reactions is justified. Below are my suggestions for how to react in practice. In context I will explain why the feelings and thoughts are also inappropriate.

1. Always treat the child with respect. The reactions should be calm, interested and non-judgmental. Non-judgmental is all-inclusive: no judgment of the child’s character or motivation [“agenda”], no judgment of the cogency of the ideas he expresses,  no judgment concerning the child’s understanding of the ideas he expresses [see below] and no judgment concerning the child’s intelligence [see below]. In particular, there is no need whatsoever to respond to the ideas he expresses on the spot. If P/E has nothing to say at the time, then the appropriate response is: “Thanks for sharing that with me; I will think about it and get back to you.”
2. Do not be cowed by impressive sounding technical terminology. Say to the child: “I am not familiar with those terms. Can you please explain them to me?” Listen carefully to the explanation and keep asking until you really understand what he says. Do not fear sounding stupid to ignorant; you sound the exact opposite – interested, respectful and desirous of really understanding. [[Often the result will be that it becomes clear that the child does not understand the terms at all. Then the challenge has been defused. You can invite him to try to clarify his ideas and try again. He learns a valuable lesson that superficially browsing an idea will not be useful to him. Unless he is very motivated to look for challenges, the whole process will stop there.]]
3. If his explanation of the terminology makes sense, then go back to the idea itself and plug in his explanations of the terms. Often the explanations do not fit the idea – they make the idea clearly false or without foundation. Then you say: “Well, I understand your explanation of the terms, but I do not see why you think the idea has merit.” [[The end result is the same as 1 above.]] [[Notice that if either 2 or 3 occurs, the judgment that the child must be super intelligent is completely out of place.]]
4. If the terms and the idea now sound reasonable and you know of no reply, say as above:  “Thanks for sharing that with me; I will think about it and get back to you.”  [And see 5.] I can guarantee that there are many people who know the subject and can give you answers that will neutralize the challenge in the idea. All you have to do is write to one of them. [[If you have the energy, you might look at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here http://plato.stanford.edu/ and check any topic. You will find vast controversy, so that no one position could be regarded as the settled truth. So there will always be intelligent critique of his ideas.]] You then invite the child to another discussion. You should say explicitly that you consulted with others on this subject – let him know that there is a great world out there with people who know these subjects who are available. You then respectfully present your reasons for not accepting his idea and then invite him to try again. [[Do not worry that the invitation reinforces his examination of dangerous ideas etc. The focus must be on winning the war, not the isolated battle. Defusing his motivation temporarily will not be the solution in the long run. He needs to give the project a real effort so that failure will last him for the long run.]]
5. You can also say: “That is a very interesting idea. Are there other opinions on the subject? Does anyone disagree? What are their reasons? How are their reasons answered by those who believe in the idea?” This has two effects: if he is unaware of any critique of the idea, that brands him as ignorant of the subject. [[And again, the judgment that the child is super intelligent is out of place.]] You can say [with astonishment]: “You mean no one disagrees?” And then next time you can present him with a list of dissenters. Second, if he is aware, then you can ask how he chooses to side with one side over the other.

I have received several such challenges from distraught parents and educators in the last couple of years. The content of the challenges was absurdly weak and irrelevant. The reactions I describe above could have defused the challenge and provided the improvements I described. Instead there was an escalation of conflict so that when I finally became involved all the logic in the world would not dislodge the child from his commitment to his absurd position. What a shame! 

The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy

http://ricochet.com/main-feed/The-Perils-of-Intellectual-Apostasy

Paul A. Rahe · March 14, 2013 at 1:43am

When I was an undergraduate at Cornell , then Yale and a graduate student at Oxford, then Yale once again, the American university was an exceedingly lively place in which students were encouraged to explore a diversity of perspectives. The people in charge were, by and large, New Deal liberals -- moderate in manner, open to argument, and distinguished first and foremost by their curiosity. They welcomed into the ranks of their colleagues both those to their left and those to their right -- for they did not regard the university as an instrument for transforming the world. They supposed, instead, that it was a space within which one could spend one's time trying to understand that world. Intellectual sparring partners were, in their opinion, a great boon.

Most of the New Deal liberals that I once knew have passed on. They have been replaced in positions of authority by a generation for whom everything is political. Its motto is "the personal is political and the political is personal." What this means in practice is that the members of this generation tend to regard those at odds with them not as merely wrong and perhaps intriguingly, interestingly wrong but as simply immoral. In the face of an argument or observation that does not sit comfortably with what they believe, they resort to denunciation. The dissenter is labeled a racist or a fascist or something worse, and he is read out of the human race. In this environment, conservatives are no longer welcome. No advertisement states that they need not apply for jobs at certain institutions, but that is nearly always the case.

The key to understanding what has happened is that the new generation has made of the university a political instrument. Its purpose, as they see it, is to help them transform the larger world. Those not on board with the program are interlopers to be demonized and driven out, and the quality of the scholarly work and the teaching they do has no weight. One can write and be widely read. One can be invited to conferences and to give lectures. But, if a job comes open at a major university, one will not even be interviewed. Trust me. I know from long experience.

Every once in a while, however, something happens that shakes things up, and then one sees that things are, in fact, far worse than one ever imagined. Take, for example, the recent furor regarding Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.

Nagel is a distinguished professor of philosophy with an impeccable pedigree. He was born in 1937; did his BA at Cornell, did a B.Phil. at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1963 under the direction of John Rawls before going on to teach at Berkeley, Princeton, and New York University. He has in the intervening years published a host of books, all of them well-received, and he has won just about every honor reserved for members of his profession. On the 4th of July 2012, when he reached the ripe old age of 75, he was at the very top of the heap. But, thanks to his new book, he is rapidly becoming a pariah. The title is sufficient to explain why.

When Steven Pinker of Harvard turned to Twitter and denounced the book as “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker,” Leon Wieseltier, a throwback to the old days of New Deal liberalism who has been the literary editor of The New Republic for decades, responded:

Here was a signal to the Darwinist dittoheads that a mob needed to be formed. In an earlier book Nagel had dared to complain of “Darwinist imperialism,” though in his scrupulous way he added that “there is really no reason to assume that the only  alternative to an evolutionary explanation of everything is a religious one.” He is not, God forbid, a theist. But he went on to warn that “this may not be comforting enough” for the materialist establishment, which may find it impossible to tolerate also “any cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and non-accidental part.” For the bargain-basement atheism of our day, it is not enough that there be no God: there must be only matter. Now Nagel’s new book fulfills his old warning. A mob is indeed forming, a mob of materialists, of free-thinking inquisitors. “In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against religion,” Nagel calmly writes, “... I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.” This cannot be allowed! And so the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Secular Faith sprang into action. “If there were a philosophical Vatican,” Simon Blackburndeclared in the New Statesman, “the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.” . . .

I understand that nobody is going to burn Nagel’s book or ban it. These inquisitors are just more professors. But he is being denounced not merely for being wrong. He is being denounced also for being heretical. I thought heresy was heroic. I guess it is heroic only when it dissents from a doctrine with which I disagree. Actually, the defense of heresy has nothing to do with its content and everything to do with its right. Tolerance is not a refutation of heresy, but a retirement of the concept. I am not suggesting that there is anything outrageous about the criticism of Nagel’s theory of the explanatory limitations of Darwinism. He aimed to provoke and he provoked. His troublemaking book has sparked the most exciting disputation in many years, because no question is more primary than the question of whether materialism (which Nagel defines as “the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real”) is true or false.

In fact, the question raised by Nagel is a very old question. It accounts for the so-called Socratic turn. The Athenian Socrates began his philosophical career as a would-be scientist. But somewhere along the way he realized that the process physics of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and their successors could not make sense of the greatest mystery of all: the existence of the scientist. Put in simple terms, the reductionist science of the materialists is self-refuting -- for it eventuates in the reduction of the scientist himself to mere matter in motion. It eventuates in a theory that explains in materialist terms why the theory itself is being proposed and thereby subverts any claim it has to be true. Reduce the scientist to a biochemical reaction and you destroy the science.

Nagel has returned to this conundrum with a vengeance. In doing so, he has broken ranks, and he has been relegated to the class of apostates. It is a good thing that he is 75 and not 25. If he were just starting his career, this book would have ended it.

The most vigorous denunciations have come from the ranks of the scientists. Wieseltier reminds us, however, that Nagel's book is not a work of science. It is a work of philosophy. It is, he observes,

entirely typical of the scientistic tyranny in American intellectual life that scientists have been invited to do the work of philosophers. The problem of the limits of science is not a scientific problem. It is also pertinent to note that the history of science is a history of mistakes, and so the dogmatism of scientists is especially rich. A few of Nagel’s scientific critics have been respectful: inThe New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr has the decency to concede that it is not at all obvious how consciousness could have originated out of matter. But he then proceeds to an almost comic evasion. Finally, he says, we must suffice with “the mysteriousness of consciousness.” A Darwinii mysterium tremendum! He then cites Colin McGinn’s entirely unironic suggestion that our “cognitive limitations” may prevent us from grasping the evolution of mind from matter: “even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.” Students of religion will recognize the dodge—it used to be called fideism, and atheists gleefully ridiculed it; and the expedient suspension of rational argument; and the double standard. What once vitiated godfulness now vindicates godlessness.

The thing that bothers Wieseltier the most, however, is another dimensiont of the attack on Nagel:

The most shabby aspect of the attack on Nagel’s heterodoxy has been its political motive. His book will be “an instrument of mischief,” it will “lend comfort (and sell a lot of copies) to the religious enemies of Darwinism,” and so on. It is bad for the left’s own culture war. Whose side is he on, anyway? Almost taunting the materialist left, which teaches skepticism but not self-skepticism, Nagel, who does not subscribe to intelligent design, describes some of its proponents as “iconoclasts” who “do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met.” I find this delicious, because it defies the prevailing regimentation of opinion and exemplifies a rebellious willingness to go wherever the reasoning mind leads. Cui bono? is not the first question that an intellectual should ask. The provenance of an idea reveals nothing about its veracity. “Accept the truth from whoever utters it,” said the rabbis, those poor benighted souls who had the misfortune to have lived so many centuries before Dennett and Dawkins.

I would like to think that Nagel's debunking of the scientistic orthodoxy now dominant in the academy would usher in a new age of sharp intellectual debate. But nothing that I see in the contemporary university suggests that such a dream is at all plausible. As long as the university is seen as a political instrument, there really are no grounds for hope.

After I posted my piece last night on The Perils of Intellectual Apostasy, a colleague drew my attention to the comments attracted by Leon Wieseltier's defense of Thomas Nagel's controversial recent book Mind and Cosmos.

These, too, deserve attention -- and none more so than the reply composed by Steven Pinker of Harvard University, which captures brilliantly the closed-mindedness that typifies the modern academy. Here is a juicy snippet:

The fact that Nagel’s wildly intemperate subtitle (that Darwinism is “almost certainly false”) will give ammunition to disturbing anti-science, anti-reason forces in the contemporary political power structure is, of course, not in itself a refutation of his argument. But surely it is not inappropriate of reviewers to bring this issue up. Nagel—and Wieseltier—have to know that there is a powerful and well-funded lobby in this country that is trying to discredit the entire institution of science as a close-minded, ideological propaganda front which is determined to promote a secular, materialistic, anti-Judaeo-Christian liberalism. This is emboldens them to blow off the scientific consensus about man-made climate change, corrupt science education, suppress research on gun violence, and criminalize lifesaving medical research. For several years Nagel has been expressing casual opinions and overstating claims in ways that are guaranteed to credit and energize this lobby. While the substance of his claims have to be evaluated on their merits, it is completely legitimate to criticize the way he has expressed them. This is not about the culture war. This is about the future of the planet.

If Wieseltier had wanted to gather further evidence for the strength of political correctness in the academy and the politicization of science, he could not have found anything elsewhere quite as compelling as this. When a distinguished scholar, such as Pinker, writes of "the scientific consensus about man-made climate change," you know he lives in a bubble where he talks only with those who agree with him. There never was such a consensus among scientists on this matter, and with every passing day there is less of one.

The Brain Activity Map

Hard cell

An ambitious project to map the brain is in the works. Possibly too ambitious

The Economist Mar 9th 2013 

NEWS of what protagonists hope will be America’s next big science project continues to dribble out. A leak to the New York Times, published on February 17th, let the cat out of the bag, with a report that Barack Obama’s administration is thinking of sponsoring what will be known as the Brain Activity Map. And on March 7th several of those protagonists published a manifesto for the project in Science.

The purpose of BAM is to change the scale at which the brain is understood. At the moment, neuroscience operates at two disconnected levels. The higher one, where the dimensions of features are measured in centimetres, has many techniques at its disposal, notably functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in tissues’ fuel consumption. This lets researchers see which bits of the brain are active in particular tasks—as long as those tasks can be performed by a person lying down inside a scanner.

At the other end of the scale, where features are measured in microns, lots of research has been done on how individual nerve cells work, how messages are sent from one to another, and how the connections between cells strengthen and weaken as memories are formed. Between these two, though, all is darkness. It is like trying to navigate America with an atlas that shows the states, the big cities and the main highways, and has a few street maps of local neighbourhoods, but displays nothing in between. BAM, if all goes well, will yield plans of entire towns and villages, and start to fill in the road network. It will also, to push the analogy to breaking point, let a user look at actual traffic flows on the roads in question, and even manipulate the road signs, in order to understand how particular communities work.

The mappers’ aim is to find out how nerve cells collaborate to process information. That means looking at the connections between hundreds, thousands and even millions of adjacent cells—and doing so, crucially, while those cells are still alive, rather than after they have been sliced and diced for microscopic examination.

[Keep in mind that these millions of neurons are out of some 100,000,000,000 neurons in the brain – a proportion of 1 to 100,000. So even if this overly ambitious project succeeds, it will be light-years from mapping the brain tout courte. D.G.]

This will require a new set of tools. And the guts of the BAM proposal are that the American taxpayer should provide those tools. It is thus no coincidence that the lead author of the paper, Paul Alivisatos, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a materials scientist, not a neuroscientist. Dr Alivisatos and his ten colleagues would like their new tools to be able to record, simultaneously, the activity of millions of nerve cells. Then, having done the recording, they would like a second toolkit that lets them manipulate each cell at will, to see what effect that has on the rest of the circuit. Finally, to handle the unprecedented amounts of data that the first and second steps will generate, they would like a new set of computing hardware and software.

A modest proposal, then. And one which is inducing polite scepticism from many neuroscientists who are not part of the charmed circle, and who fear their subject is about to be sacrificed to a juggernaut.

Such scepticism is reasonable. The third part of the project, the computer side, should be doable. That is just a question of pushing harder in a direction things are, in any case, going. How you would do the first two, though, is anybody’s guess—and Dr Alivisatos and his colleagues are pretty sketchy about the details.

Thinking big, thinking small

What ideas there are draw heavily on the nascent field of nanotechnology. This is Dr Alivisatos’s particular province, and also that of the Kavli Foundation, which exists “to advance fundamental research in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, neuroscience and theoretical physics”. A brain map would push two of those buttons, which accounts for the fact that five of the manifesto’s authors work for institutes sponsored by this foundation. But any successes that nanotechnology has enjoyed so far have been small beer compared with the devices that would be needed to interrogate nerve cells, record the results and transmit them back to base, let alone tell those nerve cells what to do.

The protagonists would, they say, build up slowly, using humbler creatures than human beings as experimental subjects to start with. This was the approach taken by the Human Genome Project, which began with bacteria and yeast, progressed to worms, flies and mice, and only then tackled people. But the analogy is not quite a fair one. When the genome project started, genomicists already had a basic understanding of how to go about it. That understanding was vastly refined and improved by the application of several billion dollars. But it was there from the beginning.

Going from existing methods of recording and manipulating cell activity, which rely on large electrodes, often connected to the outside world by physical wires, to the massively parallel, wireless system envisaged by Dr Alivisatos, is a different proposition. It may be possible. But it requires a leap of faith. The next few weeks will reveal whether that faith is shared by a cash-strapped president.

Design Can Be Suboptimal on Purpose

Evolution News & Views February 28, 2013 5:35 AM | Permalink

Evolutionists wrongly argue that ID can't be true because some designs are not optimal. But there might be a perfectly intelligent reason for some suboptimal designs in nature.

"When It Comes to Genetic Code, Researchers Prove Optimum Isn't Always Best," according tothe news from Texas A&M University. For example, "Imagine two steel springs identical in look and composition but that perform differently because each was tempered at a different rate." Engineers might want the springs to perform differently, and temper them that way for a reason.

Turning to the living cell, the researchers considered how variations in the coding of the biological clock can create similar timing differences. Their finding is related to our comments the other day on the "snooze button" on the biological clock. They were part of the team that found out how synonymous codons allow for timing differences that fine-tune circadian rhythms. Applying their analogy about tempered springs, we learn:

The group's research indicates that the protein in the fungal genus Neurospora they studied, frequency, performs better when the genetic code specifying it has non-optimal codon usage, as is normally found. However, when the genetic code is deliberately altered so that codon usage is optimized, clock function is lost. The reason for this is that non-optimal codon usage slows translation of the genetic code into protein, allotting the frequency protein the necessary time to achieve its optimal protein structure.

The team's results also demonstrate that genetic codons do more than simply determine the amino acid sequence of a protein as previously thought: They also affect how much protein can be made as well as the functional quality of that protein. (Emphasis added.)

So what at first appeared sloppy or suboptimal actually has a purpose. "Less is more" sometimes. Even though an alternate codon specifies the same amino acid, it can affect the action of the resulting enzymatic reaction through timing.

Also noteworthy about the news from Texas A&M is its elevated praise of design in the biological clock:

"Living organisms' inner clocks are like Swiss watches with precisely manufactured spring mechanisms," said Matthew Sachs, a professor in the Texas A&M Department of Biology. "For example, if you fast-temper a critical spring, the watch may be unable to keep time, as opposed to slow-tempering it. It's not just about the composition of the components, such as which alloy is used. It's about the manner in which the components are made. Our research says the genetic code is important for determining both composition and fabrication rate for a central component of the circadian clock, and that the fabrication rate also is critical. And that's essentially a discovery."

Swiss watch, you say? That sounds almost like an echo of Paley. But Paley's approach was natural theology. This approach is intelligent design: finding complex specified information, functioning with a purpose, that implies not necessarily a deity, but an intelligent cause that can be rightly inferred scientifically from our uniform experience with what intelligence routinely does.

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The Scientific American February 2013 contains the following iconoclastic articles:

New Simulations Question the Gulf Stream’s Role in Tempering Europe’s Winters

It's the flow of warm tropical water across the Atlantic that keeps European winters mild, right? Maybe not

By Stephen C. Riser and M. Susan Lozier 

For a century, schoolchildren have been taught that the massive ocean current known as the Gulf Stream carries warm water from the tropical Atlantic Ocean to northwestern Europe. As it arrives, the water heats the air above it. That air moves inland, making winter days in Europe milder than they are in the northeastern U.S.

It might be time to retire that tidy story. The explosion of interest in global climate has prompted scientists to closely study the climatic effects of the Gulf Stream only to discover that those effects are not as clear as conventional wisdom might suggest. Based on modeling work and ocean data, new explanations have emerged for why winter in northern Europe is generally less bitter than winter at the same latitudes in the northeastern U.S. and Canada—and the models differ on the Gulf Stream's role. One of the explanations also provides insight into why winter in the U.S. Northwest is warmer than it is across the Pacific in eastern Russia.

At the same time, recent studies have been casting doubt on the popular conjecture made a few years ago that melting of Arctic ice could “shut down” the Gulf Stream, thereby wreaking havoc with Europe'sweather. Yet the studies do suggest that climate change could at least affect thestrength of the Gulf Stream, which could lessen the impact of global warming on northern Europe.

....later on in the article they say the gulf stream theory is refuted.......

A Single Brain Cell Stores a Single Concept [Preview]

Each concept—each person or thing in our everyday experience—may have a set of corresponding neurons assigned to it

...in which are described the two theories of memory - millions of cells widely distributed in the brain, or narrow simple storage - that are still in competition after several decades. New discoveries lend some support to the latter, but memory storage in the brain is still not understood. Show this to those who think "science" understands the brain. 

Is the Free-Radical Theory of Aging Dead? [Preview]

The hallowed notion that oxidative damage causes aging and that vitamins might preserve our youth is now in doubt

By Melinda Wenner Moyer

David Gems's life was turned upside down in 2006 by a group of worms that kept on living when they were supposed to die. As assistant director of the Institute of Healthy Aging at University College London, Gems regularly runs experiments on Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm that is often used to study the biology of aging. In this case, he was testing the idea that a buildup of cellular damage caused by oxidation—technically, the chemical removal of electrons from a molecule by highly reactive compounds, such as free radicals—is the main mechanism behind aging. According to this theory, rampant oxidation mangles more and more lipids, proteins, snippets of DNA and other key components of cells over time, eventually compromising tissues and organs and thus the functioning of the body as a whole.

Gems genetically engineered the roundworms so they no longer produced certain enzymes that act as naturally occurring antioxidants by deactivating free radicals. Sure enough, in the absence of the antioxidants, levels of free radicals in the worms skyrocketed and triggered potentially damaging oxidative reactions throughout the worms' bodies.

Show this one to those who think taking anti-oxidants helps prevent aging. In fact the whole understaning of he process of aging is now in doubt> 

Will Scientists Ever Be Able to Piece Together Humanity's Early Origins? [Preview]

New fossil discoveries complicate the already devilish task of identifying our most ancient progenitors

By Katherine Harmon 

mammals, do. This familiar yet strange individual is Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, who lived some 3.2 million years ago. She is one of the oldest creatures presumed to have strode on the evolutionary path leading to our species, Homo sapiens.

From a distance, you probably would have assumed her to be human. Although she stood only about a meter tall, with long arms and a small head, she walked, if perhaps slightly inelegantly, upright on two legs, as we, alone among living mammals, do. This familiar yet strange individual is Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, who lived some 3.2 million years ago. She is one of the oldest creatures presumed to have strode on the evolutionary path leading to our species,Homo sapiens.

When Lucy was uncovered in 1974, evidence of bipedal locomotion virtually guaranteed her kind a spot in the human family tree. And although scientists had an inkling that other branches of humans coexisted more recently alongside our own, early human evolution appeared to be a simple affair, with Lucy and the other ancient bipeds that eventually came to light belonging to the same lone lineage. Thus, the discoveries seemed to uphold the notion of human evolution as a unilinear “march of progress” from a knuckle-walking chimplike ape to our striding, upright form—a schema that has dominated paleoanthropology for the past century. Yet as researchers dig back further in time, our origins are turning out to be a lot more complicated than that iconic image would suggest.

...indeed, in the body of the article it is suggested that it is unrealistic to expect that the lineage of homo sapiens will ever be established. 

And finally:

Human and Grasshopper Ears Are Remarkably Similar

Katydid ear structures resemble those of humans

By Marissa Fessenden

In a striking example of how two unrelated creatures can evolve similar traits, researchers have discovered that a rain—forest grasshopper has ears remarkably like those of humans and other mammals-even though its hearing organ is tucked into the crook of its front legs.

The insect, a yellow-orange-faced katydid (Copiphora gorgonensis) from Gorgona Island in Colombia, has ear structures that are similar to the human eardrum and cochlea. As sound waves approach the katydid's legs, they rock a thin membrane akin to a human eardrum. This membrane translates larger movements from air-pressure waves to smaller, more powerful motions in another structure called the cuticle plate. The plate, in turn, creates ripples in a fluid-filled chamber akin to an unfurled human cochlea. Inside this chamber, sensory cells are arranged like a keyboard from high-to low-frequency sensitivity, much like in humans.

C. gorgonensis's exquisitely evolved ear may help it avoid predators such as bats, says sensory biologist Fernando Montealegre-Z, now at the University of Lincoln in England and lead author of the study, which appeared in Science. The finding “is yet another remarkable demonstration of convergent evolution,” says Ronald R. Hoy, a professor of neurobiology at Cornell University, who was not involved in the work.

The efficiency of this minuscule system could inspire engineers to create microsensors based on the katydid’s ear design—for example, for use in hearing aids. Such sensors could be less fragile, smaller and more sensitive, potentially spurring applications we have not thought of yet.

...Of course the  credit is given to evolution. But one would like to knkow: are there other related insects that also have "ears" similar to humans? And if not, what is the pathway of gradual change that led to this unique structure in insects? 

The lesson for cautious thinkers: expect what the textbooks say today to be largely rejected tomorrow [or next year, or next decade.....].

H Allen Orr on Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel; New York Review of Books.

Orr has written a thoughtful and calm critique of Nagel's new book. Nevertheless, along with the hysterical critics, he fails to engage nagel's oint - even those he quotes at length. Below is a critical example. I hope to add more.

2.


Nagel believes that materialism confronts two classes of problems. One, which is new to Nagel’s thought, concerns purported empirical problems with neo-Darwinism. The other, which is more familiar to philosophers, is the alleged failure of materialism to explain consciousness and allied mental phenomena.

Nagel argues that there are purely “empirical reasons” to be skeptical about reductionism in biology and, in particular, about the plausibility of neo-Darwinism. Nagel’s claims here are so surprising that it’s best to quote them at length:

[I am adding the numerals – D.G.]

I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. (1) It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. (2) We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but (3) in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. (4) What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true. There are two questions. (4a) First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? (4b) The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?

[[Let’s take stock. Nagel is making five points. (1) Our intuition rebels at the thought that life is the result of an unguided process. (2) We are supposed to abandon that intuition (3) in favour of an idea which at present is only a schema, not an articulated theory. (4) The chief schematic element is the lack of any reason to believe that the probability of truth of the idea is non-negligible. This lack of reason applies to specific areas: (4a) the origin of life [self-replicators], and (4b) adequate sources of variation based solely on accidental changes to genetic material. Note that (4), (4a) and (4b) point out lack of reason to believe in non-negligible probability.



Now let’s look at Orr’s discussion below and see if we can find answers to these five points.]]

Nagel claims that both questions concern “highly specific events over a long historical period in the distant past, the available evidence is very indirect, and general assumptions have to play an important part.” He therefore concludes that “the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense.”



[[Right, since very indirect evidence for highly specific events in the distant past does not give adequate reason to believe in non-negligible probability of truth.]]

This conclusion is remarkable in a couple ways. For one thing, there’s not much of an argument here. Instead Nagel’s conclusion rests largely on the strength of his intuition. His intuition recoils from the claimed plausibility of neo-Darwinism and that, it seems, is that.

[[Look at that sentence again. What happened to points (2)-(4b)!?!]]

(Richard Dawkins has called this sort of move the argument from personal incredulity.) But plenty of scientific truths are counterintuitive (does anyone find it intuitive that we’re hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour?) and a scientific education is, to a considerable extent, an exercise in taming the authority of one’s intuition. Nagel never explains why his intuition should count for so much here.



[[Again, look at (2)-(4b). Is there any comparison to the motion of the earth here? Is the motion of the earth a highly specific fact in the distant past for which we have only very indirect evidence?]]

As for his claim that evolutionary theory is somewhat schematic and that it concerns events that happened long ago, leaving indirect evidence, this is partly true of any historical science, including any alternative to neo-Darwinism, e.g., the one that Nagel himself suggests.

[[So what? We are discussing a reason to abandon a strong intuition. Maybe other historical sciences do not challenge such intuitions. Or maybe they too should be rejected!]]

In any case, a good part of the evidence for neo-Darwinism is not indirect but involves experiments in which evolutionary change is monitored in real time.2

[[Don't worry about the footnote. It refers to evolutionary change in bacteria only, and that has been roundly criticised here: http://www.discovery.org/a/18121 [download the pdf and look for bacterial speciation].]]

More important, Nagel’s conclusions about evolution are almost certainly wrong. The origin of life is admittedly a hard problem and we don’t know exactly how the first self-replicating system arose. But big progress has been made. The discovery of so-called ribozymes in the 1980s plausibly cracked the main principled problem at the heart of the origin of life.

[[Read that sentence again. “Plausibly cracked the main problem.” That means we do not know for sure the main problem has been cracked. And even if it has – the main problem indicated that the natural origin of DNA-proteins is impossible. Plausibly cracking that problem only shows that it is possible. But Nagel’s claim is that we have no reason to think it is probable. Noting Orr says here relates to Nagel’s point. ]]

Research on life’s origin had always faced a chicken and egg dilemma: DNA, our hereditary material, can’t replicate without the assistance of proteins, but one can’t get the required proteins unless they’re encoded by DNA. So how could the whole system get off the ground?

Answer: the first genetic material was probably RNA, not DNA. This might sound like a distinction without a difference but it isn’t. The point is that RNA molecules can both act as a hereditary material (as DNA does) and catalyze certain chemical reactions (as some proteins do), possibly including their own replication. (An RNA molecule that can catalyze a reaction is called a ribozyme.) Consequently, many researchers into the origins of life now believe in an “RNA world,” in which early life on earth was RNA-based. “Physical accidents” were likely still required to produce the first RNA molecules, but we can now begin to see how these molecules might then self-replicate.

Nagel’s astonishment that a “sequence of viable genetic mutations” has been available to evolution over billions of years is also unfounded.3 His concern appears to be that evolution requires an unbroken chain of viable genetic variants that connect the first living creature to, say, human beings. How could nature ensure that a viable mutation was always available to evolution?

[[Hmmm – “his concern seems to be….” – does that not sound like an invitation to a straw man? “I guess this is bothering Nagel, so here is the answer….” But nothing in Nagel’s words suggest so naïve an idea. Even taking all the extinctions into account, and without species chauvinism [or order, or class chauvinism], Nagel says that the evidence for availability of mutations does not make the story probable. Nothing Orr says casts doubt on Nagel’s statement.]]

The answer is that it didn’t. That’s why species go extinct. Indeed that’s what extinction is. The world changes and a species can’t find a mutation fast enough to let it live. Extinction is the norm in evolution: the vast majority of all species have gone extinct. Nagel has, I think, been led astray by a big survivorship bias: the evolutionary lineage that led to us always found a viable mutation, ergo one must, it seems, always be available. Tyrannosaurus rex would presumably be less impressed by nature’s munificence.4

Genesis and Genes - review in the algemeiner by Rabbi Moshe Averick at http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/12/07/the-myth-of-the-almighty-scientist-genesis-and-genes-by-yoram-bogacz-review/

There is at least one thing that intelligent theists and atheistic/materialist scientists agree on: “leaps of faith” are extremely dangerous. A “leap of faith” means believing something – not because it is reasonable or backed up by compelling evidence – but because you would like it to be true, because it satisfies your emotional, spiritual, or philosophical agenda.  Non-believers, be they scientists or philosophers, wield this principle as a blunt instrument when they attack religion and believers. Sometimes these attacks may be justified and sometimes not. What they fail to do, however, is to apply this same standard to themselves.

Secularists have perpetuated a myth of  the “Almighty Scientist” who has transcended all human failings and temptations, who is computer-like in his mathematical thinking and objective analysis of not only scientific issues, but even in the philosophical implications of scientific “truths.” In other words, for many non-believers Science has become the religion that eclipses all other systems of belief; the Scientist has become the new holy man whose words and declarations must be accepted without question. If you think I am exaggerating, read the books and essays by some of the current crop of secular prophets: Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Christopher Hitchens, P.Z. Myers, et al. In his book Genesis and Genes (Feldheim Publishers, 2012) Yoram Bogacz, a chemical engineer and Jewish educator who resides in South Africa, masterfully lays out for the reader a history of science that shatters this myth and establishes realistic paradigms for the rational truth-seeker to investigate and evaluate controversial issues involving science and religion; in particular, cosmology and biological evolution.

Rabbi Aharon Feldman on "Genesis and Genes": "Fascinating reading...I highly recommend it"

For orthodox Jews it is important to note the strong approbation given by Rabbi Aharon Feldman, Dean of the Ner Israel Rabbinical Seminary in Baltimore:  “an excellent book defining the assumptions of science in formulating their theories…fascinating reading…I highly recommend it.” There is also an introduction by Rabbi Dr. David Gottlieb – former Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and senior lecturer at Ohr Sameach Yeshiva in Jerusalem – “Genesis and Genes will go a long way to counteract the obsequiousness to scientific authority. Through the meticulous documentation of numerous case studies, the author introduces the lay reader to a more realistic framework for evaluation of scientific results…Genesis and Genes wisely refrains from the wholesale rejection of science. Only caution is urged…the [author’s] argument is not that the theory of evolution is refuted, but rather that…the available evidence justifies profound skepticism.”

While the author presents an excellent review of the very real problems with the current theory of Darwinian Evolution, (along with relevant traditional Jewish sources on the subject), I think the most important part of the book is contained in the first 158 pages where Mr. Bogacz lucidly illustrates the long history of blunders and unjustified assumptions that scientists have made in their attempts to understand the natural world. All human foibles including arrogance, wishful thinking, narrow-mindedness, blind obedience to “standard teachings,” pure stubbornness, and even political affiliations have contributed to some of the serious errors that scientists have made over the centuries. Some notable examples:

§                                 Dr. Robin Warren, an Australian pathologist, was scoffed at when he suggested that some stomach ulcers were caused, not by stress as was the “standard teaching,” but rather by bacteria residing in the intestines. His collaborator on this project, Dr. Barry Marshall, was told by a chief gastroenterologist at one of Australia’s major hospitals that Dr. Warren was “the crackpot downstairs trying to prove that bacteria cause gastritis.”  In February 1983, their paper was rejected by the Gastroenterological Society of Australia. By 1984 their work had demonstrated that most peptic ulcers were caused by bacteria that somehow managed to survive the acidity of the human stomach. Millions of sufferers who were once given palliatives for a chronic condition could now be cured with antibiotics. Warren and Marshall were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005.

Dr. Robin Warren (left) and Dr. Barry Marshall were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005 for discovering that peptic ulcers were caused by bacteria

§                                 America’s first Nobel Laureate in Physics (1907), Albert Michelson, declared the following in an 1894 speech given at the University of Chicago: “The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented in consequences of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” How ironic in light of the fact that Michelson’s own experiments helped disprove the long held theory of the luminiferous ether.Little did he know that a young physicist working in a patent office in Switzerland (by the name of Albert Einstein) was about to revolutionize our entire understanding of the physical world with his theory of relativity.

§                                 When renowned physicist, Max Planck, was a twenty year old graduate student, one of his professors, Phillip von Jolly, advised him against becoming a physicist. He told him that after the discovery of the two laws of thermodynamics, all that was left to do was to tie up loose ends. This was how the physics community saw things as the 20^th century approached. Just a few years later Planck formulated the theory of the quantum, which helped usher in revolutionary developments associated with quantum mechanics and relativity.

§                                 In the late 18^th century, astronomer Sir Frederick William Herschel rocked the world of astronomy by announcing the discovery of a 7^th planet that came to be known as Uranus. Since antiquity, it was assumed that there were only six planets (Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn), those which are visible to the naked eye. A Scientific American article stated that “The idea that our solar  system harbored a whole other world…captivated astronomers…[They found] that the planet had actually been seen 20 times prior to 1781, including as early as 1690, but misidentified as a star.” Herschel’s predecessors could literally not see what they saw because they had been conditioned to believe there were only five other planets besides Earth. It had never been challenged or questioned. It took an amateur astronomer like Herschel to break through the established “known” facts and think outside the box.

Sir Frederick William Herschel, British astronomer who discovered Uranus

§                                 Cosmologists make absolutist declarations about the size and age of the universe while at the same time hypothesizing that somewhere in the neighborhood of 95% (!) of our universe consists of dark matter and dark energy regarding whose nature we are absolutely clueless. In fact the names “dark matter and energy” are simply another way of saying “we have no idea what it is.” The reason why physicists hypothesize the existence of dark matter and energy is because certain observed phenomena make no sense in light of the visible and measurable amount of matter and energy in the universe. (Isn’t a little bit of humility in order here?)

The list goes on and on, but I will add one heart-rending example that Bogacz does not include in his book. Dr. Phillip Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) was a Hungarian physician who was appointed as chief resident of the First Obstetrics Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital in 1846. At the time an alarming number of women giving birth ended up dying from what was called “puerperal fever.”  Strangely enough, the mortality rates were significantly lower among women who gave birth outside of the hospital. This was one of the clues that eventually led Semmelweis to discover the cure for the disease. He wrote that the number of women dying in his clinic “made life so miserable that life seemed worthless.” What turned out to be the “cure” for puerperal fever is absolutely shocking and mind boggling to those unfamiliar with the story.

Semmelweis discovered that that the occurrence of the disease could be effectively reduced to zero if Doctors would simply wash their hands with a chlorine/lime solution when they went from dissecting cadavers to delivering babies. Remember, this was well before Louis Pasteur and the development of germ theory. These findings ran against the conventional scientific wisdom that diseases spread in the form of “bad air,” also known as miasmas. His groundbreaking idea that cleanliness was crucial in preventing the spread of disease ran contrary to established medical/scientific understanding.

One would have thought that the results themselves – the startling reduction in the mortality rate when his protocols were followed – would have taken the medical profession by storm. What Semmelweis could not have foreseen and what he did not count on was the arrogance and stubbornness of the medical/scientific community when faced with a paradigm shift. Not only were his findings rejected but he was ridiculed and ostracized by the members of his own profession. According to the Wikipedia entry, “some doctors were offended by the suggestion that they should wash their hands, feeling their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean…Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of the medical profession and began writing open and increasingly angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times denouncing them as irresponsible murderers.” He eventually was dismissed from his position and tragically died in an insane asylum. He was not fully vindicated until well after his death. This story should be an object lesson for those who find themselves enthralled with Scientists.

Statue of Dr. Semmelweis; Scorned in his lifetime, he is now known as the "savior of mothers"

For those who would respond that in modern times such a thing could never happen, I remind you of the case of Dr. Warren, who was mentioned above. In a TIME interview in 2005 he recalled the scorn that was heaped on him for daring to challenge the conventional scientific wisdom by suggesting that bacteria caused peptic ulcers; “it was pretty savage.” He was even denied access to tissue samples with which to conduct his research.

Professor Dan Shechtman, of the Technion Institute in Israel, was also ridiculed by the entire scientific community for his discoveries regarding the nature of quasicrystals which ran contrary to the “accepted” scientific paradigms. In his own words: “For a long time it was me against world. I was a subject of ridicule…the leader of the opposition…was the two-time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, one of the most famous scientists in the world…for years, until his last day, he fought against  quasi-periodicity in crystals.” Pauling once said, “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” At one point the head of Shechtman’s research group told him to “go back and read the textbook” and asked him to leave for “bringing disgrace” on the team. In 2011, Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research.  Even today, the medical/scientific community suppresses the knowledge of serious medical risks associated with abortions – among them, significantly increased risks of breast cancer and miscarriages in future pregnancies – for purely political reasons. So much for the unquestioned objectivity and integrity of Scientists.

The reason I emphasize the importance of the opening four chapters of Bogacz’s book is that before one can approach and intelligently evaluate controversial subjects such as cosmology and evolution – subjects which have profound implications in our understanding of who and what we are as human beings – it is crucial to also understand that Science is expounded by Scientists who are fallible human beings – at times, very human and very fallible – just like the rest of us. Bogacz has compellingly argued that a healthy and robust skepticism is in order.

In Genesis and Genes, Yoram Bogacz has meticulously and painstakingly marshaled the evidence and has pleaded his case with the skill of a virtuoso barrister. This book is an invaluable contribution towards fostering a true understanding of the relationship between God, Science, Religion, and Torah; it is accessible to all and while directed primarily at the Jewish community, any rational truth-seeker will find it a fascinating and enlightening read.

In closing, Bogacz cites Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, one of the most influential Talmudic thinkers of the 20^th century: “We have known three revolutionaries: Darwin introduced materialism into nature; Marx injected materialism into history; and Freud brought materialism into the very soul of man.” He then adds his own commentary on Rabbi Hutner’s remarks: “Rabbi Hutner did not concoct a cocktail of materialistic reductionism and vague references to esoteric kabbalistic sources and call it theistic evolution. He just flatly rejected the compatibility of the Torah with this odious ideology. There is no need to genuflect before the masters of materialism.”  To which I add: Amen, Mr. Bogacz, Amen!

Yoram Bogacz, the author of Genesis and Genes can be contacted through his website:TorahExplorer.com. “Genesis and Genes” can be purchsed here.