These remind me of something.

Although living systems obey the laws of physics and chemistry, the notion of function or purpose differentiates biology from other natural sciences.

To describe biological functions, we need a vocabulary that contains concepts such as amplification, adaptation, robustness, insulation, error correction and coincidence detection.

A number of the design principles of biological systems are familiar to engineers. Positive feedback loops can drive rapid transitions between two different stable states of a system, and negative feedback loops can maintain an output parameter within a narrow range, despite widely fluctuating input. Coincidence detection systems require two or more events to occur simultaneously in order to activate an output. Amplifiers are built to minimize noise relative to signal, for instance by choosing appropriate time constants for the circuits. Parallel circuits (fail-safe systems) allow an electronic device to survive failures in one of the circuits.
Designs such as these are common in biology.

From molecular to modular cell biology
Leland H. Hartwell, John J. Hopfield, Stanislas Leibler and Andrew W. Murray

Here

HT:Rock

Another animal rights extremist unveils his peaceful and tolerant guide to activism. This time, it's Gary Yourofsky in the University of Southern Indiana newspaper, dreaming about inflicting violence on animal researchers, hunters and fur-clad women.

So, while my lifestyle and lectures are based on compassion, those who refuse to stop harming animals force me to support 'eye for an eye' and 'by any means necessary' philosophies. …

Institutionalized violence doesn't simply vanish with a peaceful protest, a dose of logic and whole lotta love. If people continually deny animals their inherent right to be free, radical tactics are necessary and justified. …

Deep down, I truly hope that oppression, torture and murder return to each uncaring human tenfold! I hope that fathers accidentally shoot their sons on hunting excursions, while carnivores suffer heart attacks that kill them slowly.

Every woman ensconced in fur should endure a rape so vicious that it scars them forever. While every man entrenched in fur should suffer an anal raping so horrific that they become disemboweled. Every rodeo cowboy and matador should be gored to death, while circus abusers are trampled by elephants and mauled by tigers. And, lastly, may irony shine its esoteric head in the form of animal researchers catching debilitating diseases and painfully withering away because research dollars that could have been used to treat them was wasted on the barbaric, unscientific practice vivisection.

HT: Secondhand Smoke

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. - John E. Jones III

Clayton Cramer discusses the likelihood that dominionist Christians are going to take over and institute a theocracy. (HT: Positive Liberty)

If all the "dominionist Christians" in the United States got together and organized a coup d'etat, there wouldn't be enough of them to take over Horseshoe Bend. I'm pretty sure that I've never met one. The only place that I have ever seen a "dominionist Christian" is being interviewed on some Bill Moyers documentary.

Today's quote comes from NYT columnist, John Tierney (HT to stunney). Tierney discusses the ID friendly views of philosopher Nick Bostrom, who argues that our reality is designed and exists as someone's computer simulation. Tierney notes:

Of course, it's tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation "” the Prime Designer, let's call him or her (or it).

Fascinating. Of course, according to most critics of ID, anyone who proposes design MUST be talking about God, MUST have religious and political motivations, and MUST be trying to destroy science by imposing a theocracy. And we should KNOW this because of carefully selected bits of historical and sociological data.

Yeah, right.

So, our planet may actually provide a very good guide to alien biospheres. Even if the planetary environment is very different, say a very dense atmosphere or giant oceans, we can still make a good estimate of what one day we may find. Not only that, but convergence tells us aliens will even think in much the same way"¦.Neo-Darwinians typically assume human-like intelligence is an evolutionary fluke, a historical accident. If correct, then the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a complete waste of time. But what we see on this planet tells us otherwise. All the evidence suggests the cognitive world of dolphins is remarkably similar to that of the the great apes. Certainly, both are mammals, but chimps don't live in oceans and the brain structures are markedly different. Even more remarkable is the cognitive architecture of birds, especially crows. Again it maps closely against the mind of the great apes but their brain is now known to be built to a completely different plan. When it comes to tool use the New Caledonian crows are well ahead of chimps. And the convergences don't stop there: warm-bloodedness and singing are convergent with mammals. So is social play. Did you know crows enjoy skiing? And what about the New Zealand parrot known as the kea? Watch out for those delinquent gangs of teenage birds as they roam around trashing cars.

- Simon Conway Morris. 2006. Evolutionary Convergence. Current Biology 16: R826-R827

As evidence of my pokiness, I can now report that I just finished Sean Carroll's book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful. I really enjoyed this book and will say more about it at a later date. For now, I'll just share a quote:

We can begin to think of individual groups "“ insects, spiders, and centipedes, or birds, mammals, and reptiles, as well as their long extinct fossil relatives "“ not so much in terms of their uniqueness, but as variations on a common theme.

Well, they're having at it again over at Science Blogs. The usual dog-eat-dog bruhaha over "framing," and whether or not the 'New Atheism' and its mean, nasty culture warriors are helping or hurting the cause of force-converting humanity to their way of thinking.

It begins (as usual) with Matthew Nibet's "Framing Science" blog, where he dared to post an opinion that Atheism is Not a Civil Rights Issue, saying:

This false spin serves as a very effective frame device for radicalizing a base of atheists into an ever more militant "us versus them" rhetoric, an interpretation that is used to justify sophomoric and polarizing attacks on religious Americans.

Read the rest of this entry »

I do wish we could arrest all those parents who use homeschooling as an excuse to keep their children ignorant. "“ PZ Myers, June 20, 2007

Arrest: to seize (a person) by legal authority or warrant; take into custody.

For the record, let me say that I have never advocated, nor would I ever advocate, that we inflict great harm on children by arresting their parents because someone believes the parents are using homeschooling as an excuse to "keep their children ignorant." In fact, I am strongly opposed to such government intervention and an assault on liberty.

Here's a timely essay from an ID critic. SMU professor, John Wise, writes:

Because science gives us methods to accurately understand and manipulate the world we live in. Few people would dispute that our present scientific understanding of the physical world has led to a tremendously long list of advances in medicine, technology, engineering, the structure of the universe and the atom, and on and on. The list is nearly endless, but it does not include everything. Science can tell us only what is governed by natural forces. Miracles are extra-ordinary events; gods are super-natural beings.

Are there reasonable philosophical arguments that can be made for the existence of God? Certainly. Are there reasonable philosophical arguments that can be made that God does not exist? Yes. Is there scientific evidence that answers either of these great questions one way or another? None that holds up to close scrutiny. Collins has no more scientific evidence that God exists than Dawkins has that God does not. Their evidence is philosophical, not scientific. Philosophy can encompass these issues, science cannot.

I'll address the rest of his essay later.