Minor Mistake in the Newspaper

Something caught my eye as I was flipping through the newspaper this morning. It was an article about the treatment of hippos at a zoo. In the description of the living conditions, it said that there wasn’t enough water for the hippo to float. It gives an idea of how deep the water is, except there’s one big issue. It’s a minor side note, but hippos don’t float in water. All that bulk is muscle so they sink. No zoo tries to give their hippopotamus enough water to float because they know it can’t be done.

My Second Creation Science Talk

Since the first one wasn’t all that spectacular, I figured I’d give this creation science thing another try and found someone else to listen to for a while. This one was more about trying to prove the existance of god than to disprove evolution, none the less, some things about evolution were mentioned. The main theme of this talk was that things are so spectacular, there had to be a divine creator. There was talk about the number of stars that exist and how mind boggling it was. There was also talk of the number of grains of sand, now flakes, and large volumes of water. The smoothness of the earth was also admired a great deal. This particular talk was really not aimed towards skeptics, but rather aimed towards those who’re looking to reaffirm their faith. There was little talk about issues regarding creation and tried to create a sense of awe regarding the forces of nature. Issues regarding creation vs evolution were not explored and evolution was only mentioned in passing with the occational note of ridicule.
During the few times that evolution was mentioned, it was all during the talk of how wonderful certain creatures, parts of creatures or the food chain was. The most common thing that was said was, “How could this possibly be a product of blind chance?” As throughly discussed earlier, no serious evolutionist believes things came about through blind chance anyway, so I guess this is more of an attack on the flying speghetti monster than anything else. Maybe that should be the next origin story I research, I could use something a little lighter. There were also two instances where the speaker asked that if creatures did indeed evolve, what did they do before something developed. One of them was the thing that causes blood to clot, stopping leaks. The other time was regarding a spider and how it doesn’t get stuck to its own web because of some chemical on its feet. I think the intent was to suggest that evolution was a sequential process where one part develops at a time instead of multiple things being refined continously.
Lastly, there was a small section that specifically talked about Darwin’s work and how in his book there were roughly 800 instances of phrases like, “from this, it can be infered,” or “we can summise,” which do not indicate certainty, but rather hypothesizing. His critisim of Darwin stopped there and he continued on about the elegance of the biblical creation story and it’s concise brevity. There was also speculation on the large volumes of text it would take for man to describe creation as a bit of a joke.
Sometimes in science, the most elegant solution is the right one. One such instance that I can think of is the current model of the solar system with eliptical orbits. Prior to that, there was a model of the solar system with circular orbits, which did a somewhat decent job of predicting the positions of the planets. It did have a few flaws and corrections had to be made which occured in the form of the occational loop. The correction method was inspired by the previous model of the solar system which had the earth in the center and everything going around it in circular orbits. Certain motion patterns were explained by placing circular loops into the orbits. It didn’t do nearly as well and it was hard to predict when a loop should occur. The current model not only predicts the location of planets in the sky more accurately, but also doesn’t require these corrective loops.
There’s also times when the simplistic theory isn’t the correct one though. It was once believed that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones. Then we learnt about air and wind resistance as well as the balance between gravity and drag that results in a phenomenon called terminal velocity. There’s also one of Newton’s classic laws of motion, F=MA. In my experiences, it often comes up in discussions regarding evolution vs creation as a widely confirmed, testable and accepted theory. Most people without science degrees will accept this as do most of the people who discuss evolution vs creation. This is not meant as an attack on either side, but nothing could be further from the truth. Our knowledge of physics has grown sigificantly since the time of Newton and we now know that this is grossely inaccurate at very high speeds. Most people will recall that Albert Einstien said a few things about time slowing down as you go faster. Space and mass also distort and these are things we can measure. My knowledge of physics fizzles out around here, but I believe that we’ve also found that relativity isn’t entirely accurate either. Anyway, most scientists will tell you that F=MA is only a reasonable approximation which is more than good enough for most motion that we can achieve.
Anyway, I’m going to take a bit of a break on this subject, I’m starting to notice a few trends. Maybe I’ll actually research the materials a bit before selecting the next thing I go through. Thus far, the two that I picked out of blind chance really hasn’t been that satisfying. I ran into two groups of mormon missionaries today, maybe I should phone them up and ask them to suggest a decent resource that isn’t endless repeditive allegory and actually has a somewhat correct representation of evolution.

Conclusion of my First Creation Science Experience

Well, I finally came to the end of my first batch of listening material on judeo-christian creationism. Thus far, I must say that I completely agree with the main points of the talk, life couldn’t have come about by random processes, and information is a vital ingredient to the creation and advancement of life. To the best of my knowledge though, there’s no belief system that says everything came about randomly. The speaker seems to be under the impression that evolution is a completely random process involving no information, which degrades everything to noise.
If I were to draw another analogy to information in evolution, I’d use the google search engine. The mechanism by which it operates was explained to me some time ago. First, the database is polled for all websites bringing up the key word in the search. This is one layer of information. A lot of earlier search engines kept track of the number of hits going to pages and simply assuming that the pages with the most hits had the best information. Unfortunately, the pages cannot be reviewed before viewing and simply trying to find the desired information skews the ratings adding a layer of noise. Secondly, the results are further skewed by the fact that the first results always get the most attention making it diffcult for irrelevant information to go away and new information to come forward.
The difference between google and the search engines before it is all in the ranking of the webpages. As I was told, google checks the pages pulled and assumes that the most relevant ones are the ones that have been linked to the most by the other pages containing similar information. In essence, every webpage functions as a peer review of all the other webpages in the search results. Bringing this back to evolution, according to my understanding, the underlying premise behind evolution can be summed up by saying that every time the lions go hunting information is added to the system.
The speaker also told a little story that I feel like repeating. Briefly stated, it amounted to Jesus going out and healing the sick. The speaker concluded that if evolution really was the mechanism by which higher life forms arise, Jesus would have simply killed the sick and removed them from the gene pool. This is not the only way that this behavior can be examined. As far as we can tell, all mamals have emotions as do many other forms of life. There’s a sense of security in knowing that you’ll be ok if something bad happens. It could be that populations exhibiting compassion are more successful than populations that do not and the cost of carrying the less fortunate, both in terms of hereditary effects and immediate resources are more than worth the burden. Of course, this action is largely going to influence environment and not so much genetics.
Since there was much alegory in the talk, which is why it stretched on for so many hours, I suppose I’ll tell a little alegory of my own. A person is walking along through the woods and slips. He looses his balance and goes tumbling down a hill. As luck would have it, there’s a little bear cub at the bottom and he happens to hit the cub as he’s tumbling down. While trying to figure out if he’s hurt badly, he notices the mother is around and decides that it’s best to leave right away since there’s a screaming cub next to him. Later on, while he’s treated, he tells the story of how he got hurt, screaming cub and mother bear there scaring him away. One person says, “Well, it’s like I told you all along, those bears are smart enough to know an accident when they see one.” Someone else frowns and says, “No, you’ve got it all wrong, those bears are clearly stupid, the mother doesn’t even recognize that something has harmed her cub so she doesn’t take steps to protect her young.” Then another person shrugs and points out, “Maybe these things aren’t really smarter or stupider than most people think. They kill things from time to time, so they should have a sense of when something is hurt and when something is trying to get away. Maybe the mother could clearly tell that this man was hurt and see that he was leaving anyway so decided to tend to the cub instead of risking herself attacking something that wasn’t a threat.” The man looks at the others around him and chuckles before adding, “If it helps the arguement in anyway, I was scared and didn’t know what to do, so while I was crawling away, I told the bear I was sorry and explained that this was all a big accident.”
The facts in this story are that the man tumbled down a hill, hurt a bear cub as a result and didn’t get attacked by the mother. The result is that drastically different view points can all claim that it’s supporting evidence for their opinion. An objective observer can see that we haven’t really proven anything. After a little over 17.5 hours of listening to this guy speak, I’ve been presented with little evidence that supports some form of divine creation, and I haven’t heard a single argument against evolution that doesn’t fall into the category of reading a predecided conclusion into the evidence.

Creation Science Continued

I continued listening to this particular creation scientist speak. Today can be summarized in one statement, “This is so increadible that it couldn’t have occured randomly.” He brought up the various senses as well as discussed echo location in bats and dolphins. These are pretty advanced systems and I have to agree, they didn’t arrive by random chance. Evolution though does have an intelligent input, the environment. Some things wind up more successful than others and spawn more offspring, eventually becoming dominant. There is continous input. This is somewhat akin to the free market economy, everything contributes somewhat.
Thus far, I see a fixation on one detail, which has led to a sort of tunnel vision. Instead of investigating things further, attempts to understand have ground to a halt. Maybe after this, I should find someone else to listen to. There’s got to be more to this phenomenon than this though.

My First Creation Science Experience

Today, I took some time to listen to a self proclaimed creation scientist speak. It was a prerecorded lecture which proved very facinating. I’ve heard many generalizations about creationists and evolutionists coming from both sides. Watching the discussion has been a rather facinating study of human behavior. Anyway, this particular creationist seemed convinced that Darwin worked on the origins of life and speculated that it was caused by a random process. This is just a misconception about Darwin’s work. His famous book is titled The Origin of Species, which details a mechanism by which lifeforms transform. He never produced a book called The Origins of Life, speculating on the method by which life is created from inorganic matter. Most of this prerecorded lecture was about the likelihood of life originating by chance. The actual theory of evolution was never touched and nothing was really said about the spontaneous creation of humans from a divine source.
Misattributions aside, one of the things repeated constantly during the talk was the need for information in the origin of lifeforms. This reminds me of John Conway’s Game of Life. Provided no initial data, nothing will happen. With small amounts of data, complex patterns will form based on a few simple guidelines. Evolution, as I know it, is not about the creation of life information, but rather the transformation of the data. It felt a little strange listening to this part of the discussion, the neccesity for information was hammered through with repetition, alegory and simplistic examples. This portion made me feel like I was in grade school again.
There was also a more complex portion of the talk about amino acids and L-D enantiomers, I hope my spelling is right. As a bit of a side note, I’m sick of hearing people describe aspartame as two amino acids. In organic chemistry, preceeding numbers indicate which atom something is bonded to. For instance 2-2-4 tri-methyl-pentane has three methyl groups which are bonded two on the second atom and one on the fourth atom of a pentane molecule. There’s only one molecule. Anyway, ranting aside, there was a long discussion about the formation of L and D enantiomers and the importance of being able to distinguish between the two in order to form the compact, twisting DNA molecule. The problem of sorting between L and D enantiomers is indeed a legitimate problem to creating life by chance. However, I have to disagree with the attitude of the speaker that our failure to chemically seperate the two thus far doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
One of my favorite movie quotes comes from the movie The Core, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, and what if the core is made of cheese? This is all best guess commander. That’s all science is, is best guess.” Basically in science, we observe phenomenon and make a guess. Never does science ever prove something right. Eventually, theories are proven incorrect and give way to other theories. In order to scientifically prove that L-D enantiomers cannot be seperated by a chemical process, all possible methods must first be exaughsted. The lack of firm proof is why things like gravity, and magnetism are refered to as theories. There’s the possibility of some other phenomenon causing these, which will one day prove our existing best guess to be incorrect. This feels like it could be a case of chasing Poisson’s bright spot.
Anyway, time to try to make a point out of this. To say that something is impossible because we haven’t figured it out yet is not a very scientific attitude. To say that life couldn’t happen by chance doesn’t mean that different species cannot be created if life already exists. It also helps to learn about something before seeking to disprove it. The question of the origin of life is indeed a difficult question. Endless feasability studies about various methods of creating human beings from various potential origins of life doesn’t really seem like it’s going to get anywhere. Obviously, one of them works. What’ll do it for me is seeing evidence supporting a theory, which this talk really didn’t do much of.
I’m going to keep searching for material to try to understand this and to simply observe the way beliefs are formed. Oh and all this organic chemistry stuff at the end felt a little strange, a couple minutes before, I felt like I was in elementry and then I was back in the land of grown-ups again.

More on the three parents thing

I managed to dig up a copy of the court ruling and something pesters me. This is one of the lines in the article: “The little boy id described as bright and happy. Of course he is. He’s five. But he won’t be five and blissfully unaware forever.”
This is an excert from the 14 page court ruling found on page 6 at http://www.ontariocourts.on.ca/decisions/2007/january/C39998.pdf :

The twelve-year old child of one of the applicants said this in her affidavit: I just want both my moms recognized as my moms. Most of my friends have not had to think about things like this—they take for granted that their parents are legally recognized as their parents. I would like my family recognized the same way as any other family, not treated differently because both my parents are women. … It would help if the government and the law recognized that I have two moms. It would help more people to understand. It would make my life easier. I want my family to be accepted and included, just like everybody else’s family.

Is a 12 year old blissfully unaware as well? The 12 year old seems to think that giving both parents legal recognition will help things. This makes me wonder if anybody actually reads court rulings before writing comentary on them or is it just enough to get the jist of it and twist things towards whatever convinient political view point.

Three Parents in Ontario

Lately the Ontario Court of Appeal made what is considered a landmark ruling and decided that more than two people can legally be parents of a five year old child. This isn’t a case of replacing one of the people who are legally parents but removed through abandonment or something else. Rather this is a case of three people raising a child and all wanting to be able to make decisions for the child. It’s a matter of all those legal forms you had to bring home to your parents growing up, or medical decisions.
I kind of feel that people at my local newspaper like to go out of their way create contreversy. One columnist has called the decision “pure fiction,” an attempt to “rewrite biology” and “nonsensical.” The columnist states a bunch of biology mumbo jumbo and makes a push to have the third parent refered to as a step parent instead. If this remark were directed at the media instead of a remark about the court ruling, I could understand. In the context of the legal decision, I have to wonder if the term step parent appears in any legal documents or is only used in a purely social context. Unless there’s a piece of legislation out there defining the terms mother, mom, mommy and so on and so forth, it’s best to assume that the court really has no legal power to define what someone is called in day to day activities.
About half way through the article, the columnist declares that children should not be guinea pigs in social engineering experiments by courts. The columnist foolishly overlooking the fact that the five year old has already been raised primarily by three people for the past five years.
The notion of the people who provide the genetic material being the same as the people who raise a child died a long time ago. There are even references to supreme court cases from the 80s and 70s about what is the nature of a parent. Biological parents of children loose their legal obligations to the child when a child is adopted. People who use the reproductive materials of others to produce a child do not need the donor to be present to make medical decisions. To ridicule this decision as an attempt to rewrite biology shows a lot of ignorance about society today and seperation between the court room and daily life.
I’m not a journalist so, I’m not sure which sidenote to conclude on to get people yammering about my thoughts so that others will feel compelled to buy the paper. One of the things that crossed my mind is how people seem to stop thinking whenever homosexuals/bisexuals/transgendered people are involved. That seems to be old news though, people talking about that won’t really generate more revenue. Another thing that I felt I might conclude with is a remark about how people say that we have a liberal media. This paper tends to be against all things homosexual, bisexual or transgendered. My last idea was to comment on how world news occupies 14 pages, local news occupies 7, entertainment occupies 14 and sports takes another 7 pages.