Paul Davies authored The Cosmic Blueprint. Like most of his work this book is thoughtful and well written. I want to focus on a small part of it for the purpose of this blog entry. On page 131 Davies discusses how life has modified earth's environment over geologic timescales. He illustrates his point with the specific example of the sun's luminosity which has increased by about 30% during the earth's history. Despite this significant increase, the temperature of the earth has remained within a small range that is hospitable to life. Davies uses the phrase "equability of conditions" in alluding to this.

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Bradford posted about Paul Davies' op-ed in the New York Times on the thread Science and Faith. Which quickly went downhill as our live-in critics decended like vultures to put a quick stop to any real discussion.

The SciBlog community wasn't hampered by such tactics, so came out hot and heavy in defense of their ideology against Davies' observations. Anti-theist PZ Myers insisted that Faith is not a prerequisite for science, but only managed to demonstrate laughable ignorance of the relevant science. My favorite excerpts…

When someone says that life would not exist if the laws of physics were just a little bit different, I have to wonder"¦ how do they know? Just as there are many different combinations of amino acids that can make any particular enzyme, why can't there be many different combinations of physical laws that can yield life?

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I have mentioned in passing a background in physics, an interest in the many competing wannabe replacements for the good ol' Standard Model (and contestants for what qualifies as a 'Theory of Everything'), and a particular interest from investigations of the phenomenon of consciousness in an 8-dimensional model of reality both psychic and physical. As opposed to an 11, 22 or infinite dimensional reality per other theoretical models, that is.

ScienceDaily reports today that Mathematicians Map One Of The Most Complicated Structures, which is the symmetry Lie group E₈. The project took an international team of 18 mathematicians 4 years working on separate portions of the calculation, and 77 hours of supercomputer time to put them all together. They had to 'map' the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object (in 248-dimensional E₈) as representations in a matrix with 205,263,363,600 entries for 240 vectors in an 8-dimensional space. A rather impressive accomplishment.

I'd reproduce the computer generation of the Gosset polytope 4₂₁ drawn by Peter McMullen in the 1960s because it's so pretty, but it's right there on the ScienceDaily page, so do check it out for yourself!

It's long time since we've had an open thread. Have fun.

Who designed the designer? Evolution News & Views point to this review by evolutionary biologist Allen Orr, in which Orr demolishes Richard Dawkins' favorite argument:

First, as others have pointed out, if [Dawkins] is right, the design hypothesis essentially must be wrong and the alternative naturalistic hypothesis essentially must be right. But since when is a scientific hypothesis confirmed by philosophical gymnastics, not data? Second, the fact that we as scientists find a hypothesis question-begging - as when Dawkins asks "who designed the designer?" - cannot, in itself, settle its truth value. It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem. What explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn't that question-begging?

Fine-tuning. Looks like physics grad student Brent Goodwin is planning to write a series of posts about the fine-tuning of the cosmological constants. Thanks to David Heddle for alerting me to this.

The Edge. Over at Secondhand Smoke, Wesley Smith has some fun with the answers from those The Edge considers the "most interesting minds in the world" on what they are scientifically optimistic about.

Pat Hayes of Red State Rabble criticizes the ID-friendly historian Richard Weikart, but ironically engages in some historical revisionism himself. Recalling when the Discovery Institute rented a hall at the Smithsonian to show the film "The Privileged Planet", Hayes writes:

Famously, O'Leary let the cat out of the bag about the Discovery Institute's plan to hold a screening of "The Privileged Planet" at the Smithsonian. Discovery hoped the implied endorsement of that institution would make up for in appearance what the film so badly lacked in substance: the imprimatur of science.

O'Leary's incautious post on the subject on her Post-Darwinist blog gave science supporters the advance notice they needed to alert leaders at the Smithsonian. Wisely, the Smithsonian allowed the screening to go forward, but issued a statement withdrawing the institution's endorsement from the event.

Oh, did they howl in Seattle.

Let's ignore the statement about what the Discovery Institute hoped the showing of the film would accomplish. Sure, Hayes doesn't present a shred of evidence to support his claim, but baseless speculations about the motives of others is something we hear from ID critics so often that it's hardly worth paying attention to any more.

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