David Hume, I pencil, Markets, and Intelligence.

All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man...

 One should logically draw this conclusion. The author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man. Somehow about the time Darwin looked behind the curtain and determined  that the author of nature is nothing more than compounded dumb luck, blind chance distilled into the miraculous, where life cheats at thermodynamics and only collects on the winning bets and forgets it even made the losing ones. That design is the product evolution by natural selection sufficed to give cause for forgetting these previous conclusions. Why should we accept a logical conclusion of the sort that "the author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man"? When we know full well how the author of nature writes? Sure we don't have a flipping clue how the mind of man works, but certainly we can be justified to ignore the logical arguments above out of hand, without explaining it. After all when one considers the amazing nature of  human minds, it ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. And equivalences somehow only go one way, to say that the author of nature is similar to the mind of man, certainly it true but to be disregarded because we now have Darwin to explain the authorship of nature. And why should anybody bother taking that one tiny extra step of saying that perhaps the mind of man is somewhat similar to Darwinian evolution? -- I would argue that they should because it explains the vast majority deep mysteries about intelligence. But that's just me.

There was a somewhat influential essay within Economics, which some are coming to understand  is Darwinian in nature, called I Pencil. Which argues, that the markets are such that nobody really knows how to make a pencil. That we cannot fathom how trees are made and so we conclude that it must be God. Only God can make a tree. But, nobody really knows how to make pencils. We know they are wood, graphite and brass (now aluminum for the ferrule) but who knows how to mine graphite, who knows how to make the mining equipment, who knows how to drill for oil to power the equipment, who knows how to make the lighthouse for the shipments of tin, or to power the saws. The division of labor by the markets is so profound that nobody really knows all the steps. You could set no person on a massive island filled with resources for the taking and have them make a pencil, because nobody knows how to do it.

There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.

Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

 That evolution plays a distinctive role is nothing new, to economics. It's gaining some steam but isn't a rather widely understood point. Evolution is decentralized and doesn't require that particular part know the whole. It's just not needed. And though, Read here seems to suggest that God is behind the invisible hand rather than the same blind watchmaker behind the tree. And also concludes his essay with a presumption of laissez faire faith.

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed.

Neglecting that the blind watchmaker does better for humans when humans gum up the works. Everything in nature is on a knife's edge. Nature's red in tooth and claw. And filled from the foot fungus to head lice with parasites. We shouldn't have faith in the markets, we should recognize that they are the single most powerful economic tool we have but are far better off domesticated than dominating.

In any event, the invisible hand of the markets, the blind watchmaker, the homunculi that live in the pituitary gland are really just different sides of the same process. A decentralized process that doesn't require knowing anything to know everything, to design without understanding, to arrange without forethought, to create without a creator. Is it any wonder that religious people the world over have been saying intelligence is behind the designs of nature? Darwinian evolution looks exactly like intelligence, because intelligence is likely the same process at its core. Intelligent design is trying to replace the cranes (in the Dennett sense) of evolution with the skyhooks behind intelligence often wrongly attributed to God, but really if one takes the arguments seriously, the universal acid of evolution flows the other way. It doesn't save God from the clutches of evolution, it allows the universal acid of the explanatory power of evolution to explain away that meek idol of that He who made the lamb made thee. It ends up splashing acid in the face of God. Because yes, you can argue for intelligent design in nature, but the intelligence, like all intelligence, is just another face of Darwin. The illusion of design, and the thoughts of intelligence behind nature, which even Darwin noted tend to come and go, are the other side of the same coin.

Within research into intelligence, we haven't produced anything even remotely intelligent and fail to produce anything, there is an utter lack of something we could confuse for intelligence. Within biology we have gobs of intelligence, it's all over the place infecting ever facet of what biologists do, and a seeming effort to call it an illusion of design, a mirage of intelligence. On one side of intelligence, we have no intelligence and deeply want something we could confuse for intelligence and no understandable processes and on the evolution side, we have lots of intelligence and a process we understand and all the while deep in the vaults of human intellectual history we have valid arguments which say these are the same thing. It was a mistake to disregard the equivalence of the Author of Nature with the contrivances of human minds, just because Darwin fully explained nature. We should have, at the time, and in the years since, realized that Darwin also explained human minds. It isn't that intelligence in nature is an illusion or that the design is a mirage, it really is there. It's actually completely really deeply and truly a part of nature. God is the illusion. We see the intelligence in the essence of nature and claim that it must belong to somebody, but that's just not the way it works. You can worship the Author of Nature as God, the Intelligent Designer as a divine being, but really if you look behind the curtain you'll find that you're just worshiping what Darwin so aptly described. But "It's intelligent!" one  might insist, rightfully I concede, but that's not a contradiction. Darwin's process is behind that curtain as well. Intelligent Design doesn't save God from evolution, it meekly attempts to call evolution God. Somehow I don't think that even theists who find Paul Tillich's God (a theism as close to atheism as twilight is to night) palatable could manage to swallow that bitter idolatry when properly unmasked.

Properly, the argument for design has been touted as the greatest argument for God ever devised, but really, when you get down to the core, and a dollop of universal acid is splashed on it. We find that much of theological effort, has been, over the years, engaged in worshiping Darwinian Evolution. Insisting on the false distinction that because it's intelligent, it can't be evolution.

Watching Expelled, prepairing for underwhelmity.

Expelled Exposed.

Intro with spiced up prison camps.

Freedom is great, freedom makes us great, but what if we didn't have freedom?

We are losing our freedoms in science!

Creationists does something stupid, gets canned. (I expect this shall be a theme)

Shermer things "something else going on". -- Yup. Apparently he published the paper faking the peer review himself and was lambasted for not going through proper channels and for completely abusing his authority.

Another creationist starts teaching creationism and is not invited back to work more for the university. -- Zounds.

Doctor says evolution is false. -- Internet is mean to him.

Mark sets ups a fake lab at Baylor and it gets shut down. Baylor, though a Baptist university, is actually pretty good. Although, they recently fired the president and decided to go way more stupid. So any diplomas pre-2008 are probably legit.

Astronomer doesn't get tenure. Um. Nobody guarantees you tenure and I think ID would be a pretty good reason to deny you. Look how screwed over Behe tenure at Lehigh worked out. He doesn't publish papers anymore and he's a complete embarrassment. Lehigh is a good school but in my mind I associate it with stupidity.

"We don't want people to be taught that the earth is flat or that the holocaust never happened." -- Um, irony of irony, this movie got condemned by the Anti-Defamation league for holocaust denial. I haven't yet been confronted with this part of the film, so I suspect it is going to get much worse.

Ben Stein is lost... still lost.
He found it.

He talks with the Discovery Institute then a Bible college and then a bunch of religious points. They are suppose to keep up this front.

Evolution:Intelligent Design::Newtonian Physics:Einsteinian Physics... ? Really? Somebody needs to read Isaac Asimov's Relativity of Wrong to get the basic idea of how science works. Sure you can evolve but how does evolution do design? Wow that's pretty dumb.

It isn't going to be settled by the numbers but by the evidence and the arguments. If ID had any of those, they'd be set!

Now Ben's in France. Nothing's clear, you don't have very much math. We don't have a good idea of what a species is! -- That's true but has no bearing on evolution. I'm considerably underwhelmed here.

Dawkins is back. These clips are the only oasis in the whole thing. Though Dawkins atheism is fairly different than his evolution belief. There's certainly a relationship there, but it's pretty unrelated.

First cell? -- What long before that it works fine even in the RNA world.

No explanation for abiogenesis. Claims Miller's experiments were wrong. Popular theory is crystals! He's not joking because that's actually a really good theory. What the hell?

Ben Stein's Money joke...

250 proteins so it's math wise inconceivable. That's not possible! The problem with every last thing that says anything remotely close to this is that we don't actually know what the very minimal would be and we get evolution kicking in pretty early making all the future odds non-existent (once evolution kicks in the odds are ~1 that you get something, moreso considering it already happened).

Directed panspermia? That's mostly in jest and simply outsources the problem. Though if 4 billion years isn't enough we can use most of the 13.7 billion years to do whatever we need. Though, 2 billion seems more than enough.

A gigabyte. Zounds. I could put my genetic code on my thumbdrive. Oh the humanity!

I'm lost. I'm not even sure what I'm suppose to be impressed with.

Hey, it's that stolen Harvard animation that ERV talked so much about. Making for one of the few good bits in this entire production. Ouch, they changed it a lot. This is actually way worse in places. The Harvard animation was better.

Where do you get information from? Isn't that a question for computer scientists. Hey, I'm one of those and have an okay understanding of information theory. Let me explain. SDFKDSfioasdfoijsdfjasd2-289023d8923di2klj2kl;3dmkmndalksdfds -- That's more information than pretty much anything else I've typed here. Any mutation would produce information just as there is more information in the TV static than their is in the TV show. Evolution largely works to parse this information and isolate via natural selection any little bit that lucks into creating an organism marginally better than it's cousins. What? They are still harping on this crap?

OH SWEET SPAGHETTI MONSTER! I'm ONLY HALF WAY THROUGH!!! ARG!!! -- I'm burnt out about now. I'll try some more a bit later.

Well I'm stumped. Evolution must be a lie.

One of the many knowledgeable replies to NOVA Judgment Day was as follows:

If evolution were true and man "evolved" from apes, why do we have apes and monkeys co-existing with man? Why have the apes not all turned into humans?

Well I'm stumped. That seems to be such a strong argument that I can't refute it. I'll continue to believe in evolution on faith because this argument has clearly destroyed any reasonable basis I could have had for evolution.

If you're a creationist or an intelligent design proponent or perhaps even an cdesign proponentsists, you should use this argument as often and as loudly as possible.

Micro-geology.

In my odd exploits on the web, I run into the craziest theories. One of the comments on some front page, referenced via ERV, via the main page of the subpage she noted (on the topic of Judgment Day (Nova program)), was this nifty little ID article about how Darwinists tend to reference natural bridges as evidence against the idea of ID. Namely that you can create things which cannot, in fact, be built from the ground up like natural arches. The point to which is the suggestion that though this analogy completely destroys their case they should still insist that it means that a designer exists and also to counter with some pathetic argument about how the original bridge material was naturally deposited in the first place. A point which misses the point and is obvious in the first place.

In any event, the first comment to this post offers up a new theory of micro-geology. Just like one can divide up evolution into micro and macro evolution and suggest that though there's tons of evidence for them there is some difference and thus suggesting a different mechanism. Even though it's the same thing for longer. "I can see the logic of one small step in a short amount of time. But, many steps over a long period of time? YOU MUST BE KIDDING!"

Mainstream science insists that all of the geological structures we see today have come about by a combination of purely natural materialistic processes such as erosion, deposition, volcanism, tectonic movement and other such concepts. I do not think anybody can dispute that these processes exist, but can they account for every single structure known to science?

To answer the question, yes those processes exist... yes they account for every single structure known to geology.

I accept that these forces can subtly change geographical features in the same way that micro-evolution can subtly change the form of sucsessive generations of a life-form, but can purely natural processes create entirely novel structures, indeed has it been shown that every known geological structure has a natural origin?

Yes. Though, you are welcome to suggest that space aliens made the grand canyon or something, though the compelling evidence suggests long term erosion.

Of course not, and therefore it is begging the question to merely assume that only non-materialistic explainations apply to geological structures.

We have compelling theories as to how such structures formed. We understand the processes and can explain, not only how, when, where, and why the geological structures exists, but can make accurate predictions about them. Geology is one of those sciences where it's pretty much finished. There's still a lot to know, but there's no massive mysteries left. It's like chemistry where there's plenty to know but the core of the science is so rooted it's down to filling in a few blanks. (Any geologists or chemists are invited to take me to task.)

For example those who have seen the grand canyon find it outrageous that something so beautiful might have come about by these slow natural processes.

Why? Why is beauty evidence of something fast and unnatural? I've seen the grand canyon a number of times. My reaction: "Damn, that's a big canyon."

We all know that earthquakes, erosion and volcanoes (for example) are destructive process, in the same way that a genetic mutation is an act of destroying information (not creating it).

Exactly the same, in that they are not. Genetic mutation does create information in the classic sense. Most are neutral and throwaway, some are harmful and lead to a lesser heredity (for an extreme example by killing the organism) and a precious few provide an improvement and as a result are preserved. Ask yourself, if you could in any endeavor keep only those results which helped and cast off everything which didn't... would you end up better off? Now, if after more time would you end up even better off? In fact, the longer this process goes on the more and more improvements would be accrued, it doesn't take any thought, mind, brain, designer, it takes something to keep the good and cast off the not-so-good and a hell of a lot of time.

However, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that this argument of 'earthquakes are destructive and therefore can't make pretty things' is significantly stupider than the argument that mutations don't create information. In the latter the problem is just that the person making the argument is ignorant of evolution and making a breathtakingly stupid argument, whereas in the former the argument is simply sophistry, and anybody with two braincells can note that earthquakes just shake up a bunch of dirt (and/or water) and create a number of potentially beautiful results and calling them destructive is silly and based on a few thoughts by some silly apes who like to build things. Things which tend to fall down here and there. And there's another oddity, it's always the places we haven't built stuff to fall down which are "beautiful". Don't you think the world would be prettier without our buildings?

The nano-errosionists have never offered a valid explanation for how their dumb, unguided processes are able to create things of beauty.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

And that beauty is such a give-away, a clue to where we should next be looking for design. If something in nature appears to be designed, has irreducible complexity and has specified complexity then it's pretty plain to anybody other than a self-denying evolutionist that it must be a designed object.

Specified complexity? When you make up something and get laughed out of the park, you shouldn't pretend it still works. Yeah, the problem is, nothing about geology seems designed. Really, for the most part, it's a bunch of dirt. Some parts are rather big, other parts are pretty neat looking, but when you look at the wings of a butterfly there is at least something that goes off in your head which says... pay attention to that... that is a good design.

I am reminded of Paley's argument. When you are walking and see a stone, you think to yourself that could have been there forever. However, when you are walking and see rather than a stone, a stone. The same argument doesn't apply. What is the difference between a stone and a stone. Why could one have simply formed by natural processes and the other one be clearly indicative of a designer. -- Wait, the argument seems to have developed another problem, though I can't quite put my finger on it.

Remember, the famous scientists at SETI use techniques comparable to ID's to detect design in radio signals. Why should we be afraid to do this for our planet?

Nobody is afraid of looking for the design in things. We just don't like idiots looking at things we have a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation for and screaming "GOD DID IT!" -- It's annoying and adds exactly nothing to our understanding of things. Also, it isn't an argument for anything it's a conclusion pulled out of your ass. What is this God thing? And why do you thing this thing is explained by such a thing?

cdesign proponentsists

In the Dover case on intelligent design, one of the stunning bits of evidence was in an early transcript of On Pandas and People just after creationism was booted out by Supreme Court where every reference to Creationism was promptly find+replace into intelligent design and "creationists" into "design proponents". One of the references was replaced rather wrongly resulting in "cdesign proponentsists" -- a rare transitional form.

“Evolutionists think the former is correct, cdesign proponentsists accept the latter view.”

However, where are the transitional forms between creationists and cdesign proponentsists? Where is the transitional form between cdesign proponentsists and design proponents?

For those of you who don't know what Intelligent Design is, it is the belief that the some life is just so complex that it must have been created by an Intelligent Designer (capitalized to show reverence to God) who might be a deity or space aliens but to stay within the law we aren't saying.

Definition: Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design - n. Fighting for God with a thesaurus. Eg. "Before Intelligent Design was invented Creationists thought a thesaurus was a dinosaur."

Ben Stein is apparently making a movie about ID.

Expelled. Wow, what rebels these Christians are, undermining science is so fighting against the man. I oddly first heard about this on Pharyngula though without a link to the movie. He had a clip.

I have another great story he should cover. I was teaching English and rather than teach I started yelling and flinging feces at them. But, those vile administrators said "No" and was pretty well driven away. Why? Why do they hate the truth?