Gordy Slack wrote What neo-creationists get right, an article in which he attempts to set aside his gut reactions and dispassionately assess some points made by the opposition. From the article:

First, I have to agree with the ID crowd that there are some very big (and frankly exciting) questions that should keep evolutionists humble. While there is important work going on in the area of biogenesis, for instance, I think it's fair to say that science is still in the dark about this fundamental question. It's hard to draw conclusions about the significance of what we don't know. Still, I think it is disingenuous to argue that the origin of life is irrelevant to evolution. It is no less relevant than the Big Bang is to physics or cosmology. Evolution should be able to explain, in theory at least, all the way back to the very first organism that could replicate itself through biological or chemical processes. And to understand that organism fully, we would simply have to know what came before it. And right now we are nowhere close. I believe a material explanation will be found, but that confidence comes from my faith that science is up to the task of explaining, in purely material or naturalistic terms, the whole history of life. My faith is well founded, but it is still faith.

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OPENTHREAD

OPENTHREAD

Despite assertions to the contrary scientists, social scientists, educators and professionals in many fields have found the term intelligence to be both a useful concept and one that can be used in conjuction with explanations related to research. The evolution of intelligence is discussed in some papers. Sometimes the evolution of intelligence is explained by theories of complex animal behavior. On other occasions in terms of nutrition.

Intelligence is at times alluded to indirectly as in: One signal from light-years away could prove we're not alone in the vastness of space"”and alter humanity's view of our place in the universe. Extensive scholarly use of the word intelligence is testimony that the concept confers explanatory utility.

I don't know if it's appropriate for me to post a thread like this, but my conscience has been bothering me for a while now, and I need to apologize. And since what I did wrong was on this blog, I thought I better make my apology public.

I want to aplogize to Jack T. I lost my temper, and accused you of things that I had no right to accuse you of. There was no excuse for it. If you still read this blog, I offer my sincere apologies for doing so, and I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me.

Piattelli-Palmarini: Ostracism W/out Nat Selection, is the title of an article featuring an interview of Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini by Suzan Mazur. It is rich in notable quotes. Although Piattelli-Palmarini has some counter-mainstream ideas he establshes his bonafides with mainstreamers with this comment:

I think that abandoning Darwinism (or explicitly relegating it where it belongs, in the refinement and tuning of existing forms) sounds anti-scientific. They fear that the tenants of intelligent design and the creationists (people I hate as much as they do) will rejoice and quote them as being on their side. They really fear that, so they are prudent, some in good faith, some for calculated fear of being cast out of the scientific community.

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Our semi-annoying, semi-enlightening commenter and sometimes contributor Thought Provoker has spent the better part of the past week valiantly attempting to defend Charles Darwin from Ben Stein's charge in the movie Expelled that Darwinism led to eugenics, and eugenics led to Adolph Hitler's eugenics laws, which led to… The Holocaust.

I admit to sensitivity on this issue, as both my Godparents were Jews, very recent immigrants from Europe. Both of them had tattoos and had lost their entire families in the Holocaust. They never had any children of their own. Can you guess why? So I got 'indoctrinated' very young in the importance of what Never Again! means.

My husband's Aunt Melba (still spry but blind at 96) was sterilized as an adolescent when she and her sister were dropped off at an orphanage back when being an orphan was considered a symptom of "undesirable genetic inheritance" in America. So both sides of this family have some eugenics horror stories in the family album and a serious commitment to making sure it never happens again.

These family stories are related. Such things were as common when I was growing up as unfortunate survivors of polio and thalidomide babies and radiation-induced cancer clusters from atmospheric bomb testing. What happened to my Godparents had its insidious roots in what happened to Aunt Melba years earlier in Oklahoma. Direct, irrefutable connections, as history amply documents in collections from Cold Spring Harbor to the Holocaust Museum.

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Steven Pinker is someone with whom I have had frequent disagreements. However, his article The Moral Instinct makes some interesting points worth pondering. The article is long and for the purpose of this blog entry I'll confine the focus to the second page. From the article:

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Well, I can't disagree with this required reading list.

Many of you are probably already familiar with the story referenced by the linked article Mendel Upended which tells of an unexpected find having potentially enormous implications for inheritance concepts. Researchers Susan Lolle and Robert Pruitt encountered phenotypic traits not according with inheritance concepts derived from Mendel; leading them to contemplate whether the plants they were working with might revert to their grandparents' allelic frequency. As the article indicates there are plenty of doubters one of whom believes that "exceptional claims require exceptional evidence." Apparently adaquate evidence is not enough. This notable quote from another researcher:

"The evidence for some kind of massive programmed rearrangement upon environmental induction in flax is unequivocal," he writes, "but inheritance of acquired changes has been an anathema to evolutionary biologists ever since Darwin's time."

Speculating about mechanisms is part of the fun. So is the possibility of upending apple carts.