Ian Musgrave Archives

Evolution News and Views noticed my previous post, and wrote a little reply. Unfortunately for them they completely missed the point, that Dembski claimed “Darwinists” were making stuff up, when there was good theoretical and (indirect) observational evidence to be confident that planets abounded in the galaxy.

The 55 Cnc system (excluding the outermost planet), 55 Cnc e is marked by the red cross near the sun. The 55 Cne system has features similar to our solar system.

Instead, they chose to focus on whether the planets we have found are habitable, which was beside the point [1]. Guillermo Gonzalez wrote a response for them, which included this:

The typical exoplanetary system is very different from our Solar System. Jovian planets are being discovered in very tight or highly eccentric orbits. Jovian planets in our Solar System are characterized by large nearly circular orbits. Our Solar System looks ever more like the exception, and it is exceptional in ways that are life friendly.

Distribution of orbital periods of the currently discovered exoplanets. The pink bars are “Super Jupiters” and the yellow bars are Jupiter-like planets in Jupiter period orbits.

Well, that’s sort of true, but deeply misleading. When we first started looking Super Jupiters were the norm. To explain why, and why this is no longer true, I’m going to digress for a moment to explain the main methods used to find exoplanets. The first is the radial velocity method. Here the slight wobbles produced in the position of a star by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet are detected by Doppler shift.

In the transit method, the slight dimming in the stars light as the planet passes in front of it.

On this Thursday at 18:00 UT NASA will hold a press conference on a recent discovery by the Kepler, the exoplanet discovery telescope. I don’t know what to expect, on the basis of past performance they will probably announce a tidally locked super-Earth in the habitable zone of a Red Dwarf as if we have found a second Earth (or maybe they will confirm KOI-701.03 really is in the habitable zone of a reasonably sun like star).

Still, despite coming hard on the heels of the 50 new exoplanets found by HARPS, the existing bonanza of Kepler worlds and discovering the atmospheric composition of some exoplanets, one can hardly suppress a thrill at the prospect of learning something new about the plethora of extrasolar worlds we have found.

One wonders how William Dembski feels after proclaiming in 1992:

“Dawkins, to explain life apart from a designer, not only gives himself all the time Darwin ever wanted, but also helps himself to all the conceivable planets there might be in the observable universe (note that these are planets he must posit, since no planets outside our solar system have been observed, nor is there currently any compelling theory of planetary formation which guarantees that the observable universe is populated with planets)”

Three years later the first exoplanet was confirmed, and the current count stands at 677.

Over at Science in Pen and Ink Lelia Battison has an in-depth discussion of Richard Hoovers’ paper on alleged “fossil” bacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites in the Journal of Cosmology. It is an excellent article that covers a lot of issues not previously covered, and brings together some other information that has been scattered around. I’m referenced as well. Go have a read of Microbes on a Moonbeam, disentangling the Meteorite Microbe claims.

(for reference my posts on the subject are here and here)

The Journal of Cosmology has now posted 21 commentaries on the “Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites” paper by Richard Hoover that I have critiqued in my “Life from Beyond Earth on a Meteorite, or Pareidolia?” post.

The majority are uncritical (some don’t even seem to have read the actual paper), and zoom off on tangents assuming the Hoover’s paper is valid. Two posts are critical (commentary 5 and commentary 9), and bring up the same issue I do (but with more references), that abiotic minerals can imitate the shapes of bacteria, and that without further tests, there is no way to say these filaments are fossils of any sort.

As for the majority, well, largely I think they are sad. The near complete absence of any critical engagement with the paper is very telling, and there is much leaping to unsupported conclusions. I would dearly love for extra-terrestrial life to be found, but I’m not going to grasp at epsonite straws to pretend it’s been found. Hoover’s flawed paper is not evidence of extra-terrestrial life.

Oh, and the journal has added a long rant to before the main article:

Have the Terrorist(sic) Won? Only a few crackpots and charlatans have denounced the Hoover study. NASA’s chief scientist was charged with unprofessional conduct for lying publicly about the Journal of Cosmology and the Hoover paper. The same crackpots, self-promoters, liars, and failures, are quoted repeatedly in the media. However, where is the evidence the Hoover study is not accurate?

Few legitimate scientists have come forward to contest Hoover’s findings. Why is that? Because the evidence is solid. But why have so few scientist come forward to attest to the validity? The answer is: They are afraid. They are terrified. And for good reason.

Apparently I am a crackpot and charlatan (sighs expressively), at least I’m in good company with Phil Plait, PZ Myers and Rosie Redfield (and really, read commentary #9 carefully).

Fossils of life or inorganic fibers? Image of alleged “microfossils” from “Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus Richard B. Hoover Journal of Cosmology, 2011, Vol 13, xxx.

A recent paper published in the Journal of Cosmology has claimed to have discovered evidence of fossil bacteria in a rare subclass of carbonaceous meteorite. The implications of this paper, should it be correct, are enormous and the blogosphere has gone into overdrive discussing it. There are interesting analyses by the Bad Astronomer, PZ Myers and Rosie Redfield.

Rosie Redmond’s analysis is more detailed (and Rosie being the microbiologist who burst the “Arsenic Bacteria” bubble, knows she her stuff), but all posts quickly get to the heart of the matter; the “evidence” is a bunch of squiggly stuff that bears little resemblance to actual bacterial fossils unless you obscure the details by rescaling the images.

(scroll down for an update)

(This follows on from my article on the recent Astrology kerfuffle and was written (but not used) in 2005 for Australian Sky and Space. The positions are correct for 2005, but Mars has obviously moved by now)

Even though the Sun passes through the classical constellation Ophiuchus, it is not included in the astrological zodiac. Also Cetus, where several planets can spend some time, is excluded (most recently Mars was briefly in Cetus). As well, Pluto wanders a bit further from the Zodiac than the others due to its high eccentricity, but the constellations it wanders into are excluded from the astrological zodiac. And what about asteroids, Kuiper belt objects and Plutinos? Astrologers are divided over whether to include them in charts, and although you can find astrological predictions on the internet that do include these objects, your average horoscopes exclude them. And what about space probes? Size and mass is no obstacle to astrological relevance, surely these messengers of human curiosity and hope should be included? Sadly, they are not.

I think it is a great shame that these constellations and objects are excluded from western horoscopes, they would be far more colourful than the wishy-washy current versions that suggest that Mars may be making you a little more aggressive. So I have written the kind of horoscope I would like to see.

The Sun in the constellation Ophiuchus on December 12, contary to coomets of some astrologers.

A recent article by astronomer Parke Kunkle has had the twitterverse and astrologers in an uproar by pointing out that Sun no longer enters the constellations associated with the zodiac due to precession of the equinoxes.

Now, readers of the Panda’s Thumb might wonder why a kerfuffle about a pseudoscience like astrology warrants attention on a blog devoted to evolution. However, there is a parallel between how astrologers respond to criticism and how anti-evolutionists respond to criticism. So you might find it interesting (oh, and yes, astrology is rubbish).

Einstein rings, a spectacular prediction of relativity, taken from Hubble (Image credit Hubble/NASA)

You may remember a little while back I wrote about a conference of modern Geocentrism (Galileo was Wrong). Geocentrism is the belief that Earth is the centre of the Solar system, nay the entire Universe and everything revolves around it.

Todd Wood attended the conference, and you can read the about his growing sense of incredulity in his posts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5).

It turns out that these folks are relativity deniers.

There’s been a lot of blank disbelief on the blogosphere of late, due to the announcement of a conference on Geocentrism (Galileo was Wrong). Geocentrism is the belief that Earth is the centre of the Universe and everything revolves around it. You would think that, 400+ years after Galileo, people would have cottoned on the the idea that the Earth orbits the sun, the sun orbits the galactic centre and the Milky Way galaxy does … well …complicated stuff with other galaxies, but basically we worked out long ago that the Earth is not the centre of the solar system, let alone the Universe.

Other people, especially Ethan at Starts with a Bang and the Bad Astronomer, have dealt with the technical details (and I have an earlier discussion here and here). My goal is to get you, the ordinary person on the Clapham omnibus (or in my case, the Outer Harbour train, where I am writing this), to try and demonstrate the Earth is heliocentric for yourself and to do so with common household materials. After all, science is at heart a practical endeavour, and non-professionals should be able to find the evidence for themselves.

As everybody should be aware by now, Denyse O’Leary is offering a prize for the original code for Dawkins’ Weasel program which illustrates cumulative selection [1]. O’Leary’s offer arises from people challenging Dembski’s misrepresentation of the Weasel program, as he has misrepresented it yet again in a trivial non-id paper. To get some much needed perspective, read Joe Felsenstein’s excellent article (and its follow-up) and those of Chris Mark Chu Carroll (here and here)

Seriously, arguing over whether Dawkins “weasel” program implements locking is a bit like arguing over whether the measuring cylinder in the Measuring Cylinder/Tap model of drug clearance is emptied by a tube or a bloke with a cup. Both are simplified systems that make demonstrating a concept easy, and do much the same thing.

The point is that a leading light of the cdesignproponentsits has spent an enormous amount of time critiquing a toy demonstration of selection, and can’t even get the toy example right. Not only that, they can’t admit when they were wrong. Heck, no one in the cdesign proponetsists can admit Dembski is wrong about a toy program, even when presented with video evidence.

Let’s emphasise this again. It’s a non-issue except for the way it highlights the determined cluelessness of cdesign proponetsists. To use the metaphor of the Measuring Cylinder/Tap model of drug clearance again, Dembski is effectively arguing that Dawkins said the measuring cylinder is emptied by a man with a cup in his book, but anyone can go to Dawkins original book, read how he set it up, and understand that Dawkins specified a tube. Dawkins doesn’t specify how big the tube, or the flow rate of the tap, but it’s sort of obvious and you can easily make an analogous system which demonstrates the same things that Dawkins does. Everyone understands except Dembski who then makes a convoluted argument over the whole thing (see www.evoinfo.org and read their “explanation” of Dawkins program if you have a spare half-hour of your life you don’t mind wasting).

Now there is a video showing a measuring cylinder with a tube (metaphorically, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sUQIpFajsg (go to 6:15) for the real video showing the weasel program), Dembski goes “oh, Dawkins must have REALLY have used a cup in his book, then swapped to a tube for the video”. Aside from the convoluted mentality involved in this staggering piece of “reasoning”, it goes to the heart of the cdesign proponentists reliability.

When Dembski claims that Lenski et al., have “smuggled in information”, explaining why they are wrong can get quite technical, but when they claim Dawkins has “smuggled in information”, one can simply point to how deeply they have misunderstood Dawkins model, and if they can’t get Dawkins right (after being told repeatedly, having it explicitly demonstrated to them and being shown a video), what hope is there that they got Lenski right.

For more information on Dembski’s denial of the video evidence, see Dembski Weasels Out, for a wide compendium of Weasel programs old and new, including head to head comparisons of Dawkins version vs Demski’s locking version see Weasels on Parade (note it took over 23 days for the Uncommon Descent people to come up with any programs themselves). To see where I completely reconstruct the output shown in Dawkins book, see here.

[1] Why doesn’t O’Leary just ask Dawkins? The whole concept of running a competition to get Dawkins code instead of asking Dawkins is rather bizarre. While he may not have the original code, he can tell her how he did it.[2] [2] People have asked Dawkins before. It no longer exists. Just like the AppleBasic programs I wrote to calculate stimulation-induced radioactive outflow for our laboratory. Used for years but vanished into the mists of time. Seriously, even if there was a disk around with AppleBasic finding a machine to run it and make copies would be an adventure in itself.

Over at Uncommon Descent Dr. Dembski has replied to commentators who pointed out he misrepresented climate science, especially his claim that in the 70’s

The scare back then was global cooling!

In response, Dr. Dembski quotes an article which proves he did misrepresent climate science. If that’s not enough, he goes on to make stuff up.

Dear Dr. Dembski, in your recent post on Uncommon Descent “H.L. Mecken on the urge to save humanity”, you quote approvingly from an article at the Investors Business Daily.

A new scientific paper [McLean, de Freitas, and Carter, 2009] says that man has had little or nothing to do with global temperature variations.…..Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that nature, not man, has been the dominant force in climate change in the late 20^th century.

As a mathematician Dr. Dembski, you will certainly be able to effortlessly analyse the McLean, de Freitas, and Carter, 2009 paper (the full paper can be found here).

Your challenge, Dr. Dembski, is to show exactly how this paper supports the statements in the Investor Business Daily article. Please pay particular attention to the smoothing and bandpass filtering analysis in your explanation. Oh, and you may also like to explain why the lead author John McLean states:

The paper by McLean et al (JGR, 2009) does not analyse trends in mean global temperature (MGT); rather, it examines the extent to which ENSO accounts for variation in MGT.

and what his statement means for the Investors Business Daily piece. You may also wish to consult these articles at Open Mind, Only in it for the Gold and More Grumbine Science, which do an in-depth analysis of the paper.

Given your interest in the role of science in policy decisions, this challenge is a valuable opportunity for you to use your expertise to show how this paper refutes many decades of climate research.

Fellows of the Discovery Institute seem to be over represented in fringe groups, Paul Nelson is a Young Earth Creationist, the Godfather of Intelligent Design Phillip Johnson and DI fellow Jonathan C. Wells have signed on to AIDS denial and Guillermo Gonzalez has signed on to a climate change denialist list.

Topically, given the debate about science communication that has been happening in the wake of of “Unscientific America”, in a recent article William Dembski dives into the whole Global Warming Denialism thing [1].

Ironically, at that same time in the 1970s, scientists were concerned not that the earth was warming but that it was cooling. The scare back then was global cooling!

Unfortunately for Dr. Dembski, this is a complete myth. There was no global cooling scare in the 70’s. While this is an indication of the level of fact checking involved in the article, more important is the subtext in this article, which makes more clear than ever the real concern of the Intelligent Design movement.

And this is the naked, unadulterated envy (and fear) of the power of scientists.

William Dembski and Robert Marks have written a paper. No it won’t be going in the peer reviewed literature, but into another of Dembski’s anthologies. Mark C. Chu-Carroll of Good Math, Bad Math explains what is mind-bogglingly wrong with it here and here.

I’ve been thinking about comets a lot lately, trying to image C/2009 G1, reading “The Hunt for Planet X”, wondering why Galileo was so wrong about them and recently reading a Young Earth creationist blog post on them. The latter referred to a very interesting pre-publication article. And I’d like to discuss this article, as this illuminates not only the origins of comets but also how science is done.

Image Credit ESO (click to embiggen).

The Gliese 581 system delivers again. Giese 581 is a red dwarf star 20.4 light years away that until recently boasted the lightest extrasolar planet ever found. At 5 Earth masses, Gliese 581c was not exactly a second Earth, but it and 7 Earth mass Gliese 581d captured the worlds imagination as they seemed to be in the habitable zone of their parent star, where liquid water can exist.

Now the smallest mass planet ever has been discovered around Gliese 581, a 1.9 mass planet Gliese 581e, presumably rocky, that screams around Gliese 581 in a little over three days. At a mere 0.03 Astronomical Units from its star, Gliese 581e is a Mercury-like world, baking in the close embrace of the Red Dwarf.

Over at Todd Woods blog about a month ago you could have found this interesting (and unintentionally amusing) statement.

“Anyone who knows me at all knows that I break down creationist biology into four main components: design, natural evil, systematics, speciation, and biogeography.”

This automatically channels the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch “Amongst our weapons are …” Anyway, he fixed the numeric discrepancy (without acknowledging the blogosphere who pointed it out), but minor typographical errors are not the reason biologists laugh at creationists [1]. The reason we laugh at them is they are so gormless about biology.

It is now 62 hours since William Dembski posted that the Evolutionary Informatics lab was going to try and reproduce Dawkins Weasel Program according to how it was actually written, as opposed to their fantasy version. In that time I’ve resurrected an elderly program, and several readers have made their own weasels from scratch. Commenter Anders has even made a Python version that puts “freely mutating” and “locking versions” head to head with great graphs. (Update: Wes Elsberry did a head to head comparison last year, see here for his comparison [scroll down], it differs from my implementation but the basic message is the same).

I’ve gone back and done a head to head comparison myself between a program with no “locking” (all letters in any given string have a chance to be mutated) and one with “locking” (where the matching letters are preserved against mutation). Trying to implement “locking” al la Dembski proved too hard. You have to keep indices of the letter locations and keep updating them. It is such a pain in the bottom to try and do this that I cannot imagine Dawkins even wanting to try and program a “Locking” implementation in GBASIC. Remember, Dawkins weasel was a quick and dirty program bashed out in a short time. To implement “locking” I just kept a copy of the parent string unmutated (after all, in the real world not every offspring has mutations in genes of interest).

So what happened?

Over at uncommon descent William Dembski is musing over Richard Dawkins Weasel program. Why you may ask? Way back in prehistory (the 1980’s) Dawkins wrote a little BASIC program (in Apple BASIC of all things) to demonstrate the difference between random mutation and random mutation with selection, which many people were having trouble grasping. Now, this wasn’t a simulation of natural selection, and Dawkins was very careful to point this out.

But as a demonstration of selection versus simple random mutation, with the string “methinks it is a weasel” being selected in a matter of minutes, when simple random mutation would take longer than the age of the Universe, it was pretty stunning. As a result, creationists have been having conniption fits over this little program for decades. Such is its power, the Issac Newton of Information Theory, William Dembski, spent a not inconsiderable portion of his time attacking this toy program. In particular, he claimed that after every successful mutation, the successful mutation was locked into place, and couldn’t be reversed. But he was wrong, and it seems he just can’t admit it.

I’ve never heard of the Journal “Politics and the Life Sciences”, but it is quite eclectic. Recent articles include ,Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Barriers to SCHIP enrollment, Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Eisenhower’s 1955 heart attack and Organ trading in Jordan.

In September 2008, they they significantly broadened their eclecticism by publishing book reviews by Intelligent Design proponents. Of interest to me, they published a review by philosopher and dedicated anti-materialist Angus J. L. Menuge of “Why Intelligent Design Fails”. I’m interested of course, because I have a chapter in this book.

Now, why they would publish a review of a book published four years ago is not clear, but at least they could have got a reviewer who actually read the book.