Internet forums are buzzing with speculation about a new picture from NASA's Spirit rover that people are calling "Mars Man" or "The Mars Creature" …

Let's start with the most distant view:

Zoom in a bit …

And then a little more …

So how are we to handle this buzz as epistemically responsible creatures? Well, Mike Gene gives us an answer in The Design Matrix.

We need higher epistemic resolution - in this case visual resolution - to infer anything but "rock shaped by atmosphere of Mars". The current image does not provide enough resolution to make a responsible design inference. It's that simple.

Now a question for Mike: When do we know that we have enough epistemic resolution? How deep must we go, how many levels of resolution must we traverse, before we are justified?

Here, here and here.

At TT, I think it's safe to say that we're all evolutionists. Despite rumors of evolution going out of business there's just no denying that adaptation happens. Organisms change to adapt to new environments, whether birds, bees or bunnies who lay Cadbury eggs.

And sometimes adaptation just SUCKS!

Ever since meeting Mike Gene online I've been determined to find out as much information about him as possible. This past weekend I hit jackpot, and ended up in front of his house. Here's the photo I took.

What surprised me most of all was the Gene family car. A green 1978 VW Rabbit. Now, I know Mike talks all about having kids, but isn't it tantamount to child abuse to neglect the safety of your children in favor of a rabbit fetish?

BTW, for those of you who are on the same trail. Mike's license plate number is visible in this picture which should give you plenty of information. If you have photoshop, you can zoom in on the mailbox to make out his street address too.

When I first made this post, I thought that Zimmerman was a peer reviewer himself. I made a mistake. He's just a singer. But he sings songs to peer reviewers. That makes him a BuzzBot just like Nick Matzke. And it's the Buzzbots who give many of the peer reviewers their primary ideas about ID. And, according to people like Agent BuzzBot Nick Matzke, it's ducky all the way down. There's no difference between creation science and ID. So this song is about everyone who embraces ID.

It's a song about Mike Gene and Krauze.

This is a fascinating documentary on a guy from the UK whose brain works in quite unique ways. Two surprising abilities include his use of imagery to do massive mathematical calculations and also his ability to learn any new language at a conversational level within about 7 days.

More reason the threatiness fails.

Americans are more scientifically literate than Europeans or Japanese, but 70 percent of them cannot understand the New York Times science section, according to Michigan State University researcher.

So Americans lead the world in scientific literacy, the animal rights terrorists continue to blow sh*t up, and the employees of the NCSE would be screwed if cognitive dissonance wasn't such a pervasive human phenomenon (even among the educated).

Source: Scientific literacy: Americans lead but could do better

Well worth the 10 minute watch.

http://www.designerspeaks.com/watch.php?clip=6

According to at least one of the commentors (sp?) on our blog, the causes of these experiments cannot be discovered and will not be discoverable experimentally (that's the fallacy of intelligent design)…

The intelligent design of evolution (link takes you to Nature article)
Mark P Styczynski, Curt R Fischer and Gregory N Stephanopoulos

The debate between intelligent design and evolution in education may still rage in school boards and classrooms, but intelligent design is making headway in the laboratory. In this case, though, the designer turned out to be just some clever scientist. A recent paper in Nature (Yoshikuni et al, 2006) presented the iterative evolution of highly specific catalysts from a promiscuous wild-type enzyme via what the authors refer to as designed divergent evolution.

The paper investigated whether catalytic functionality could be rationally engineered into a protein, without recourse to the high-throughput screening techniques necessary for directed evolution. Yoshikuni et al (2006) started with a terpene synthase enzyme,?-humulene synthase, that is promiscuous not in its substrate specificity but in its product selectivity?it catalyzes the formation of 52 different sesquiterpene products from one single substrate, farnesyl diphosphate. (Sesquiterpenes naturally occur in a variety of plants, and their derivatives are used in applications ranging from chemical feedstocks to antifungal compounds.) The predominant product for the wild-type enzyme is?-humulene, but Yoshikuni et al designed seven mutant variants with improved selectivities for eight of the products.

John Timmer is to be congratulated for providing some excellent coverage of the "Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science" conference. Very good reporting.

What I'd like to focus on in this blog is Pennock's pragmatic test for understanding evolution as science. Take note TelicThought readers. Pennock places a huge amount of value in *what evolution can do for us today* - in other words, how we can use evolution. Directed evolution, by engineers, for people.

The first session was on the nature of science and biology, presented in part by Robert T. Pennock of Michigan State, who testified at the Dover trial. He suggested that teachers should present evolution as part of a discussion of the nature of science, as the development of the theory is an example of science done right. He even suggested that science itself can be viewed as a selective process that discriminates among competing ideas. In contrast, he presented ID as a negative argument against evolution with no explanatory power. Ultimately, however, he suggested that the key feature of evolution is that it passes the pragamatic test: evolutionary processes work in both engineering and computer programming, producing efficient products that would not have been proposed by intentional design, including an antenna used by NASA. I asked him later about the prominent roles played by engineers and chemists (who have careers centered around goal oriented design) in providing creationist arguments with academic credentials, and he suggested that ultimately, the success of evolved designs will win over these fields.

[emphasis added]