When it comes to just about any topic, it seems as if the public discourse on the internet is dominated by rhetoric and propaganda. People are either selling products or ideology. In fact, just because someone may come across as calm and knowledgeable does not mean you should let your guard down and trust what they say. What you need to look for is a track record of intellectual honesty. Let me therefore propose 10 signs of intellectual honesty.
Researchers at the University of Delaware have discovered that when the leaf of a plant is under attack by a pathogen, it can send out an S.O.S. to the roots for help, and the roots will respond by secreting an acid that brings beneficial bacteria to the rescue.
The finding quashes the misperception that plants are “sitting ducks”–at the mercy of passing pathogens–and sheds new light on a sophisticated signaling system inside plants that rivals the nervous system in humans and animals.
1. gather complete information - more than one source
2. understand and define terms (make others define terms, too)
3. question the methods by which results were derived
4. question the conclusion: do the facts support it? is there evidence of bias? remember correlation does not equal causation.
5. uncover assumptions and biases
6. question the source of information
7. don’t expect all the answers
8. examine the big picture
9. look for multiple cause and effect
10. watch for thought stopping sensationalism
11. understand your own biases and values
From Human Biology: Health, Homeostasis, and The Environment, 3rd Edition, by Daniel D. Chiras.
It is well known that eukaryotic cells are more complex than prokaryotic cells. For example, while the typical eukaryotic cell is 10-100 micrometers in diameter, contains numerous membranous organelles, has a cytoskeleton, and reproduces through mitosis, the typical bacterial cell is only 0.2-2.0 micrometers in diameter, lacking organelles and cytoskeleton, while reproducing through binary fission.
Yet the theme of needless complexity repeats itself at increasingly smaller scales like a fractal image.
Deborah McLennan, from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto, recently published a paper entitled, “The Concept of Co-option: Why Evolution Often Looks Miraculous” (Evo Edu Outreach 1:247–258). It’s a good paper that outlines the role of cooption in evolution. And it will help us see clearly how non-teleologists assign a central role to chance when it comes to the evolution of complex structures. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in the summer, I retired from posting at Telic Thoughts. This has freed up a bit of time that has allowed me to semi-regularly update this blog with substantive postings that build on The Design Matrix. Several readers have e-mailed me to let me know that they are unable to comment on this blog. This is not by design. I did not build this blog; I had it built a couple years back for the book. This simply means I do not know how to activate registration so people can comment. Of course, if I was highly motivated to correct this, I could track down some folks for help. But right now, I am really enjoying the ability to use my small amount of spare time to focus on toolkits, front-loading, preadaptation, etc. instead of spending most of my cyber-time on distractions, such as correcting misrepresentations of my positions and fending off character attacks. While my history shows I am not one to shy away from those types of fights, I don’t think it is the most productive way to use my time. Right now, I have about a half-dozen postings written and waiting for posting and about least another dozen waiting to be written.
However, for those who want to comment (good or bad), simply e-mail me your comments and I may or may not post them for you. Whether I post it depends on whether I think it fits in with one of the many topics that race around in my head and/or my mood at the moment. I’m not going to waste time posting long diatribes, off-topic complaints, and personal attacks, thus if you have a critical point to make, make it succinct and focused on the essay.
Perhaps in the future I will activate the comments (or set up another related blog) if I get more time, but for now, this will have to suffice.
Now and then, I hear a critic attempt to spin front-loading evolution as some form of back-peddling or moving the goalposts. Unfortunately for such critics, the internet has a memory and I have shown before, I have been raising the hypothesis of front-loading since the early 2000s. Here’s something I wrote on a forum known as Brainstorms back on May 7, 2002:
Yes, an imperfect replicator will necessarily evolve. But this does not mean unicellular organisms will necessarily evolve into a multicellular organism. In fact, a planet-full of unicellular organisms could very well undergo billions and billions of years of darwinian evolution without ever evolving a multicellular organism. My perspective explores the possibility that unicellular organisms were designed in such a way that the evolution of multicellular organisms was made more likely.
[……]
It seems to me that an effective front-loading strategy would have to employ things like preadaptation, cooption, and buried design. The alternative is to directly design all the genes needed far in the future and deposit them in the present. The two main design problems come with storing all this information and maintaining it until it is used. Preadaptation, cooption, and buried design are solutions to these design problems.
[…..]
I already explained that the outcome of FLE is the thing in question. But logically, the best place to start, after positing that the original life forms were unicellular organisms seeded on this planet, would be to investigate whether such cells were front-loaded to evolve into multicellular organisms. So I’ll put that hypothesis on the table.
Six years later and it appears that my original hypothesis is much, much stronger. Why? Simply read all the blog entries marked ‘front-loading.’ And that was just from this year with a lot more to come.
For the past several years, I have been focused on how one might facilitate the evolution of metazoa. But because of recent scientific discoveries, I should pause and comment on an old topic - the bacterial flagellum.
Five years ago, I wrote an essay that raised many questions and expressed skepticism about Nick Matzke’s hypothesis of homology between the bacterial flagellum and the F ATPase. At the time I wrote this, the skepticism was justified. But since then, new data have come in that have served to significantly strengthen Matzke’s hypothesis and undercut my skepticism.
October 20th, 2008 by 
Mike Gene 
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