Intelligent design has become the US’s newest “intellectual” export. It has been included in the syllabus for biology produced by the OCR exam board under the guise of “teaching the controversy“. Of course, there is no controversy except that which was invented by the Discovery Institute several years ago as a part of its Wedge Strategy.

Naturally, critics of the inclusion say that the move elevates ideas like Intelligent Design to the same playing field as the theory of evolution, which is testable and conforms to the most basic principle of scientific theories: falsifiability.

James Williams, science course leader at Sussex University’s school of education, told the Times Educational Supplement: “This opens a legitimate gate for the inclusion of creationism or intelligent design in science classes as if they were legitimate theories on a par with evolution fact and theory.

“I’m happy for religious theories to be considered in religious education, but not in science where consideration could lead to a false verification of their status as being equal to scientific theories.”

Let’s hope this nonsense stops before it really starts for our friends overseas.

[tags]creationism, intelligent design, evolution, teach the controversy, education, science education, wedge strategy[/tags]

Drudge report has a copy of the press release scheduled to be released today at 2pm.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon.

[...]

“Other moons in the solar system have liquid-water oceans covered by kilometers of icy crust,” said Andrew Ingersoll, imaging team member and atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “What’s different here is that pockets of liquid water may be no more than tens of meters below the surface.”

Liquid water, of course, is one of the things that most scientists consider necessary for life to potentially develop, which makes this announcement so exciting. While there may be liquid water, my money is on there not being life on Encedalus. Time will tell.

[tags]Enceladus, E.T., alien life, Saturn, NASA[/tags]

Of course we don’t do that, and there are a few explanations as to why this is. (Because it’s “fun” doesn’t apply: that’s an evolutionary byproduct of needing to reproduce.) One hypothesis put forth almost 20 years ago suggests that sex evolved as a way to purge harmful mutations from the population. By shuffling genes “randomly” (mixing chromosomes is anything but random — any sociologist will tell you that), the harmful mutations would be concentrated into a few select individuals who would be weaker and less likely to reproduce, and therefore these mutations would be weeded out through natural selection.

We know now that this is way oversimplified. Most mutations occur in the non-coding (“junk”) DNA of an organism, and most genetic diseases are the product of many mutations, not just one. Then there is the fact that genetic disorders can be carried and passed on to offspring without every having been expressed. (For instance, when a disease “skips” a generation.) It turns out that observing this “negative epistasis” in nature has been rather difficult. Figuring out how it evolved has been even more challenging.

Now a new computer model provides a possible answer to this last question.

The researchers created digital organisms that reproduced through sex in the same manner as real organisms. And like a regular organism, the virtual one developed a natural buffer to resist change by mutations. This ability, called “genetic robustness,” is thought to be one of the main benefits of sex.

By shuffling genes, sex allows a population to spread its mutations across many individuals within a group. The mutations become diluted and can be effectively dealt with by an individual’s genetic repair system.

But the researchers found that the protection only works when the digital organisms were facing a few mutations at a time. When assaulted by many at once, their repair systems became overwhelmed and the organisms died. Azevedo think this happens in real life, too.

In essence there is a buffer: one or two mutations is okay, but once this buffer is overrun, negative epistasis takes over. The genetic robustness of sex and a limited ability to deal with mutations naturally leads to negative epistasis which protects a species at the cost of a few individuals within a population. How this actually truly gets rid of a disease, I’m not sure. If it were really an effective system one would think things like Huntington’s disease and Fragile X syndrome would have been weeded out long ago. I would be interested to see how negative epistasis effects carriers of disease instead of just those who express it.

[tags]negative epistasis, sex, sexual reproduction[/tags]

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”

-Charles Darwin

Indeed. It’s been my experience that those in the know know they don’t know everything, and are more likely to be open minded about something new.

Reports are now out now showing that the book literally swapped terms like “creationism” for “intelligent design.” (Hey, I can do that too, with a simple Control-H!) The move shows how thin the veneer of “science” in the intelligent design camp is, because most proponents of ID have claimed that they are not creationists. Of course, teaching creationism in a public school is illegal because of the constitutional separation of church and state. Not to mention that it’s a little tough to try to teach “creation” as science. (By anyone’s standards.) By adding one more layer of abstraction between a deity and science, you get intelligent design which is politically acceptable to teach as science.

Forrest compared early drafts of Of Pandas and People to a later 1987 copy, and showed how in several instances the word “creationism” had been replaced by “intelligent design”, and “creationist” simply replaced by “intelligent design proponent”.

[...]

Matzke, who was at the trial, points out that the “switching” of the words is also suspicious because of its timing, which came just after the US Supreme Court’s decision on 19 June 1987 that it was unconstitutional to teach creationism in schools.

The names of the drafts alone are incriminating, he says. The first draft, in 1983, was called Creation Biology, the next is Biology and Creation, dated 1986, and is followed by Biology and Origin in 1987. It is not until later in 1987 that Of Pandas and People emerges.

Regardless of what one’s religious beliefs and political views on the matter, I believe that using underhanded tactics such as these is disingenuous and undermines the study of science in favor political maneuvering. While I have also said that science does not and should not exist in a political vacuum when it comes to ethics, it should exist in that vacuum when attempting to determine the truth and report facts. Unfortunately, this is not the case in the United States in this day and age.

• A UK heart surgeon, Mr. Francis Wells (anyone else find it strange that he goes by the title “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”?) has pioneered a new way of restoring normal mitral valve function by studying the heart diagrams made by Leonardo da Vinci. His technique allows him to avoid some of the drawbacks that current repair operations introduce. Mr. Wells has successfully treated 80 patients with the technique. Three cheers for Leonardo?
• Pathological liars often have anatomically different brain structures which allow them to create complex lies quickly, with relatively little inhibition. Excess white matter in the prefrontal cortex (used for high-level thought) and decreased gray matter (which mediates inhibitions) giving them an edge over anti-social people and normal control subjects.
• Yesterday, I wrote about Gary Olsen, the third “space tourist,” and how calling him simply a tourist was unfair. As a materials scientist, it stands to reason that he’ll conduct experiments on himself. He’ll be investigating space sickness, lower back pain, and be collecting data on microorganisms inside in the ISS.

I find the commentary on Leonardo da Vinci interesting. It’s been said that some of the best doctors come from backgrounds outside medicine: particularly engineering because they bring a different mindset and way of looking at problems with them when they go to medical school. With no formal background in medicine, da Vinci brought an engineering perspective to the table when he looked at the body and drew his illustrations and diagrams. I think it’s all sorts of cool that even today, people are learning from his work.

The researchers believe that in the sequence of events following the supernova, first, the iron-rich grains emitted from the explosion shot into the tusks. Whatever caused the craters had to have been traveling around 6,214 miles per second, and no other natural phenomenon explains the damage, they said.

They think the supernova exploded 250 light-years away from Earth, which would account for the 7,000-year delay before the tusk grain pelting. It would have taken that long for the supernova materials to have showered Earth.

These iron grains were traveling at exactly 6,214 miles per second, I’m sure. Somehow the leap from tiny craters in mammoth tusks to a supernova to iron grains traveling at exactly 6,214 miles per second seems a little… I dunno… HUGE to me.

Then there were storms similar to those in The Day After Tomorrow caused by a comet-like shower of debris (similar to a nuclear winter, I would suspect) which caused superheated hurricanal winds in the atmosphere that then rolled across North America

The debris is supposed to have killed all the large animals but saved the small animals who escaped by going underground.

In addition to the tusk evidence, the scientists said arrowheads from North America’s prehistoric Clovis culture, which went extinct around 13,500-13,000 years ago, Icelandic marine sediment, as well as sediment from nine 13,000-year-old sites in North America, contain higher-than-normal amounts of radiation in the form of potassium-40 levels.

[...]

Magnetic particles also were unearthed at the sites. Analysis of these particles revealed they are rich in titanium, iron, manganese, vanadium, rare-earth elements, thorium and uranium.

These elements all are common in moon rocks and lunar meteorites, so the researchers think the materials provide additional evidence that North America was bombarded 13,000 years ago by material originating from space.

I buy the space-bombardment, but I have difficulty making the leap from tiny tusk craters to superheated hurricanes destroying North America. A lot of scientists seem excited about the idea, so maybe I’m the only one having this difficulty. I would think that looking at the night sky would show up a location 250 light years from Earth where a supernova could have occurred. A black hole, perhaps. I’d like to hear from the astrophysicists now, I think, because frankly, this theory sounds a little like an Ice Age sequel than a solid scientific theory.

Traditionally, it has been thought that the more hosts HIV passes through, the more lethal it would become. The new study contradicts this, suggesting evolutionary forces at work: if a virus becomes more efficient, it’s going to wipe out hosts quicker and more effectively. In the short-run, this may be beneficial, but in the long run, it will wipe out what is effectively its environment, leading to extinction of the species itself.

“There is a natural trend to reach an ‘equilibrium’ between the agent and the host interests, in order to guarantee concomitant survival for a longer time,” he said.

It makes sense, then, that the virus would adapt to decrease in virulence which ensures its survival for a long time to come. While it’s too early to say one way or the other, this latest study affords new hope in the search for a cure for HIV and AIDS. In the meantime, caution is urged in being lulled into a false sense of security, despite the fact that other infectious diseases have shown the same tendencies in weakening. Among these are smallpox, TB, and syphilis.

Obviously it goes without saying that this doesn’t mean that crazy people like Christine Maggiore are correct and/or have the moral high ground, however.

Over the next four hours, they took more than 550 pictures of the squid as it tried to free itself. The squid was finally able to break free, but only after leaving a 5.5m tentacle attached to the hook. When it was retrieved, it was still functioning, sticking to the deck of the boat and Dr. Kubodera’s fingers.

This is the first time a giant squid has been caught on camera, and it shows that Architeuthis is not a sluggish hunter as had been thought. The 13m giant squid is not the largest type squid. Larger “Colossal squid” are thought to exist that are perhaps twice as large, though none have ever been seen.

The parents taking the school board to court have asserted that this violates the separation of church and state. And they’re absolutely right. I’ve stated in the past that ID is okay to teach (even in public schools) so long as it’s not taught in the science classroom. ID lacks the most basic tenets of what constitutes “science” — testability and falsifiability.

The first witness on behalf of the parents was Kenneth Miller a professor at Brown University who lectured the courtroom on a variety of topics, but his basic theme was that there was no controversy in science about the validity of evolution; the only controversy over the topic comes from outside science, from the lay public.

Much of the confusion over evolution and intelligent design comes from the definition of “theory” itself. When used in the context of science, it implicitly has a different meaning than it does when applied to almost anything else. Therefore, dismissing evolution as “merely a theory” is an egregious misuse of the implied meaning. Not everything can become a scientific theory — it must first undergo scrutiny, testing, and revision. While the mechanisms and explanations behind evolution have changed since Darwin, his overarching themes of natural selection and “survival of the fittest” have withstood scientific scrutiny for well over 100 years. The school board of a public school system should not be so easily able to toss it aside like so much garbage, regardless of local public opinion.

According to a CBS poll one year ago, 65% of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution; 37% would want it to be taught instead of evolution.

Fifty-five per cent believe God created humans as we know them today.

Unfortunately for the public, public opinion is meaningless when it comes to what is correct and what is not. Should we teach probability as common sense dictates, simply because most people believe wrong information? Certainly not. And there is no reason that the origins of life should be taught to the whim of public opinion either. Because the public in this case is ignorant, and therefore, wrong.

Science is about understanding and explaining phenomena, not about what “feels good” and makes people happy. As I’ve said in the past, no matter how far back science pushes the boundaries of human understanding, intelligent design can add one more layer of abstraction, thereby rendering it effectively impossible to prove one way or the other. For this simple reason alone it belongs in a religion or philosophy class, not a science class.

“On the other hand,” Miller said, “intelligent design is not a testable theory in any sense and as such it is not accepted by the scientific community.”

During his cross-examination of Miller, Robert Muise, another attorney for the law center, repeatedly asked whether he questioned the completeness of Darwin’s theory.

“Would you agree that Darwin’s theory is not the absolute truth?” Muise said.

“We don’t regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth,” Miller responded.

Miller is absolutely right, even though it would seem as though he’s avoiding the question to those that would choose to read it that way. Even a “simple” theory like the Theory of Gravity has undergone massive revision in the last 50 years, and it stands to reason that it will be further modified over the course of the next 50 years. Tossing it out as “incomplete” is ridiculous. If there’s anything that science has taught mankind it’s this: just when you think you’ve got almost a complete understanding of something, a new development or discovery will come along and turn your world upside-down. It happened to physics with the discovery of subatomic particles, and it will happen again. No matter how well-established and understood your theory may be, something new could come along and blow it out of the water. What matters is that the overarching themes remain consistent though the underlying explanation for the theme may be altered.

I’ll be following this case with great interest in the coming weeks. (And I will endeavor to avoid ranting.)