Dembski pwned again: ant trails and intelligent design

February 26, 2011 • 6:28 am

If you’re into ants—and who isn’t?—you can’t do better than follow biologist Alex Wild’s excellent blog Myrmecos (the study of ants is called “myrmecology”).  It’s one of the best taxon-specific blogs around.

Alex doesn’t like to deal with creationists, but made an exception when Intelligent Design (ID) advocate William Dembski started making pronouncements on ants.  Noting that ants tend to take the shortest path between colony entrances (they also do this when travelling between a colony entrance and a food source), Dembski, writing on February 18 at the ID site Uncommon Descent, pronounced this feat inexplicable by natural selection (ergo Jesus):

Now here’s an interesting twist: Colonies of ants, when they make tracks from one colony to another minimize path-length and thereby also solve the Steiner Problem (see “Ants Build Cheapest Network“). So what does this mean in evolutionary terms? In ID terms, there’s no problem — ants were designed with various capacities, and this either happens to be one of them or is one acquired through other programmed/designed capacities. On Darwinian evolutionary grounds, however, one would have to say something like the following: ants are the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process that programmed the ants with, presumably, a genetic algorithm that enables them, when put in separate colonies, to trace out paths that resolve the Steiner Problem. In other words, evolution, by some weird self-similarity, embedded an evolutionary program into the neurophysiology of the ants that enables them to solve the Steiner problem (which, presumably, gives these ants a selective advantage).

I trust good Darwinists will take this in without skipping a beat, mumbling something like “evolution sure is amazing” or “natural selection is cleverer than us.” Dispassionate minds might wonder if something deeper is at stake here.

(“Something deeper,” of course, means Jesus.)

Well, if Dembski had bothered to learn anything about ant trails (and this takes only a few minutes of Googling), he would have realized that embedded in the ants’ tiny brains is not an evolutionary algorithm for solving the Steiner problem, but a simple rule combined with a fact of chemistry: ants follow their own pheromone trails, and those pheromones are volatile.  As Wild explains, ants start out making circuitous paths, but more pheromone evaporates from the longer ones because ants take longer to traverse them while laying down their own scent.  The result is that the shortest paths wind up marked with the most pheromone, and ants follow the strongest scents.

Wild shows a nice simulation video on his site, demonstrating how, given these simple assumptions, ants wind up taking the shortest trails.

Before we say that evolution can’t explain a behavior, it behooves us to learn as much as we can about that behavior.  Dembski didn’t learn jack.  And we shouldn’t underestimate the capacity of insect brains to store complicated information, or of evolutionists to decipher how that capacity evolved.  A good example is the waggle dance of honeybees.

Alex is actually pretty soft on Dembski, for after pwning him Wild says,

In Dembski’s defense, his error is a common one. Ant societies share enough superficial similarities to human ones that the tendency to anthropomorphize is strong. It is too easy to assume ants solve complex problems the way we humans do, with smart individuals applying brainpower to puzzle them out.

I am not as forgiving.  Dembski is not just an average joe expressing bewilderment at the “swarm intelligence” of ants.  He is supposedly conversant with evolution and biology, and is making a pronouncement against evolution in a prominent place. He should have done his homework.  Thanks to Alex for correcting him, and for demonstrating the unjustified eagerness of creationists like Dembski to say “evolution couldn’t have done that.”

Dispassionate minds, indeed.

h/t: James

Caturday felid: cat burglar!

February 26, 2011 • 5:45 am

In San Mateo, California, lives a cat named Dusty, now called “Klepto Cat.”  In the dark of night, Dusty sneaks out from his home and ravages the neighborhood, stealing things from other people’s houses.  He’s purloined bathing suits, stuffed animals, sponges, towels, underwear—you name it.

Dusty’s booty now totals more than 600 items.  Some are so large that he has to waddle when bringing them home.

Dusty’s been a klepto cat for three years; his gateway theft involved a sparkly pink purse.  Animal Planet set up a night-vision camera that captured him in flagrante delicto; here’s the LOLzy video of the investigation:

In an interview with a local television station (video at link), his owners display a sample of Dusty’s swag.

And, in his ultimate fifteen minutes of fame, Dusty appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, where David read Dusty his rap sheet.

It’s Friday; let’s have some cats!

February 25, 2011 • 12:50 pm

On January 10 a snow leopard was born at the Chattanooga zoo.  (Two of her littermates were apparently stillborn.)

As I’ve written before:

The snow leopard (Panthera uncia), also known as the ounce, is a denizen of the mountains of central Asia. With its camouflaging cream-colored fur, speckled with black rosettes, it’s surely one of the world’s most beautiful cats. Its thick coat (most evident on the tail) and large paws are adaptations to the high-altitude mountain habitat. But these adaptations, and its beauty, have been the ounce’s downfall: hunted heavily to make hats and coats, only about 3500-7000 of these cats remain in the wild.

And a video:

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h/t: Michael

 

 

I haz a priez!

February 25, 2011 • 10:03 am

The Freedom from Religion Foundation informs me that I haz been selected to receive the “Emperor Has No Clothes Award” at their 2011 convention in Hartford, Connecticut.

Co-run by Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, the FFRF, as you probably know, does lots of good work, especially in the legal realm, enforcing the Constitutional mandate for separation of church and state.  Last year they got a federal judge to declare the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional (I still find that amazing); sadly, the Obama administration has appealed the ruling, and the issue is still in the courts.

The FFRF also does all kinds of outreach, especially on campuses, and runs Freethought Radio, the freethought radio show that’s broadcast nationally (you can hear it every Saturday from 11 am to noon). And the FFRF has more than 16,000 members.

The EHNC award is designed to celebrate “‘plain speaking’ on the shortcomings of religion by public figures”, and comes with some dosh, transportation to the meeting in Hartford this October 7-9 (where I’ll give a 30-minute talk), and, most important, this lovely and LOLzy statue of an emperor en déshabillé:

The statue is made right here in Chicago—by the same people who make the Oscar statue! The only thing it’s lacking is the Kazezian rude Gnu-child, mocking the emperor with shouted forced laughter and morally repugnant incivilities.  Previous recipients include many of my atheist heroes and pals, including Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins, and George Carlin.  I’m immensely honored to be among them.

p.s. Yes, I am aware of the other recipients!

New arguments against New Atheists

February 25, 2011 • 6:57 am

You can say this for religious apologists: they’re creative.  Just when you get tired of the same, endlessly recycled arguments against New Atheists, they come up with some new ones.  From Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham, comes a piece by Jim Spiegel, “Unreasonable doubt.”  (Spiegel is a professor of philosophy at Taylor University, an evangelical Christian college in Indiana.)

Taylor has a beef about atheists: he thinks we’re largely an immoral bunch.  But, reversing the usual accusation that atheism causes immorality, he claims that immorality causes atheism.  (He has a new book called The Making of An Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief.)

How does this chain of causation work?  Spiegel cites the case of scholar Mortimer Adler, who, after a life of atheism, finally got baptized at 81.  According to Spiegel, Adler was an atheist simply because it was easier, quoting him as saying that being religious “would require a radical change in my way of life, a basic alteration in the direction of my day-to-day choices as well as in the ultimate objectives to be sought or hoped for …. The simple truth of the matter is that I did not wish to live up to being a genuinely religious person.”

Spiegel also cites the gospel of Paul:

Paul provides at least part of the answer in the same Romans passage, noting that some people “suppress the truth by their wickedness” (1:18). We all suffer from intellectual blind spots created by personal vices and immoral desires. To the extent that we succumb to these, we may be tempted to adopt perspectives that enable us to rationalize perverse behavior.

Those perspectives, of course, include atheism.  Spiegel also cites Alvin Plantinga’s ideas:

But some things can impede cognitive function, and sin is one of these. The more we disobey and give ourselves over to vice, the less reliable our belief formation will be, particularly regarding moral and spiritual matters.

He also claims that many historic intellectuals who rejected God had lives that were a moral shambles:

Historian Paul Johnson’s fascinating if disturbing book Intellectuals exposed this pattern in the lives of some of the most celebrated thinkers in the modern period, including Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Hemingway, Russell, and Sartre. In their private (and often public) lives, these Western intellectual stars were moral wrecks. Could their rejection of God—and, in particular, Christianity, with its exacting moral standards—have been entirely intellectual and dispassionate? Or might the same desires confessed by Nagel and Adler have played a role in their atheism?

I sense here some cherry-picking of data.  One could easily make a list of famous Christians whose moral lives were equally bankrupt.  But never mind.  For Spiegel, with his armchair psychologizing, has another theory.  It’s based on father rejection!

External factors may also hamper the natural awareness of God and contribute to a descent into atheism. In his book Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, New York University psychologist Paul Vitz, a onetime atheist, examines the lives of the major atheists of the modern period, including Hobbes, Hume, Voltaire, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Russell, and Freud. He found they had something in common: a broken relationship with their father. Whether by death, departure, abuse, or some other factor, the father relationships of all these well-known atheists were defective. Vitz also examined the lives of prominent theists during the same period (Pascal, Reid, Burke, Berkeley, Paley, Wilberforce, Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher, Newman, Chesterton, and Bonhoeffer, among others). In every case, he found a good relationship with the father or at least a strong father figure. . .

Life is too complex to make a hard and fast rule about such things. But at the least, it shows that there are moral and psychological dimensions to atheism, ones we cannot ignore. At most, it strongly suggests that atheists can be self-deceived, driven by a motivated bias to disbelieve in God.

I wonder if this applies to the New Atheists.  Well, I always got along okay with Dad, but of course Hitchens had a difficult relationship with his father “The Commander.”  Dawkins seems to have had a good relationship with his father, but what about Dennett and Harris?  The problem, of course, is that all of this is anecdotal.  What data there are don’t show any positive relationship between atheism and immorality.  Atheists are grossly underrepresented among America’s prison population, and there’s no evidence that atheist Scandinavia has become a moral cesspool.   What Spiegel really means by “immorality” seems to be “not accepting Jesus,” and of course that’s correlated with atheism!

But even if accepting Jesus as Your Personal Lord and Savior did keep you on the moral path, one can still ask, “Well, are Christian beliefs true?”  Most of us wouldn’t want to live a life based on lies, even if it they did make us more upright.  That’s just hypocrisy.  Spiegel is aware of this, and so he needs to provide evidence for God.  And here is how he does it:

As important as it is to remind atheists of the rational evidence for God, the real problem in many cases is moral and psychological in nature.  Such a suggestion is potentially offensive to unbelievers. But we still need to ask if it is nonetheless true. According to Scripture, the evidence for God is overwhelming. The apostle Paul says that “God has made it plain” that he exists; his “invisible qualities … have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Rom. 1:19-20). And the psalmist writes, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (19:1). This naturally prompts the question: If the evidence for God is so abundant, then why are there atheists?

Yep, that’s the evidence.  It’s all in the Holy Book: “according to Scripture, the evidence for God is overwhelming”!  How can anyone write that with a straight face?  But if what religious books said counted as independent evidence for the existence of divine beings, then we also must consider the Qur’an, the Eddas, the Bhagavad Gita, and all those other books that give “overwhelming” evidence for different gods!

This dude doesn’t seem to have a lot of respect for data.  It’s not the atheists whose thinking is warped—it’s people like Spiegel.

The greatest pop voices of our time. Day 6, also-rans: Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan, and Tony Bennett

February 25, 2011 • 5:58 am

Rounding out the week, we have three leftovers—hardly a good term for such great singers.

Nat King Cole (1919-1965) started out as a jazz pianist; that talent, and his unforgettable smoky voice, are on display in this movie performance of “When I Fall in Love”:

Sassy!  It was only a few years ago that I discovered the incredible Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990). I don’t know of any female pop singer with anything close to her range. And doesn’t listening to this version of “Perdido” make you smile?  (Actually, Vaughan is usually classified as a jazz singer, but I couldn’t leave her out.)

To finish up, Tony Bennett (b. 1926) singing “The Good Life”. (It was a tough choice between this and his version of “Love Look Away,” from Rogers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song.)

Most of the singers I’ve highlighted are not ones I grew up with, for my growing-up years coincided almost perfectly with the advent and growth of rock.   I distinctly remember the first time I heard what is seen as the flagship song of rock and roll, “Rock Around the Clock,” by Bill Haley and his Comets.  The song was recorded in 1954, and I heard it in 1955 in Athens, Greece, where my father, an Army officer, was stationed.  I was just a wee tyke, playing at the house of my father’s commanding officer, General Quinn.  I heard the song come from a bedroom upstairs; it was being played by Quinn’s  14 year old daughter, Sally, and I was transfixed at the music. It was like nothing I had heard before.

Sally Quinn, of course, became a journalist, married editor Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post, and now edits the Post’s “On Faith” column.  LOL!

Rabbi Yoffie lays it out

February 24, 2011 • 8:07 am

The old joke goes, “What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?”  The answer is, “A Jew.”  And that’s largely true, but there are some exceptions to Jewish atheism.   One is Rabbi Eric Yoffie, who, in a piece at PuffHo called “The frustrating, difficult, never-ending search for God,” tells us all how to find Him in these difficult times when the Big Man in the Sky seems to be hiding from us. The upshot: all is well, for we can find Him by reading sacred texts, keeping our eyes open, observing rituals, and acting like God (presuming, of course, that we know how God acts).  But the final paragraph is telling:

All of this might be a little overwhelming, I say. But start somewhere. The search for God is frustrating and difficult, and it is never done. But with God, our lives have meaning and purpose; without God, we are reduced to being no more than a tiny speck in a vast universe.

There’s Abrahamic religion in a nutshell.  Because we don’t like the truth—which is that all of us are just specks—we make up a god.