Jay L. Wile's Blog, page 33
March 15, 2017
My Elementary Science Series Wins an Award
I wanted to share this with my readers: Practical Homeschooling has announced that my elementary series was awarded first place in the Elementary Science category of their 2017 Reader AwardsTM. My high school and and junior high school science courses have been voted #1 in their categories for many years, but this is the first time my elementary science series has received that honor!
When one homeschooling mother learned of the award, she wrote:
I just learned that your elementary science courses were voted #1 by the readers of Practical Homeschooling: well deserved! We have completed Science in the Beginning and Science in the Ancient World and are now using Science in the Scientific Revolution. The kids and I absolutely love doing the experiment with each lesson (using things I actually have around the house)! But the best thing is that my children actually remember a huge amount of what they have learned, even from two years ago, because of your understandable and informative lessons paired with the experiments. I cannot recommend your books highly enough!
I want to thank Practice Homeschooling and its readers for this honor. I am thrilled to know that my courses are making home science education easier and more enjoyable!
March 13, 2017
Chris Williams: Husband, Father, Actor, and Friend
Chris Williams, one of my Christian role models.
Towards the end of his life, Thomas Aquinas wrote a short book as a gift to the King of Cyprus. In that book, he wrote:
First of all, among all worldly things there is nothing which seems worthy to be preferred to friendship. Friendship unites good men and preserves and promotes virtue.
As the events of the past few weeks play in my mind, I can’t help but think of those wise words.
My dear friend Chris Williams went into the hospital about three weeks ago with a sudden illness, and he never got better. As his condition worsened, our prayers intensified, but the Lord did not heal him here on earth. I spent a couple of nights in the ICU with him, and when it became clear that the end was near, my wife and I went to the hospital to say goodbye. While I was there, I talked to his father at length, and I just kept thinking that this isn’t the natural order of things. Parents should not see their children die.
But it’s worse than that. Chris leaves behind a wife and two daughters, ages 10 and 15. Children shouldn’t have to grow up without a father. It’s just not right. He won’t be there to celebrate the milestones in their lives. He won’t be there to cheer them on when they need encouragement. He won’t be there to hold them when they need comfort. You can try to make sense of something like this all you want, but it doesn’t make sense. It’s just not right.
So what can be done? Well, the first thing I can do is celebrate the life that he had here on earth. Chris was an amazing man. He was incredibly talented, but utterly unassuming. He was one of my “go-to” actors in our church’s drama ministry. He was best at comedy, but he could literally play any role I gave him. His elder daughter joined him on stage a few times, and they were brilliant together. I will never forget them as father and daughter in A Drama About Grace. Despite his incredible talent, he didn’t think he was anything special as an actor. He just did it because he wanted to serve.
I think that was the key to Chris’s life. He was very successful in his career. He was an amazing actor. He was a devoted husband and father. But more than all of those things, he was a servant. He genuinely wanted to make this world a better place in which to live, and he was willing to do that one person at a time. My life was significantly better because Chris was a part of it, and I suspect that many others can say exactly the same thing. This is one of the many reasons I saw him as a Christian role model.
The second thing I can do is honor his legacy by being a servant myself, especially to his family. In the coming days, weeks, months, and years, they will have a host of struggles. I hope that I can be there to make those struggles a bit less painful.
The third thing I can do is accept this tragedy. I can’t explain it. I can’t justify it. I can’t understand how God’s master plan for the universe could include it. However, I can accept it, especially in the light of something his wife, Kim, wrote. In church yesterday, our pastor said that Kim texted him after Chris had died, and at the end of the text she wrote:
God was totally there.
After reading that text, my pastor said:
Of course. He was picking up one of His kids.
After that very sad but inspirational service, I was speaking to another friend about a play I had written. It recently won an award from a community theater organization and will be performed later on this year. It portrays former slave-ship captain John Newton near the end of his life. Chris played the lead role, a fictional assistant to famous abolitionist William Wilberforce. The character’s name is Nigel Bremley, and Chris brought him to life in a way that was better than I ever could have imagined. I told my friend that I would have loved to see Chris play that role again. My friend replied:
Think about it this way. Right now, he could be talking to John Newton, asking him what he thought of the play.
Kim’s text and the words of my friend encapsulate what makes this tragedy at least somewhat bearable. In the end, I know I will see Chris again, and I know that while we weep, he is in the arms of His Savior. I also know that in the context of eternity, the suffering that has been caused by this tragedy will hardly be remembered.
Of course, I do have to admit that I am somewhat anxious about seeing Chris in heaven. If John Newton didn’t like my play, those will be the first words out of his mouth!
March 9, 2017
One Reason It Is Hard to Change a Person’s Mind About Politics (and Science)
A scene from Her Opponent (Photo by Richard Termine)
I don’t write about politics, because I find that most political discussions produce lots of heat but very little light. However, I have decided to discuss a political “experiment” that I recently learned about because I think it relates to science. In addition, it is about a play, and since I am an amateur actor and playwright, I couldn’t resist. However, I have to warn you up front that I will mercilessly delete any comments that try to turn this into a political discussion. It is not. It is a discussion about how people react to the information they are given.
The intriguing political experiment was conceived by Dr. Maria Guadalupe, Associate Professor of Economics and Political Science at INSEAD an international business school. She wanted to know how people would react to the 2016 presidential debates if the genders of the two candidates were reversed. As a result, she decided to produce Her Opponent, a play that featured excerpts from the three presidential debates with the genders of the two candidates reversed. A male actor portrayed former Secretary of State and Senator Jonathan Gordon, while a female actress played business tycoon Brenda King.
Jonathan Gordon, of course, was the “male version” of Hillary Clinton, while Brenda King was the “female version” of Donald Trump. The actors delivered their lines verbatim from the debates, and they worked hard to use the same mannerisms, emotions, and vocal inflections as the candidates they were trying to represent. You can see a short excerpt from a rehearsal here. The audience members were given two surveys to fill out – one before seeing the play and one after seeing the play.
As New York University reports, Dr. Guadalupe and her co-producer thought they knew what the results of the surveys would be. They thought that the audience would react very negatively to Brenda King, because they thought that the kinds of things Mr. Trump said in the debates would never be tolerated coming from a woman. In the same way, they thought the audience would react positively to Jonathan Gordon, because they thought that Hillary’s tone and statements would be given more weight if they came from a man. It turns out that their expectations were wrong.
According to the surveys and the post-play discussions, those who admired Hillary Clinton did not hold the same admiration for Jonathan Gordon. In fact, one audience member found him to be “really punchable.” Similarly, those who did not like Donald Trump described Brenda King as an authority figure that you don’t really like but you know will take care of you. They also admired Brenda King’s debating technique. In then end, some who voted for one of the two candidates in the actual election said that they wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to vote for either of the two candidates from the play.
Of course, the overall analysis of the experiment’s results is focused on gender. It seems that what was considered by some to be unacceptable when it was done by Donald Trump was considered acceptable when it came from Brenda King. In the same way, what some considered calm and reasoned when it came from Hillary Clinton was considered smug and arrogant when it came from Jonathan Gordon. That may very well be true. However, I took something quite different from the results of the experiment.
In my mind, the experiment shows how the messenger can be more important than the message. In the end, we think we make our political decision based on the facts, but that might not be the case. Instead, we might make them based on how those facts have been communicated to us. From one source, the facts lead to one conclusion. From another source, those same facts might lead to a completely different conclusion. For some, the source might be the deciding factor.
I think that’s how this political experiment relates to science. Science has a huge collection of facts, and some of them just aren’t consistent with one another. One set of facts supports an evolutionary view of origins. Another set of facts supports a creationist view of origins. How do we sort through these facts and decide which view is correct? While many of us like to think that it is because we have made the most reasonable analysis of the facts, I wonder how much it has to do with who delivered those facts to us?
For example, I started my science education as an atheist. The more I learned about science, the more clear it became to me that the atheist position was not reasonable from a scientific point of view. I eventually ended up believing in a Creator God, and eventually in the God of the Bible. As I learned even more science, I ended up becoming convinced that the earth is young, so I ended up becoming a young-earth creationist. I personally think that I came to this position because I followed the data.
However, I have heard from others who started their science education as young-earth creationists and ended up becoming atheists. They are similarly convinced that they came to their position because they followed the data. How is it that I ended up “following the data” to one conclusion, and they ended up “following the data” to a precisely opposite conclusion? I don’t have the answer, but I think that perhaps this experiment can shed some light on the issue.
In the play, the audience members were presented with the same “data” that they learned from the actual presidential debates. Within the limits of what is possible, they were even presented with that data in a very similar way. However, the actual presenters were different. As a result, the way they ended up interpreting the data was different. I wonder how true that is in science as well.
Is it possible that if I could replay my life and watch it unfold, I would find that at some point, the young-earth creationist position was articulated by a messenger who I really liked? I might not have agreed with him or her at the time, but the way he or she presented the position might have resonated with me to the point that I began to look at all data through that lens. Is that why the data ended up leading me to be a young-earth creationist? Is it possible that the young-earth creationist who became an atheist later on in life had a similar experience? Did some messenger of atheism affect the way he looked at the data?
I don’t have answers to those questions. However, I think that this political “experiment” provides food for thought.
March 7, 2017
Microfossils? Maybe. Oldest? Who knows?
These tubes of iron ore MIGHT have been formed by bacteria.
(photo from the scientific paper being discussed)
The headlines are screaming the latest incredible fossil find. Science News says, “Oldest microfossils suggest life thrived on Earth about 4 billion years ago.” MSN reports, “World’s oldest microfossils found, study says.” The Washington Post writes, “Newfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on Earth.” I have learned to take most of the “science” you find in the major media outlets with a grain of salt, so I decided not to comment on this story until I read the scientific paper upon which all this fuss is based. As is usually the case, the scientific paper is not nearly as sensational as the headlines that report on it.
Let’s start with where this discovery was made. There is a geological formation in Quebec, Canada known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. It contains rocks formed from lava as well as those formed from sediments. These rocks, however, have been subjected to a lot of heat and pressure and are therefore called metamorphic rock, because the heat and pressure have transformed (metamorphosed) them from their original state. That’s important. I will come back to it later.
Extensive geological studies have concluded that this formation was once on the ocean floor and contained hydrothermal vents. There is controversy when it comes to the conventional dating of the formation, however. Radioactive dating based on the abundance of specific uranium and lead isotopes indicates that the formation is about 3.8 billion years old. However, radioactive dating based on samarium and neodymium isotopes indicate that it is 4.3 billion years old. As a nuclear chemist, I don’t think either dating method gives accurate results, so those dates mean very little to me. However, they are important to those who are committed to believing in an ancient earth. So whether or not these are the oldest microfossils isn’t really known. If one of those two conflicting ages happens to be correct (I seriously doubt it), then yes, they are the oldest.
But are they microfossils? That’s not clear, either. An example of what was found is pictured above. The structures you see are tubes made of iron oxide. They have the same basic characteristics of tubes found associated with bacteria that use iron near modern-day hydrothermal vents. However, such tubes can also be formed through strictly chemical and physical processes. The authors suggest reasons to reject a non-biological origin for the tubes, but I am skeptical. Since the rocks are metamorphic, we know they were exposed to high pressures and temperatures. Those conditions can easily transform the chemicals found in the rocks into structures that look just like those tubes, with no help from bacteria.
Of course, there were other finds as well. The authors of the study found several structures that are consistent with the rotting of organic matter, but once again, those same structures can be formed without organic matter as well. In the end, this find reminds me a lot of the famous Mars meteorite from 1996. In case you don’t remember, the meteorite contains several structures that are known to be produced by living organisms. Thus, this meteorite was considered strong evidence for the idea that life once existed on Mars. Over the course of time, however, it was decided that all of those structures had been produced by non-biological processes. This current situation is very similar. At this time, there is simply no way to know for certain whether the “fossils” in this study are of biological or non-biological origin.
But let’s suppose they are fossils, and let’s suppose they really are somewhere between 3.8 and 4.3 billion years old. If so, then the case for the naturalistic origin of life just got weaker. After all, even the simplest bacterium is incredibly complex. Thus, if natural processes are required to produce a bacterium, it’s going to take a lot of time for all the random events necessary to produce such complexity to occur in just the right order and under just the right conditions. Since conventional wisdom states that the earth is 4.6 billion years old, those random events have less than 800 million years to happen. That’s not long, given what has to be accomplished.
However, it might be even worse than that. Geological structures were recently found in Greenland that were interpreted to be stromatolites, and they are supposed to be 3.7 billion years old. Stromatolites are formed by bacteria, but the bacteria associated with stromatolites are quite different from the bacteria that supposedly made the microfossils in Canada. So if the accepted ages and microfossils in both Canada and Greenland are real, then life not only had to originate less than 800 million years after earth formed, but it also had to diversify to the point where there were different kinds of bacteria in less than 900 million years. That kind of timescale is incredibly hard to reconcile with the myriad of “lucky coincidences” required for the emergence and diversification of bacteria!
Evolutionists are fond of waving the “magic wand” of time around, confidently stating that given enough time, lots of very unlikely events can occur in the order necessary to produce what we see today. As we learn more and more about the fossil record, however, that magic wand is becoming less and less powerful!
March 2, 2017
Junk DNA and Evolution
Does evolution depend on a lot of junk DNA?
In my previous post, I reviewed the book Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies. At the end of the review, I mentioned that the book suggested a conclusion for the famous ENCODE experiments that I had never considered. In case you are unaware, ENCODE is an international collaboration of scientists who want to find out exactly how much of the human genome is actually used by the human body. In 2012, they made the startling announcement that more than 80% of the human genome has at least one biochemical function. This flatly contradicts the evolution-inspired notion that the vast majority (up to 98%) of the human genome is composed of “junk DNA” and is not used for any purpose. Evolutionists have generally dealt with ENCODE’s conclusion in one of two ways. Some say that ENCODE’s definition of “function” is too broad, so what they call “functional DNA” is not really functional. Thus, the vast majority of human DNA is still “junk.” Others suggest that the concept of “junk DNA” isn’t vital to evolution to begin with, so ENCODE’s results (correct or incorrect) do not really relate to evolution.I have always considered that those in the latter group have a very weak case. As Dr. John Sanford demonstrated a while ago, the “gold standard” digital simulation of evolution (Avida), requires at least 85% of the starting genome to be junk in order to produce any significant evolution. However, while reading Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies, I learned about another argument against the idea that evolution doesn’t depend on junk DNA. It comes from evolutionist Dr. Dan Graur, who says quite plainly:
If ENCODE is right, evolution is wrong. (p. 234 of Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies)
Even though I am a creationist, I would never make such a strong statement, but Dr. Graur thinks it is obvious. Why? According to Chapter 13 of Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies, it’s because each generation suffers from genetic mutation. In order for natural selection to “weed out” most of the deleterious mutations, each generation needs a certain number of individuals from which natural selection can choose. The more possible deleterious mutations, the more individuals natural selection needs in each generation.
Now, if the vast majority of the human genome is junk, then the vast majority of mutations are not deleterious, because they occur in the unused, junk portion of the genome. As a result, we don’t need to produce many offspring in order to give natural selection enough choices so it can keep most of the deleterious mutations out of the gene pool. However, if the vast majority of the genome is functional, then there are a lot of deleterious mutations, so we need to have more offspring to give natural selection what it needs to weed them out. According to Graur, if ENCODE is right, each person needs to have 3×1019-5×1035 children in order to keep those deleterious mutations from piling up in each generation. Obviously, that’s not possible, so if ENCODE is right, evolution is wrong.
Of course, as a creationist, I like Dr. Graur’s conclusion. Indeed, it fits in very well with Dr. John Sanford’s view that the human genome can only be thousands of years old specifically because natural selection cannot weed out the deleterious mutations. However, I am willing to consider a third option. Perhaps Dr. Graur is wrong. Perhaps the human genome is more resilient than he thinks. Unfortunately, I really don’t know. As I said, I hadn’t previously heard Dr. Graur’s argument. I have since read about the concept on which it is based (mutational load), and his calculations seem correct. However, I really doubt that I understand the details well enough to spot any serious errors.
I am wondering if any of you have heard this argument before. If so, what do you think about it?
February 27, 2017
Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies
The cover of the book
(click for Amazon entry)
The purpose of Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies is to explore how naturalism overtook science and how that error can be corrected. The book is actually a compilation of the proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism. As such, it is really a collection of essays written by multiple authors. Some of the authors deal with the problem of naturalism’s infection of science, others discuss how scientists can build alternatives to naturalism, and others make suggestions for how non-naturalistic causes can be used to guide research in certain fields.
But wait a minute. Science is about studying the natural world – doing repeatable experiments and coming up with conclusions that apply uniformly throughout nature. Doesn’t anything supernatural work against that? After all, if miracles can occur, doesn’t that mean I can’t trust my experiments? Couldn’t any result I get in the lab be the work of a capricious demon? Of course not, and the author of the second contribution to this book (Tom Gilson), gives us the obvious reason why.
He begins by using a quote from famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane:
My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. (p. 39)
As Gilson points out, this is not atheistic thinking at all. Indeed, any Christian would make that same exact assumption. Why? Because miracles are very rare, and in the Christian worldview, they are done for specific purposes. Thus, a Christian would never think of any supernatural interference in his or her experiments. As Gilson states:
The occasional, infrequent miracle does nothing to upset the scientific method. Scientists routinely encounter anomalous data, and they have a routine for what to do: either re-run the experiment, cast out the data point as a statistical outlier, or otherwise pick up and start over again. This is not an unusual practice in science. (p. 43)
As someone who has done a lot of original scientific research, I can attest that this happens all the time. Indeed, when we had unexplained noise in our experimental systems, my atheist Ph.D. adviser would call the noise “demons,” because usually, when we finally got rid of the noise, we had no idea how we did it. As nuclear chemists, we are trained to spot anomalies, and they generally don’t interfere with our conclusions. As Gilson says, the key to science is regularism. Science expects the universe to behave with reliable regularity, and there is nothing in Christianity that would say otherwise. Indeed, some have made the case that the Christian worldview is what gave us the expectation of regularism in science.
But how can we incorporate the supernatural into science? That’s what most of the authors discuss. While there are many reasonable suggestions, I think James D. Johansen‘s is probably the best. Indeed, it is the way I think some really good science has already been done. He calls his method “applied theology.” Essentially, he says that the scientist can use theological ideas (or presumably any ideas that come from a supernatural viewpoint) to come up with hypotheses, and then those hypotheses can be tested by observation or experiment. If the hypotheses are consistent with the data, then the theologically-inspired idea has some scientific merit. This is the way Copernicus came up with his view of the heavens, and it is even the way some modern scientists have come up with their hypotheses.
Consider, for example, Russell Humphreys’s work on planetary magnetic fields. He took a statement from Scripture (2Peter 3:5) and used it to come up with a model of how God might have supernaturally created the planets. He then used that model to predict the magnetic fields of each planet. His model was successful for the magnetic fields that had already been measured, but those of Neptune and Uranus weren’t known at that time. Later on, they were measured, and his predictions were consistent with the data. That same model was used to predict how a recent measurement of Mercury’s magnetic field would compare to the previous measurement. Once again, his prediction was accurate.
It seems to me that this is a perfect example of how science can incorporate the supernatural. While the model itself depends on a miracle, the natural results of that miracle can be tested. In other words, while science cannot explain miracles, it can (at least on some occasions) test whether or not those miracles actually occurred.
As I said previously, some of the authors make suggestions for how non-naturalistic causes can be used to guide specific fields. The first applies to computer science, the second to linguistics, and the third to psychology. While those were interesting, I found the fourth to be very intriguing, mostly for introducing a conclusion from the famous ENCODE experiments that I had never before considered. I will discuss that in a later blog post.
For now, I would like to suggest that anyone doing scientific research or planning to do scientific research should read this book. It will provide a lot of valuable guidance on how to do your research in a way that is unfettered by artificial constraints.
February 20, 2017
The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ
The cover of Andrew Klavan’s book (click for Amazon entry)
In a previous post, I discussed Andrew Klavan’s conversion story and mentioned that he had written a book about it. I said I would read and review it when I had the chance. I read it a few weeks ago, but the book requires quite a bit of reflection to review, so I have only now come to the point where I can actually write my thoughts about it. It’s not that the book is hard to understand. It’s that the book is a real mixed bag.First, let me say that Mr. Klavan is a masterful writer. When you sit back and think about the way that he is expressing his thoughts, you realize what an artist he is with words. However, what he says varies from shamefully self-indulgent to amazingly profound. There were times I got so annoyed with the self-indulgence that I nearly put the book away, but his flashes of brilliance kept me going. He says that his first draft was nearly twice as long as the final copy and that his wife helped him clean it up. I am glad she did, because I don’t think that his flashes of brilliance would have gotten me through nearly twice as many pages!
Now don’t get me wrong. I really am glad that I read the book, and I think that lots of people should read it. I am just warning you that there are times you will roll your eyes and think, “Please don’t give me another detailed account of another memory.” Of course, I understand the problem. He’s telling you about how he made the dramatic change from a Jewish person who didn’t believe in God to a Jewish person who started following God’s Son. That’s a remarkable change, and it requires a lot of backstory. I just think Mr. Kalvan gives you too much backstory. However, dealing with the backstory is well worth it, because the overall story is both compelling and important.
After a brief introduction, Klavan discusses his childhood. Both his mother and his father were Jewish, but he actually describes his mother as anti-semitic. She was a Jew who hated Jews and wanted to be anything else but a Jew. His father, on the other hand, was very serious about his Jewish heritage and wanted his sons to be as well. However, as Klavan says, that presented a problem:
My father wanted us, his sons, to know our own people. He wanted us to take their history seriously. He didn’t want us to leave our heritage behind. Which was fair enough, in theory. But in practice, there was a problem…My parents did not believe in God. For me, this rendered our Jewish observances absurd…I could see that the magnificent four-thousand-year-old structure of Jewish theology and tradition was, at its core, a kind of language for communicating with the divine presence. Subtract the Almighty and what was the purpose of it? It was just an empty temple… (kindle version, Chapter 3)
This led to a serious moral crisis when he was a young teen. Every Jewish boy has a bar mitzvah at the age of 13. The boy must prepare for this ceremony by learning the proper way to recite (actually “sing”) Scripture in Hebrew so that he could do it as a part of the ceremony. The problem, of course, is that Klavan didn’t believe the Scriptures he was supposed to be singing, so it seemed like an utter waste of time. After he struggled through the preparation and ceremony, he received all sorts of expensive gifts, and for several months, he was enchanted with them. As time went on, however, he became ashamed by them, because he realized he had accepted them on false pretenses. In the end, he threw them all into the garbage. His description of how he did this, found at the end of Chapter 3, will show the reader why I say that Klavan is a masterful writer.
Since Klavan was raised as a secular Jew, you might wonder how he came to learn about Christianity. The answer surprised me. He had a nanny he dearly loved, Mina, and she was a Christian. She didn’t try to teach him about Jesus, but she did have him over to her house during Christmas. This was his first exposure to Christ. However, as he writes in Chapter 4:
In the end, as I considered my conversion, I thought: No. It wasn’t that night at Mina’s house that made Jesus Christ central to my thinking. It wasn’t that picture on the wall that made his presence pervasive in my imagination. It wasn’t even the Christmases through the following years that made him matter to me so much. It was stories. It was literature. He came to me that way. (emphasis mine)
How did Christ come to him through literature? As a teen, he began to read voraciously and decided to become a writer. In some stories, he was able to notice some Christian imagery because of what little he learned from his nanny during Christmas. As a result, he decided to read the New Testament so that he could spot more Christian imagery. In other words, he decided to read about Christ simply so he could better understand literature.
This reading of the New Testament did not lead to an immediate conversion. However, it did lay the background for five epiphanies that ended up causing him to become a Christian. Once again, if you can get through the periods of self-indulgence, he describes these epiphanies in an amazing way. I will simply list them. First, he realized that true suffering exists in everyone’s life, not just his. Second, he realized that joy is possible, and it is the source of wisdom. Third, he understood that love is real. It isn’t some byproduct of electrical signals in the brain. It is an intangible reality that is wholly separate from biology. Fourth, he found that it was possible to have a clear perception of the world. Finally, he found that he could learn to laugh, even at the heart of his mourning. He writes:
I had them all now. All the pieces I needed. The five revelations that were really one revelation: the presence of God. (kindle version, Chapter 11, emphasis his)
There was, however, a stumbling block. The Western culture that brought him the literature he loved and the religion that inspired that literature had, in his mind, been a breeding ground for the hatred of the Jewish people. His people. How could this culture and its religion be the source of Ultimate truth if they were the source of such intense hatred? Eventually, he realized that, in fact, the hatred of Jews, which is best exemplified by the Holocaust, is definitive proof that the Bible is true. As he writes:
The Holocaust was the crucifixion compulsively reenacted on a grand scale: an attempt to kill God’s people in order to extinguish the Light of the World that shows us who we are…There are some people who say that an evil as great as the Holocaust is proof there is no God. But I would say the opposite. The very fact that it is so great an evil, so great that it defies any materialist explanation, implies a spiritual and moral framework that requires God’s existence. More than that. The Holocaust was an evil that only makes sense if the Bible is true, if there is a God, if the Jews are his people, and if we would rather kill him and them than truly know him, and ourselves. (kindle version, Chapter 12, emphasis his)
Perhaps that quote, more than any other I have given, shows you why I think Klavan makes some truly profound statements in his book. There is one more profound statement he makes that is worth mentioning, but it belongs in its own blog post.
February 16, 2017
Another Failed Evolutionary Prediction
A fossil cast of a Protoceratops nest (click for credit)
According to the currently-fashionable hypothesis, dinosaurs evolved into birds. Indeed, some evolutionists take this to such an extreme that they say things like:
Birds Are Living Dinosaurs
While there are some evolutionists who disagree with this hypothesis, it is part of the current scientific consensus. Of course, for a hypothesis to be considered scientific, it must make predictions that can be confirmed by the data. The more its prediction are confirmed, the more reliable it becomes. The more its predictions are falsified, the less reliable it becomes.
Indeed, one of the reasons I consider the creation model to be very strong is that it has made several predictions which have been confirmed by the data (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example). The evolution model, however, has made many predictions that have been falsified by the data (see here, here, here, here, and here, for example).
The hypothesis that dinosaurs evolved into birds has been used to make a prediction about the time it took for dinosaur eggs to hatch, which is typically referred to as the incubation period. We can’t directly measure the incubation period of dinosaur eggs, but many evolutionists have assumed that it must be similar to that of birds, which is quite different from that of reptiles. For example, Dr. Kenneth Carpenter wrote a book entitled, Eggs, Nests, and Baby Dinosaurs: A Look at Dinosaur Reproduction. On page 200, he suggests that the incubation period of dinosaur eggs should be similar to that of birds. He shows how bird egg incubation period varies with mass and then writes about a particular dinosaur egg:
…with an estimated live weight (i.e., as it might have been 70 million years ago) of 152 g, would have an estimated incubation time (from time of egg laying until hatching) of thirty-five days.
Similarly, on page 266 of Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs: Understanding the Life of Giants, we read:
The amount of time necessary for a dinosaur embryo to mature to the hatching stage may never be known with certainty, but it can be at least roughly estimated by a model developed by Rhan and Ar (1974) for birds. On the basis of comparisons with extant birds that have, in contrast to modern reptiles, a rather constant incubation temperature of about 40 oC, a dinosaur egg of 1.5 kg – the size of an ostrich egg – would require an incubation time of about 60 days to hatch.
The latest research indicates that such predictions aren’t anywhere close to being correct.
Gregory Erickson and his colleagues recently published a report in which they made what seems to be a reliable estimate of the incubation period for two dinosaurs: Protoceratops andrewsi and Hypacrosaurus stebingeri. The former laid eggs that were about 200 g, while the latter laid eggs that were about 4 kg. Based on the prediction that dinosaur egg incubation periods were similar to that of birds, the Protoceratops egg should have taken about 40 days to hatch, while the Hypacrosaurus egg should have taken about 80 days to hatch.
Erickson and his colleagues found that the incubation periods were more than twice as long as predicted. Protoceratops eggs took about 83 days to hatch, while Hypacrosaurus eggs took about 170 days. This is on par with the incubation periods for reptiles, not birds. From an egg incubation period standpoint, then, dinosaurs were significantly more like reptiles than birds.
How did Erickson’s team determine those incubation periods? They examined fossilized embryos and used a CT scanner to analyze the developing teeth. They found lines (called incremental lines of von Ebner) that are typical of any animal with teeth. These lines are laid down daily in all existing animals that have been studied, so counting the lines tells you the number of days the embryo’s teeth had been developing before fossilization. Is this an exact measure of the incubation period in these dinosaur eggs? Not really. It’s possible that the lines weren’t laid down daily in dinosaur teeth. In addition, animal embryos don’t form teeth right away, and many produce initial teeth that are reabsorbed. Thus, the authors had to make some assumptions about such issues in order to get the total incubation period.
Nevertheless, it seems that this study gives us the best estimate of the incubation periods for two species of dinosaur, and they are radically different from what was predicted based on the “birds are living dinosaurs” hypothesis.
February 9, 2017
What Happens to the Mind When the Body Can’t Communicate?
A version of the brain/computer interface cap used in the study (click for credit)
More than five years ago, I sat by a hospital bed where my Aunt Kay lay dying. Unlike my father, she was completely uncommunicative on her deathbed. She never made any purposeful physical movements, and despite repeated requests, she never indicated that she was aware of what was going on around her. I remember sitting there wondering whether or not she was “in there.” Was she able to hear the words of love people were sharing with her, or was she, for all intents and purposes, already gone? While I am here on this earth, I will never have the answer to that question, but a recent scientific paper indicates that in at least some cases, completely uncommunicative people really are still “in there.”
In this case, the study was done on four patients with advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Their cases are so severe that they are described as being in a complete locked-in state. This means that they cannot make any voluntary movements at all. They can’t even move their eyes. As a result, they have no way of letting others know what they think or feel. One of the patients had been unable to reliably communicate with anyone for six years prior to the study. Two of them had been in a similar uncommunicative state for two years, and one of them for several months.
The researchers outfitted each of the patients with a cap similar to the one pictured above. It could communicate with a computer that recorded measurements related to the physical workings of their brains. The researchers then instructed the patients that they would be asked several yes/no questions over the course of the study. Some would have answers that could be verified. Some would be “open” questions for which only the patient knew the answer. The patients were asked to strongly think “yes” or “no” (actually, “ja” or “nein” since the study was done in Germany) in response to each question. They were specifically told not to “picture” their response. They were told to only think it.
The researchers found that there was a noticeable difference in the way blood was flowing in the brain when the patient thought “yes” as compared to when the patient thought “no.” Interestingly enough, the differences were not uniform. Each patient seemed to have his or her own pattern of blood flow for the two thoughts, but in each case, the patterns were different enough to be distinguished (see Figure 1 in the study). Using those differences, they started asking questions and detecting answers over multiple sessions. For the questions with verifiable answers, they would tell the patient the accuracy over the course of the session as a form of encouragement.
In the end, they were able to achieve better than 75% accuracy with three of the patients, and slightly over 70% accuracy with the fourth. They asked the “open” questions (the ones that didn’t have verifiable answers) several times over the course of the sessions, and they found that more than 70% of the time they detected the same answer. This led them to believe that they could determine the correct answer to the “open” questions as well.
When it came to questions about the quality of the patients’ lives, the authors make this very interesting statement:
[three of the patients] answered open questions containing quality of life estimation repeatedly with a “yes” response, indicating a positive attitude towards the present situation and towards life in general…
That came as quite a shock to me. I would think that if I were in that situation, I wouldn’t say that I had much of a quality of life. However, at least three of the patients said that they did. Popular media accounts of this study say that all four patients were “happy,” but I can’t find that statement in the published study. Of course, it’s possible that the patients had such a positive attitude because they were finally finding a way to communicate again.
Obviously, this study is very preliminary and must be replicated with many other patients. However, it does give hope to those who are unable to communicate with the outside world. A lot of effort should be made to test and develop this (or a similar) technique, because it could be a life-changer for many “locked-in” people and their loved ones.
February 6, 2017
Politics Poison Science
In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a “scientific” paper for what appear to have been political reasons. We now know the data used are false and should never have been submitted for publication.
From the days I started doing scientific research, I have seen that politics play far too great a role in science. Some of this stems from the fact that most basic research is funded by the federal government, and since politicians control the money, they inevitably exert influence on what kind of scientific research is done. Over the years, however, I have observed a nasty, growing trend of scientists’ own political views influencing the way they handle data and communicate their results. In some fields, the political influence is worse than it is in others, and climate science might be the most politicized field of them all. A story posted on Dr. Judith Curry’s blog is the latest in a series of revelations that show us just how bad this has become.
Starting in the late 2000’s, those who had been studying worldwide temperatures noticed that the average temperature of the earth was not increasing. This was troubling for those who believed in human-produced global warming, since the models upon which they base most of their conclusions suggest that the earth’s average temperature should be increasing with increasing levels of carbon dioxide. As time went on, this lack of warming became more and more difficult to understand under the human-produced global warming paradigm, and critics of the paradigm started calling it “The Pause.”
In 2015, however, scientists from the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) produced a report that was published in Science, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals. According to this report, “The Pause” was an artifact of the way earlier temperature analyses were done. When those analyses were “corrected,” there was no “Pause.” As shown in the NOAA-generated graph above, the trend of global warming had remained constant since the early 1950s. While slower than predicted by the models, it had not slowed down in recent years at all. As a result of its conclusion, this paper became known as the “Pausebuster” paper.
Interestingly enough, the Pausebuster paper was published about six months before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, France. Critics of the paper noted this timing and argued with the conclusions. In fact, another prestigious scientific journal, Nature, published a paper in 2016 (after the Paris conference) that strongly argued against the conclusions of the Pausebuster paper. We now know for certain that this 2016 paper is correct, and that the scientists who produced the Pausebuster paper disregarded the NOAA’s protocols in the process of producing their paper. How do we know this? Because the scientist who wrote some of those protocols has finally spoken out.
Dr. John Bates holds an earned Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has spent his entire scientific career at the NOAA, the last 14 years of which he was a Principal Scientist at the NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. He earned the NOAA Administrator’s Award in 2004 for “outstanding administration and leadership in developing a new division to meet the challenges to NOAA in the area of climate applications related to remotely sensed data.” He also earned a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records. He retired from the NOAA in November of last year and now feels comfortable about exposing the way politics has corrupted the science being done there.
His article is long and detailed, and it is focused on the ways in which the NOAA handles its temperature data. Most people see graphs of global temperatures over time and think it is a fairly straightforward thing to measure: Put a bunch of thermometers all around the world and average them. It’s as simple as that! If you read his post, you will find that it is much more complicated! Add to that the fact that the trends seen in the data using thermometers are different from those seen using weather balloons and satellites, and you will see that anyone who claims we understand global temperature trends doesn’t know much about how such trends are measured!
I think the more illustrative source to read when it comes to Dr. Bates’s horrible revelations is The Daily Mail’s article based on their exclusive interview with him, which is also linked in his article on Dr. Judith Curry’s blog. The interview focuses on how the Pausebuster’s scientists did everything they could to bias their data towards the conclusion that the earth is still warming.
Probably the most egregious action taken by the Pausebuster’s authors was the way they approached the temperatures measured on the surface of the ocean. As you might expect, there are many thermometers floating on buoys on the ocean, and those thermometers are a substantial source of data on global temperature, since the surface of the earth is more than 70% ocean! The scientists decided that the thermometers on these buoys were reading temperatures that were too low. Why? Because they disagreed with the temperatures of water taken in by ships. The ship-based temperatures were warmer, so the authors decided to “correct” the buoy temperatures with the ship-based temperatures.
Think about that for a moment. Which is a more accurate measure of sea surface temperature? The reading of a thermometer floating on the ocean, or the reading of a thermometer in water that has been taken in by a warm ship? Obviously, the buoy temperatures are more accurate. However, they were “adjusted,” because using ship-based data in the adjustment produced the warming trend that the authors wanted! As Dr. Bates says in the interview:
They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did – so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.
Despite the horrible revelations made by Dr. Bates in his article on Dr. Curry’s blog and his Daily Mail interview, I actually found Dr. Curry’s statement about this situation to be the most revealing. After giving her readers some background information about her collegial relationship with Dr. Bates and how she came to publish his piece on her blog, she says this:
Being retired sure is liberating…
To anyone who is a scientist, that should send chills up and down your spine. She is essentially saying that the only reason she can voice her scientific opinions and Dr. Bates can come forward with his report of scientific irregularities is because they no longer need to worry about harming their professional careers as scientists. If that doesn’t convince you that politics have poisoned science, I don’t see how anything ever could.
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