Feedback for November 2005

In the philosophy of science there is a long tradition of discussing what laws and theories are. Most people seem to think that theories include models (mathematical models) that can be axiomatised - that is, reduced to a logicomathematical form with certain fixed assumptions, but not everyone does.

A law is traditionally a general statement without exception - as you note, many of Newton's "laws" and several others (such as the Ideal Gas Law) have been shown not to be exceptionless. Physicists have no trouble adopting those laws as working generalisations. Only philosophers appear to have trouble with it.

So there is a close relationship between "theory" in science and "law", in that, the "law" is the core mathematical component of the theoretical explanation. That said, many theories do not start life as mathematical - often they are verbal and metaphorical, and are formalised later - such is what happened to the theory of natural selection, and more recently, to speciation.

I very much like your notion of rigorous proof being the reason why "law" dropped out of sight in science. I suspect, though, that this is not uniform across all sciences.

Humans are diploid; we have two copies of each chromosome, one from each parent. (There is also a bit of shuffling involved.) A gene is a location on a chromosome, usually which expresses a protein. An allele is a particular sequence for a gene. Within the population there will be a distribution of different alleles available, and depending on which alleles you inherit, there will be small differences in the expressed proteins and hence in your own body form. For example, when we say there are different genes for blue eyes or brown eyes, we actually mean there are different alleles for the gene that helps determine eye color.

Because we are diploid, we have two alleles for each gene; on a pair of chromosomes. An allele is dominant if it determines the final effect, and it is recessive if you need two copies of the allele to get the corresponding effect. For example, the allele for blue eyes is recessive. To get blue eyes, you need the corresponding allele on both chromosomes. The allele for brown eyes is dominant. As long as the brown eye allele is on one of your chromosomes, you get brown eyes.

If you are heterozygous for the gene, this means you have two different alleles on two matching chromosomes. If you are homozygous for the gene, then you have the same allele on both chromosomes. For a heterozygous individual, the effect is determined by the allele that is dominant.

Whether an allele is recessive or dominant makes no difference for propagation. Your children may inherit either of your two alleles with equal probability. A mutation can produce a new allele. Whether it is dominant or recessive, it can still get passed on to your children.

You speak of dinosaurs; but they were an enormously diverse group of organisms. The proper comparison for dinosaurs would not be hominids, but mammals. The majority of dinosaur species are known from only one or two fossils. There are of course some famous species for which we have more. The dinosaurs ruled the earth for well over 150 million years, on all continents, and we know something like 1000 different genera.

The hominid record is mostly in Africa (until you get to Homo erectus which spread out to Asia), and consists of two or three genera over about five million years. By comparison, we have many more fossils for hominids than for most comparable dinosaur families.

This article was published in 1997 by a magazine called Earth, a for-profit magazine focused on geology and paleontology for the general public. The magazine folded after three volumes. The former Editor, Josh Flishman, has personally acknowledged to me that Earth was a popularization, and not a scientific journal. But in 1997, the popularity of Steven Speilberg's film "Jurassic Park" prompted a tie-in theme at Earth magazine featuring Mary Schweitzer's preliminary analysis of an exceptionally well preserved portion of a bone from a remarkably well preserved skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex. There were no red blood cells present, and this speaks volumes for the respect for truth shown at Answers in Genesis Ministry.

This also says volumes about the links posted above by our creationist friend. I would have added them to my list of creationist distortions of this particular research, but they are all to Ron Wyatt sites. Ron Wyatt sites belong in a universe all their own.

Since I wrote the quoted paragraph (see the linked TO article), Mary Schweitzer's lead professor and co-author has admitted that the tie-in with the "Jurassic Park" industry also invloved considerable money.

There have been more recent discoveries by Schweitzer et al that I have reviewed in Dino Blood Redux.

Enjoy.

It is worth mentioning here that the usual reply to creationists that "the second law doesn't apply to non-isolated systems" is not quite correct. The second law always applies; in fact, it was originally developed for non-isolated systems (the working fluid of a heat engine). The key point is that it is only in isolated systems that the second law takes the simplified "entropy must increase" form. For non-isolated systems, the second law still applies as a statement about heat flows and temperatures, just not in the form used in creationist arguments.

You are correct that the earth has a constant input of useful energy from the Sun, and that this is generally ignored in most of the arguments given by creationists for alleged problems with the second law. But this does not mean the second law fails to apply at all. There are perfectly good formulations of the second law for open systems that take the energy flows into account.

Second, what we call the laws of physics are determined by how the universe works, not vice versa. If we find that the universe violates the first law of theromdynamics (not the "first law of physics"), then so much the worse for the law. Laws of physics describe our understanding of how how things work. To insist that the universe conform to our understanding of it -- whether that understanding comes from science or religion -- is a form of hubris.

Third, appealing to god explains nothing, unless you are going to explain the mechanisms by which god operates. And that, I expect, would be a harder problem than discovering the origins of the universe.

Fifth, the Big Bang is an observed phenomenon. We observe that other galaxies are moving away from us, and are moving faster away from us the farther away they are. If everything is moving away from everything else right now, at some point in the past it had to be closer together. The theory of the Big Bang explains this observation, as well as others (such as the cosmic microwave background radiation and the abundance of various elements in the universe).

Sixth, the Big Bang is consistent with a view that God created the universe. After all, the theory was originally proposed by a priest, Georges-Henri LeMaitre. But it's also consistent with other views. Before a certain point in time known as the Planck epoch, we really can't say much of anything about the state of the universe whatsoever. We don't really know how or even if the laws of physics apply to the Big Bang itself.

Our dating FAQs, for example my Isochron Dating FAQ, document dating techniques. There is no input in the equation for "evolutionary references." It is laughable to suggest that geologists take orders from biologists on isotopic dating. And yet many creationists make that silly suggestion.

I hate having to explain my [bad] puns...

As it happens, I am answering this on November 17. The astronomy picture of the day for Nov 17 2005 is of a star forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Here is a press release from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in June 2005, confirming measurements of rings of dust around young stars in another star forming region in our own galaxy, confirming that the quantities are sufficient for formation of planetary systems.

Sarfati cites Lee Spetner, who proposed the notion of specificity as an information metric, but failed to make the definition rigourous. He nevertheless claims that no mutation increased specificity -- a claim that Sarfati repeated uncritically in the above article. It's false; mutations can increase specificity just fine, and indeed Spetner has acknowledged this himself in various discussions.

The article you have cited is worthless. Rather than go though and refute it point by point, the best approach is to read Sarfati's article and also read the available information in this archive that presents the view of conventional biology and genetics.

• Information Theory and Creationism is a starting point.
• Spetner and Biological Information addresses the notions proposed by Lee Spetner, and which are cited by Sarfati in your link.
• Review of Spetner's book Not By Chance. The reviewer is Gert Korthof (offsite), and it is particulary noteworthy for an associated cordial email exchange between Korthof and Spetner arising from the review, in which Spetner acknowledges several times that yes, mutations can increase information.
• Apolipoprotein AI Mutations and Information; an example mutation to consider.

I will not pretend that this, or any other evidence, will convince you. Nothing about the world can be proved absolutely; you can "disprove" that the earth is round with every bit as much justification as you "disprove" macroevolution. And if you honestly wanted the evidence, you would not need us to tell you where to find it. Feel free to continue in however much ignorance you choose. Just do not pretend that you are fooling the people who know the evidence is ubiquitous because they have actually seen it.

See: Claim CB102 - Mutations are random noise; they do not add information.

You see the problem is evolutionary theory does not explain the origin of the universe, nor is it intended to. There is this whole different branch of science called cosmology that works on the origin of the universe.

Criticizing evolution for not explaining something about the origin of the universe is like attacking the germ theory of disease because it doesn’t have an explanation for what causes earthquakes. It doesn’t make any sense.

Thanks for highlighting the fact that young earth creationists don’t simply reject evolution but pretty much all of modern science.

Scientists certainly do not have a notion that all religious people are "genetically weak". There is no basis at all for thinking that a propensity towards religious thinking is either beneficial or detrimental in evolutionary terms.

It may be fun to speculate; but it's only speculation. Bear in mind that the cultural or social characteristics of a population will impact on what does or does not give a reproductive benefit to individuals. For example, sexual selection -- which is more easily studied -- occurs when there is a selective pressure to display characteristics that are preferred by prospective mates, and a selective pressure to prefer the characteristics that are a focus of competition. This leads to a kind of positive feedback effect. We could speculate that something like this can give a positive feedback to certain cultural or social preferences.

For whatever reason, humans have a capacity for reflection and wonder that is apparently unsurpassed in the rest of the animal kingdom. This often expresses itself in spiritual and religious feeling of various forms, even for those who are not associated with any organized religious faith -- scientists included.

Humans are apes, and as apes we form social dominance hierarchies - the widely known alpha males to epsilon males (although in humans we also have a female hierarchy, and also a combined hierarchy). In these dominance hierarchies we form alliances in order to share in the resources that the alpha individual is able to distribute.

Consequently, we are predisposed to show abeisance to dominant individuals, and to form alliances with others who accept the dominance of that individual.

When humans began to form large agricultural, and hence urban, societies, the alpha individual was absent; the king, or martial leader. It follows that there would be a need to have a present alpha individual across broadly geographic societies. A dead king, ascended to a higher state of being and hence omnipresent, or some other heroic individual, would make a very good "ultimate king".

As the development of monotheism is a very late idea, the role religion plays in evolutionary terms is, I believe, the outcome of our social structures. This would also explain monotheism, since a universally present alpha individual is a very powerful way to maintain homogeneity across many social systems and regions.

And I cannot stress too strongly that if true this doesn't devalue the import of theism, or in any way show that it is false. If a God exists who planned providentially the course of evolution, then this will have been an intended outcome. As a nonreligious person I do not believe that, but I don't think that a religious person must agree with me.

• Corrolations between measurements using different isotopes that decay be completely independent processes.
• Observations of the spectra of distact galaxies, where we can identify and measure the decay of new atoms in distant supernova that took place in the ancient past.
• Observations of the Oklo natural nuclear reactor; a reaction that formed nearly two billion years ago. The distribution of the reactor byproducts is dependent on the decay constants, and they show the same constants as measured today.

See also creationist claim CF210.

Modern geologists are catastrophists in the limited sense of recognizing occasional drastic localised catastrophes; such as the bolide impact that killed of the dinosaurs, or super-volcanoes, or other such events. However, the term "catastrophism" is usually used to refer to a notion that was disproved back in the nineteenth century, in which it was proposed that global catastrophes periodically reformed the entire planet. Velikovsky is well known for continuing to propose such notions even in the mid twentieth century; but he could only do so by ignoring all the details of empirical evidence and indulging in fanciful violations of elementary physics. I'm afraid that style of catastrophism is dead.

As a minor detail... the seeds are not dead.

This is the first comment I have seen that directly associates Behe with the likes of Hovind. Pity poor Behe.

The following (in no particular order) is a list of papers I have read recently that seem to address the particular concern in your request.

This is far from a comprehensive list, but it should get you started.

The Universe is about 13.7 billion years old. This is a much less solidly established number. Ned Wright, a UCLA astronomer and cosmologist, has an excellent page (offsite) on Age of the Universe. (Ned's articles are for amateurs, but he gets pretty technical.)

The particle matter that existed before life and evolution got started has many sources. It's not really significant for evolution, which works the same regardless of the source of particles. But it is certainly a fascinating question in its own right.

The basic story is thought to be as follows. (Following links go offsite, to NASA or Professor Wright's pages.) Small atoms, mainly Hydrogen and Helium, formed in the first few seconds of the Universe (BB Nucleosynthesis.)). Heavier atoms, like Oxygen, Carbon and Nitrogen, are formed in stars. Really heavy atoms, iron and above, are formed under special conditions that occur in supernovae or giant stars. All this material can be found in great clouds of dust and gas in space, from which new star systems are formed. This is how our own solar system is thought to have begun; as gravity works to bring together all the material that now forms our planet. The different stages in this process can be observed going on in our galaxy at present.

The natural world operates by great chains of causes and effects and changing circumstances. Science aims to study these natural processes. It is the nature of science to be always subject to revision, never fully proven, and with many questions still unknown. As you follow causes and effects into the past, of course you can come to a point where the unknown dominates. There's good reason for confidence concerning some of the basic details of Big Bang cosmology; but the very earliest stages are a mystery.

Saying "God did it" is not an answer that will satisfy any scientist, whether they believe in God or not. The questions addressed by science consider the processes involved. They are not an alternative to "God did it"; and the scientific models are used in the same way by atheists, Christians, agnostics, and others.

A more accurate description of the second law is "heat will not flow from a cold object to a hot one". This turns out to be equivalent to the statement: "no process can result in a net decrease in entropy".

The notion of "entropy" does not really correspond to what we normally think of as order. It has to do rather with dissipation of energy. Also, the crucial notion of "net entropy" is always ignored when this criticism is made. It is possible, and indeed common, for a physical process to result in a localized decrease in entropy, as long as it is linked to a greater increase in entropy somewhere else.

The second law admits no exceptions for life, or for intelligence, or for "purpose". Living creatures, human constructions, and operation of machines or factories all must work consistent with the second law. They utilize some energy flow to do work; and any local entropy decrease is always more than compensated for by a greater increase in entropy in the waste heat and byproducts of the process.

There are many examples of localized order that appear spontaneously with an energy flow, in both living and non-living systems. The water cycle on the earth results in a continually replenished river flowing to the sea. The fundamental driving force for this is from the Sun, which brings a local order to the river. The geysers in Yellowstone National Park, like Old Faithful, are locally ordered structures, driven by energy from heat within the Earth. A barren island in time becomes verdant with life; as living things tap into their energy sources (food, or light form the Sun) to let them grow and flourish.

Evolution is another natural process. No part of evolution conflicts with the second law, in any way; any more than growth of an oak from an acorn conflicts with the second law. If there was no energy source, no light from the Sun, then all processes of life would quickly cease. There would be no birth; no growth; no evolution. The living world exists only because it can tap into a continuous flow of free energy from the Sun (or from other sources like hot springs), and it converts that free energy into waste energy at a higher entropy as a part of the processes by which life is maintained and developed.

There are a number of statistical problems which make the general application of Dr. Verhey's conclusions "problematic." He is also aware of this, and has stated so, both in his paper and in the Panda's Thumb discussion.

Unfortunately, I suspect that his paper will be grabbed onto and waved about as if it supported the creationist scheme of "teach the controversy." (Even when this is promoted by non-creationists who should know better).

The problem of fitting animals aboard the ark has a long history. Most people decided it was impossible by the early eighteenth century when more extensive biological exploration, of the New World especially, showed that there are a lot more animals in the world than those that Middle Easterners were familiar with.

Mr. Forestier has made a remarkable sketch to convey some idea of the possibilities suggested by this discovery. As we know nothing of the creature's form, his reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius. But if, as the peculiarities of the tooth suggest, Hesperopithecus was a primitive forerunner of Pithecanthropus, he may have been a creature such as Mr. Forestier has depicted.

Henry Fairfield Osborn, the scientist who described the tooth, later said of the illustration that:

…such a drawing or 'reconstruction' would doubtless be only a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate.

For more on Nebraska Man see the following:

Creationist Arguments: Nebraska Man, by Jim Foley

The role of "Nebraska man" in the creation-evolution debate, by John Wolf and James S. Mellett

Nebraska Man was a mistake, one that was easy to make given the similarities between some pig/peccary teeth (especially when they are very worn as this tooth is), and those of hominids, and one that was fairly quickly corrected with a retraction that was published in 1927. It has lived on far, far, longer in the works of antievolutionists than it ever did as a mistake in science.

I am not an expert but I have personally examined the "Hesperopithecus" tooth (which is in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York), and to the untrained eye it is very human-like. If seen in the context of an archeological site and told that it was human I seriously doubt that most lay people would question this.

But let's talk about people misidentifying teeth. Osborn misidentified a peccary tooth for a hominid tooth, but at least these are both mammals. In 1987 creationists Carl Baugh and Don Patton misidentified a fish tooth that they found near the Paluxy River at Glen Rose Texas, as a human tooth.

See A Tale of Two Teeth by Ron Hastings

At least Osborn got the right Class of vertebrate, and while the Nebraska Man mistake lasted only five years and was retracted, it is eighteen years and counting for "Glen Rose Man".