Creating Doubt in Science

There is currently a strong suite of Discovery Institute bills running through state legislatures to allow "alternative theories" to be taught in science classes. See list here: Antievolution Legislation Scorecard. There is not a direct link back to the Discovery Institute, but it is their wording, seen before and passed in places like Texas and Louisiana and Tennessee. From a legal standpoint, the bills look harmless, closely resembling intellectual freedom policies. But the point is clearly to sow confusion about the difference between science and just making things up, especially in regard to evolution and climate science. Hemant Mehta suggests that it would only be fair to show this video in churches where the churches put their books into science classes.

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The evolution of the mechanism for evolution.

I must confess that I have something in common with Creationists: I find it difficult to understand how the earliest and simplest life forms came to exist. Unlike the creationists, however, I am not willing to suggest that the earliest life forms were created as-is by some sort of disembodied sentient Supreme Being. I can’t fathom how such a Being could get anything at all done, given that “he” is alleged to be disembodied; for instance, some sort of physical neural network is a prerequisite for cognition. Further, those who posit that life was created as-is by a supernatural Creator need to explain how that Creator got here in the first place; their creation of a Creator constitute an eternal regress. Who created “God,” and God’s God, etc. Thus, I don’t believe in a ghostly Creator, but where does this leave me?  How did the earliest life forms emerge from non-life?  Though firm answers have not yet been derived from rigorous scientific experimentation, I am intrigued by the ideas put forth by Stuart Kauffman in his 1995 book, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self Organization and Complexity. Early in his book, Kaufman points out that the simplest free living cells (called "pleuromona") are highly simplified types of bacteria. They have a cell membrane, genes, RNA, protein synthesizing machinery and all the other necessary gear to constitute a form of life. Here's the problem: [more . . .]

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Snowflake Spirituality

I was staring out of my window, watching snow flurries and thinking about the essence of being. Philosophies and religions have long grappled with trying to understand and explain the human spirit, the soul, throughout time. I have a distinct and solid understanding, and thought of a useful metaphor for it as I watched the flurries descend. Definitions of "the soul" generally include total individuality and immaterial nature. It is that which makes each of us unique, it manifests as long as we live, growing and changing within us, and then instantly vanishes from view as we die. In most religions, the question then is asked, "Where does it go?" Consider the snowflake. It begins as a small cluster of water molecules up in a cloud at the boundary of vapor and mist. As it hovers in the wind currents, it grows and evolves. The species (chemical formula) determines the basic nature, a flat hexagon. So why is every one different? Because they grow in subtly different mixes of molecules and temperatures. Each becomes an individual. When they grow heavy enough to drop below the cloud line, they are born as falling snowflakes. But they have not finished growing. They continue to sublime and to collect molecules. As with any system, they increase in complexity and purity as they encounter random or systematic changes in environment. Sometimes they merge, often they fracture. Finally they reach the ground. Some settle into clusters, becoming packed into a solid layer, and even all the way to ice. Others hit something warm and melt. In either case, what has become of the individual essence? It's parts get recycled into other forms, compacted or melted, evaporated or metabolized. Eventually, all of the above. But the unique form is gone. Where did the unique shape of this snowflake go? When we die, our spirit, soul, self is gone. It can remain in the memory of others, carried forward by our neighbors or impressions made on the environment. Like a melted snowflake. In what way is the end of snowflake self any different than the end of a human self? Granted, humans are able to ask this question. And human life is naturally rated more highly by humans than the unique individuality of other creatures and things. But besides that?

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Video of nature by the numbers

If you like nature and you like numbers, you'll love this short video, "Nature by the Numbers." The video features real life instances of Fibonacci numbers, the Golden Angle and Ratio, and Delaunay triangulation. If you'd like to know more about the math illustrated in the video, visit this accompanying link.

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Superorganisms take the limelight

In the Natural History's February 2009 article titled "Could an Ant Colony Read this Book," ecologist Robert Dunn tracks the long-term collaborative efforts of Edward O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler, leading up to their new book: The Superorganism. In their new book, Hölldobler and Wilson

. . . have breathed new life into a notion that intrigued scientists before World War I: that a colony of social insects is analogous to an individual. The concept of the superorganism—which compares a colony’s members to a body’s cells and sometimes its nest to the body’s skeleton—fell out of favor as research increasingly focused on the genes of individuals. Hölldobler and Wilson, building on new insights into the evolution and workings of insect societies, seek to bring it back. To them, “superorganism” is more than a metaphor; it is a unit in the hierarchy of biological organization, falling somewhere between an ecosystem and an individual. And, they argue, it is the most useful level of biological organization at which to examine how pieces are assembled to make a whole—be it an association of bacteria, a single creature, or a whole society—as well as to understand what holds all organisms together, even when the pieces struggle toward independent goals.

According to Dunn (and Wilson and Holldobler), ants and other highly social creatures (such as termites, and honeybees) offer a rare opportunity to study the process by which individuals meld into an unified organism. Other examples include the early symbiosis of mitochondria with an early form of bacteria, plant cells ("which arose when a eukaryotic cell . . incorporated a photosynthetic bacterium") and multicellular creatures in general (e.g., human beings). In each of these examples, individuals gave up reproduction "either partially or completely, to work for their overbearing mother." Wilson and Holldobler point to group selection (and individual selection) as a key component of the evolution of highly social species. "In group-selection models, evolution favors the groups whose member cooperate more effectively, regardless of whether such cooperation helps a given individual (or that individual's kin) reproduce." The key to allowing this process is "communication and the division of labor." Apropos for a book that was five years in the making by Wilson and Holldobler.

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