Skeptic Denialism

Evidence #1

2011-12-29T20:30:00.053Z

World Trade Center Controlled Demolition

NIST debunk the debunkers and themselves:

"The observed fire activity gleaned from the photographs and videos was not a model input". ~ NIST NCSTAR 1-9, pg. 378

"The steel was assumed in the FDS model to be thermally-thin, thus, no thermal conductivity was used." ~ NIST NCSTAR 1-5F, pg. 20

"I hereby find that the disclosure of the information described below, received by the National Institute of Standards and Technology ("NIST"), in connection with its investigation of the technical causes of the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11,2001, might jeopardize public safety." ~ Patrick Gallagher, NIST Director

"We are ... withholding 3,370 files ... The NIST director determined that the release of these data might jeopardize public safety. This withheld data include remaining input and all results files of ... the collapse initiation model." ~ Caroline Fletcher of NIST

"The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence is referred to as the “probable collapse sequence,” although it does not actually include the structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached and collapse became inevitable." ~ NIST NCSTAR 1, pg. 82

"We are unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse ... NIST has stated that it found no corroborating evidence to suggest that explosives were used to bring down the buildings. NIST did not conduct tests for explosive residue." ~ Caroline Fletcher of NIST

Jennifer Abel, "Theories of 9/11", Hartford Advocate, January 29, 2008:
Abel: What about that letter where NIST said it didn’t look for evidence of explosives?

Michael Neuman of NIST: Right, because there was no evidence of that.

Abel: But how can you know there’s no evidence if you don’t look for it first?

Neuman: If you’re looking for something that isn’t there, you’re wasting your time.
"We conducted our study with no preconceived notions about what happened." ~ Shyam Sunder, WTC7 Press Briefing

"Based on our technical judgement, we decided what were credible hypotheses that we should pursue further ... We judged that other hypotheses that were suggested really were not credible enough to justify investigation." ~ Shyam Sunder, WTC7 Technical Briefing

"NIST therefore concluded that the fires in First Interstate Bank and One Meridian Plaza were at least as severe, and probably more severe, than the fires in WTC 7." ~ NIST NCSTAR 1-9, pg. 341

"There are more similarities than differences between the uncontrolled fires that burned in WTC 7 and those that occurred in the following buildings: First Interstate Bank Building (1988), One Meridian Plaza Building (1991), One New York Plaza (1970), and WTC 5 (2001) ... The differences in the fires were not meaningful ... In each of the other referenced buildings, the fires burned out several floors, even with available water and firefighting activities (except for WTC 5). Thus, whether the fire fighters fought the WTC 7 fires or not is not a meaningful point of dissimilarity from the other cited fires." ~ NIST WTC7 FAQ

"On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom — approximately 10 stories — about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out" ~ Shyam Sunder, 2005

"Other than initiating the fires in WTC 7, the damage from the debris from WTC 1 had little effect on initiating the collapse of WTC 7" ~ NIST NCSTAR 1-A, Executive Summary

"In Stage 2, the north face descended at gravitational acceleration ... This free fall drop continued for approximately 8 stories or 32.0 m (105 ft), the distance traveled between times t = 1.75 s and t = 4.0 s." ~ NIST NCSTAR 1-A, pg. 45

"[A fall of less than free fall is to be expected] because there was structural resistance that was provided in this particular case. And you had a sequence of structural failures that had to take place. Everything was not instantaneous." ~ Shyam Sunder, WTC7 Technical Briefing

Conclusion of MacQueen and Szamboti (2009):

We have tracked the fall of the roof of the North Tower through 114.4 feet, (approximately 9 stories) and we have found that it did not suffer severe and sudden impact or abrupt deceleration. There was no jolt. Thus there could not have been any amplified load. In the absence of an amplified load there is no mechanism to explain the collapse of the lower portion of the building, which was undamaged by fire. The collapse hypothesis of Bazant and the authors of the NIST report has not withstood scrutiny.

Abstract of Chandler (2010):

The roof line of the North Tower of the World Trade Center is shown to have been in constant downward acceleration until it disappeared. A downward acceleration of the falling upper block implies a downward net force, which requires that the upward resistive force was less than the weight of the block. Therefore the downward force exerted by the falling block must also have been less than its weight. Since the lower section of the building was designed to support several times the weight of the upper block, the reduced force exerted by the falling block was insufficient to crush the lower section of the building. Therefore the falling block could not have acted as a "pile driver." The downward acceleration of the upper block can be understood as a consequence of, not the cause of, the disintegration of the lower section of the building.

Molten Steel & Extreme Temperatures at WTC

Source Related to Exceptionally High Temperatures, and/or to Persistent Heat at Ground Zero; Disinformation Regarding the Phenomena of "Molten Steel"/ Exceptionally High High Temperatures/Persistent Heat at Ground Zero; Pre-Collapse Pressure Pulses

WTC2 molten metal:

NIST FAQ:
NIST concluded that the source of the molten material was aluminum alloys from the aircraft, since these are known to melt between 475 degrees Celsius and 640 degrees Celsius (depending on the particular alloy), well below the expected temperatures (about 1,000 degrees Celsius) in the vicinity of the fires. Aluminum is not expected to ignite at normal fire temperatures and there is no visual indication that the material flowing from the tower was burning.

Pure liquid aluminum would be expected to appear silvery. However, the molten metal was very likely mixed with large amounts of hot, partially burned, solid organic materials (e.g., furniture, carpets, partitions and computers) which can display an orange glow, much like logs burning in a fireplace. The apparent color also would have been affected by slag formation on the surface.
Experiments to test NIST "orange glow" hypothesis...

NIST says that flowing aluminum with partially burned organic materials mixed in, "can display an orange glow." But will it really do this? I decided to do an experiment to find out.

We melted aluminum in a steel pan using an oxy-acetylene torch.

Then we added plastic shavings -- which immediately burned with a dark smoke, as the plastic floated on top of the hot molten aluminum. Next, we added wood chips (pine, oak and compressed fiber board chips) to the liquid aluminum. Again, we had fire and smoke, and again, the hydrocarbons floated on top as they burned. We poured out the aluminum and all three of us observed that it appeared silvery, not orange! Of course, we saw a few burning embers, but this did not alter the silvery appearance of the flowing, falling aluminum.

We decided to repeat the experiment, with the same aluminum re-melted. This time when we added fresh wood chips to the hot molten aluminum, we poured the aluminum-wood concoction out while the fire was still burning. And as before, the wood floated on top of the liquid aluminum. While we could see embers of burning wood, we observed the bulk of the flowing aluminum to be silvery as always, as it falls through the air.

This is a key to understanding why the aluminum does not "glow orange" due to partially-burned organics "mixed" in (per NIST theory) - because they do NOT mix in! My colleague noted that it is like oil and water - organics and molten aluminum do not mix. The hydrocarbons float to the top, and there burn - and embers glow, yes, but just in spots. The organics clearly do NOT impart to the hot liquid aluminum an "orange glow" when it falls, when you actually do the experiment!

In the videos of the molten metal falling from WTC2 just prior to its collapse, it appears consistently orange, not just orange in spots and certainly not silvery. We conclude that the falling metal which poured out of WTC2 is NOT aluminum. Not even aluminum "mixed" with organics as NIST theorizes.

NIST should do experiments to test their "wild" theories about what happened on 9/11/2001, if they want to learn the truth about it.

FEMA Report Appendix C - Summary of Eutectic Steel from WTC7:

Evidence of a severe high temperature corrosion attack on the steel, including oxidation and sulfication with subsequent intragranular melting, was readily visible in the near-surface microstructure. A liquid eutectic mixture containing primarily iron, oxygen, and sulfur formed during this hot corrosion attack on the steel ... The severe corrosion and subsequent erosion [is] a very unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified.

WTC 'meteorite' on display at a NY Police Museum:

GUN ENCASED IN CONCRETE AND GUN-CASING REMAINS
The U.S. Customs House stored a large arsenal of firearms at its Six World Trade Center office. During recovery efforts, several handguns were found at Ground Zero, including these two cylindrical gun-casing remains and a revolver embedded in concrete. Fire temperatures were so intense that concrete melted like lava around anything in its path.

Summary of Harrit et al (2009):

We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later.

BSE images of small but representative portions of each red-layer cross section indicate that the small particles with very high BSE intensity (brightness) are consistently 100 nm in size and have a faceted appearance. These bright particles are seen intermixed with plate-like particles that have intermediate BSE intensity and are approximately 40 nm thick and up to about 1 micron across.

The smaller particles with very bright BSE intensity are associated with the regions of high Fe and O. The plate-like particles with intermediate BSE intensity appear to be associated with the regions of high Al and Si.

It is also shown that within the red layer there is an intimate mixing of the Fe-rich grains and Al/Si plate-like particles and that these particles are embedded in a carbon-rich matrix.

Analysis shows that iron and oxygen are present in a ratio consistent with Fe₂O₃.

From the presence of elemental aluminum and iron oxide in the red material, we conclude that it contains the ingredients of thermite.

As measured using DSC, the material ignites and reacts vigorously at a temperature of approximately 430 °C, with a rather narrow exotherm, matching fairly closely an independent observation on a known super-thermite sample. The low temperature of ignition and the presence of iron oxide grains less than 120 nm show that the material is not conventional thermite (which ignites at temperatures above 900 °C) but very likely a form of super-thermite.

After igniting several red/gray chips in a DSC run to 700 °C, we found numerous iron-rich spheres and spheroids in the residue, indicating that a very high temperature reaction had occurred, since the iron-rich product clearly must have been molten to form these shapes. In several spheres, elemental iron was verified since the iron content significantly exceeded the oxygen content. We conclude that a high-temperature reduction-oxidation reaction has occurred in the heated chips, namely, the thermite reaction.

The spheroids produced by the DSC tests and by the flame test have an XEDS signature (Al, Fe, O, Si, C) which is depleted in carbon and aluminum relative to the original red material. This chemical signature strikingly matches the chemical signature of the spheroids produced by igniting commercial thermite, and also matches the signatures of many of the microspheres found in the WTC dust.

The carbon content of the red material indicates that an organic substance is present. This would be expected for super-thermite formulations in order to produce high gas pressures upon ignition and thus make them explosive. The nature of the organic material in these chips merits further exploration. We note that it is likely also an energetic material, in that the total energy release sometimes observed in DSC tests exceeds the theoretical maximum energy of the classic thermite reaction.

Based on these observations, we conclude that the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.

Videos and analyses:

NIST Finally Admits Freefall
Downward Acceleration of the North Tower
What a Gravity-Driven Demolition Looks Like
Lack of Deceleration of North Tower’s Upper Section Proves Use of Explosives
Einsteen, Szamboti and Greening's analysis of the Balzac-Vitry demolition
Debunker Verinage Fantasies are Bunk!
Another Balzac Vitry Verinage
Jonathan Cole - 9/11: Mysterious Eutectic Steel - AE911Truth.org
9/11 Experiments: The Great Thermate Debate
9/11 Experiments: Eliminate the Impossible
9/11 Theories: Expert vs. Expert

Assassinations & False Flags

[JFK] The Warren Commission on the improbability that the same man who supposedly scored a headshot on a moving target from 265 feet could miss so wildly from 140 feet:

The greatest cause for doubt that the first shot missed is the improbability that the same marksman who twice hit a moving target would be so inaccurate on the first and closest of his shots as to miss completely, not only the target, but the large automobile.

[Reichstag Fire] Excerpt from Final Judgement: The Story of Nuremberg (1947):

Who started the fire? Dozens of persons were interrogated on this subject during the course of the trial, some in the secrecy of the interrogation rooms, others on the stand in the courtroom.

Cecilie Mueller, private secretary to the banker Schroeder, said that she was present at a meeting between Hitler and industrialists on January 3, 1933, at which "Goering and Papen plotted to burn the Reichstag in order to make possible the banning of the Communist party, which would be blamed for the fire... Schroeder and Keppler consented to the plan proposed by Papen".

Franz Halder, for a while Chief of Staff of the German Army, testified: "On the occasion of a luncheon on the Fuehrer's birthday in 1942 the conversation turned to the topic of the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears when Goering interrupted the conversation and shouted:
'I am the only one who really knows the Reichstag story, because I set it on fire.'
"He slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand."

[Hans] Gisevius, who at the time held office in the Ministry of the Interior, and later became identified with the so-called "Hitler opposition," testified: "Hitler had stated the wish for a large-scale propaganda campaign. Goebbels took on the job of making the necessary proposals and preparing them, and it was Goebbels who first thought of setting the Reichstag on fire. Goebbels talked about this to the leader of the Berlin SA Brigade, Karl Ernst, and he suggested in detail how it should be carried out."

"Goering gave assurances that the police would be instructed, while still suffering from shock, to take up a false trail. Right from the beginning it was intended that the Communists should be debited with this crime, and it was in that sense that ... ten SA men who had to carry out the crime, were instructed."

Rudolf Diehls, at the time head of the Gestapo and for a while Goering's relative by marriage, insisted that "Goering knew exactly how the fire was to be started" and that he, Diehls, "had to prepare, prior to the fire, a list of people who were to be arrested immediately after it."

[Pearl Harbor] Excerpt from Citizens of London (2010):

By all accounts, the scene that wintry night at the prime minister’s country retreat was jubilant. As soon as they heard the news about Pearl Harbor, all those present knew that their long fight was over: America was now in the war. According to one observer, Churchill and Winant did a little dance together around the room.

[9/11] Rudy Giuliani to the 9/11 Commission, May 19, 2004:

The reason Pier 92 was selected as the command center was because on the next day, on September 12th, Pier 92 was going to have a drill. It had hundreds of people here, from FEMA, from the federal government, from the state, from the State Emergency Management Office, and they were getting ready for a drill for biochemical attack. So that was going to be the place they were going to have the drill. The equipment was already there so we were able to establish a command center there within three days that was two-and-a-half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center.

[7/7] Peter Power, Manchester Evening News, July 8, 2005:

Yesterday we were actually in the City working on an exercise involving mock broadcasts when it happened for real.

When news bulletins started coming on, people began to say how realistic our exercise was - not realising there was an attack. We then became involved in a real crisis which we had to manage for the company.

[7/7] Excerpt from "London's response to 7/7":

On July 6, 2005, a document arrived at De Boer’s UK headquarters finalising what had been agreed for a future crisis response. Within 24 hours the plan was being realised and implemented with the creation of a temporary mortuary...

[Haiti] A Nextgov article on the simultaneous drill:

On Monday, Jean Demay, DISA's technical manager for the agency's Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, happened to be at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami preparing for a test of the system in a scenario that involved providing relief to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane. After the earthquake hit on Tuesday, Demay said SOUTHCOM decided to go live with the system.

[9/11] Cass Sunstein outs Popular Mechanics:

Expanding the cast further, one may see the game as involving four players: government officials, conspiracy theorists, mass audiences, and independent experts – such as mainstream scientists or the editors of Popular Mechanics – whom government attempts to enlist to give credibility to its rebuttal efforts.

Summary of Ullrich and Cohrs (2007), Terrorism Salience increases System Justification: Experimental Evidence:

The recent years have seen an unprecedented wave of large-scale terrorist attacks on targets in the Western world, which most people remember by the mere mention of the dates 9/11/2001 (New York and Washington), 3/11/2004 (Madrid), or 7/7/2005 (London). Although the precise intentions of the terrorists may be irretrievably lost, it seems safe to assume that their aim was not to empower the governments of the targeted countries. Yet, there is evidence to suggest that such events in fact did shift public opinion toward increased support of government authorities, harsh policies, and system-justifying ideologies.

In the present paper, we build on these findings and systematically explore the relationship between terrorism salience and system justification.

We conducted four experiments that compared system justification tendencies of German research participants either thinking about international terrorism or not. Across experiments, we reminded different types of participants (student as well as general population participants) of different terrorist attacks (Madrid, New York, and an alleged plot of terrorist attacks on British airplanes) and assessed their support for the status quo (Studies 1–4) and the accessibility of death-related thoughts (Study 3). We also varied the extent of thought about terrorism required of participants (agreeing or disagreeing with Likert items about terrorism or reflecting on the possibility of one’s own death), the temporal proximity of data collection to the date of the respective attacks, and the type of control condition. All these variations have the potential to shed light on the processes involved in the effects of TS. Since these studies are essentially the first to address the effect of TS on system justification, theoretical interest also centers on the estimate of the population effect size that these studies provide as a set, so we conclude with a meta-analytic summary of our experiments.

Combining effect sizes across studies, we obtained an overall effect size of d = 0.47, which corresponds to a medium effect. Figure 1 displays the effect sizes of Studies 1–4 along with the overall effect. Vertical bars represent the 95% confidence intervals. The confidence interval for the overall effect size indicates that plausible values for the TS effect are between d = 0.25 and d = 0.69.

Fig. 1 Effect Sizes for Terrorism Salience Effects on System Justification across Studies 1–4. Note. Positive values of the bias-corrected effect size Hedges’ d indicate that system justification was higher in the terrorism salience group relative to a control group. The error bars represent the 95% confidence intervals for the population effect size.

The present research has demonstrated that thinking about international terrorism can increase people’s proclivity for system justification. This effect was robust across four experiments exposing a wide range of general population participants to diverse terrorism-related stimuli. Although the recent wave of terrorist attacks has been claimed to produce a large array of system-justifying responses such as support for government authorities, conservatism, and country identification, these claims were based on observational data which allow only weak causal inferences. Thus, the present research nicely complements these previous studies by providing evidence that the link between salience of terrorism and system justification can indeed be regarded as causal.

Bilderberg - Just A "Friendly Supper Club"?!

Official Website: http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/

There are many pieces of evidence which prove that Bilderberg was instrumental in the creation of the European Union. In 2009, the 1955 Bilderberg conference report was leaked by Wikileaks. The report discusses the prospect of "European unity" under a "common market" and "the need to achieve a common currency".

In 2003, BBC Radio 4 examined the papers of the former Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, who attended the early Bilderberg meetings in the 1950s and made notes. One document included the following quote:

Some sort of European Union has long been a utopian dream, but the conference was agreed it was now a necessity of our times. Only in some form of union can the freemasons of Europe achieve a moral and material strength capable of meeting any threat to their freedom.

The Treaty of Rome in 1957, essentially the birth of the EU, was signed into existence by, among others, Bilderberg attendee Paul-Henri Spaak. George McGhee, former US Ambassador to West Germany, reportedly stated that "The Treaty of Rome, which brought the Common Market into being, was nurtured at Bilderberg meetings".

Bilderberg Chairman Étienne Davignon admitted to the EU Observer in 2009 that Bilderberg "helped create the euro in the 1990s".

Secret Rulers of the World (2001) - Part 5 - The Bilderberg Group - 40:25:

Jon Ronson:
Conspiracy theorists say that the ultimate Bilderberg agenda is a one world government.
Lord Denis Healy, Bilderberg founding member:
I think that's exaggerated but not totally unfair in the sense that, those of us in Bilderberg really felt that we couldn't go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless, and to the extent that we could have a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.

Wikileaks Cable 07ANKARA1360:

SUBJECT: ANKARA MEDIA REACTION REPORT
FRIDAY, JUNE 1, 2007

TV Highlights
NTV, 7.00 A.M.

Domestic News

- The annual Bilderberg Conference of the global elite will be held in Istanbul from May 31 to June 3 to discuss possible military operations against Iran, Turkey's EU membership, and energy policies. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and UNDP chief Kemal Dervis are some of the international personalities expected to attend this year's meeting.

In 2010, former NATO secretary general Willie Claes discussed Bilderberg proceedings on a Belgian radio show. In this MP3 clip, he says:

... maar natuurlijk, de rapporteur probeert toch altijd wel een synthese te trekken, en iedereen is verondersteld gebruik te maken van die conclusies in het milieu waar hij invloed heeft hé.

Which Google translates as:

... but of course, always the report tries to draw a synthesis, and everyone is supposed to use those conclusions in the environment where he has his influence.

A number of household names attended the Bilderberg conference before they were household names. In 1991, Bill Clinton, then an obscure governor, attended Bilderberg prior to his 1992 Presidential run, and in 1993, Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, attended the meeting prior to becoming the leader of the Labour Party in 1994, and Prime Minister in 1997. In November 2009, Herman Van Rompuy attended a Bilderberg dinner shortly before being appointed President of the European Council.

In 2008, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton held a private meeting after ditching reporters on a plane. The reporters were not made aware of the meeting until they were literally locked inside the plane as it took off. The media initially reported that they were meeting at Clinton's home, but then later admitted that the meeting did not actually take place there. It just so happens that Bilderberg was meeting in Chantilly, Virginia at the time, which is most likely where Obama and Clinton actually went. The mainstream media did not make this connection.

The US officials who attend Bilderberg are actually violating federal law; specifically the Logan Act, a 1799 law that criminalizes unauthorized US citizens from negotiating with foreign governments.

The security for the 2009 conference in Athens included circling helicopters and even two F-16s! It was the first Bilderberg conference to be covered by Guardian blogger Charlie Skelton. Skelton was followed and harassed everywhere he went and was searched and detained several times. He described the experience as like living in a "weird, little, kind of reality show police state" and said it was a glimpse into a nightmare dystopian future. Writing on his blog, he summarizes the experience here and here:

I have learned this from the random searches, detentions, angry security goon proddings and thumped police desks without number that I've had to suffer on account of Bilderberg: I have spent the week living in a nightmare possible future and many different terrible pasts. I have had the very tiniest glimpse into a world of spot checks and unchecked security powers. And it has left me shaken. It has left me, literally, bruised.

When I filled out my report in Sintagma police station, with the nice captain, he was obviously using the wrong paperwork because there was a box where it said: "Name of item lost." It was a lost property form. I wrote "innocence".

Interestingly, YouTube suspended both of Alex Jones' YouTube channels shortly before the 2009 Bilderberg meeting and then restored them immediately after.

At the 2011 conference in Switzerland, Italian MEP Mario Borghezio tried to enter the hotel the Bilderberg delegates were staying at and was assaulted by security and arrested. Henry Kissinger was able to attend the 2010 conference in Spain, despite being wanted for war crimes there.

The UK conservative Chancellor George Osborne attended the 2011 conference IN OFFICAL CAPACITY. In other words, the British taxpayer paid for him to meet and discuss official business with international finance ministers, heads of state and the CEOs, chairmen, founders, presidents and directors of top corporations and banks in secret. This is shocking in itself, but the fact that the media failed to report on this is scandalous.

Both Jim Tucker and Daniel Estulin have moles inside Bilderberg who leak information to them, enabling them to accurately predict the future.

A member of a related group, the Trilateral Commission, inadvertantly let slip to activists during a meeting in Ireland in 2010 that they are "deciding the future of the world", "need a world government" and, referring to Iran, "need to get rid of them". Another member revealed that "Bilderberg expects us to have a plan outlined".

Reportedly, one of the main talking points of the 2011 conference was the wars in the middle-east as a means for global population reduction. According to Jim Tucker, "They're unifed on their war project. Their rationalization is that the world is too crowded anyway, they have to limit the population growth, and one way to do it is with our wars. So they've been amplifying that all day". Bill Gates, a Bilderberg regular who infamously stated that vaccines would play a role in global population reduction, pledged a billion dollars to a vaccine fund just days after attending Bilderberg 2011. Gates' defenders assert that what he means is that vaccines will improve quality of life in the third world, resulting in the population naturally stabilizing. But since Bilderberg's middle-east conflicts as a means for global population reduction obviously means killing people, there's good reason to suspect that Bilderberg's vaccine agenda as a means for global population reduction also translates to something similar. Especially when you consider that a recent study found a correlation between the number of childhood vaccine doses and infant mortality rates for 30 developed nations.

Does this sound like just a "friendly supper club", as people like David Aaronovitch claim?

Climategate & Peer-Review

Climategate analysis by John P. Costella
ClimateGate: 30 years in the making (Edition 1.1)

McIntyre & McItrick (2003) on the weighting:

"Sheep Mountain CA (ca534) exhibits the distinct “hockey stick” shape of the final MBH98 Northern Hemisphere temperature index, while another NOAMER site, Mayberry Slough AR (ar052), has a growth peak in the early 19th century (Figure 1). The MBH98 algorithm assigns 390 times the weight to Sheep Mountain compared to Mayberry Slough ... "

McIntyre & McItrick (2005) on the 'Censored' Folder:

"MM-type results ... occur ... if the bristlecone pine sites are excluded, while MBH-type results occur if bristlecone pine sites ... are included. Mann’s FTP site actually contains a sensitivity study [/BACKTO_1400-CENSORED/] on the effect of excluding 20 bristlecone pine sites in which this adverse finding was discovered, but the results were not reported or stated publicly and could be discerned within the FTP site only with persistent detective work."

mbh98.tar\TREE\ITRDB\NOAMER:

Climategate 'Censored' Folders
Graphs of Climategate 'Censored' and 'Fixed' Data

Wegmen (2006) on the social network and its implications for 'peer-review':

One of the interesting questions associated with the ‘hockey stick controversy’ are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published.

Phil Jones' peer-reviews of colleagues work:

Review of Wahl&Amman.doc
review_mannetal.doc
review_schmidt.doc
SanteretalSciencereview.doc

Phil Jones to Michael Mann, May 6, 1999 (0926026654.txt):

You may think Keith or I have reviewed some of your papers but we haven't. I've reviewed Ray's and Malcolm's - constructively I hope where I thought something could have been done better. I also know you've reviewed my paper with Gabi very constructively.

Phil Jones, November 16, 1999 (0942777075.txt):

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Phil Jones, March 11, 2003 (1047390562.txt):

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor. A CRU person is on the editorial board...

Michael Mann, March 11, 2003 (1047388489.txt):

I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

Michael Mann, March 12, 2003 (3366.txt):

Either would be good, but Eos is an especially good idea. Both Ellen M-T and Keith Alverson are on the editorial board there, so I think there would be some receptiveness to such a submission.

Tom Wigley, April 24, 2003 (1051190249.txt):

One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.

Keith Briffa to Ed Cook, June 4, 2003 (1054748574.txt):

I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review - Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting - to support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can.

Ed Cook to Keith Briffa, June 4, 2003 (1054756929.txt):

I got a paper to review ... that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology ... is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. ... If published as is, this paper could really do some damage ... It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically.

Ed Cook to Keith Briffa, September 3, 2003 (1062592331.txt):

I am afraid the Mike and Phil are too personally invested in things now ... Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).

Ray Bradley, October 30, 2003 (1067532918.txt):

Tim, Phil, Keef:
I suggest a way out of this mess. Because of the complexity of the arguments involved, to an uniformed observer it all might be viewed as just scientific nit-picking by "for" and "against" global warming proponents. However, if an "independent group" such as you guys at CRU could make a statement as to whether the M&M effort is truly an "audit", and if they did it right, I think that would go a long way to defusing the issue.

Phil Jones to Michael Mann, March 31, 2004 (1080742144.txt):

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully.

Phil Jones to Michael Mann, July 8, 2004 (1089318616.txt):

I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

BBC Environmental Correspondent Alex Kirby to Phil Jones, Dember 7, 2004 (4894.txt):

We are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all ... and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats.

Tom Wigley, January 20, 2005 (2151.txt):

Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.

Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes, February 21, 2005:

Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

Phil Jones, July 5, 2005 (1120593115.txt):

The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn't statistically significant.

Michael Mann, November 15, 2005 (4121.txt):

The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there, but these guys always have "Climate Research" and "Energy and Environment", and will go there if necessary.

Michael Mann, February 9, 2006 (1139521913.txt):

I wanted you guys to know that you're free to use [RealClimate.org] in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we'll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you'd like us to include.

You're also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We'll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont'get to use the RC comments as a megaphone...

André Berger to Phil Jones, January 5, 2007 (3594.txt):

Many thanks for your paper and congratulations for reviving the global warming.

Phil Jones, April 2007 (0121.txt):

Another issue that may overtake things is new work at NCDC, which is likely to raise recent temps (as the impact of the greater % of buoys is accounted for) and also reduce earlier temps (pre -1940) for reasons that aren't that clear. Tom Peterson will be presenting this here tomorrow, so will learn more. Upshot is that their trend will increase....

Keith Briffa to Michael Mann, April 29, 2007 (1177890796.txt):

I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC , which were not always the same. I worried that you might think I gave the impression of not supporting you well enough while trying to report on the issues and uncertainties .

Michael Mann to Phil Jones, August 29, 2007 (1680.txt):

I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.

I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them.

Do you mind if I send this on to Gavin Schmidt (w/ a request to respect the confidentiality with which you have provided it) for his additional advice/thoughts? He usually has thoughtful insights wiith respect to such matters.

Phil Jones, December 20, 2007 (1885.txt):

I'm not adept enough (totally inept) with excel to do this now as no-one who knows how to is here.

What you have to do is to take the numbers in column C (the years) and then those in D (the anomalies for each year), plot them and then work out the linear trend. The slope is upwards. I had someone do this in early 2006, and the trend was upwards then. It will be now. Trend won't be statistically significant, but the trend is up.

Phil Jones, November 13, 2008 (4663.txt):

To almost all in government circles (including the US from Jan 20, 2009), the science is done and dusted. The reporting of climate stories within the media (especially the BBC) is generally one-sided, i.e. the counter argument is rarely made. There is, however, still a vociferous and small majority of climate change skeptics (also called deniers, but these almost entirely exclude any climate-trained climate scientists) who engage the public/govt/media through web sites. Mainstream climate science does not engage with them, and most of these skeptics/deniers do not write regular scientific papers in peer-review journals.

Ben Santer, March 19, 2009 (1237496573.txt):

If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available - raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations - I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.

Phil Jones, March 19, 2009 (1237496573.txt):

I'm having a dispute with the new editor of Weather. I've complained about him to the RMS Chief Exec. If I don't get him to back down, I won't be sending any more papers to any RMS journals and I'll be resigning from the RMS.

Kevin Trenberth, July 30, 2009 (1248998466.txt):

I think you should argue that it should be expedited for the reasons of interest by the press. Key question is who was the editor who handled the original, because this is an implicit criticism of that person. May need to point this out and ensure that someone else handles it.

1249503274.txt:

Journal of Geophysical Research standard request:
Please list the names of 5 experts who are knowledgeable in your area and could give an unbiased review of your work. Please do not list colleagues who are close associates, collaborators, or family members.
Phil Jones, August 5, 2009:
Agree with Kevin that Tom Karl has too much to do. Tom Wigley is semi retired and like Mike Wallace may not be responsive to requests from JGR.

We have Ben Santer in common ! Dave Thompson is a good suggestion. I'd go for one of Tom Peterson or Dave Easterling.

To get a spread, I'd go with 3 US, One Australian and one in Europe. So Neville Nicholls and David Parker.

All of them know the sorts of things to say - about our comment and the awful original, without any prompting.

Tom Wigley to Phil Jones, September 28, 2009 (1254108338.txt):

Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly explain the 1940s warming blip.

If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I'm sure you know).

So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean -- but we'd still have to explain the land blip.

I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are 1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips -- higher sensitivity plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.

Removing ENSO does not affect this.

It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip".

Kevin Trenberth, October 12, 2009 (1255352257.txt):

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Mike Salmon, October 23, 2009 (1256353124.txt):

I'm not thinking straight. It makes far more sense to have password-protection rather than IP-address protection. So, to access those pages

Username: steve
Password: tosser

Have a good weekend!

Michael Mann on "the cause":

August 3, 2004 (3115.txt):
By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.
May 26, 2005 (3940.txt):
They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a bit.
May 30, 2008 (0810.txt):
I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don't know what she think's she's doing, but its not helping the cause...

"Hiding the decline" in peer-reviewed publications:

Keith’s Science Trick, Mike’s Nature Trick and Phil’s Combo
Hide-the-Decline Plus
Peer Review of Enhanced Hide-the-Decline

Briffa_sep98_d.pro:

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!'
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

Phil Jones, Climate: The hottest year, Nature News, November, 15 2010:

The whole point about trying to pervert the peer-review process is that it is impossible to do it.

U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993):

Another pertinent consideration is whether the theory or technique has been subjected to peer review and publication. Publication (which is but one element of peer review) is not a sine qua non of admissibility; it does not necessarily correlate with reliability, and in some instances well-grounded but innovative theories will not have been published. Some propositions, moreover, are too particular, too new, or of too limited interest to be published. But submission to the scrutiny of the scientific community is a component of "good science," in part because it increases the likelihood that substantive flaws in methodology will be detected. The fact of publication (or lack thereof) in a peer-reviewed journal thus will be a relevant, though not dispositive, consideration in assessing the scientific validity of a particular technique or methodology on which an opinion is premised.

Summary of Casadevall & Fang (2009), Is Peer Review Censorship?:

Given the unpleasantness of having one's work rejected, as well as a desire for more-rapid communication of scientific findings, some scientists have expressed nostalgia for the good old days when nearly any submitted manuscript was accepted for publication, and some have even compared peer review to censorship. After all, neither Newton nor Darwin had to submit to the indignity of peer review prior to publication!

The current system persists despite abundant evidence of imperfections in the peer review process. Most scientists would agree that peer review improves manuscripts and prevents some errors in publication. However, although there is widespread consensus among scientists that peer review is a good thing, there are remarkably little data that the system works as intended. In fact, studies of peer review have identified numerous problems, including confirmatory bias, bias against negative results, favoritism for established investigators in a given field, address bias, gender bias, and ideological orientation. Smith wrote that peer review is “slow, expensive, ineffective, something of a lottery, prone to bias and abuse, and hopeless at spotting errors and fraud”. Chance has been shown to play an important role in determining the outcome of peer review, and agreement between reviewers is disconcertingly low. Bauer has noted that as a field matures, “knowledge monopolies” and “research cartels”, which fiercely protect their domains, suppress minority opinions, and curtail publication and funding of unorthodox viewpoints, are established.

Returning to the questions of censorship, it is self-evident how foibles in peer review can create a major problem with scientific acceptance, for peer reviewers are the major gatekeepers for the printed word.

If reviewers prevent authors from any discussion of controversial or speculative viewpoints or if editors are overzealous in screening manuscripts for perceived newsworthiness or consistency with prevailing dogma, there is a danger of blurring the distinction between peer review and censorship. If a reviewer obstructs the publication of a manuscript because it competes with or questions his or her own work, there is an ethical dimension as well.

Vaccines & Big Pharma Corruption

Conclusion of Wakefield et al (1998):

We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and its possible relation to this vaccine.

The "Lancet 12" parents defend Andrew Wakefield:

Read Complaint Filing and Parent Letters in UK's GMC Wakefield, Walker-Smith, Murch Investigation
Lancet 12 Parents Respond to Brian Deer BMJ GMC Allegations
Selective Hearing
The Gary Null Show - 01/27/11
Julia Ahier of the Lancet 12 speaks out!

Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, February 5, 2010:

Dr. Andrew Wakefield is being discredited to prevent an historic study from being published that for the first time looks at vaccinated versus unvaccinated primates and compares health outcomes, with potentially devastating consequences for vaccine makers and public health officials.

The first phase of this monkey study was published three months ago in the prestigious medical journal Neurotoxicology, and focused on the first two weeks of life when the vaccinated monkeys received a single vaccine for Hepatitis B, mimicking the U.S. vaccine schedule. The results ... were disturbing. Vaccinated monkeys, unlike their unvaccinated peers, suffered the loss of many reflexes that are critical for survival.

Did Reed Elsevier interfere in the editorial decisions of Neurotoxicology?:

On February 12, 2010 the journal Neurotoxicology made a quiet change on its web-site to an “in-press” article that had previously been available as an “epub ahead of print.” There was no press release or public announcement, simply an entry change. The entry for the article, “Delayed acquisition of neonatal reflexes in newborn primates receiving a thimerosal-containing Hepatitis B vaccine: Influence of gestational age and birth weight”, was first modified to read “Withdrawn” and has since been removed altogether from the Neurotoxicology web-site. The only remaining official trace of the paper is now the following listing on the National Library of Medicine’s “PubMed” site.

This paper had cleared every hurdle for entry into the public scientific record: it had passed peer review at a prestigious journal, received the editor’s approval for publication, been disseminated in electronic publication format (a common practice to ensure timely dissemination of new scientific information), and received the designation “in press” as it stood in line awaiting future publication in a print version of the journal. Now, and inexplicably, it has been erased from the official record. For practical scientific purposes it no longer exists.

Joan Cranmer, the editor-in-chief of Neurotoxicology ... last November, in the form of a response to a threatening letter she had received ... gave a strong defense of Neurotoxicology’s review procedures.
“As Editor of Neurotoxicology this is to inform you that the referenced manuscript has been subjected to rigorous independent peer review according to our journal standards. If you have issues with the science in the paper please submit them to me as a Letter to the Editor which will undergo peer review and will be subject to publication if deemed acceptable.”
That response, of course, came before the subsequent media storm over the GMC findings and the decision by another journal, The Lancet to retract a paper co-authored by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the last listed author (a slot typically reserved for a project’s senior scientist) on the primate paper.

In scientific terms ... The Lancet case series carries far less significance than the primate paper. Contrary to the bulk of media coverage on this issue, the 1998 “early report” provided neither evidence nor claims of causation. By contrast, the Thoughtful House primate project was carefully designed to test causation hypotheses.

Despite protests from study participants, on February 2nd, the same day Horton announced The Lancet’s decision, Neurotoxicology informed the primate study authors of their decision not to proceed with publication in the print edition and soon removed the epub from its web-site.

At first glance, the two journals--The Lancet and Neurotoxicology--couldn’t be more different: The Lancet, a general purpose medical journal founded in 1823 and named after a device used to bleed patients under the now obsolete theory of the humors, is headquartered in London; Neurotoxicology, founded in 1979 and headquartered in Arkansas, is a specialized journal focused on “dealing with the effects of toxic substances on the nervous system of humans and experimental animals of all ages.” There is, however, a critical connection between the two. Both journals are published by Elsevier, a division of publishing giant Reed Elsevier, a multi-billion dollar corporation. Elsevier publishes close to 2400 scientific journals and also distributes millions of scientific articles through its online site ScienceDirect. According to Reed Elsevier’s 2008 Annual Report, “ScienceDirect from Elsevier contains over 25% of the world’s science, technological and medical information.”

As a leading publisher of scientific and medical journals, Reed Elsevier possesses enormous power over what studies actually make it into the scientific record. Moreover, in its quest for profits, the company has displayed an inclination to provide privileged access to that record to its commercial partners. In 2009, Elsevier acknowledged publishing nine journals, with titles such as “Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine” that were entirely sponsored by mostly undisclosed pharmaceutical advertisers (one was solely sponsored by Merck and published articles favorable to products like Vioxx and Fosamax). Although Reed Elsevier doesn’t manufacture drugs or vaccines, as a for-profit publisher it clearly has an interest in generating revenue from commercial partners in the medical industry.

Suspicions over the editorial independence of Reed Elsevier on the question of vaccine safety draw support from evidence of board level conflicts of interest involving Reed Elsevier’s CEO, Sir Crispin Davis. Davis, who retired in 2009 as CEO of Reed Elsevier, has served since July 2003 on the board of directors of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) a major vaccine manufacturer (also recently appointed to the board of GSK is James Murdoch, publisher of News Corp., which owns The Times of London, the newspaper which launched the media attack on Wakefield). In 2008, vaccines accounted for 12.5% of GSK’s worldwide revenues. And although Reed Elsevier has no known vaccine liability risk, GSK has been directly exposed to two of the most prominent autism/vaccine controversies. GSK manufactured Pluserix, a version of the MMR vaccine introduced in the UK in 1989 and withdrawn in 1992 due to safety concerns. GSK also produced a thimerosal containing vaccine similar to the one examined in the primate paper (which was a Merck product) named Engerix B, for hepatitis B. GSK lists its financial exposure to thimerosal litigation in the U.S. under the “legal proceedings” section in its 2008 Annual Report.

Tensions between publishers, who attend to a publication’s profitability, and editors, who attend to independent content, are well known. In their normal operations, there is little reason to believe that Reed Elsevier executives might involve themselves in the scientific review process. However, when scientific publications that can threaten the profitability (and commercial sponsorship) of valued partners of Reed Elsevier such as Glaxosmithkline and Merck are suppressed, Reed Elsevier’s actions should raise concerns among the scientists who lend their names and reputations to the journals the company distributes.

Preface of Vaccines and Autism - What Do Epidemiological Studies Really Tell Us?:

There are 16 epidemiological studies here on MMR vaccines, thimerosal and autism. These studies represent the most often cited papers by scientists, public health officials and members of the media when trying to refute any evidence of an association between vaccinations and autism.

There are serious methodological limitations, design flaws, conflicts of interest or other problems related to each of these 16 studies. These flaws have been pointed out by government officials, other researchers, medical review panels and even the authors of the studies themselves. Taken together, the limitations of these studies make it impossible to conclude that thimerosal and MMR vaccines are not associated with autism.

Excerpt from CBS News - Vaccines and autism: a new scientific review:

A number of independent scientists have said they've been subjected to orchestrated campaigns to discredit them when their research exposed vaccine safety issues, especially if it veered into the topic of autism. We asked [Helen] Ratajczak how she came to research the controversial topic. She told us that for years while working in the pharmaceutical industry, she was restricted as to what she was allowed to publish. "I'm retired now," she told CBS News. "I can write what I want."

Abstract of Jefferson et al (2009), Relation of study quality, concordance, take home message, funding, and impact in studies of influenza vaccines: systematic review:

Objective To explore the relation between study concordance, take home message, funding, and dissemination of comparative studies assessing the effects of influenza vaccines.

Data synthesis We identified 259 primary studies (274 datasets). Higher quality studies were significantly more likely to show concordance between data presented and conclusions and less likely to favour effectiveness of vaccines. Government funded studies were less likely to have conclusions favouring the vaccines. A higher mean journal impact factor was associated with complete or partial industry funding compared with government or private funding and no funding. Study size was not associated with concordance, content of take home message, funding, and study quality. Higher citation index factor was associated with partial or complete industry funding. This was sensitive to the exclusion from the analysis of studies with undeclared funding.

Conclusion Publication in prestigious journals is associated with partial or total industry funding, and this association is not explained by study quality or size.

Comments on the above study:

Vaccine Studies: Under the Influence of Pharma:
Jefferson's analysis confirms that drug companies marketing vaccines have a major influence on what gets published and is said about vaccines in medical journals. It is no wonder that there are almost no studies published in the medical literature that call into question vaccine safety. The preferential treatment of Pharma-funded studies also explains why the risks of an inappropriately fast-tracked vaccine like Gardasil are underplayed in the medical literature and why a physician like Andrew Wakefield, M.D., who dared to publish a study in 1998 in a medical journal (The Lancet) calling for more scientific investigation into the possible link between MMR vaccine and regressive autism, has been mercilessly persecuted for more than a decade by both Pharma-funded special interest groups as well as public health officials maintaining close relationships with vaccine manufacturers.
Dr. Mercola:
Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) has hit it on the head with this article. There are many disturbing issues at work behind and beneath the vaccine research that actually ends up seeing the light of day.

For example, the peer review process, which is the basic method for checking medical research to see if it’s fit to publish, is not without serious flaws.

For one, it’s almost impossible to find out what happens in the vetting process as peer reviewers are unpaid, anonymous and unaccountable. And although the system is based on the best of intentions, it lacks consistent standards and the expertise of the reviewers can vary widely from journal to journal.

This leaves the field wide open to reviewers to base their decisions on their own prejudices. And more often than not, there is a distinct tendency to let flawed papers through if their conclusion is favorable for the vaccine.

As Dr. John Ioannidis (see below) has previously stated, there appears to be an underlying assumption that scientific information is a commodity, and hence, scientific journals are a medium for its dissemination and exchange.

When scientific journals function in this manner, it has major consequences for the entire field of science and medicine, and ultimately for you and your family’s health – especially in the case of vaccines, as many wind up being mandated for all children.

While idealists will likely not agree with this viewpoint, realists can acknowledge that journals generate revenue and build careers. Publication is also critical for both drug development and marketing, which are needed to attract venture capital.

So, sad to say, it is ever so clear that the current system is highly susceptible to manipulation of both pocketbooks and ego’s.

Scientific Claims -- A 50/50 Chance of Being True

Back in 2005, Dr. John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, showed that there is less than a 50 percent chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper will be true.

Dr. Ioannidis did it again just last year, showing that much of scientific research being published is highly questionable. According to that analysis, the studies most likely to be published are those that oversell dramatic or otherwise considered important results.

Results that oftentimes turn out to be false later on.

Prestigious journals boast that they are very selective, turning down the vast majority of papers that are submitted to them. The assumption is that they therefore publish only the best scientific work.

But Dr. Ioannidis study of 49 papers in leading journals, which had been cited by more than 1,000 other scientists -- in other words, well-regarded research -- showed that within only a few years, almost a third of the papers had been refuted by other studies.

Making matters worse, the “hotter” the field, the greater the competition, and the more likely that published research in top journals could be wrong.

Abstract of Miller & Goldman (2011), Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?:

The US childhood immunization schedule specifies 26 vaccine doses for infants aged less than 1 year — the most in the world — yet 33 nations have lower IMRs. Using linear regression, the immunization schedules of these 34 nations were examined and a correlation ... was found between IMRs and the number of vaccine doses routinely given to infants ... Linear regression analysis of unweighted mean IMRs showed a high statistically significant correlation between increasing number of vaccine doses and increasing infant mortality rate ... A closer inspection of correlations between vaccine doses, biochemical or synergistic toxicity, and IMRs is essential.

Intelligent Design & Evolution

Michael Behe, Good News, January 2011:

The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that ID is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism - it is intelligent design.

Summary of A Comparison of Judge Jones’ Opinion in Kitzmiller v. Dover with Plaintiffs’ Proposed “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law”:

In December of 2005, critics of the theory of intelligent design (ID) hailed federal judge John E. Jones’ ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover, which declared unconstitutional the reading of a statement about intelligent design in public school science classrooms in Dover, Pennsylvania. Since the decision was issued, Jones’ 139-page judicial opinion has been lavished with praise as a “masterful decision” based on careful and independent analysis of the evidence. However, a new analysis of the text of the Kitzmiller decision reveals that nearly all of Judge Jones’ lengthy examination of “whether ID is science” came not from his own efforts or analysis but from wording supplied by ACLU attorneys. In fact, 90.9% (or 5,458 words) of Judge Jones’ 6,004-word section on intelligent design as science was taken virtually verbatim from the ACLU’s proposed “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” submitted to Judge Jones nearly a month before his ruling. Jones essentially cut-and-pasted the ACLU’s wording into his ruling to come up with his decision.

Judge Jones’ extensive borrowing from the ACLU did not end with the words of ACLU lawyers. He even borrowed the overall structure of his analysis of intelligent design from the ACLU. The ACLU organized its critique of ID around six main claims, and Judge Jones adopted an identical outline, discussing the same claims in precisely the same sequence.

In addition, Judge Jones appears to have copied the ACLU’s work uncritically. As a result, his judicial opinion perpetuated several egregious factual errors originally found in the ACLU’s proposed “Findings of Fact.

Proposed “findings of fact” are prepared to assist judges in writing their opinions, and judges are certainly allowed to draw on them. Indeed, judges routinely invite lawyers to propose findings of fact in order to verify what the lawyers believe to be the key factual issues in the case. Thus, in legal circles Judge Jones’ use of the ACLU’s proposed “Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law” would not be considered “plagiarism” nor a violation of judicial ethics.

Nonetheless, the extent to which Judge Jones simply copied the language submitted to him by the ACLU is stunning. For all practical purposes, Jones allowed ACLU attorneys to write nearly the entire section of his opinion analyzing whether intelligent design is science. As a result, this central part of Judge Jones’ ruling reflected essentially no original deliberative activity or independent examination of the record on Jones’ part. The revelation that Judge Jones in effect “dragged and dropped” large sections of the ACLU’s “Findings of Fact” into his opinion, errors and all, calls into serious question whether Jones exercised the kind of independent analysis that would make his “broad, stinging rebuke” of intelligent design appropriate.

The new disclosure that Judge Jones’ analysis of the scientific status of ID merely copied language written for him by ACLU attorneys underscores just how inappropriate this part of Kitzmiller was—and why Judge Jones’ analysis should not be regarded as the final word about intelligent design.

Conclusion of Whether Intelligent Design is Science: A Response to the Opinion of the Court in Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District by Michael Behe:

The Court’s reasoning in section E-4 is premised on: a cramped view of science; the conflation of intelligent design with creationism; an incapacity to distinguish the implications of a theory from the theory itself; a failure to differentiate evolution from Darwinism; and strawman arguments against ID. The Court has accepted the most tendentious and shopworn excuses for Darwinism with great charity and impatiently dismissed evidence-based arguments for design.

All of that is regrettable, but in the end does not impact the realities of biology, which are not amenable to adjudication. On the day after the judge’s opinion, December 21, 2005, as before, the cell is run by amazingly complex, functional machinery that in any other context would immediately be recognized as designed. On December 21, 2005, as before, there are no non-design explanations for the molecular machinery of life, only wishful speculations and Just-So stories.

Excerpt from Answering Scientific Criticisms of Intelligent Design by Michael Behe

Let us now consider the issue of falsifiability. Let me say up front that I know most philosophers of science do not regard falsifiability as a necessary trait for a successful scientific theory. Nonetheless, falsifiability is still an important factor to consider since it is nice to know whether or not one’s theory can be shown to be wrong by contact with the real world.

A frequent charge made against intelligent design is that it is unfalsifiable, or untestable. For example, in its recent booklet Science and Creationism, the National Academy of Sciences writes: “[I]ntelligent design … [is] not science because [it is] not testable by the methods of science”. Yet that claim seems to be at odds with the criticisms I have just summarized. Clearly, Russell Doolittle and Kenneth Miller advanced scientific arguments aimed at falsifying intelligent design. If the results of Bugge et al. had been as Doolittle first thought, or if Barry Hall’s work had indeed shown what Miller implied, then they correctly believed that my claims about irreducible complexity would have suffered quite a blow.

Now, one cannot have it both ways. One cannot say both that intelligent design is unfalsifiable (or untestable) and that there is evidence against it. Either it is unfalsifiable and floats serenely beyond experimental approach, or it can be criticized on the basis of our observations and is therefore testable. The fact that critical reviewers advance scientific arguments against intelligent design (whether successfully or not) shows that intelligent design is indeed falsifiable. What is more, it is widely open to falsification by a series of rather straightforward laboratory experiments such as those that Miller and Doolittle pointed to, which is exactly why they pointed to them.

Now let us turn the tables and ask: How could one falsify the claim that a particular biochemical system was produced by a Darwinian process. Kenneth Miller announced an “acid test” for the ability of natural selection to produce irreducible complexity. He then decided that the test was passed and unhesitatingly proclaimed intelligent design to be falsified. But if, as it certainly seems to me, E. coli actually fails the lactose-system “acid test”, would Miller consider Darwinism to be falsified? Almost certainly not. He would surely say that Barry Hall started with the wrong bacterial species or used the wrong selective pressure, and so on. So it turns out that his “acid test” was not a test for Darwinism; it tested only intelligent design.

The same one-way testing was employed by Russell Doolittle. He pointed to the results of Bugge et al. to argue against intelligent design. But when the results turned out to be the opposite of what he had originally thought, Professor Doolittle did not abandon Darwinism.

It seems then, perhaps counterintuitively to some, that intelligent design is quite susceptible to falsification, at least on the points under discussion. Darwinism, on the other hand, seems quite impervious to falsification. The reason for that can be seen when we examine the basic claims of the two ideas with regards to a specific biochemical system like, say, the bacterial flagellum. The claim of intelligent design is that “No unintelligent process could produce this system”. The claim of Darwinism is that “Some unintelligent process could produce this system”. To falsify the first claim, one need only show that at least one unintelligent process could produce the system. To falsify the second claim, one would have to show the system could not have formed by any of a potentially infinite number of possible unintelligent processes, which is effectively impossible to do.

The danger of accepting an effectively unfalsifiable hypothesis is that science has no way to determine if the belief corresponds to reality. In the history of science, the scientific community has believed in any number of things that were in fact not true, not real, for example, the universal ether. If there were no way to test those beliefs, the progress of science might be substantially and negatively affected. If, in the present case, the expansive claims of Darwinism are in reality not true, then its unfalsifiability will cause science to bog down, as I believe it has.

So, what can be done? I do not think that the answer is never to investigate a theory that is unfalsifiable. After all, although it is unfalsifiable, Darwinism’s claims are potentially positively demonstrable. For example, if some scientist conducted an experiment showing the production of a flagellum (or some equally complex system) by Darwinian processes, then the Darwinian claim would be affirmed. The question only arises in the face of negative results.

I think several steps can be prescribed. First of all, one has to be aware – raise one’s consciousness – about when a theory is unfalsifiable. Second, as far as possible, an advocate of an unfalsifiable theory should try as diligently as possible to demonstrate positively the claims of the hypothesis. Third, one needs to relax Darwin’s criterion from this:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.
to something like this:
If a complex organ exists which seems very unlikely to have been produced by numerous, successive, slight modifications, and if no experiments have shown that it or comparable structures can be so produced, then maybe we are barking up the wrong tree. So, LET’S BREAK SOME RULES!
Of course, people will differ on the point at which they decide to break rules. But at least with the realistic criterion there could be evidence against the unfalsifiable. At least then people like Doolittle and Miller would run a risk when they cite an experiment that shows the opposite of what they had thought. At least then science would have a way to escape the rut of unfalsifiability and think new thoughts.

Abstract of Axe (2004), Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds (Full PDF):

Proteins employ a wide variety of folds to perform their biological functions. How are these folds first acquired? An important step toward answering this is to obtain an estimate of the overall prevalence of sequences adopting functional folds. Since tertiary structure is needed for a typical enzyme active site to form, one way to obtain this estimate is to measure the prevalence of sequences supporting a working active site. Although the immense number of sequence combinations makes wholly random sampling unfeasible, two key simplifications may provide a solution. First, given the importance of hydrophobic interactions to protein folding, it seems likely that the sample space can be restricted to sequences carrying the hydropathic signature of a known fold. Second, because folds are stabilized by the cooperative action of many local interactions distributed throughout the structure, the overall problem of fold stabilization may be viewed reasonably as a collection of coupled local problems. This enables the difficulty of the whole problem to be assessed by assessing the difficulty of several smaller problems. Using these simplifications, the difficulty of specifying a working β-lactamase domain is assessed here. An alignment of homologous domain sequences is used to deduce the pattern of hydropathic constraints along chains that form the domain fold. Starting with a weakly functional sequence carrying this signature, clusters of ten side-chains within the fold are replaced randomly, within the boundaries of the signature, and tested for function. The prevalence of low-level function in four such experiments indicates that roughly one in 10⁶⁴ signature-consistent sequences forms a working domain. Combined with the estimated prevalence of plausible hydropathic patterns (for any fold) and of relevant folds for particular functions, this implies the overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as 1 in 10⁷⁷, adding to the body of evidence that functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences.

Abstract of Axe (2010), The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds:

Four decades ago, several scientists suggested that the impossibility of any evolutionary process sampling anything but a miniscule fraction of the possible protein sequences posed a problem for the evolution of new proteins. This potential problem—the sampling problem—was largely ignored, in part because those who raised it had to rely on guesswork to fill some key gaps in their understanding of proteins. The huge advances since that time call for a careful reassessment of the issue they raised. Focusing specifically on the origin of new protein folds, I argue here that the sampling problem remains. The difficulty stems from the fact that new protein functions, when analyzed at the level of new beneficial phenotypes, typically require multiple new protein folds, which in turn require long stretches of new protein sequence. Two conceivable ways for this not to pose an insurmountable barrier to Darwinian searches exist. One is that protein function might generally be largely indifferent to protein sequence. The other is that relatively simple manipulations of existing genes, such as shuffling of genetic modules, might be able to produce the necessary new folds. I argue that these ideas now stand at odds both with known principles of protein structure and with direct experimental evidence. If this is correct, the sampling problem is here to stay, and we should be looking well outside the Darwinian framework for an adequate explanation of fold origins.

["Nylonase"] Summary of Negoro et al (2005):

6-Aminohexanoate-dimer hydrolase (EII), responsible for the degradation of nylon-6 industry by-products, and its analogous enzyme (EII´) that has only ~0.5% of the specific activity toward the 6-aminohexanoate-linear dimer, are encoded on plasmid pOAD2 of Arthrobacter sp. (formerly Flavobacterium sp.) KI72.

EII´ has 88% homology to EII but has very low catalytic activity (1/200 of EII activity) toward the 6-aminohexanoate-linear dimer (Ald), suggesting that EII has evolved by gene duplication followed by base substitutions from its ancestral gene.

We have found that of the 46 amino acid alterations that differed between the EII and EII´ proteins, two amino acid replacements in the EII´ protein (i.e. Gly to Asp (EII-type) at position 181 (G181D) and His to Asn (EII-type) at position 266 (H266N)) are sufficient to increase the Ald-hydrolytic activity back to the level of the parental EII enzyme. The other 44 amino acid alterations have no significant effect on the increase of the activity.

The activity of the EII´-type enzyme is enhanced ~10-fold by the G181D substitution and ~200-fold by the G181D/H266N double substitutions. Nylon oligomer hydrolase utilizes Ser112/Lys115/Tyr215 as common active sites, both for Ald-hydrolytic and esterolytic activity, but requires at least two additional amino acid residues (Asp181/Asn266), specific for Ald-hydrolytic activity.

These results indicate that the G181D and H266N are amino acid alterations specific for the increase of nylon oligomer hydrolysis. Thus, the nylon oligomer-degrading enzyme (EII) is considered to have evolved from preexisting esterases with β-lactamase folds.

Abstract of Nadeu & Jiggins (2010), A golden age for evolutionary genetics? Genomic studies of adaptation in natural populations (Full PDF):

Studies of the genetic basis of adaptive changes in natural populations are now addressing questions that date back to the beginning of evolutionary biology, such as whether evolution proceeds in a gradual or discontinuous manner, and whether convergent evolution involves convergent genetic changes. Studies that combine quantitative genetics and population genomics provide a powerful tool for identifying genes controlling recent adaptive change. Accumulating evidence shows that single loci, and in some cases single mutations, often have major effects on phenotype. This implies that discontinuous evolution, with rapid changes in phenotype, could occur frequently in natural populations. Furthermore, convergent evolution commonly involves the same genes. This implies a surprising predictability underlying the genetic basis of evolutionary changes. Nonetheless, most studies of recent evolution involve the loss of traits, and we still understand little of the genetic changes needed in the origin of novel traits.

Debating the "edge" of evolution:

Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues
Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli
Multiple Mutations Needed for E. Coli
Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution
Bold Biology for 2009
Waiting Longer for Two Mutations
Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth Shies Away from Intelligent Design but Unwittingly Vindicates Michael Behe
Reductive Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness
The Limits of Complex Adaptation: An Analysis Based on a Simple Model of Structured Bacterial Populations
Experimental evolution, loss-of-function mutations, and "the first rule of adaptive evolution" (PDF)
The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution: A reply to Jerry Coyne
The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzymes Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway

Sponge genome goes deep, Nature, 5 August, 2010 (PDF):

A draft genome sequence of the Great Barrier Reef demosponge offers a comprehensive look at the genetic mechanisms that first allowed individual cells to work together as parts of a larger whole.

With more than 18,000 individual genes, the sponge genome represents a diverse toolkit, coding for many processes that lay the foundations for more complex creatures. These include mechanisms for telling cells how to adhere to one another, grow in an organized fashion and recognize interlopers. The genome also includes analogues of genes that, in organisms with a neuromuscular system, code for muscle tissue and neurons.

According to Douglas Erwin, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, such complexity indicates that sponges must have descended from a more advanced ancestor than previously suspected. "This flies in the face of what we think of early metazoan evolution," says Erwin.

Charles Marshall, director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, agrees. "It means there was an elaborate machinery in place that already had some function," he says. "What I want to know now is what were all these genes doing prior to the advent of sponge."

The researchers also identified parts of the genome devoted to suppressing individual cells that multiply at the expense of the collective. The presence of such genes indicates that the battle to stop rogue cells — in other words, cancer — is as old as multicellularity itself. Such a link was recently hinted at by work showing that certain 'founder genes' that are associated with human cancers first arose at about the same time as metazoans appeared.The demosponge genome shows that genes for cell suicide — those activated within an individual cell when something goes wrong — evolved before pathways that are activated by adjacent cells to dispatch a cancerous neighbour.

"Cell suicide predated cell homicide," says Carlo Maley, an oncologist at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This suggests that the single-celled colonial organisms that gave rise to our ancestors had already evolved mechanisms to kill themselves, which multicellular creatures later exploited as a cancer defence.

Evolution of multicellularity: what is required?:

Evolution faces a tough dichotomy to get around if multicellularity is to evolve: cellular selection vs organismal integrity. At the single cell level, selection will favour cells that reproduce better. But if those cells are allowed to reproduce uncontrollably in a multicellular organism, they will inexorably destroy organismal integrity, and harm or kill the organism, also causing the ‘fitter’ cells to die.

At the organismal level, selection will favour traits that preserve organismal integrity, which tries to control reproduction of cells beyond what is needed. Pepper et al. agree:
‘Multicellular organisms could not emerge as functional entities before organism-level selection had led to the evolution of mechanisms to suppress cell-level selection.’
However, this leads to a mystery for the evolutionist: how do multicellular organisms evolve from single celled creatures when cellular selection and organism-level selection are totally contradictory to each other? The multicellular organism seeks to control the reproduction to what is needed at a higher level of organisation; a single cell seeks to reproduce more than its competitors.

It appears that mechanisms for apoptosis (programmed cell death) are necessary for multicellularity, whereby certain cells are triggered to die during development or because they have gone haywire. Such mechanisms are incredibly complex and arguably irreducibly complex. Explaining the existence of such a mechanism without intelligent design seems to be a futile exercise.

Videos:

Journey Inside The Cell
Powering the Cell: Mitochondria
The ATP Synthase Enzyme
Apoptosis
Blood Clotting
Sticky gecko feet - Space Age Reptiles - BBC

"Firefight" Authors & Contributors: A Plane Hit the Pentagon!

2011-12-18T17:30:00.003Z

[Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon] - C-SPAN Video Library
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/205883-1

Here/now: Interview with Pat Creed Pt. 3 - 6:16:

My co-author especially, being a professional journalist, he kept hammering me, again and again and again, "You need to be proud of this, no errors, confirm everything. Every single person who says 'this happened' get two other sources to say 'yeah that happened'". We really worked hard to make sure that not only was it a good story but it was a very accurate story and I feel very comfortable and confident that what we wrote is a good reflection of what happened.

Amazon Reader Link

Page 373:

For the first time, Regan's team saw something they had expected to see all along but had been scarce until then: recognizable airplane parts. They all thought they would find big pieces of the airliner laying everywhere, the way car parts end up strewn across a highway after a crash. But the physics of an airplane crash were obviously different: Mostly there was just tons of shredded metal and melted plastic.

Finally, they found several airplane seats, piled among the usual mounds of upturned office furniture and random wreckage. A couple of the seats still had bodies belted into them, which had already been found and marked for the FBI. Most of the workers inside were conscientious about not gawking, yet the seats attracted a lot of attention. They were the first objects the nonaviation experts had seen that unmistakably belonged to an airplane.

Page 425-426:

The airplane had nearly disintegrated, but Dan Fitch's group found several huge cogs, bent and blackened, that weighed a couple hundred pounds each; it took a couple of workers to handle each one. Other objects nearby looked like large gears, and strips of metal that appeared to be fan blades. Workers realized that they were pulling apart the remnants of one of the aircraft's two engines. The aluminum cowling that had encased it all had been torn away, but the guts of the engine were there.

FEMA crews used a blowtorch to free the core of the motor from the column in which it was embedded. Then Fitch and several others used pieces of six-by-six to pry the motor loose from the column and push it off the pile. With the help of some Old Guard troops, they rolled the heavy piece of machinery onto a dolly and finally managed to push it outside. The whole effort took the better part of an entire shift.

Quotes

2011-12-18T09:30:00.011Z

"I want to say to the Taoiseach how very grateful I am for his leadership and friendship. But I must say that I was somewhat ambivalent when we were up here giving our virtual signatures. Do you have any idea how much time I spend every day signing my name? I'm going to feel utterly useless if I can't do that anymore. By the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions -- you just sign your name. You may find you can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual everything. Just stick a little card in and get the predictable response."

~ Bill Clinton, September 4, 1998 [Source]

"There is a new world order, like it or not!"

~ Tony Blair, November 13, 2000 [Source]

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we!"

~ George W. Bush, August 5, 2004 [Video]

"Whatever the price of the Chinese revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose ... The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history."

~ David Rockefeller, From a China Traveler, New York Times, August 10, 1973

---

"Some even believe we [the Rockefellers] are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

~ David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2002 [Scan]

"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."

~ John Adams [Source]

---

"If the leaders are divided into parties, will not one prevail at one year, and another the next? and will not this introduce the most wretched of servitudes, an uncertain jurisprudence?"

~ John Adams [Source]

"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win, because it works."

~ Stephen Hawking, ABC News Interview, June 7, 2010

"Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit."
(Rough translation: "Blind faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.")

~ Albert Einstein, Letter to Jost Winteler, July 8, 1901

"A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing
the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."

~ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859
[Darwin 1:16]

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had."

"Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."

"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."

"I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way."

~ Michael Crichton, Aliens Cause Global Warming, January 17, 2003

"For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

~ John F. Kennedy, Yale University Commencement Address, June 11, 1962

"Something began to say to me, 'He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it'. When oppressed people willingly accept their oppression they only serve to give the oppressor a convenient justification for his acts. Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it. So in order to be true to one’s conscience and true to god, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system."

~ Martin Luther King, Stride Toward Freedom, 1958

---

"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal'. It was 'illegal' to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers."

~ Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

---

"On some positions cowardice asks the question, 'is it safe?', expediency asks the question, 'is it politic?', vanity asks the question, 'is it popular?', but conscience asks the question, 'is it right?'. And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right."

~ Martin Luther King [Audio]

"You don’t write 'God Save The Queen' because you hate the English race. You write a song like that because you love them, and you’re fed up with them being mistreated."

~ Johnny Rotten (Sex Pistols), The Filth and the Fury, 2000

"We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives in the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment."

"I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of 'Admin'. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

~ C.S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters, 1961

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

~ Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom Of God Is Within You, 1894

"I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever, and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical or philosophic problems — can very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives."

~ Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, 1899

"He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed."

~ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932

---

"Technological progress has reduced the number of physical contacts, and thus impoverished the spiritual relations between members of a community ... [It] has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."

~ Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, 1937

"I hate when I read things and celebrities are complaining like, 'I have no personal life!' I'm like, 'Well, that's because you write everything that you're doing!' So I was that person that's like, 'I'm so sad, I have no real, normal life! Everyone knows what I'm doing!' I'm like, 'Well, that's my fault because I'm telling everyone.' And then I tweet, 'I'm here' and then wonder why a thousand fans are outside of the restaurant. Well, Hello?! I just told them! So I was just kind of thinking that doesn't really make much sense, and everything I'm saying is not really going with what I'm putting on the internet. So yeah, kind of lame."

"I'm a lot less on my phone, I'm a little bit more social. I have a lot more real friends than friends that are on the internet that I'm talking to, which is, like, not cool, not safe, not fun, and most likely not real. I think everything is just better when you're not so wrapped up in that. I just think it's kind of lame, and I feel like I hang out with my friends, and they're so busy taking pictures of what they're doing to put on Facebook, they're not really enjoying what they're doing. And you're going to look back and have ten million pictures, but you're not in one of them because you weren't having fun, you were too busy clicking away. So I think just enjoy the moment you're in and stop telling people about it. Just enjoy it for yourself."

~ Miley Cyrus, The Last Song Interview, March 13, 2010

"So this is how liberty dies - with thunderous applause!"

~ Padmé

"People have a tendency to rationalize what they can, and forget what they can't."

~ Rupert Giles

"A person should not believe in an '-ism', he should believe in himself."

~ Ferris Bueller

"You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

~ Jesus Christ
[John 8:32]

---

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

~ Jesus Christ
[Matthew 19:24], [Mark 10:25], [Luke 18:25]

RIDICULOUS BIBLE QUOTES

"But if the man was right and there is no proof that his bride was a virgin, the men of the town will take the woman to the door of her father's house and stone her to death."

[Deuteronomy 22:20-21]

---

"There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses."

[Ezekial 23:20]

---

"From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. "Get out of here, baldy!" they said. "Get out of here, baldy!" He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. "

[2 Kings 2:23-24]

"Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there would be no religious people!"

~ Dr. Gregory House

"Today’s mighty oak is just yesterday’s nut that held its ground."

~ David Icke, The Biggest Secret, 1999

---

"If I am seen as sane by a world this crazy, I'm disappointed."

~ David Icke, Oxford Union Lecture, 2008

"To teach the Rockefeller drug ideology, it is necessary to teach that Nature didn't know what she was doing when she made the human body."

~ Hans Ruesch, The Drug Story, CIVIS International Foundation Report No. 15, 1993

"[The Illuminati's] plan is to overturn all government and all religion ... eradicate every idea of a supreme being, and distinguish man from beast by his shape only."

~ George Washington Snyder to George Washington, August 22, 1798

Debunking a National Treasure

2011-12-16T10:00:00.010Z

Last week, the BBC aired the final episode of the its Frozen Planet series, which has attracted controversy due to its promotion of man-made global warming alarmism. The dogmatic promotion of the so-called "consensus" of man-made climate change is nothing new for the BBC. Over the past few years, a number of BBC programs have been produced attempting to discredit the climate skeptic movement, including Horizon's Royal Society propaganda piece outrageously titled Science Under Attack (2011), BBC Four's Meet the Climate Sceptics (2011), Panorama's What's Up With The Weather? (2010), which was produced by Mike Rudin of Conspiracy Files fame, and Earth: The Climate Wars (2008). But what makes programs like Frozen Planet so dangerous is that the chief propagandist in this case is British national treasure Sir David Attenborough. When a man as admired and respected as Attenborough takes a stance on on a politicized issue such as climate change, it's dangerous because millions of people trust him and will believe what he has to say, even if he's talking nonsense.

I love Attenborough's nature programs as much as anyone, which is why it depresses me to see how he's bought into the the pseudoenvironmentalist nonsense of man-made climate change and overpopulation alarmism (In 2009, he presented a Horizon program entitled How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?). The video above features clips from two of Attenborough's documentaries, Nature's Great Events: The Great Melt (2008) and The Truth About Climate Change: Are We Changing Planet Earth? (2006), as well as a recent interview he gave to the BBC.

The first and fourth clips in the video, which are from the Great Melt program, are full of shots that would make Al Gore bow down and worship! We see two sad looking polar bears stranded on a small island of ice during the 2007 summer melt. The camera circles the island as emotional incidental music plays. Several far shots show how there's nothing but water for miles around as the relentless sun beams down. Attenborough's narration tells us that the summer melting is getting worse and worse. Then, when the winter ice returns, we see it crack under the weight of one of the polar bears. More emotional music plays as the poor wet bear struggles to free itself. Attenborough laments that even the winter ice is now too thin. After drying himself off, and as the sun sets for the winter, our cuddly ursine hero walks off into the distance. He's survived the greatest melt ever recorded. However, Attenborough warns, future summer melts may threaten the survival of his entire species!

To be fair, the facts Attenborough mentions are indeed facts. It is true that Arctic temperatures have increased and that 2007's summer melt was the worst on record. No skeptic denies this. It is not the facts that are the problem, but the interpretation of those facts.

The main issue here, of course, is not whether or not the climate is changing, or even whether or not the climate change will have negative effects. The main issue is, are we to blame? Bizarrely, in the second clip, Attenborough tells the BBC interviewer that:

The issue as to whether or not human beings are responsible for the change of climate is actually irrelevant in my opinion. The fact is that we know these changes are happening, the evidence for that is incontrovertible, and as far as we can see ahead, if they go on, they will have catastrophic effects on the human race.

Irrelevant?! How is the question of whether or not our greenhouse emissions are to blame irrelevant? Even if the warming is going to be catastrophic, if human CO2 emissions aren't the cause, then there's nothing we can do about it. We could reduce our CO2 emissions to zero and the catastrophic warming would still occur.

The only other option would be to spray chemicals into the air to reflect sunlight back into space - i.e. geoenginering. And indeed scientists are proposing such a thing. Last month, the BBC's HardTalk program interviewed geo-engineering advocate Professor David Keith, who said humans are "using the atmosphere as a waste dump for carbon dioxide". Apparently, putting out a life-giving trace gas that plants breathe and animals have been exhaling for hundreds of millions of years is "using the atmosphere as a waste dump", but spraying tonnes of aerosolized aluminium into the atmosphere is no big deal. This shows how backwards this pseudoenvironmentalism is. Since Attenborough thinks we ought to be concerned about catastrophic global warming, but thinks the issue of whether or not human CO2 is to blame is irrelevant, is he suggesting that we should support such geo-engineering efforts? If he is, I think he should seriously rethink his label as a "naturalist".

In his documentaries, Attenborough rarely includes evidence that human CO2 is the main driver of recent warming. But thanks to the semantic sleight of hand so commonly employed by warmists, he doesn't have to. The only clip I could find of him actually addressing this question is from his 2006 Are We Changing Planet Earth? program - the third clip in the above video.

So what was the smoking gun evidence that convinced him that our CO2 emissions are indeed to blame for the observed global warming? A computer model! Yep, those climate models that exaggerate climate sensitivity and ignore the influence of cosmic rays (recently confirmed by CERN to be a factor, although they weren't allowed to say that) are apparently all the proof we need that the warming over the last thirty years was due to our CO2 emissions.

Computers are wonderful inventions don't get me wrong, but they have one fundamental flaw: garbage in, garbage out. Or in this case it's more, garbage in, gospel out. They are not reality. They prove nothing.

Also note how their graph stops at the year 2000. The documentary was made in 2006, so they had at least five more years worth of temperature data that they could have included on that graph. I wonder why they didn't. Could it be because there was no significant warming throughout those five years?

I don't think Attenborough is a bad guy. I think he's just been misled and has given in to BBC environmentalist peer-pressure, and has simply accepted the claims of scientific authorities without expressing any skepticism. It's a shame really because who doesn't love his nature programs!

Ken Miller and PZ Myers don't understand Intelligent Design

2011-12-12T08:50:00.003Z

Discussion:
Ken Miller Twists William Dembski's Methods for Inferring Intelligent Design
The PREFACE to William Dembski's foundational work, The Design Inference (1997)
The Collapse of Ken Miller
Ken Miller's Response
Ken Miller: "Blame the BBC's bad editing"
Then What is Ken Miller Talking About?: Miller Passes the Blame, Promotes a Straw Man
Dembski comments on the hypocrisy of Darwinist criticisms of Expelled
Ken Miller’s Strawman No Threat to ID

PZ Myers' Driftwood Delusions
Source: Uncommon Descent: The flaw is not in the science, the flaw is in the logic

Let’s move on to one of the more outspoken and zealous (read: tiresome and obnoxious) advocates of the atheist/Darwinist worldview, P.Z. Myers. Dr. Myers is an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota-Morris, a satellite of the main state university, or as David Klinghoffer put it, “well known as the Harvard of Morris, Minnesota.” In a lecture at the Atheist International Alliance in 2009 (Burbank, Ca.) entitled Design vs. Chance, Myers administered, what he considered to be, a thorough thrashing of Intelligent Design. What actually occurred, as I will try to demonstrate, is that he stuck both feet so deep in his mouth, that it would have required a team of expert podiatrists to make things right again. I leave it to the reader to decide for him or herself which of those options more closely mirrors reality.

Myers began by presenting a brisk summary of Intelligent Design theory, “The core of the argument is this: (A) Complexity can only be created by a designer, (B) Biology is really complex, (C) Biology was created by design”. He then poses the following to his audience:
“What about the whole complexity issue? We biologists will freely admit that things are really complicated inside the cell. So how do we explain it? Don’t we have to resort to a Creator? And we say, of course not. There’s lots of things that are very complicated [and aren’t the result of an intelligent creator]. I’ll show you an example here.”
At this point in his PowerPoint presentation there is a photograph showing a rather large pile of driftwood along what is obviously a coastline. Myers informs us that it is Rialto Beach in upper Washington State. He continues...
“And this is a very common thing along beaches ... driftwood. You find these walls of driftwood between you and getting down to the beach, real walls, very complicated walls. It has been constructed, who did it? We know the answer, natural processes did it. We don’t need a designer to build this kind of wall. This is complex, you simply can’t deny it. If I turn the projector off would you be able to draw it? No.”
To be honest, when I saw this lecture for the first time, I thought Myers was joking. A pile of driftwood as being analogous to the “complexity” of a living cell?! Myers is arguing that since a “complex” and “complicated” pile of driftwood can accumulate through an undirected natural process, so can a living cell. I guess if by “complexity” you mean a chaotic collection of junk, then I would have to agree; a large pile of driftwood is certainly “complex”. In any case, no self-respecting ID theorist would ever use the term “complexity”. The terms that are always used are “functional complexity” or “specified complexity”. In other words, complexity that achieves some pre-determined goal, complexity that clearly functions towards a specific purpose. The argument is that functional complexity and specified complexity clearly are the result of intelligent intervention. A pile of driftwood is immediately recognizable for exactly what it is; a random, disorganized, purposeless collection of ... well, driftwood! To describe this argument as flawed logic would be misleading; we first would have to dignify it by labeling it as some form of logic in the first place. It is not flawed logic, it is simply ridiculous.

It may be hard to believe, but it gets worse. A photograph of an expertly-constructed brick wall surrounding a garden flashes on the screen.
“On the other hand we are familiar with this kind of wall. So this is also a wall, it’s one that we can recognize that has a specific purpose, that was built by human agents, and I’d have to say that of these two walls, which one is simpler? The human built one ... When we look at natural walls [i.e driftwood] what we discover is natural things are built by chance and necessity, they are functionally unspecified, there’s nothing that says that a pile of driftwood is a wall ... and they tend to be complex. In this sense, complex often means sloppy, but it’s still complex. Artificial walls [i.e. the brick wall] are built with intent, they are functionally very specific ... and relatively simple.”
Let’s follow this “logic” as it leads us straight into a train wreck:
Piles of driftwood are “functionally unspecified”, “sloppy”, are assembled randomly by natural processes and are considered to be “complex”.
Brick walls are “functionally very specific”, have a “specific purpose”, are assembled by intelligent agents, and are considered to be “simple”.
Ergo, a living cell which is “complex” is comparable to a pile of “complex” driftwood and has nothing in common with the “simple” and “functionally very specific” brick wall that obviously is the product of intelligent design.
Does Myers actually expect us to believe that the simplest living organism that exists, a bacterium – which is, in the words of Australian microbiologist Michael Denton, “a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of elegantly designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up of all together one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and without parallel in the non-living world ... an object resembling an immense automated factory ... carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth” is assembled like a pile of driftwood on a beach? Isn’t it glaringly obvious that it resembles, not the “functionally unspecified” and chaotic collection of driftwood, but the “functionally very specific”, “built with a purpose”, and “built with intent” brick wall?! Has he gone mad? Has this man completely abandoned any semblance of rationality? How is it possible that his audience continues to sit through this nonsense, bobbing their heads up and down in approval like a pack of toy dogs on the back window of a car?

9/11 Truth Versus The BBC

2011-11-27T15:40:00.006Z

9/11 Truth Versus The BBC

Extra: Niels Harrit Versus Mike Rudin

In Defense of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and Intelligent Design

2011-10-31T20:00:00.030Z

"I cannot believe this shit. Ben Stein makes some movie that nobody ever even hears about. Then a year later it gets posted here. Then we see that in that year, over 100,000 articles centered around the National Academy of Sciences spend all of their time bashing the movie... Yeah I definitely see what is going on here."
~ Sane/Dig, Prison Planet forum moderator

"If you want to debunk dishonesty and sleaze in documentaries, the BBC is far more worthy of your attentions." ~ William Dembski

"Science provides evidence for the unobservable via inference" ~ TalkOrigins

"The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this is that ID is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism." ~ Michael Behe

"There is a difference between observations of evolution, and the cause of the changes that have been observed. We're not talking about gaps, we're talking about the creative power of the mutation/selection mechanism." ~ Stephen C. Meyer

"We think of natural selection as tuning the piano, not as composing the melodies." ~ Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (2010)

"Like Behe's irreducible complexity, the concept of specified complexity can also be tested." ~ Ker Than, anti-ID science writer

"I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology you might find a signature of some sort of designer." ~ Richard Dawkins

"To find out what's true has a value all of its own. If it has additional good consequences, so be it." ~ Paul Nelson

"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." ~ Michael Shermer

"A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." ~ Charles Darwin

A couple of years ago, I was listening to Jason Bermas' Infowarrior show and he was discussing his views on intelligent design and evolution. He mentioned the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and how it "debunks" evolution and also discusses eugenics. Back then I didn't really care much about the creation/evolution controversy, but I was interested in eugenics so I decided to watch it. For those of you who haven't seen it, the entire movie is embedded below. I recommend you watch it before reading this article.

I've seen a lot of mind-blowing, eye-opening, life-changing documentary films over the last few years - documentaries like Starsuckers, Loose Change, Wake Up Call, EndGame, Truth Rising, Selective Hearing and What In The World Are They Spraying? - but out of all of them, the one that has changed the way I look at the world the most is Expelled. Not just the film itself but also the reaction to it on the internet. It definitely touched a lot of nerves!

Most of the movie was nothing new to me. I already knew about eugenics and from my research into the global warming debate I was already aware of how the scientific establishment suppresses dissent, I just had no idea the same thing was going on in evolutionary science. I was also well aware of the so-called 'skeptics' - people like Michael Shermer - and how wrong they are about things like 9/11 truth, but I always assumed they had it right on Darwinian evolution. Expelled made me question those assumptions.

The claim that the only people who doubt Darwin are fundamentalist conservative Christian creationists stands refuted by me! I'm not a conservative (although I do agree with many of their criticisms of the left), I'm not even remotely religious and in fact find religion pretty ridiculous (just ask my sister what I was like at my Dad's church wedding!) and I have no real objection to the idea of descent with modification from a universal common ancestor (so I'm not 'anti-evolution'). I do believe in mind-brain dualism and some form of afterlife, but that's about the extent of my religious and philosophical views. And if when I die it turns out I'm wrong about that, what do I care? I'll be dead! On my Facebook profile I've put my religious views as "Agnostic Darwin Heretic".

A month after first watching Expelled, I mentioned it during an argument on Facebook with a "left-wing intellectual elitist" (his words) friend of mine who I went to school with, his response was:

Did... Did you just try to use Expelled as a source of viable information? Expelled was a bunch of retarded IDers whinging because they didn't actually understand the scientific process.

Evolution is a fact. As time goes on, mutations in reproduction occur. These mutations can be either beneficial, negative, or do f**k all. Beneficial will lead to a higher chance of survival, Negative less so, and f**k all effect will have f**k all effect.

The organisms that have a higher chance of survival have a higher chance of reproducing, and as such, the mutated genes have a higher chance of progressing.

There is a vast (and I mean VAST) supply of literature on the subject of evolution, and it is about as close as a fact as is humanly possible to discover.

Just because the fossil record doesn't preserve every possible developmental attribute, does not mean that those stages weren't there. We just have no way of seeing them.

What was immediately interesting to me was that it seemed like he hadn't actually watched the movie! The ID proponents in the movie all accept "evolution" to some degree - and certainly understand and accept the fundamental premise of adaptation via mutation and natural selection - and at no point in the film did anyone say anything about a lack of transitional fossils. He seemed to be attributing creationist talking points to the movie that it doesn't actually make.

But since I knew he was a lot more informed than I was about evolution, I thought maybe I had been misled by the movie and so I decided to do more research. I started off by reading articles critical of Expelled. I read the Wikipedia article and all the Scientific American articles about it, numerous ScienceBlogs blogs and every page of the website Expelled Exposed. And again, I was surprised because it was as if the authors of these articles hadn't actually watched the movie. The movie exposes the very tactics that they were employing in these debunking pieces!

The movie is essentially a response to common criticisms of ID, and the counter arguments in the film seem perfectly valid to me. The critics of Expelled, rather than addressing these counter arguments, simply reassert the same weak arguments that the movie was countering!

In this article I will counter the main talking points of the Expelled debunkers. Over the last 18 months I've done a lot of research into the intelligent design controversy, and have written a number of ID posts on this blog. I decided to write this post after sorting through my old emails and stumbling upon the email from Facebook notifying me of the above comment from my friend.

Please don't take this post as an endorsement of the Discovery Institute. I know all about the Wedge Strategy and am fully aware of the Discovery Institute's political agenda - and I'm not saying I agree with that agenda. But as far as I'm concerned, whatever agenda they may have doesn't discredit their scientific arguments any more than Richard Dawkins' secular/atheist agenda discredits his. This post is simply about debunking the Darwinist misrepresentations of ID and the movie Expelled. I have no agenda, I simply don't like misinformation; especially when it's spouted by people who claim to pride themselves on reason and critical thinking.

"The producers misled pro-Darwin participants about the title of the movie"

Scientific American writes:

As Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, Michael Shermer and other proponents of evolution appearing in Expelled have publicly remarked, the producers first arranged to interview them for a film that was to be called Crossroads, which was allegedly a documentary on "the intersection of science and religion." They were subsequently surprised to learn that they were appearing in Expelled, which "exposes the widespread persecution of scientists and educators who are pursuing legitimate, opposing scientific views to the reigning orthodoxy," to quote from the film's press kit.

When exactly did Crossroads become Expelled? The producers have said that the shift in the film's title and message occurred after the interviews with the scientists, as the accumulating evidence gradually persuaded them that ID believers were oppressed. Yet as blogger Wesley Elsberry discovered when he searched domain registrations, the producers registered the URL "expelledthemovie.com" on March 1, 2007—more than a month (and in some cases, several months) before the scientists were interviewed. The producers never registered the URL "crossroadsthemovie.com". Those facts raise doubt that Crossroads was still the working title for the movie when the scientists were interviewed.

Not only is this complaint a load of fuss over nothing, but it's also totally hypocritical. So the producers lied about the title of the movie? ... Who cares?! It's not uncommon for otherwise honest journalists and filmmakers to use somewhat sneaky tactics to expose hidden truths - covertly recording people, using false personas, not fully disclosing intentions etc. - it's called going undercover! If the Expelled producers had told people like Dawkins that the movie was going to be about persecution of ID proponents, I doubt they would have taken part in it. It had to be done.

Besides, it's not as if the other side is any better. In 2006, the BBC made an anti-ID documentary entitled A War on Science. Do you honestly think the ID proponents featured in that program were told it was gonna be called a "A War on Science"?! As William Dembski comments:

I find it remarkable that the Darwinists are belly-aching about the treatment they received from EXPELLED producers. Our side experiences far worse. When the BBC interviewed me for their documentary on ID, they didn’t tell me it would be titled A WAR ON SCIENCE and that my colleagues and I would be portrayed as those trying to destroy science. Whereas the Darwinists were filmed in their offices and made to look professorial, they had me walking down a railroad track, Behe suspended in mid-air on a carnival ride looking ridiculous, etc. Finally, they spliced in commentary by Ken Miller ostensibly critiquing my work on probabilities, which he then was forced to repudiate since the criticisms were so patently off target with respect to my work — he attributed the fault to bad editing on the part of the BBC.

So, if you want to debunk dishonesty and sleaze in documentaries, the BBC is far more worthy of your attentions. The worst that can be said about the producers of EXPELLED is that they didn’t tip their hands early. In consequence, we find Darwinists with their pants down and looking unimpressive. I’m sure that hurts. Take the pain.

At 38:45 in this radio podcast, the producer, Mark Mathis, defends himself:

The most incredible part is - and this is why I sleep very well at night - when you hear these scientists speak in this film, they are being entirely consistent with what all of them do in articles, films, books and on the internet. We are not taking anything out of context. Nothing is being twisted. They are saying exactly what they can be heard saying in many other places in the media. And so we don't understand what their problem is.

They wanna have it both ways. They want everything to be done in such a way that it is demeaning to Intelligent Design, it mocks Intelligent Design and it reinforces their atheistic Darwinian view. I mean, how is it that Richard Dawkins can complain about this film, when he made his own film called The Root of all Evil - which is about religion - when he has spoken disparagingly in so many cases, written a book, The God Delusion. He's been interviewed for a film, A War on Science - that if you disagree with atheistic Darwinian view, you're not just wrong, you're part of a war on science itself. It's preposterous!

"There is no conspiracy to 'expel' ID proponents"

Well first of all, no one has ever really said there is a 'conspiracy'. 'Conspiracy' isn't really the right word. The terms I would use are 'groupthink', 'confirmation bias', 'peer-pressure' and 'pseudo-intellectual circle-jerking'. It's nothing sinister, just basic group psychology.

When it comes to the central thesis of Expelled, that ID is being suppressed in academia, the responses from the film's debunkers are very interesting. Sites like the NCSE's Expelled Exposed website on the one hand try to deny that intelligent design advocates are being persecuted, and on the other hand attempt to justify the persecution of intelligent design advocates!

Their denials can be easily refuted. With Richard Sternberg, for example, they claim that the treatment he received had nothing to do with ID, but was due to the fact that the paper by Stephen Meyer that he accepted had not been properly peer-reviewed. Emails obtained by a congressional subcommittee, however, tell a different story. In one email, the President of the Biological Society of Washington, Roy McDiarmid, wrote:

I have seen the review file and comments from 3 reviewers on the Meyer paper. All three with some differences among the comments recommended or suggested publication. I was surprised but concluded that there was not inappropriate behavior vis a vis the review process.

It's clear from the chronology of the emails that the outrage that the paper had been published came before skepticism of its peer-review. Obviously the paper's conclusion was what motivated the attacks. The peer-review stuff was just them looking for an excuse. A similar thing happened in 2009, when the California Science Center cancelled a screening of the documentary Darwin's Dilemma. The official reason was violation of contract, but internal emails again reveal how CSC staff wanted to cancel the screening because the film was pro-ID, and that the alleged pretext was a fabrication.

On September 7, 2004, the Council of the Biological Society of Washington released the following statement:

The paper by Stephen C. Meyer, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," in vol. 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239 of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, was published at the discretion of the former editor, Richard v. Sternberg. Contrary to typical editorial practices, the paper was published without review by any associate editor; Sternberg handled the entire review process.

The Council endorses a resolution on ID published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2002/1106id2.shtml), which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity.

It's interesting that they would cite the 2002 AAAS resolution, since the main argument of the AAAS was that ID is not science because no case for it has been made in the peer-reviewed literature. Before the Meyer paper was published, people would say that intelligent design isn't science because there are no pro-ID papers. Then when Meyer's pro-ID paper was published, the response was that it shouldn't have been published, because it isn't science! So then they retract the paper, and then use the fact that it was retracted to strengthen their case that ID isn't science! The circular logic being employed here is akin to that of a schoolyard bully.

The emails also reveal how Eugenie Scott sent Smithsonian staff a rebuttal to Meyer's paper - a blog post on the anti-ID blog Panda's Thumb. The AAAS also linked to this "scientific critique" when discussing the controversy.

This is something that really annoys me about not just Darwinists, but 'skeptics' and scientific elitists in general. They always like to make themselves appear intellectually superior to their opponents by claiming that their views are supported by peer-reviewed science, while their opponents don't publish peer-reviewed science and make their claims only on blogs. They often demonize blogs and frame the debates as a bunch of idiots on the internet going up against a vast amount of authoritative, peer-reviewed literature. Yet when their opponents do publish peer-reviewed papers, and they attempt to debunk them - as Panda's Thumb did with Meyer's paper - suddenly the roles reverse. The 'skeptics' are now the random bloggers on the internet going up against peer-reviewed science. But apparently it's okay when they do it! It seems critiquing peer-reviewed science on blogs is okay, as long as you side with them. If you don't, you're an idiotic, anti-science denialist! The hypocrisy is astounding.

In a Washington Post article, Eugenie Scott admitted - while attempting to justify it - that the treatment Sternberg received was due to his views on evolution:

If this was a corporation, and an employee did something that really embarrassed the administration, really blew it, how long do you think that person would be employed?

They don't care if you are religious, but they do care a lot if you are a creationist. Sternberg denies it, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it argues for zealotry.

So in other words, because Scott and others consider Sternberg to be a "creationist", what happened to him was - according to them - totally justified. Here we see them attempting to justify the very thing they are denying occurred!

The movie itself refutes claims that two of the other cases - Guillermo Gonzalez's loss of tenure and Robert Marks' website being shut down - had nothing to do with ID. In the case of Robert Marks, after Dean Kelley attempts to deny that what happened to him had anything to do with ID, Kelley's original email to Marks is shown on screen:

I have received several concerned messages this week about an interview and web site dealing with evolutionary computing associated ID. Please disconnect this web site immediately and Cheryl will arrange a time for us to meet immediately upon my return.

And in the case of Gonzalez, the producers interviewed Hector Avalos from Iowa State University who admitted that "what we wanted to stop is the use of the name of ISU to validate intelligent design ... and we did succeed".

It's true he wasn't explicitly referring to the tenure denial, but it is clear from Gonzalez's tenure file that intelligent design was an issue. Gonzalez's department head wrote in a private Chair's Statement that "The problem here is that Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory ... The fact that Dr. Gonzalez does not understand what constitutes both science and a scientific theory disqualifies him from serving as a science educator."

In a Talk Reason article, Dr Avalos dismisses the evidence of viewpoint discrimination by arguing that all it proves is that "-- drum roll, please—scientists do not like other scientists portraying non-science as science". Again, he is justifying the very thing the Expelled debunkers are denying occurred.

During a recent lecture in Glasgow, Eugenie Scott mentioned Expelled and once again attempted to rationalize intolerance towards ID:

Expelled ... accuses the scientific establishment of conspiring to keep the intelligent design scientists from holding jobs and sharing their groundbreaking ideas. Quite possibly the reason why intelligent design has not been accepted in the scientific community is because it's just really bad science, but that's not the position that's being taken in the Expelled movie.

In perhaps the most blatant condonation of intolerance towards ID, Expelled Exposed states:

What they seek, of course, is for intelligent design to be accepted as a valid scientific alternative to evolution. They have failed to make a convincing case for it, yet they seem to believe that they have an entitlement to a place in academia.

In other words, because the NCSE feels that ID has "failed to make a convincing case", they say ID proponents have no "entitlement to a place in academia".

To on the one hand deny that ID advocates are being persecuted, while on the other hand justifying persecution of ID is Orwellian doublethink at its most blatant. Again, it's a similar mentality to that of a schoolyard bully. Ironically, by denying that intelligent design has a right to a place in academia, the critics of Expelled have justified the central thesis of the documentary!

"ID argues that life is too complex, it must have been designed"

This straw man characterization of the design argument is mentioned in the movie. During the section on media bias, Bruce Chapman says:

We constantly deal with reporters who refuse even to report the correct definition of intelligent design. They over and over again talk about 'life is so complex god must have done it' ... It's a wanton distortion of our position.

And journalist Larry Witham says:

You can look at Associated Press stories, and the same sentence will appear in those stories for ten years: "Intelligent design says that life is too complex ... " - it's called a boilerplate. And the reporter never reports any more or gets any new ways to say it, so the public understanding never advances.

There are two things wrong with this characterization of the design argument. First of all, the claim that ID argues that life is "too complex" is incorrect. This is a common straw man that even leading ID critics like Ken Miller and PZ Myers have employed (see here). I completely agree what they are saying - that you don't need to invoke a creative intelligence to explain an 'improbable' sequence of shuffled cards or a 'complex' pile of driftwood - but ID advocates have never claimed otherwise.

What if you saw a driftwood formation that looked like this though?

Image Credit: http://heatherjansch.com/

With intelligent design, it's not about 'complexity' or 'improbability', but specified or functional complexity. A letter of the alphabet or a single binary digit is specified but not complex, a randomly generated sequence of characters or bits is complex but not specified, and a meaningful sentence or functional piece of computer code is complex and specified. It is specified complexity that we recognize as being the product of intelligence. The examples cited by Miller and Myers are perfect examples of things which are complex but not functional or specified, so obviously you don't need to invoke a creative intelligence to explain them.

This fundamental distinction between mere 'complexity' or 'improbability' and 'specified complexity' is clearly made in the first two paragraphs of the preface to William Dembski's first foundational work, The Design Inference (1997)!

ID theorists don't simply point to the 'complexity' of life. They point out that life at every level is a specific and functional arrangement of parts. DNA is a specific and functional arrangement of nucleotide bases. A protein is a specific and functional arrangement of amino acids. A molecular machine inside the cell is a specific and functional arrangement of proteins. Etc. etc. It is this functional complexity which they say is best explained by intelligent design.

Either people like Ken Miller and PZ Myers don't actually understand the fundamental design argument or they deliberately misrepresent it. Or, most likely, it's simply their out-of-whack egos driving them to perform impressive feats of mental gymnastics - like Cartman in that Fishsticks episode of South Park.

Secondly, the overall structure of the argument is not as they characterize it. ID critics like to characterize the design argument as an argument from ignorance or incredulity (a 'god of the gaps' argument). Stephen Meyer counters this distortion in his book Signature in the Cell (2009):

As one of my frequent debating partners, Michael Shermer, likes to argue, “Intelligent design…argues that life is too specifically complex (complex structures like DNA)…to have evolved by natural forces. Therefore, life must have been created by…an intelligent designer.” In short, critics claim that ID proponents argue as follows:
Premise One: Material causes cannot produce or explain specified information.
Conclusion: Therefore, an intelligent cause produced specified biological information.
If proponents of intelligent design were arguing in the preceding manner, they would be guilty of arguing from ignorance. But the argument made in this book does not assume this form. Instead, it takes the following form:
Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.
Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.
Conclusion: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell.
Or to put it more formally, the case for intelligent design made here has the form:
Premise One: Causes A through X do not produce evidence E.
Premise Two: Cause Y can and does produce E.
Conclusion: Y explains E better than A through X.
In addition to a premise about how material causes lack demonstrated causal adequacy, the argument for intelligent design as the best explanation also affirms the demonstrated causal adequacy of an alternative cause, namely, intelligence. This argument does not omit a premise providing positive evidence or reasons for preferring an alternative cause or proposition. Instead, it specifically includes such a premise. Therefore, it does not commit the informal fallacy of arguing from ignorance. It’s really as simple as that.

Bottom line, the claim that "intelligent design says life is too complex, god must have done it" is a straw man. The movie mentions this, yet Darwinists continue to misrepresent ID in this way.

"ID is anti-evolution"

Again, it's as though the people making this claim haven't actually watched the movie. Three times in the movie the ID position on evolution is clarified. When Ben Stein is talking to Paul Nelson, he asks Nelson if there really is a debate among scientists about whether or not evolution occurred, and Nelson's response is:

Well evolution is a kind of funny word. It depends on how one defines it. If it means simply change over time, even the most rock-ribbed fundamentalist knows that the history of the Earth has changed - that there's been change over time. If you define evolution precisely though to mean "the common descent of all life on Earth from a single ancestor via undirected mutation and natural selection", that's textbook definition of neo-Darwinism, biologists of the first rank have real questions.

When we are introduced to William Dembski, Dembski's first words in the film are:

Evolution, from an intelligent design perspective, is perfectly acceptable if the sense is that, how did the design get implemented? The issue is, is there real design there and are these material mechanisms, like natural selection, adequate to account for everything we see in biology? And our argument is, no it's not.

Later, Ben Stein asks Jonathan Wells if he thinks the whole theory is wrong or just certain parts of it, and Wells' response is:

Well again, evolution is a slippery word. I would say, minor changes within species happen. But Darwin didn't write a book called "How existing species change over time". He wrote a book called "The Origin of Species". He purported to show how this same process leads to new species - in fact, every species. And the evidence for that grand claim is in my opinion almost totally lacking.

In the film, people like Richard Dawkins repeatedly state that "evolution is a fact" and that the evidence for "evolution" is overwhelming - as if "evolution" is just one single idea. But it's not one single idea. The word "evolution" has several meanings. The three key meanings are:

Adaptation via natural selection
Descent with modification from a universal common ancestor
The 'Blind Watchmaker' thesis

Even the most hardcore fundamentalist young-earth creationists acknowledge that natural selection is a real process that adequately explains minor adaptations. Everyone agrees, for example, that the dozen or so varieties of Galapagos finches all most likely share a common ancestor, and that the subsequent variation and diversification was due to random variation and natural selection. So no one is denying "evolution" in that sense of the word.

One argument that's frequently made is that rejecting Darwinism would negate 150 years worth of medical progress because "evolution" helps us understand how bacteria and viruses mutate and adapt etc. But which meaning of "evolution" are we talking about here? We're talking about the first meaning - minor adaptations due to variation and selection. Neither ID nor even creationism is opposed to this idea.

As for the second meaning - the idea that all life on Earth is related in a tree of life via descent with modification from a universal common ancestor - creationism in all its forms is typically opposed to this idea; intelligent design however is not. While many ID proponents are also skeptical of common descent - citing things like the Cambrian explosion as evidence against universal common descent - with ID that's not the main issue. In fact there are many ID proponents who accept common descent, Michael Behe for example. In response to Eugenie Scott calling him a creationist, Behe wrote in 2000:

Scott refers to me as an intelligent design "creationist," even though I clearly write in my book "Darwin's Black Box" (which Scott cites) that I am not a creationist and have no reason to doubt common descent. In fact, my own views fit quite comfortably with the 40% of scientists that Scott acknowledges think "evolution occurred, but was guided by God."

William Dembski has also repeatedly stated that he has no stake in the debate either way:

"I'm open to common ancestry ... I don't think I would go as far as Eugenie. I think there is still some question about that but I know there are some very strong lines of evidence for common ancestry ... So I'm open to that. That's not a problem for me if that's how it turns out." ~ William Dembski, December 7, 2001

"I have no dog in this fight. If common descent were true and well supported scientifically, I could make my peace with it. My beef, and that of the ID community, is with non-teleological mechanisms like natural selection being invoked by Darwinists as designer substitutes." ~ William Dembski, March 15, 2011

One day last year, I was able to find, in only a couple of hours of research, numerous quotes by ID proponents and sympathizers clarifying the ID position on common descent. Despite the fact that ID proponents have stated many times that ID is perfectly compatible with common descent, there is a constant effort by the Darwinists to equate ID with denial of common descent. One example of this can be found in the 2007 Nova documentary, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial:

NICK MATZKE: What's really being advocated is the idea that organisms poofed into existence through the miraculous act of an intelligent designer, i.e., God. That's the view that intelligent design promotes.

[...]

NARRATOR: As it turned out, the latest in a large body of evidence to refute intelligent design and support evolution was coming to light just as this case was unfolding.

[...]

Darwin believed that evidence for his idea of common ancestry would be unearthed in the form of transitional fossils. For example, if, over millions of years, fish gave rise to land animals, as evolutionary theory predicts, we should find fossils of extinct creatures that are part fish and part land animal.

The program then goes on to discuss the discovery of Tiktaalik, a transitional form between fish and tetrapods. According to PBS, such transitional fossils "refute intelligent design", but that is false. Transitional fossils are, at best, proof of descent with modification - an idea which is perfectly compatible with intelligent design.

The main idea that intelligent design challenges is the whole 'blind watchmaker'/'climbing mount improbable' stuff; and proof of common descent is not by itself proof that natural selection can scale 'mount improbable' and act as a 'blind watchmaker'. As Casey Luskin & Paul Logan Gage write in Intelligent Design 101:

Many assume that if common ancestry is true, then the only viable scientific position is Darwinian evolution—in which all organisms are descended from a common ancestor via random mutations and blind selection. Such an assumption is incorrect: Intelligent design is not necessarily incompatible with common ancestry. Even if all organisms on earth share a common ancestor, it does not follow that the primary mechanisms causing the differences between the species must be blind, unguided processes such as natural selection.

Bottom line, probably the biggest misconception about the "intelligent design vs evolution" debate is the belief that it's between intelligent design and evolution! As William Dembski writes:

According to evolutionist Francisco Ayala, Darwin’s greatest achievement was to show that the organized complexity of living things could be brought about without recourse to a designing intelligence. Given this view of Darwin’s achievement, what evolutionary biology has come to mean by “evolution” is an unintelligent or blind form of it. This was brought home to me two years ago at a debate in which I participated. I was invited, along with my colleague and friend Michael Behe, to debate Darwinists Kenneth Miller and Robert Pennock at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The debate was initially titled “Blind Evolution or Intelligent Design?” Yet, when the debate actually took place on April 23, 2002, the program bulletin distributed at the event quietly dropped the word “blind” and titled the debate simply “Evolution or Intelligent Design?” The original title was more accurate. Intelligent design, the view for which Behe and I were arguing, is opposed to blind evolution, not to evolution simpliciter.

In the same way man-made global warming activists exploit the ambiguity of the term 'climate change' and accuse the skeptics of being 'climate change deniers', Darwinists employ the exact same semantic sleight-of-hand to discredit their opponents. Reading the writings of both groups is often like watching a three-card Monte or shell game con! The technical name for this fallacy is equivocation.

"Abiogenesis is not evolution"

The movie never claims otherwise. In fact, Jonathan Wells acknowledges that Darwinism strictly defined starts after the first life. But again, intelligent design isn't really challenging "evolution" per se. Whether you consider abiogenesis to be part of Darwin's theory or not, it is a key event in the materialist creation story, which is what ID is challenging.

"ID is untestable/unfalsifiable"

The gold standard for what constitutes a scientific explanation is testability (or falsifiability). In its 2008 booklet, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, the National Academy of Sciences states:

In science, explanations must be based on naturally occurring phenomena. Natural causes are, in principle, reproducible and therefore can be checked independently by others. If explanations are based on purported forces that are outside of nature, scientists have no way of either confirming or disproving those explanations. Any scientific explanation has to be testable — there must be possible observational consequences that could support the idea but also ones that could refute it. Unless a proposed explanation is framed in a way that some observational evidence could potentially count against it, that explanation cannot be subjected to scientific testing.

A frequent charge made against intelligent design is that it is untestable, and therefore unscientific. For example, the NAS argues later in the aforementioned booklet that "Intelligent design is not a scientific concept because it cannot be empirically tested".

However, this claim appears to be at odds with the fact that all the critics of intelligent design do is attempt to falsify it! In an impressive display of Orwellian doublethink, critics of intelligent design in one breath claim that intelligent design is untestable, and in another breath cite experimental results which they believe refute intelligent design. Ken Miller, for example, cites things like nylonase or Barry Hall's E. Coli lactase experiment as observations which undermine the case for design.

Now, whether or not these observations really do undermine the case for design is a matter of debate, but let's assume for the sake of argument that these results are as significant as Ken Miller claims. In that case, intelligent design would indeed be falsified, which is precisely why Ken Miller cites such results!

One cannot have it both ways. The fact that people put forward scientific arguments against intelligent design suggests that it can indeed be falsified. In fact, it can be falsified by simple laboratory tests like those commonly cited by critics.

Let's say for example you grew some bacteria in a laboratory for 100,000 generations or so and in that time we observed the step-by-step Darwinian evolution of an entirely new functional system in one of the populations. That would prove that it isn't necessary to invoke intelligence to explain such intricate complexity and intelligent design would therefore be as good as falsified.

Now let's turn it around. Let's say you grew bacteria in a lab for over a million generations and in that time nothing interesting happened, would that falsify Darwinian evolution? Not at all. Defenders of Darwinian evolution would simply say things like "maybe the environmental conditions weren't right", or "maybe we didn't introduce the right selective pressures" or "maybe we just didn't wait long enough" etc. Darwinists can always make excuses for why nothing happened, there is no result that would absolutely falsify Darwinian evolution.

Now again, when we say "Darwinian evolution", we're not talking about the tree of life. The tree of life is falsifiable. It could be falsified simply by finding a fossil in the wrong strata (a Precambrian rabbit, for example). What we're talking about here is the 'blind watchmaker' idea that the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection can function as a designer substitute. That assertion, it seems, cannot be falsified. So under the National Academy of Sciences' own demarcation criteria, intelligent design is actually the more scientific of the two ideas, not Darwinian evolution.

"ID violates the principle of methodological naturalism"

Intelligent design invokes the supernatural, so the Darwinists say, and science cannot invoke the supernatural. This is the ultimate "your argument is invalid"-type argument employed by Darwinists. When all else fails, they play this trump card.

The problem is, the line between the 'natural' and the 'supernatural' is not clearly defined. What we label as 'supernatural' is often determined by our current understanding of the world. There was a time when the idea of gravity was considered to be an appeal to the supernatural. Today, things like psychic phenomena are often labeled as 'magic' or 'supernatural', but what if we were to ever be visited by advanced aliens who could communicate psychically, would we still think of such a phenomenon as being 'supernatural'?

When ID critics use the term 'naturalism', what they really mean is 'materialism'; because when they say 'nature', they mean the material world. A non-materialist philosopher though would argue that 'nature' is not simply limited to the material world; that there is more to 'nature' than just the material world. A better, more clearly defined dichotomy therefore would be material versus transcendent. At best, intelligent design is an inference to something that transcends the material world, but just because it transcends the material world doesn't necessarily mean it isn't 'natural'. To assume otherwise is to assume the very thing at issue.

If 'methodological materialism' is the rule, then ID does indeed break it. But of course it does. The whole point of ID is that it is contesting the rule of 'methodological materialism'! As William Dembski explains in his rebuttal to Dover expert witness Barbara Forrest:

The point to appreciate here is that Forrest and her fellow expert witnesses, in assuming methodological materialism, have assumed precisely the point at issue. Specifically, to say, as Forrest does, that science is the search for natural explanations of natural phenomena is to presuppose that such explanations exist for all natural phenomena. But how is this claim to be justified? Rather than justify it, Forrest begs the question. To see that Forrest has indeed made a question-begging assumption here, consider the following analogy drawn from the game of chess. In chess, there are initially thirty-two pieces arranged on an eight-by-eight chessboard as follows:

Moreover, chess operates by certain fixed rules. For instance, bishops move diagonally, pawns only move forward and only take one square diagonally, etc. In this analogy, the chess pieces in their initial configuration correspond to the material entities that for Forrest constitute nature and the rules of chess correspond to the laws of interaction that for Forrest govern nature. Given the initial position of chess pieces and the rules of the game, we can ask whether the following position is possible:

It turns out that it is not. There is no way to get from the first position to the second by the rules of chess.

So too, intelligent design purports to show that there exist configurations of material entities (e.g., bacterial flagella, protein synthesis mechanisms, and complex organ systems) that cannot be adequately explained in terms of antecedent material conditions together with processes characterized by fixed laws that act on them. Granted, chess constitutes a toy example whereas the biological examples ID theorists investigate are far more complicated. Moreover, whereas chess operates according to precise mathematical rules, the laws of interaction associated with material entities are probabilistic, so the obstacles to producing complex biological configurations of material entities are not logical impossibilities but empirical improbabilities. But the point of the analogy still holds. Whenever you have a theory about process — how one state is supposed to progress into another — it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether the process in question is capable of accounting for the final state in terms of the initial state.

As I've already pointed out, the logical inference to intelligent design is testable, and that's what science is about: logical inferences that are testable using the scientific method. The objection seems to be that while the inference to design is testable, the 'designer' isn't - and the 'methodological naturalism/materialism' argument is just another way of saying that. The problem is, if logical inferences are unscientific if the thing that is being inferred to is unobservable/untestable, then lots of things that are accepted by mainstream science would also be unscientific. Consider, for example, dark energy. We can't observe or detect dark energy directly. Instead, we infer its existence based on what can observe. We observe galaxies accelerating away from one other and we logically infer that there must be some invisible, undetectable form of energy driving these galaxies apart. The reasoning behind intelligent design is basically the same: we observe functional complexity in nature and we logically infer the existence of some unobservable intelligent entity as an explanation for that. If that's unscientific then so is dark energy. So are lots of things, in fact - even Darwinism!

A TalkOrigins article defending 'macroevolution' makes this exact point:

Science Provides Evidence for the Unobservable via Inference

The primary function of science is to demonstrate the existence of phenomena that cannot be observed directly. Science is not needed to show us things we can see with our own eyes. Direct observation is not only unnecessary in science; direct observation is in fact usually impossible for the things that really matter. In fact, the most important discoveries of science have only be inferred via indirect observation. Familiar examples of unobservable scientific discoveries are atoms, electrons, viruses, bacteria, germs, radio-waves, X-rays, ultraviolet light, energy, entropy, enthalpy, solar fusion, genes, protein enzymes, and the DNA double-helix. The round earth was not observed directly by humans until 1961, yet this counterintuitive concept had been considered a scientific fact for over 2000 years. The Copernican hypothesis that the earth orbits the sun has been acknowledged virtually ever since the time of Galileo, even though no one has ever observed the process to this day. All of these "invisible" phenomena were elucidated using the scientific method of inference.

I completely agree with what TalkOrigins is saying here, but I would argue that you could use the exact same argument in defense of intelligent design!

My personal position on the demarcation issue is either ID is science, or Darwinism isn't. I don't care which one you go with. Whether you allow ID into science or demote the 'blind watchmaker' thesis to 'non-science', I don't care. The only inexcusable position as far as I'm concerned is the one advocated by the anti-ID Darwin lobby: that Darwinian evolution is science, but ID isn't. Because it seems to me that any criteria for what constitutes 'science' that you want to invoke to exclude ID, if enforced consistently, will cut just as much the other way against Darwinism. Both infer to an entity or process that's apparently unobservable, both require a certain amount of faith and both are unfalsifiable if you dismiss the arguments of the other side. So the way I see it, either they're both science, or neither is. Unless the criteria is materialism, but that's begging the question.

"ID is rebranded creationism"

The 'proof' that ID is rebranded creationism is presented in the following NCSE video:

I'll admit, I got a good laugh out of the "cdesign proponentsists" thing, but as 'evidence' I found it pretty unconvincing. As far as conspiracy theories go, and I know conspiracy theories, this is probably the weakest I've ever heard. I know if I were to ever base an anti-establishment conspiracy theory solely on a few old, mined quotations and a typo, the 'skeptics' would laugh in my face - and rightfully so - but apparently when they do it, it's okay.

Terms like 'Creationism' and 'Intelligent Design' are just labels. It is the ideas themselves that are important, not what you call them. In these early drafts of Of Pandas and People that used the word creationism instead of intelligent design, the basic content was the same as the final version. It's not as if in these early drafts they were arguing that the Earth is young or discussing evidence for a global flood, or anything like that, and then took out all that stuff after teaching creationism was ruled unconstitutional. If that was the case then yes, this would be pretty good evidence that ID = Creationism. But that wasn't the case. The fact is, the 'product' was the same in these early drafts, the only difference being that it was labeled 'Creationism' instead of 'Intelligent Design'. The critics have it backwards. This isn't proof that ID is re-labeled creationism. All this proves is that what we now call 'Intelligent Design' was once called 'Creationism'. That doesn't change the fact that what we now call 'Intelligent Design' is distinctly different from what the word 'Creationism' most commonly refers to.

It's pretty shocking to see such flawed logic from people who claim to be champions of reason and critical thinking. Most of these prominent ID critics, like Michael Shermer for example, are the very same 'skeptics' who think all 'conspiracy theories', such as those surrounding the JFK assassination and 9/11, are ridiculous. Two and a half years ago, a peer-reviewed paper was published documenting "active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology" in samples of World Trade Center dust - a finding which strongly supports the alternative 9/11 theory that the twin towers were destroyed by controlled demolition. But for the skeptics, this is isn't good enough. So it seems in their minds, actual forensic proof of explosives at the World Trade Center site isn't good enough evidence for the 9/11 conspiracy theory, but a few old, mined quotations and a typo is all the proof you need for the ID = Creationism conspiracy theory! It's totally backwards!

One thing the anti-ID crowd doesn't want you to know about the Dover trial is that Judge John Jones' ruling on intelligent design was basically copied verbatim from the plaintiff's proposed "Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law". Michael Behe highlights some of the word-for-word similarities between the two documents in the video below.

Judge Jones even copied several obviously false claims from the plaintiffs' proposed "Findings of Fact". One example of this is their interpretation of a famous moment in the trial dealing with the evolution of the immune system. As dramatized by PBS here, when Behe was questioned on this topic, the plaintiffs presented him with a stack of papers and books which they claimed refuted his assertion that the scientific literature has no answers for how the vertebrate immune system evolved.

In his 2008 book Only a Theory (2008) (pg. 74), Ken Miller characterizes Behe's response as follows:

Even when presented with every opportunity to make their case, the defenders of design retorted to little more than saying "It's not good enough for me" in the face of overwhelming evidence for evolution.

Miller's statement was in reference to the following quote from Judge Jones' ruling:

He [Behe] was presented with fifty eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not “good enough.”

Judge Jones' characterization of the exchange was taken basically word-for-word from the plaintiffs' proposed "Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law":

He [Behe] was confronted with the fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books and several immunology text-book chapters about the evolution of the immune system, P256, 280, 281, 283, 747, 748, 755 and 743, and he insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution – it was “not good enough.”

But let's look at Behe's exact words from the Day 12 PM transcript:

Behe: My answer, or my argument is that the literature has no detailed rigorous explanations for how complex biochemical systems could arise by a random mutation and natural selection and these articles do not address that.

Rothschild: So these are not good enough?

Behe: They're wonderful articles. They're very interesting. They simply just don't address the question that I pose.

The "not good enough" quote was not Behe's words, but Rothschild's. Later, the relentless Rothschild posed the same question again:

Rothschild: Is that your position today that these articles aren't good enough, you need to see a step-by-step description?

Behe: These articles are excellent articles I assume. However, they do not address the question that I am posing. So it's not that they aren't good enough. It's simply that they are addressed to a different subject.

As you can see, Behe did not say "it's not good enough". In fact, he said the exact opposite.

So the plaintiff attorneys distorted the facts, Judge Jones copied their distortions word-for-word without checking the facts and Ken Miller parroted Judge Jones in his book. The Darwinists believe they've found a transitional fossil in the form of "cdesign proponentsists", but we can go one better. Here we have a clear, documented, irrefutable example of descent with modification!

"Darwinism is compatible with theism"

Intelligent design advocates use the word Darwinism (or Neo-Darwinism) not as an ad-hominem, but to distinguish belief in common descent from the belief that all life is the result of purely unguided, unintelligent, material processes like random mutation and natural selection, which is what intelligent design is primarily challenging.

People such as those at the NCSE assert that Darwin's theory of evolution is perfectly compatible with a belief in god. If by "evolution" one simply means common descent, then I agree. It is not logically contradictory to believe that all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor and that god intelligently guided that evolution in some way. But such a belief would fall under the category of intelligent design. Since the NCSE is so critical of intelligent design, it is obvious that when they say "evolution", they mean Darwinism.

As Stephen Meyer briefly explains in the above video clip, it is logically contradictory to believe in Darwinism and in god, because Darwinism asserts that the appearance of design in life was produced solely via unguided, unintelligent, material processes such as random mutation and natural selection. How can god, an intelligent, transcendent entity, guide an unguided, unintelligent, purely material process?! That's so much a theological problem as it is just a basic logical problem!

In the movie Expelled, both Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers admit that it was their acceptance of Darwinian evolution that turned them atheist. Ask any of their followers and they will likely tell you the same thing. Atheists turn atheist because they can see no logical way to reconcile Darwinian evolution with belief in god. And this is one point that intelligent design proponents agree with them on. Darwinian evolution is a 'blind watchmaker'. The whole point of it is that it takes away the need for an actual 'watchmaker'. The only way god could play any role in evolution is if there was more at work than just the 'blind watchmaker'. But then that wouldn't be purely Darwinian evolution, it would be intelligently directed evolution, i.e. intelligent design!

So it seems theistic evolutionism in general is fine, but theistic Darwinism is an oxymoron.

"Expelled blames Darwin for the holocaust"

While there isn't conclusive evidence that Darwin himself advocated eugenics, the connection between Darwin's ideas and the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century are well documented. But no one is "blaming" Darwin or his theory for the holocaust, we are simply pointing out that connection. And certainly no one is saying that all evolutionists are Nazis. In fact, both Ben Stein and David Berlinski are careful to emphasize this in the movie. It's not that belief in Darwinism automatically makes you a eugenicist or a Nazi, it's that people who are eugenicists/Nazis are attracted to Darwinism. In their minds, Darwin's theory is a scientific rationalization for their ideology.

All of the great twentieth century tyrannical regimes were rationalized 'scientifically'. Except it wasn't actually science though, but politicized dogma heavily propagandized by the state. Consider, for example, the 'race science' that led to the Holocaust. While we know in retrospect that the whole thing was a bunch of pseudo-scientific nonsense, it was widely accepted by the establishment in Germany at the time. You had professors of 'racial science', you had top research institutions endorsing it. If you were alive then, you would likely have been told that it was a "well-established scientific consensus", or something to that effect. And of course, any scientist who publicly challenged it was discredited or worse, so few people did so out of fear.

Hitler didn't round up and exterminate millions of Jews by himself; he had an army to do it for him. Most of those who did the deed were arguably not technically malevolent, they were simply victims of propaganda who genuinely believed they were doing the right thing and were too weak minded to question their orders. That's how tyranny works. Without 'race science', there would have been no justification for the Nazis racial policies, and the end result most likely would not have been possible.

The lesson here is that the scientific establishment tends to go along with the state, regardless of the empirical merit of the state's claims, so we need to be vigilant whenever a politically or ideologically sensitive idea such as climate change or evolution is dogmatically promoted by the establishment, and the intellectual freedom to challenge these ideas is vitally important. That was the central message of the movie Expelled. It's not really warning us about Darwinism per se, but about scientific elitism in general.

Contrary to mainstream history, eugenics did not die with the Nazis. Many leading names in science today are eugenicists. The most infamous is John P. Holdren. He is President Obama's current science advisor and is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1977, he wrote a book called Ecoscience which called for all kinds of eugenical policies including compulsory sterilization and abortion. Whatever your view on abortion - pro-life or pro-choice - the idea of compulsory abortion should sicken you. In China, mothers who violate the nation's one child policy can have their babies forcefully aborted, even if they are in their ninth month of development, and people like Holdren want this sort of thing worldwide. With people like him essentially running science, is it any wonder alternatives to Darwinian materialism aren't allowed?! Again, it's not that belief in Darwinism automatically turns you into a person like Holdren, but certainly Darwinism is attractive to people like him.

One final point on the Darwin-Hitler connection, it's interesting how the critics say THE MOVIE links Darwin to the holocaust. "The movie" is basically a collection of interviews. "The movie" doesn't claim anything. It is the people in the movie that are making the claims. Interestingly, the person in the film who makes the most forceful connection is Uta George, the curator of the Hadamar holocaust museum. When Ben Stein asks her if this was "a Darwinian concept", she says yes. Stein then asks her if it was also Malthusian and she says "yes but the Nazis, they relied on Darwin". Here we have a third-party expert witness who has no stake in the debate over Darwinian evolution. If you have a problem with the movie's claims, take it up with her!

"Ben Stein twisted Richard Dawkins' comment about alien designers"

According to some critics, Ben Stein twisted Dawkins' words to claim he believes life on Earth was intelligently designed by aliens. As Dawkins himself writes:

Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE."

Here is a clip of the scene in question:

I'd like to know what movie Dawkins was watching, coz I didn't hear a "ZOMG! Dawkins believes we were intelligently designed by aliens" in there! That may be how some creationists spun it, but that's not how Ben Stein interpreted it.

The damning thing about Dawkins' statement - and this is I think what Ben Stein meant - it's not that he seems to be open to the idea that we were intelligently designed by aliens, it's that he admitted that design is a scientifically testable idea. He said it's possible that we may find evidence for this "intriguing possibility" in biochemistry and molecular biology, in the form of a "signature". This is why Stein said, "Wait a second, Richard Dawkins thought that intelligent design might be a legitimate pursuit". He didn't say Dawkins thinks intelligent design is true, he simply commented on how he seems to be advocating scientific inquiry into a design hypothesis.

Conclusion

I think what's going on here is that the Darwinists, atheists, anti-ID people etc. are watching Expelled with the preconceived belief that it is dishonest creationist propaganda. And so rather than simply listening to the raw arguments in the movie, they're twisting everything they hear so it fits that preconceived view. They're convinced there is an agenda, so they are interpreting everything they hear based on the assumption that there is an agenda and so they get very defensive and attribute claims to the movie that it doesn't actually make.

If one watches the movie with no emotional investments one way or another, and actually listens to what's being said instead of getting all defensive and immediately consulting your own internal "how to debate a young-earth creationist" debating manual, like I did, and a friend of mine did (who by the way is an atheist), one comes away with a completely different opinion of the movie. When I read the writings of the film's debunkers, I honestly get the sense that they watched a completely different movie to the one I saw. They're not debunking the movie, they're debunking their own distorted interpretation of the movie. It really illustrates the power of ideological commitment, which was one of the film's points...

John Lennox: What is being presented to the public is, first comes the science and then comes the world view. I would want to argue that that may not be the case, that it may actually be the other way around; that the world view comes first and is influencing the interpretation of science.

Alister McGrath: My deep regret is that some people are so deeply entrenched in their own world views that they will simply not countenance alternatives

The Great Debate: Blind Watchmaker or Intelligent Design?

One thing I've noticed from reading, listening to and participating in numerous debates on the internet is that they tend to go round in circles.

Essentially the entire atheist/Darwinist view is based on a denial of design (1). As Richard Dawkins wrote in River out of Eden (1995):

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

But wait, there are people out there who say there is a case to be made for design (2)! Intelligent design advocates point to the functional complexity of life, making comparisons to human technology and information, to argue that life is most likely the product of intelligence.

Darwinists respond by pointing out that human technology is not made of self-replicating DNA, and therefore the comparison is invalid (3). The problem with this argument is it assumes the very thing at issue. Why do they believe it to be different for things made of self-replicating DNA? Well, because they believe there exists this designer substitute mechanism of random mutation and natural selection that can explain the appearance of design in living things and remove the need for real design. But can random mutation and natural selection function as a designer substitute? That's the question!

Intelligent design advocates note logical problems with the 'blind watchmaker' thesis, pointing to irreducible complexity as an apparent obstacle for the gradual Darwinian mechanism. They also point out that it has never been empirically demonstrated in a lab (4) that the mechanism can produce entirely new functional systems.

The typical Darwinist response at this point is to state that the reason it hasn't ever been observed in a lab is because it can't be, since the process takes millions of years (5). The problem is, this doesn't do them any favours, because they are essentially admitting that the 'blind watchmaker' thesis is untestable (6).

The Darwinist's then distort this valid criticism of Darwinian evolution into an argument from ignorance/incredulity, or what they call a 'god of gaps' (7) argument. They claim the case for design is based solely on not being able to imagine how it could happen via Darwinian means. ID advocates respond by asserting that it's not just a 'god of the gaps', it's an inference to the best explanation. It is not just a negative argument against Darwinism, because there is also a positive case to be made for design (2)! From this point on, the debates just go round in circles.

Debating in this manner isn't going to get us anywhere. I know it's difficult in this age of trolling, but we have to get past this kind of reactionary debate mentality. The simplest, fairest and most rational way to approach this debate is to look at the basic pros and cons of the two hypotheses.

Occam's Razor dictates that when we have multiple competing hypotheses of equal explanatory power, we should tend towards the simplest one. So if Darwinian evolution has the explanatory power to account for everything in biology, then that is the hypothesis we should go with. On the other hand, if it doesn't have the explanatory power, then we should go with the hypothesis that does have the explanatory power: intelligent design.

So it all comes down to one fundamental question: Does Darwinian evolution have the explanatory power? Can it function as a 'blind watchmaker'? To the people who say it can, the burden of proof is on you! I will now take a look at the positive case, or lack thereof, for this grand Darwinist claim.

Probably the most embarrassingly bad efforts to prove that natural selection can function as a designer substitute are the ones which involve computer algorithms. In Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker, he attempts to show how a Darwinian process can generate a line of Shakespeare using a computer program he made. In the clip below, he gives a demonstration this "weasel" program.

Now there's nothing wrong with Dawkins' program, the problem is, it isn't Darwinian. Dawkins himself admits that it's "a bit of a cheat", because it looks into the future and homes in on a distant target. However, he also asserts that it's still a "fairly good model" for Darwinian evolution. I agree that it's a cheat, but I disagree that it's a fairly good model for Darwinism. You're giving foresight to a process that by its very definition has no foresight!

As a computer programmer myself, I see how ridiculous Dawkins' logic here is. When the programmer or user of a program specifies a line of text to be printed on screen, it doesn't matter how it does it; whether it fetches the string directly from the memory and prints it, or repeatedly manipulates a randomly generated string until it matches the specified string and then prints that. At the end of the day, the reason that line of text is on the screen is because it was specified intelligently by the programmer or user.

What Dawkins' program is modelling is more of a teleological process. It demonstrates that evolution is possible if information is in some way hard-coded into the universe, but that was never in doubt. The question is, where does the information come from? Rather than refuting the design argument, Dawkins' has proven their point, because the information was specified intelligently by him.

But Dawkins' weasel program is simple. Over the years, evolutionary algorithms have become more sophisticated. Nonetheless, they all suffer from the same basic flaw. Consider, for example, the Avida simulation.

In 2003, a paper by Lenski et al. was published in Nature entitled The evolutionary origin of complex features. The paper was clearly a response to the claims of intelligent design advocates. The abstract of the paper begins with "A long-standing challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it can explain the origin of complex organismal features" and ends with "These findings show how complex functions can originate by random mutation and natural selection". One of the authors of the paper, Robert Pennock, is a prominent critic of intelligent design. The findings were hailed in scientific magazines as a mortal blow to creationism and ID. And the paper was even used as evidence in the Dover trial. Yet the authors avoided referencing the work of ID proponents. Perhaps because if they did they would be acknowledging that ID is a scientifically testable idea, which of course contradicts their constant assertions to the contrary. By not referencing any pro-ID work, they were able to challenge intelligent design in a leading journal while avoiding legitimising it. The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that was intentional!

And before you say "What pro-ID work?!", they could have cited a pro-ID book. Books are often cited as references in peer-reviewed scientific papers. Take, for example, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species!

The Lenski paper reported on research using the Avida artificial life software. Avida is a virtual Petri dish in which digital "organisms" self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve. When an organism is "born" with a mutation that allows it to perform a logic function, it is rewarded with increased "fitness". The more complex the logical operation, the more fitness the organism is rewarded with.

Sounds good, right? The problem is, the relative fitness of an organism is determined by static, absolute fitness multipliers. As Robert Deyes writes:

Equally striking were the computational merits that were awarded to digital organisms whenever they performed particular logic functions. NOT and AND functions for example were given a computational merit of 2 while 'EQUALS' was given a merit of 32. It seems that even evolutionary biologists would have a problem here since their claim is that in real life, what constitutes evolutionary fitness is never pre-specified. No single trait gives an organism an absolute merit value for every type of situation it encounters. So rather than demonstrating Darwinian natural selection, AVIDA appeared to show what happens in a teleological world where goals and purpose are front-loaded into the fabric of life ... If anything what we see here is an example of goal directed evolution- precisely what Darwinian evolution purports not to be.

Since "fitness" is an absolute numerical value that is increased the closer you get to the target function, it is unsurprising that the target function evolved. It is the exact same flaw that Dawkins' weasel program has.

By rewarding the simpler functions, the simulation pre-supposes a gradual pathway to the target function. The Lenski paper discusses what happened when the simulation was set up so the simpler functions yielded no reward:

50 populations evolved in an environment where only EQU was rewarded, and no simpler function yielded energy. We expected that EQU would evolve much less often because selection would not preserve the simpler functions that provide foundations to build more complex features. Indeed, none of these populations evolved EQU, a highly significant difference from the fraction that did so in the reward-all environment.

In other words, when they modelled a situation where there was no selective advantage until you have the final function - i.e. when they truly modelled irreducible complexity - the final function did not evolve. Avida's success, therefore, depends on there being a gradual pathway to complex functions. As Casey Luskin puts it, Avida "does not test Darwin's theory--it assumes it".

The Lenski paper was hyped as a refutation to irreducible complexity. The truth is, the authors began with the assumption that there is a gradual pathway to the complex function and then ran the simulation and documented how it followed that gradual pathway. If it were a true test of irreducible complexity, the task would be to find a gradual pathway, not follow a pre-specified one.

Casey Luskin also notes how the process of "mutation" in the Avida world is nothing like the process of mutation in biology:

Another way the study granted too much selective advantage was that every mutation inserted a line of code which had pre-set meaning and functionality in the computer-environment. The biological analogy might be inserting a fully functional protein via the duplication of a gene. Such gene-duplication events do occur in biology, but biochemical evolution at the gene-level must also via point mutations (or insertions or deletions of segments of DNA within a gene). Point mutations, insertions, or deletions need not add such discrete and meaningful functionality, however every mutation in the Lenski paper which added code represented the addition a of a complete and discrete function. The paper thus granted the addition of too much functionality for each "mutation" and did not accurately model biology in this respect. Were it to accurately model biology, the study might have randomly substituted, inserted, or deleted code at the lower level of words or even letters into the code of the digital organism. While this might have had the effect of creating many syntax errors in the code of the digital organism, it might have been closer to what really happens in biology when a gene experiences substitutions, insertions, or deletions of nucleotides.

Put simply, the instructions themselves aren't altered, what is altered are the attributes that determine whether or not an organism can execute a certain instruction.

To understand why "digital world" evolutionary simulations miss the point, consider the analogy of video game "unlockables". Lots of video games reward their players when they reach certain milestones in the game by making new weapons, vehicles, areas etc. available to them. When an unlockable is made available to you, the information coding for that unlockable doesn't just spontaneously come into existence, does it? Nor was it created by you playing the game. No, the information was already there, it just wasn't being used before. When you reach the defined milestone in the game, and the unlockable is made available, all the game does is start using the information that was already there in the game's code and data files. And that code, ultimately, was intelligently written by a programmer.

With "digital world" simulations, it's essentially the same principle. When the digital organisms "evolve" certain functions, the information coding for those functions was already there, hard-coded into the digital world by the programmer (or into the physical computer itself if the instructions are machine level). All that's happening is, when a digital organism gets lucky and is born with a certain virtual genome (which was basically homed in on), it can now use that pre-programmed information. So all these simulations really are, essentially, are video games playing themselves!

In summary, Avida shows that evolution will work if:

Natural selection works by numbers.
An end goal is pre-defined and an organism's "fitness" depends on how close it is to that end goal.
It is assumed that there is a gradual pathway to all complex functions.
The process of mutation is simply the reordering of lines of pre-programmed, functional code that's stored outside the organism's genome and is immune to alteration.

The problem is, this isn't how Darwinian evolution works in reality!

The central question is, how did the information in biology arise? By an undirected, unintelligent process, or by intelligent design? The only thing evolutionary algorithms demonstrate - whether they're a simple program like Dawkins' weasel program or a digital world - is that evolution will work if there is pre-specified information in some form. They do not demonstrate that an undirected, unintelligent process can create information.

Bottom line, the idea that you can use intelligently designed computer algorithms running on intelligently designed computers to show that intelligent design isn't necessary to explain life is simply ludicrous! The purely Darwinian version of evolution has no pre-programmed goals and no pre-specified functions, and it is not possible to create a simulation of evolution without either. All the Darwinists have proven with their simulations is that computers will do what you tell them to! Shocker! If this is all one has to do to get inducted into the Royal Society, I think I might have a go myself!

More technical dissections of evolutionary algorithms can be found at The Evolutionary Informatics Lab.

Historically, the human eye has been cited by many as a something so intricate that it could only have been designed, but in recent years we have often been told that evolutionary theory has explained how the eye evolved by Darwinian means. In the above clip from an episode of the BBC's Bang Goes The Theory series, Richard Dawkins outlines the leading evolutionary explanation, describing how the "camera" eye is believed to have evolved from a light-sensitive spot, via the intermediary stages of a "cup" eye and a "pinhole" eye.

Mystery solved, right? Well, not according to some. A number of Darwin heretics have criticised this explanation, calling it oversimplified and purely speculative. The fact that these simpler eyes exist in nature is proof of evolution in a sense. It is proof that eyes have increased in complexity. But that isn't proof that the undirected process of random variation and natural selection is what created the camera eye. Michael Behe, David Berlinski, Casey Luskin, Jonathan MacLatchie and Sean Pitman have each written detailed critiques of various aspects of this eye evolution story. See my blog post entitled The Oversimplified Eye Evolution Fairytale for a compilation of key extracts from these critiques.

To summarize, the account starts off with a fully functional eyespot of light-sensitive pigments already present. So in other words, our story begins at the second chapter! We are taking vision as a given with no discussion as to how you go from no vision to vision via a gradual Darwinian process. Even the simplest form of vision is, biochemically, extremely complicated.

And at the other end, when the lens is introduced, there is no mention of how this occurs in embryological development. The development of the lens is a remarkably complex cascade involving numerous chemical triggers. First, the embryo's outer surface thickens and bulges. The bulge then separates into a free-floating element called a lens vesicle as the eye is developing around it. The vesicle cells then differentiate and become transparent lens fibers. Remarkably, subsequent development of the eye depends in large part on chemicals secreted by the developing lens! The process of lens development illustrates that it's a lot more than just "hardened jelly", as the BBC presenter characterized it, and the mutual dependency between the developing eye and developing lens seems inconsistent with the premise that the lens was a relatively late add-on.

The theory also only makes sense if you invoke the abrupt appearance of additional components such as the cornea, the iris, muscles to move the eye and focus the lens and mechanisms for colour vision etc. Each of these things would certainly give an organism a selective advantage over organisms that don't have these things, but where do these things come from in the first place? It's not as if they can each arise fully formed in a single mutation! Like the eye itself, these parts have to come about via a gradual ascent up 'mount improbable'. But again, there's no apparent functional advantage until those parts are fully formed, so they can't arise via that kind of process! It seems natural selection is good at explaining the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest!

Furthermore, each stage in the evolution of the eye has to be accompanied by changes to the optic nerve - to transmit the additional information - and neurological changes in the brain - to process the additional information - otherwise there will be no improvement in vision. So each stage in eye evolution is not just one modification, but three modifications. If these three modifications arose simultaneously, then we are no longer talking about a gradual ascent up 'mount improbable'. If they did not arise simultaneously, then there is no logical reason for them to come about at all because there's no reason for natural selection to preserve just one or two of the modifications.

At best this account provides a step-by-step explanation of "numerous gradations" for only one feature of the eye: its concavity. But even that would be giving it too much credit, since no experiments have ever been done to test this theory. It wouldn't be too difficult to test. All you would have to do is take a creature with a flat eyespot, have it produce offspring and artificially select for those with slightly more dimpled eyespots. Repeat this for several generations and see if you can get close to a "cup" eye. If it works, then you can test the new eyes against the old to see if there really is an improvement in vision. If there is, then part of the theory at least would be experimentally confirmed. It could at least be considered science then. At present, it's nothing more than a just so story.

Recently featured on the front page of the parody wiki Uncyclopedia was an article taking the piss out of irreducible complexity. In the article, the writers attempt to ridicule the logic by using the example of an arch. An arch is irreducibly complex in a sense, since the removal of one of the stones will result in the entire structure collapsing. Yet arches are built gradually with the aid of scaffolding.

So if an arch can be constructed gradually with the aid of scaffolding, it has been suggested that irreducibly complex systems in nature could also be constructed gradually with the aid of some form of biochemical "scaffolding". The premise is similar to geneticist Hermann Muller's idea for how "interlocking" complexity could arise by gradual means due to systems changing in such a way that they become dependent on parts that were originally merely an asset.

As Boudry et al. write in an article entitled Irreducible Incoherence and Intelligent Design – a look into the conceptual toolbox of a pseudoscience:

As early as the beginning of the 20th century, geneticist Hermann Muller explained how biological systems that depend on the complex “interlocking” actions of many different components could come about by evolutionary processes: “Many of the characters and factors which, when new, were originally merely an asset finally became necessary because other necessary characters and factors had subsequently become changed so as to be dependent on the former” (Muller 1918, pp. 463-464). Thus, redundant complexity can eventually generate IC (under the weak interpretation). More recently, biochemist and molecular biologist A. G. Cairns-Smith proposed the analogy of “scaffolding” in the construction of an arch to explain the evolution of systems that are IC according to Behe (Cairns-Smith 1986; see also Orr 1997; Pennock 2000). A classical stone arch is IC in the weak sense, because the structure will collapse as soon as one removes either the keystone or one of the other stones. The support of scaffolding is necessary in building a stone arch, but once the arch is completed, the scaffolding can be safely removed. In a similar vein, a biochemical structure may have functioned as a scaffold in the evolution of an IC system before becoming dispensable and disappearing. That is, “Before the multitudinous components of present biochemistry could come to lean together they had to lean on something else” (Cairns-Smith 1986, p. 61).

The scaffolding analogy is a nice idea, but no one has ever suggested a way in which it could apply to biochemical machines and processes. The function of an arch is to stay up, and a partially constructed arch can stay up with the help of scaffolding, but how do you "scaffold" a partially constructed motor so that it can function as a motor? When talking about mechanisms, the scaffolding analogy makes no sense!

The most commonly parroted counter argument to irreducible complexity is Ken Miller's idea of "co-option". Ken Miller agrees that if you remove just one of the bacterial flagellum's 40 parts, it can no longer function as a flagellum. However, he argues, that doesn't necessarily mean it's entirely non-functional. He cites the example of the type-III secretion system, a needle-like structure found in pathogenic bacteria which is built from 10 of the bacterial flagellum's 40 parts. Miller reasons that the bacterial flagellum likely evolved from something like the type-III secretion system, a simpler molecular machine with a different function.

It is unlikely that the flagellum evolved from the type-III secretion system. If anything, it was probably the other way around. If you think about it, bacteria have been swimming around in the water a lot longer than they've been acting as pathogens for eukaryotic organisms. As a 2008 New Scientist article reported:

One fact in favour of the flagellum-first view is that bacteria would have needed propulsion before they needed T3SSs, which are used to attack cells that evolved later than bacteria. Also, flagella are found in a more diverse range of bacterial species than T3SSs. "The most parsimonious explanation is that the T3SS arose later," says biochemist Howard Ochman at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

But even if you ignore that, the existence of the type-III secretion system still doesn't explain the evolution of the bacterial flagellum. To understand why irreducible complexity is such a problem for Darwinism, consider Dawkins' analogy of climbing Mount Improbable...

On one side of the mountain we have an unscalable cliff face, which represents the probability of something like the eye arising by chance alone. On the other side, however, Dawkins envisions a more gradual route. This gradual route represents the gradual Darwinian process of random genetic change and natural selection. It is claimed that through incremental tinkering, with each step providing some type of functional advantage, complex structures can arise over several generations.

The problem is, for irreducibly complex systems, there doesn't appear to be a gradual route! The idea of a gradual route depends on there being a series of functional intermediate stages. But for irreducibly complex systems, there is no function until you have the complete system. If there's no gradual route, there's no way it can evolve incrementally via random mutation and natural selection. In order to refute the argument from irreducible complexity, you have to prove that there is, in fact, a gradual route to such systems.

But Ken Miller has not done that. All he has done is suggest one possible step along the route. To say this refutes irreducible complexity is like saying you could travel by foot from Southampton to New York because we know there's an iceberg somewhere in between! Darwinists need to do better than that.

Miller's idea of co-option has been expanded upon by Nicholas Matzke, a former NCSE staff member and contributor to the Panda's Thumb blog, who was the guy who blatantly misrepresented ID in the quote from the PBS documentary I cited earlier. In 2003, he wrote a lengthy article proposing a Darwinian explanation for the bacterial flagellum. His theory is animated in this YouTube video by cdk007 and in 2006 he challenged the design argument in a paper in Nature.

Sean Pitman has written a technical critique of Matzke's 2003 article. In summary, he writes:

Given the TTSS system as a starting point, regardless of the tenuousness of that hypothesis, the next steps in the evolution of the flagellum should be easy - right? With just a few residue changes here and there, the pathway of improved beneficial function should be made up of neat, closely spaced, steppingstones. Consider that Matzke's proposed scenario is one of the most detailed descriptions that I have come across - as superficial as it is. Necessary parts just pop into existence and easily attach to each other in just the right way. No detailed discussion concerning the significant modifications that would be required for such specific attachments to be realized to a beneficial degree is provided. Matzke's discussion is a gross underestimate of the complexity involved in going from one beneficial state to the next along his proposed evolutionary pathway.

In fact, not a single evolutionary step proposed by Matzke or anyone else has ever been demonstrated to be "crossable" in any laboratory experiment - - not one. Without the ability to test such stories in the laboratory, they are simply not falsifiable and therefore are, by definition, not supported by scientific method. It may seem strange for many to even consider this, but such statements concerning the evolution of complex functions, on the order of flagellar system complexity, are not scientific at all - they aren't even theory. At the very best they are untested and perhaps untestable propositions. Simply put, these "stories" about flagellar evolution are just that - - fairytale stories. And, when examined in closer detail, they don't even look good on paper.

I have to commend Matzke for his efforts. As William Dembski said, "he has told the best Darwinian story to date concerning the evolutionary origin of the bacterial flagellum". But that's all it is - a story! Much like the eye evolution story, it's oversimplified, it invokes the abrupt appearance of key parts and most importantly from a scientific standpoint, it isn't testable. It's just another Darwinian fairytale masquerading as science.

Computer algorithms and just so stories do not a science make. For the 'blind watchmaker' to be considered scientific, you need more than that. You need to actually empirically test it in a lab.

But of course there are some interesting experimental results which are cited by Darwinists as examples of the 'blind watchmaker' in action. In Chapter 5 of The Greatest Show On Earth (2009), Dawkins discusses Richard Lenski's long-term E. Coli evolution experiment; specifically, the results of a 2008 PNAS paper reporting on the evolution of citrate metabolism in one of the populations. Dawkins' interpretation of this find is that it "undermines [the] central dogma of ‘irreducible complexity’".

What Dawkins neglected to mention though is that two days after the paper was first published online, Michael Behe - the man who coined the term 'irreducible complexity' - wrote about the paper and argued that it supported his thesis in his 2007 book, The Edge of Evolution.

Not only is Behe's article not mentioned in Dawkins' book, but Behe's name doesn't appear in the book at all. There's a few mentions of 'irreducible complexity', but no mention of the man who came up with the concept, or of any leading ID proponent for that matter. Instead, while discussing Lenski's research, Dawkins sets up a straw man by telling a boring anecdote about some silly dispute with a Conservapedia editor:

Andrew Schlafly, creationist editor of ‘Conservapedia’, the notoriously misleading imitation of Wikipedia, wrote to Dr Lenski demanding access to his original data, presumably implying that there was some doubt as to their veracity. Lenski had absolutely no obligation even to reply to this impertinent suggestion but, in a very gentlemanly way, he did so, mildly suggesting that Schlafly might make the effort to read his paper before criticizing it. Lenski went on to make the telling point that his best data are stored in the form of frozen bacterial cultures, which anybody could, in principle, examine to verify his conclusions. He would be happy to send samples to any bacteriologist qualified to handle them, pointing out that in unqualified hands they might be quite dangerous. Lenski listed these qualifications in merciless detail, and one can almost hear the relish with which he did so, knowing full well that Schlafly – a lawyer, if you please, not a scientist at all – would hardly be able to spell his way through the words, let alone qualify as a bacteriologist competent to carry out advanced and safe laboratory procedures, followed by statistical analysis of the results. The whole matter was trenchantly summed up by the celebrated scientific blogwit PZ Myers, in a passage beginning, ‘Once again, Richard Lenski has replied to the goons and fools at Conservapedia, and boy, does he ever outclass them.’

(Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth (2009), pg. 131)

This is a perfect example of how people like Dawkins and Myers approach this issue - it's all straw man! As David Klinghoffer notes:

If you follow the top Darwin blogs you'll notice how eagerly and often they go in for mocking extremely marginal and daffy creationists. PZ Myers specializes in this. So too, in his books, does Richard Dawkins. How about answering the arguments of a real scientist who advocates intelligent design on scientific rather than Bible-thumping grounds -- a Douglas Axe or Ann Gauger, for example? How about a thoughtful critique of The Myth of Junk DNA or Signature in the Cell? A response to serious science bloggers like ENV's Casey Luskin or Jonathan M.?

Uh, no, thank you!

It's quite a contrast with intelligent-design advocates who, like them or not, wrestle with the top scientists and thinkers on the other side, while ignoring the small timers.

In 2009, while both Dawkins and Stephen Meyer were on book tours, Meyer noticed that their tours crossed paths and challenged Dawkins to a debate; Dawkins declined. A few days later, during an appearance on The Michael Medved Show, Dawkins was asked by Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman about his refusal to debate ID proponents. Dawkins' response was:

I will have a discussion with somebody who has a genuinely different scientific point of view. I have never come across any form of creationism, whether you call it intelligent design or not, which has a serious scientific case to put.

The objection to having debates with people like that is that it gives them a kind of respectability. If a real scientist goes onto a debating platform with a creationist, it gives a kind of respectability which I do not think that your people have earned.

Interestingly, that's the exact same BS excuse Al Gore gives for why he refuses to debate man-made global warming skeptics, and the same reason NIST gives for why they won't debate Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. But the thing is, Dawkins actually DOES debate his opponents, but only his more fringe opponents. A few years ago, he presented a series on Channel 4 called The Genius of Charles Darwin, and devoted an entire episode to debating creationists. And the creationists featured in the program were far less deserving of attention than the ID scientists. Essentially, Dawkins avoids debates by arrogantly appealing to his own authority, but he isn't even consistent about it. I think the real reason he refused to debate Stephen Meyer is pretty clear: he isn't confident he can best him.

I've read The Greatest Show on Earth and actually agree with most of it. Since I have no issue with the age of the Earth or common descent, the only scientific chapter I really have issue with is Chapter 5. It's not so much what's in the book that's the problem, it's what's not in the book! On the back cover of the book there is a quote from The Times praising it as "a beautifully crafted and intelligible rebuttal of creationism and intelligent design", but the truth is, it hardly addresses intelligent design claims at all! Essentially, the book is one big 480-page straw man attack.

Unlike Dawkins, I'm not going to attack my opponents straw man by focusing on the weaker claims and ignoring the better evidence. In fact, I'm now going to address what is cited by many as one of the strongest pieces of evidence that new information and novel functionality can arise by Darwinian means.

In a 2005 MSNBC/LiveScience article, writer Ker Than cites an intriguing scientific discovery as evidence against intelligent design:

In 1975, Japanese scientists reported the discovery of bacteria that could break down nylon, the material used to make pantyhose and parachutes. Bacteria are known to ingest all sorts of things, everything from crude oil to sulfur, so the discovery of one that could eat nylon would not have been very remarkable if not for one small detail: nylon is synthetic; it didn't exist anywhere in nature until 1935, when it was invented by an organic chemist at the chemical company Dupont.

The discovery of nylon-eating bacteria poses a problem for ID proponents. Where did the [Complex Specified Information] for nylonase—the actual protein that the bacteria use to break down the nylon—come from?

'Nylonase' seems to be the Darwinist's strongest scientific argument against ID - the observed rapid evolution of entirely new proteins - and that's why it fascinated me.

The name 'nylonase' is a little misleading, since it's not nylon that the enzyme degrades, but a by-product of nylon-6 production. The enzyme's actual name is 6-aminohexanoate-dimer hydrolase. While the by-product also isn't found in nature, the bonds that hold it together (amide bonds) are nothing unusual, so it's not as impressive as "nylon-eating bacteria" makes it seem. However, it is still an interesting observation.

Ker Than's interpretation of this find is the same as that of an article archived on the NCSE's website entitled New Proteins Without God's Help. This article was written in 1985, so it's more than a quarter of a century old! Since then, more research has been done which challenges the anti-ID crowd's interpretation. Recent studies by scientists at the University of Hyogo in Japan have found that 'nylonase' is simply a slightly modified carboxylesterase enzyme. The carboxlesterase enzyme already had a slight amount of activity towards the nylon oligomer, and a couple of mutations in the catalytic site greatly increased its 'nylonase' activity without significantly affecting its original esterase function.

While this certainly is "evolution" in one sense of the word, and it is a testament to the versatility of bacterial adaptation, it is not new complex specified information, nor is it arguably even a new function. And, as Ker Than noted, "the nylonase enzyme is less efficient than the precursor protein it's believed to have developed from". As an example of the 'blind watchmaker' in action, it's no more impressive than antibiotic resistance.

Last year, during a debate between Michael Behe and Keith Fox on a UK Christian radio show, Fox cited the nylon-degrading enzyme as evidence which refutes Behe:

Fox: One example that is cited of a new function evolving reasonably recently is the production of an enzyme that degrades nylon -- a man made fibre; where organisms who were exposed to, actually the effluent from a nylon factory, evolved the ability to degrade that. It's something that's not out there in nature, it's a new function.

Behe: Well no that's -- yeah it's been reported as that but that's not quite correct. It doesn't degrade nylon, it degrades a precursor, a small organic chemical that's used in the synthesis of nylon.

Fox: That's correct but it's still something that isn't out there in nature and it is a new function.

Behe: Well that may be true but the question is, how hard is it to do that? And I suspect it's not so hard. Hydrolysing some amide bond, or an ester or something like that, is not quite the same thing as, you know, being an outboard motor.

Some might say Behe is moving the goalposts here, but he isn't. Behe's goalposts have always been where he's setting them now. The Darwinist's simply aren't scoring!

So, we return to that fundamental question: Does Darwinian evolution have the explanatory power? Can natural selection function as a 'blind watchmaker'? Well, the computer simulations tell us absolutely nothing and the empirical basis is surprisingly underwhelming, but Darwinist storytellers like Richard Dawkins, Ken Miller and Nick Matzke can always think of ways in which it COULD work. But such exercises in storytelling are more faith-based than science-based.

And this brings me to my main point, and the reason I wrote this blog. The main point I want to argue is that Darwinism, materialism and atheism are world views which are just as much faith-based as their theistic and spiritual alternatives. Atheists of the Dawkinsian variety like to sit on their high horses and look down on all the religious people with an arrogant delusion of intellectual superiority because their world view is based on "science", while those silly theists base their world view on faith. And the reason I like the ID arguments so much is because, regardless of which is actually true - Darwinian materialism or intelligent design - they expose how belief in the blind watchmaker (and by extension, Darwinism, materialism and atheism) actually takes quite a lot of faith. And that's an uncomfortable reality check for those who claim to be rational free-thinkers. Perhaps that's why they hate ID so much!

"The first effect of not believing in god is to believe in anything." ~ Émile Cammaerts

Alex Jones vs Jamie Bartlett of Demos: 9/11, Global Warming, Consensus & Peer-review

2011-10-23T09:43:00.092+01:00

The other night, Alex Jones debated Jamie Bartlett of Demos on Infowars Nightly News. While the debate in general was pretty crap, one moment I found interesting was when Mr Bartlett attempted to discredit Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. See the clip below.

Bartlett claimed that the overwhelming "scientific consensus" of the architectural, engineering and demolition communities is that the towers collapsed due to fire and that there were no explosives involved, and dismissed AE911Truth as just "a rabble of a few" - saying they will be taken seriously only when they publish real peer-reviewed research.

First of all, AE911Truth now has over 1600 members and their growth is accelerating. So they're a bit more than just "a rabble of the few". It is true that, worldwide, the vast majority of architects and engineers believe the official story, but why is that? Because that's what they've been told! It's not as if every architect and engineer in the world has looked the all the evidence and concluded that the official story is true. Most aren't aware there even is another side to the debate. They've simply been spoon-fed the official story and have never questioned it.

Of all the people who have looked at the case for demolition, the overwhelming majority end up siding with AE911Truth. Richard Gage has travelled the world giving talks and setting up booths at AIA conventions etc. And most of the professionals he talks to end up agreeing with him. Videos of Gage talking to architects and engineers and their reactions to seeing the explosive evidence for the first time can be found here, here and here.

Secondly, the claim that there are no peer-reviewed papers supporting AE911Truth is false. 9/11 truth scientists have published peer-reviewed papers - and not just in "truther journals" (The Journal of 9/11 Studies), but also in more established journals aswell - including Environmental anomalies at the World Trade Center: evidence for energetic materials in The Environmentalist and two papers in Bentham open access journals: Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction in the Open Civil Engineering Journal and Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe in The Open Chemical Physics Journal.

The official NIST reports, by the way, were not peer-reviewed and their computer models haven't ever been made available for public scrutiny. When independent researchers attempted to obtain their model input data via the freedom of information act, NIST denied their request, claiming releasing the data might "jeopardize public safety"!

Alex is right to draw parallels to the global warming debate. Terms like "consensus" and "peer-review" are thrown around alot in that debate too. The problem with appealing to "consensus" is it's basically a circular argument. The mainstream, establishment views of 9/11 and climate change are only the "scientific consensus" because they are the mainstream, establishment views! Most climate scientists believe the theory of man-made global warming for the same reason most architects and engineers believe the official story of 9/11: because that's what they've been taught and they've never really questioned it, and most aren't aware there even is another side to the debate. It's interesting how, in both cases, most of the scientists who actually look at the other side end up siding with the dissenting view.

The "peer-review" argument is equally circular. I've written a number of posts on this blog (see here, here and here) and even devoted a 16 minute video to exposing the myth of "peer-review" in climate science.

The problem with peer-review in its current form is it is inherently biased towards the establishment view. Peer-review works fine if the issue isn't really controversial in a political or ideological sense, but when the issue is controversial, "peer-review" becomes little more than an echo chamber for intellectual circle-jerking. Scientists are only human and therefore are, along with the editors and publishers of journals, just as prone to group think, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance and peer-pressure as anyone. Arguably more so, since their careers are at stake. Also they're smart. And, as skeptic Michael Shemer observes, smart people are better at rationalizing beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons!

Alex mentioned how the Climategate scientists went after journals that dared to gave a voice to the climate skeptics. This is true. In an email dated April 24, 2003, Tom Wigley suggested a strategy for dealing with one such journal:

One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.

Peer-review? More like peer-pressure! This is such a damning quote because it illustrates how the scientific community is plagued by group think, and how the warmists know this and exploit this.

When you consider how journals and institutions are ranked by "prestige", common sense tells you that what the editors and publishers of journals care about more than anything is their reputation. The more "prestigious" and "reputable" a journal is, the more resistant it's going to be to publishing anything controversial. That's why you don't see 9/11 truth papers or AGW-skeptic papers in journals like Nature or Science. It's not that these groups do bad science, although the establishment defenders will claim otherwise, it's simply because the views are controversial and the journals are resistant to giving them a platform.

This is why there shouldn't be a "scientific establishment". The idea of an "establishment" is inherently anti-science. 9/11 truthers and global warming skeptics are anti-establishment, and their critics dismiss them for not playing by the rules of the very establishment they're challenging! It's all very circular.

When the nanothermite paper was published, the first thing the 9/11 debunkers did was question its peer-review. They dismissed the journal as a "vanity publication" and said the paper isn't worth taking seriously. There are also a number of similar stories in the global warming debate. Papers by Christopher Monckton, Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer have been the subjects of editorial and peer-review controversies which the warmists have exploited to discredit them. They always seem to go after the review procedures rather than the actual content of the papers themselves.

The best scientific counter argument the 9/11 debunkers can come up with is their assertion that what the 9/11 truth scientists believe to be "active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, [and a] highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material" is actually just primer paint! Because apparently it's an easy amateur mistake or something to confuse paint with aluminothermic nanotechnology! I don't know how many times I made that mistake in chemistry class! It's not as if they're fundamentally very different in both appearance and chemical behavior ... Oh wait, they are!

The debunkers know that when it comes to the actual claims made in the paper, they've got no leg to stand on. They can't refute it so they have to dismiss it. So they make up a load of crap about its peer-review and say it's not worth taking seriously.

The nanothermite paper may not have been published in a top journal like Nature, but its findings have remained unchallenged for over two and a half years, and have been independently corroborated by chemical engineer Mark Basile. In a recent BBC documentary, the lead author, Neils Harrit, who has published over 60 papers in his career, said the nanothermite paper is without a doubt the best peer-reviewed paper he's ever published.

It's interesting how Jamie Bartlett didn't feel comfortable passing judgement on the 9/11 demolition hypothesis and global warming. The man who supposedly aims to encourage children to think critically and think for themselves apparently doesn't like thinking for himself!

Climate Change, Equivocation & 'Peer-Review'

2011-09-16T09:00:00.000+01:00

This blog is mainly about debunking 'skeptics'. Although leading skeptics Michael Shermer and James Randi have expressed some degree of skepticism over man-made global warming, many 'skeptical' bloggers defend it and attack the so-called 'deniers' - in fact, when Randi questioned it, the skeptic guru himself was accused by his own community of being duped by 'denialism' and recanted somewhat - so it's worth addressing the claims of those 'science bloggers'.

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptics are often called 'climate change deniers' or 'global warming deniers' by the AGW-defenders. As well as being an obvious attempt to link AGW-skepticism with holocaust denial, the label is also highly misleading, since noone is denying that global warming has occured and certainly noone is denying that climate changes. Of course climate change is real, the climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years!

The following three GSCE Bitesize pages give you a fairly good idea of how global warming is taught in schools in the UK ...

AQA Science - Humans and their environment - Greenhouse Gases
Edexcel Science - There’s one Earth - Global Warming
Geography - Managing resources - Global Warming

Students are taught about the greenhouse effect and told that our CO2 emissions are causing global warming. The only 'evidence' that they are shown is a comparison of graphs - one of CO2 concentration and one of temperature. These facts that kids are taught are facts. The greenhouse effect is a real process, temperature and CO2 concentrations have increased throughout the twentieth century, and we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere. Noone is denying these facts. It is the interpretation of these facts that's the problem.

Simply noting a correlation between CO2 and temperature is not evidence for causation. And to be honest, the correlation isn't even that good. Look at the graph above. Notice how temperature increased between 1910 and 1940, then decreased between 1940 and 1975, then increased again between 1975 and the present. What's interesting is that the gradient of the 1910-1940 warming trend is the same as the gradient of the 1975-present warming trend. Yet, if you look at the CO2 line, the gradient between 1975 and the present is much steeper than the gradient between 1910 and 1940. If CO2 was the main driver of recent warming, you would expect the 1975-present warming trend to be much steeper than the 1910-1940 warming trend.

What we can learn from the lack of correlation is that the relationship isn't as simple as warmists would like you to believe. Either there are other factors at work or there is a delay between CO2 increase and temperature increase. Either way, these graphs by themselves provide poor evidence for the claim that global warming is due to human CO2. You take them out and what do you have left? Nothing but assertion.

Global warming as it is taught in schools therefore is oversimplified, dogmatic and based on logical fallacies. The reason I'm attacking how it is taught in schools is because this is how most people come to know about it. Global warming needs to be taught more constructively, or else you're not really teaching science but spoon-feeding children dogma. At the very least a more constructive teaching will encourage critical thinking, which is something I think everyone can agree is severely lacking in education today.

Of course, the scientific case for man-made global warming is much more than what is taught in schools, but there is debate about the more advanced stuff too. Rather than engage in rational debate about this, what the alarmists tend to do is employ a semantic sleight-of-hand to create the illusion that there is no real debate. Terms like 'global warming' and 'climate change' encompass so many different ideas, and alarmists have a tendency to exploit the ambiguity of the terms and blur these ideas together, as if it's a single idea. They then accuse their opponents of being a 'denier' of this single idea as if they are denying everything.

One example of this semantic sleight-of-hand can be found in this essay by Kevin Trenberth:

Given that global warming is “unequivocal”, to quote the 2007 IPCC report, the null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence.

Did you see what he did there? In a response, Willis Eschenbach exposes his sleight of hand:

As Steve McIntyre has often commented, with these folks you really have to keep your eye on the pea under the walnut shell. These folks seem to have sub-specialties in the “three-card monte” sub-species of science. Did you notice when the pea went from under one walnut shell to another in Dr. T’s quotation above? Take another look at it.

The first part of Dr. T’s statement is true. There is general scientific agreement that the globe has been warming, in fits and starts of course, for the last three centuries or so. And since it has been thusly warming for centuries, the obvious null hypothesis would have to be that the half-degree of warming we experienced in the 20th century was a continuation of some long-term ongoing natural trend.
But that’s not what Dr. Trenberth is doing here. Keep your eye on the pea. He has smoothly segued from the IPCC saying “global warming is ‘unequivocal’”, which is true, and stitched that idea so cleverly onto another idea, ‘and thus humans affect the climate’, that you can’t even see the seam.

The pea is already under the other walnut shell. He is implying that the IPCC says that scientists have “unequivocally” shown that humans are the cause of weather ills, and if I don’t take that as an article of faith, it’s my job to prove that we are not the cause of floods in Brisbane.

The proper name for this semantic sleight-of-hand is equivocation, and the illusion created by AGW-activists depends so much on this fallacy, that a clear understanding of it can completely alter ones perception of the global warming debate.

For example, whenever there is a natural disaster, such as the earthquake/tsunami in Japan in March or the recent tornado outbreak in the US, the alarmists always try link it to 'climate change' and attack the AGW-skeptics for continuing to deny what's right in front of their faces.

Now, if by 'climate change' they mean simply a change in climate, then yes, these events likely were due to 'climate change', noone is denying that. But that's not what they mean. When they say 'climate change', what they reallly mean is 'global warming due to human activity', or in other words: you! That's right, you are to blame for earthquakes and tornadoes! Especially if you're one of those evil climate deniers! But there isn't really any science supporting that, so they just blame it on 'climate change', knowing most uninformed people will interpret the term 'climate change' as 'a bad thing caused by humans'.

Another example of this fallacy being used to great effect is when warmists claim their views are supported by a vast amount of peer-reviewed science or evidence. By bundling all these different ideas under one term, they again make it appear as though 'climate change' refers to just one single idea that is supported by a vast amount of evidence, instead of multiple different ideas with different degrees of evidential support.

This allows them to prop up their grand claim of catastrophic, human CO2-driven warming with a vast amount of literature that is completely unrelated to it. Since most studies in climate science are fairly neutral on the issue of whether or not global warming is due to human activity or whether or not it's a bad thing, most of these studies are irrelevant to the debate. However, by blurring all these different ideas together under the term 'climate change', one can claim there is a vast amount of evidence supporting 'climate change' (catstrophic, human CO2-driven warming), by pointing out the number of 'climate change'-related studies there are. And that's exactly what global warmists do.

In order to have a truly rational debate on this subject, warmists need to stop playing these silly games of semantics and fully acknowledge that 'climate change' is not just one single idea that you either fully ascribe to or deny entirely.

So again, let's be clear. The basic facts - that the climate changes, that the frequency and intensity of natural disasters obviously varies with climate change, that the Earth has been in a warming trend since the 19th century, that CO2 traps heat via the greenhouse effect, that we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere and that we are having some effect on the environment - are all accepted by AGW-skeptics. Noone is 'denying' any of this. What is debatable though is the grand alarmist claim that if strict regulations aren't imposed on society by some tyrannical world government body, our CO2 emissions are going to destroy the planet.

When it comes to the politics, the most important questions are:

Are current temperatures unprecedented?
Are human CO2 emissions the main driver of recent warming?
If we don't do something about it, will there be a climate catastrophe?

According to climate alarmists, the answer to all three of these questions is 'yes'. It is these issues primarily that AGW-skeptics disagree with them on.

Despite what climate alarmists constantly assert, there are many peer-reviewed papers supporting the skeptic view of AGW. The website Popular Technology.net lists lists over 900! Also, on the website CO2Science.org, there is a database of some 300+ papers that support the skeptic view of the Medieval Warm Period. For two corroborating examples, see here; for maps, see here, here and here.

Another thing that's worth mentioning is the scandals. The so-called 'Climategate' scandal was big news in late 2009, but that was only the beginning. Since then there have been numerous other scandals that discredit just about every area of the AGW-alarmism, including 'Amazongate', 'Glaciergate', 'Satellitegate', 'Polarbeargate' etc. The website NoTricksZone lists over a hundred of these climate scandals.

Speaking of Climategate and peer-review, the most important thing exposed by the Climategate emails and data was that the peer-review process in climate science has been corrupted. In a 2006 report on the 'Hockey Stick' graph, professor Edward Wegmen noted how scientists such as Phil Jones and Michael Mann worked together in a tightly-knit social network and suggested this undermined the legitimacy of the peer-review process:

One of the interesting questions associated with the ‘hockey stick controversy’ are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published.

Wegmen hypothesized that members of the 'cliche' were peer-reviewing eachother's work. At the time though, he had no proof of this. Well, thanks to Climategate we now have that proof.

When AGW-skeptics attempt to publish papers challenging the so-called consensus of man-made global warming in a leading journal, the editors try very hard to find a reason to reject the paper. Recently, Professor Richard Lindzen attempted to publish a paper supporting AGW-skepticism in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The PNAS editors were not happy with his choice of reviewers and recommended five additional reviewers. Two of their suggestions were Gavin Schmidt and Kevin Trenberth, who are prominent AGW-alarmists and Climategate conspirators! These people are far from unbiased. After further correspondence, Lindzen received a letter of rejection with four peer-reviews attached. Two of the reviews were from people suggested by Lindzen, which were respectful and constructive, recommending reworking. The other two reviews were from people PNAS suggested, which were more bitter in tone. Lindzen and his co-author wrote a detailed response to their reviews, and revised their paper to satisfy them as much a possible. However, their paper no longer satisfied the length constraints of PNAS and so they had to settle for a journal with a much lower impact factor. The warmists were successful in keeping the paper out.

Now you may argue that everything PNAS did was perfectly justified, and in a way I agree. The problem is not the rules, but the selective enforcement of those rules. As I discuss in more detail with evidence here, pro-AGW submissions are not neccesarily subjected to the same rigor. The Climategate conspirators often reviewed eachother's papers while their critics were given no say and those submissions were accepted. Apparently, such a thing is okay when they do it! Not only that but Phil Jones was even given the opportunity to review and reject papers critical of the CRU's work. Again, the same luxury is not given to AGW-skeptics.

These obvious double standards expose how 'peer-review' in science tends to be biased in favour of the politically correct view. The problem with peer-review in its current form is that it fails to take into account the group think and confirmation bias of the reviewers and journal editors. The implications this has for science are deeply troubling. When the defenders of man-made climate change (or any establishment dogma, for that matter) appeal to 'peer-review', they are really just employing circular reasoning.

It's not that peer-review is bad, it's just not the gold standard people would like you to believe. The process can be corrupted by various interests. And the alarmists know this. After all, that's exactly what they accuse the skeptics of doing ...

"The peer-review process at Climate Research has been hijacked by a few skeptics on the editorial board." ~ Michael Mann, March 11, 2003

"This latest assault uses a compromised peer-review process as a vehicle for launching a scientific disinformation campaign." ~ Michael Mann, April 24, 2003

Yet they would also like us to believe that perversion of the peer-review process is impossible ...

"The whole point about trying to pervert the peer-review process is that it is impossible to do it." ~ Phil Jones, Climate: The hottest year, Nature News, November, 15 2010

So on the one hand they're saying they couldn't possibly be corrupting the peer-review process because the peer-review process is impossible to corrupt, yet on the other hand, they are accusing the skeptics of corrupting the peer-review process. Anyone else see the obvious contradiction here?

Another AGW-skeptic paper that was the subject of an editorial controversy is a 2008 paper by Lord Christopher Monckton entitled Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered. Shortly after that paper was published, a disclaimer appeared above it that read:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions.

The very fact that the APS Council felt the need to make it clear which side of the global warming debate they were on illustrates how politically-driven this issue is. Lord Monckton asserts that the paper was in fact peer-reviewed and has even published the reviewer's comments to prove this. However, the APS refuses to remove the disclaimer. For a full statement from Monckton about this controversy, see here.

More recently, a paper by Roy Spencer published in July 2011 has attracted similar controversy. On September 2nd, the editor-in-chief of Remote Sensing, the journal the paper was published in, resigned over the paper. The paper was not retracted, and in fact he admitted that "there were no errors with the review process". His alleged reason for resigning was that the paper supposedly ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents. Roy Spencer disagrees:

But the paper WAS precisely addressing the scientific arguments made by our opponents, and showing why they are wrong! That was the paper’s starting point! We dealt with specifics, numbers, calculations…while our critics only use generalities and talking points. There is no contest, as far as I can see, in this debate. If you have some physics or radiative transfer background, read the evidence we present, the paper we were responding to, and decide for yourself.

If some scientists would like do demonstrate in their own peer-reviewed paper where *anything* we wrote was incorrect, they should submit a paper for publication. Instead, it appears the IPCC gatekeepers have once again put pressure on a journal for daring to publish anything that might hurt the IPCC’s politically immovable position that climate change is almost entirely human-caused. I can see no other explanation for an editor resigning in such a situation.

More evidence of peer-review bias comes from the fact that warmist Andrew Dessler was able to successfully publish a rebuttal paper within only six weeks of the publication of Spencer's paper. As Anthony Watts writes:

This paper appears to have been made ready in record time, with a turnaround from submission to acceptance and publication of about six weeks based on the July 26th publication date of the original Spencer and Braswell paper. We should all be so lucky to have expedited peer review service. PeerEx maybe, something like FedEx? Compare that to the two years it took to get Lindzen and Choi out the door. Or how about the WUWT story: “Science has been sitting on his [Spencer's] critique of Dessler’s paper for months”.

If anyone needs a clear, concise, and irrefutable example of how peer review in climate science is biased for the consensus and against skeptics, this is it.

It seems likely that pressure was put on APS and Remote Sensing to distance themselves from their respective papers. The Climategate emails reveal how warmists plotted to discredit or put pressure on journals that published papers challenging AGW. In an email dated April 24, 2003, Tom Wigley suggested a strategy for dealing with one such journal:

One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.

Peer-review? More like peer-pressure! This is such a damning quote because it illustrates how the scientific community is plagued by group think, and how the alarmists know this and exploit this. In his statement on the APS controversy, Monckton commented on how this group think, peer-pressure and ideological bias in the peer-review arena makes is difficult for skeptics of a politicized 'consensus' to even enter it, regardless of how scientific their skepticism may be:

I have set out this history at some length because it is a not uninteresting example of the difficulties that researchers who question the current orthodoxy face when trying to get their results published.

I am by no means alone in having been treated with what many enquirers have described as unreasonable discourtesy on the part of the learned journals. Too many of the journals, and too many scientific bodies, have taken preconceived stances on the “global warming” question, and now simply refuse to countenance any paper, however scientifically solid, that casts any doubt on their publicly-declared prejudice.

'Peer-review' is the mantra of global warming alarmists and 'science bloggers'. The problem is, the process has been corrupted to the point that it's no longer simply a quality-control filter, but a way of censoring dissent and reinforcing dogma. Rather than have a real and fair debate over controversial topics such as global warming, the establishment simply dismisses dissenters and tells them that, in order to be taken seriously, they must follow what can be best described as a scientific bureaucracy that is inherently biased against them.

For a crash course in the climate change controversies, see my 16-minute video, A Peer-Reviewed Deception.

The Oversimplified Eye Evolution Fairytale

2011-09-15T16:03:00.032+01:00

Bang Goes The Theory: Richard Dawkins on Eye Evolution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhDWCujcFEY

Casey Luskin writes:

Classical explanations for the evolution of the eye assume that the eye can be built via such small, step-by-step changes. Darwin believed the eye could evolve under a scheme of "fine gradations," but standard evolutionary accounts for the origin of the eye fall far short of that mark: they lack details, ignore biochemical complexity, and in fact invoke sudden and abrupt appearance of key components of eye morphology. For example, all accounts of eye evolution start with a fully functional eyespot, not mere "light-sensitive pigments."

Michael Behe writes:

To Darwin vision was a black box, but today, after the hard, cumulative work of many biochemists, we are approaching answers to the question of sight. Here is a brief overview of the biochemistry of vision.

When light first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. The change in the shape of retinal forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein's metamorphosis alters its behavior, making it stick to another protein called transducin. Before bumping into activated rhodopsin, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with activated rhodopsin, the GDP falls off and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but critically different from, GDP.)

GTP-transducin-activated rhodopsin now binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to activated rhodopsin and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the ability to chemically cut a molecule called cGMP (a chemical relative of both GDP and GTP). Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, like a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub.

Another membrane protein that binds cGMP is called an ion channel. It acts as a gateway that regulates the number of sodium ions in the cell. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions to flow into the cell, while a separate protein actively pumps them out again. The dual action of the ion channel and pump keeps the level of sodium ions in the cell within a narrow range. When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phosphodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged sodium ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane which, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.

My explanation is just a sketchy overview of the biochemistry of vision. Ultimately, though, this is what it means to "explain" vision. This is the level of explanation for which biological science must aim. In order to truly understand a function, one must understand in detail every relevant step in the process. The relevant steps in biological processes occur ultimately at the molecular level, so a satisfactory explanation of a biological phenomenon such as vision, or digestion, or immunity must include its molecular explanation.

Now that the black box of vision has been opened it is no longer enough for an "evolutionary explanation" of that power to consider only the anatomical structures of whole eyes, as Darwin did in the nineteenth century, and as popularizers of evolution continue to do today. Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric. Darwin's simple steps are now revealed to be huge leaps between carefully tailored machines. Thus biochemistry offers a Lilliputian challenge to Darwin. Now the black box of the cell has been opened and a Lilliputian world of staggering complexity stands revealed. It must be explained.

In Darwin's Black Box (1996), Behe writes:

We are invited by Dawkins and Darwin to believe that the evolution of the eye proceeded step-by-step through a series of plausible intermediates in infinitesimal increments. But are they infinitesimal? Remember that the "light-sensitive spot" that Dawkins takes as his starting point requires a cascade of factors, including 11-cis-retinal and rhodopsin, to function. Dawkins doesn't mention them. And where did the "little cup" come from? A ball of cells—from which the cup must be made—will tend to be rounded unless held in the correct shape by molecular supports. In fact, there are dozens of complex proteins involved in maintaining cell shape, and dozens more that control extracellular structure; in their absence, cells take on the shape of so many soap bubbles. Do these structures represent single-step mutations? Dawkins did not tell us how the apparently simple "cup" shape came to be. And although he reassures us that any "translucent material" would be an improvement (recall that Haeckel mistakenly thought it would be easy to produce cells since they were certainly just «simple lumps»), we are not told how difficult it is to produce a "simple lens." In short, Dawkins's explanation is only addressed to the level of what is called gross anatomy.

David Berlinski writes:

Light strikes the eye in the form of photons, but the optic nerve conveys electrical impulses to the brain. Acting as a sophisticated transducer, the eye must mediate between two different physical signals. The retinal cells that figure in Dawkins' account are connected to horizontal cells; these shuttle information laterally between photoreceptors in order to smooth the visual signal. Amacrine cells act to filter the signal. Bipolar cells convey visual information further to ganglion cells, which in turn conduct information to the optic nerve. The system gives every indication of being tightly integrated, its parts mutually dependent.

The very problem that Darwin's theory was designed to evade now reappears. Like vibrations passing through a spider's web, changes to any part of the eye, if they are to improve vision, must bring about changes throughout the optical system. Without a correlative increase in the size and complexity of the optic nerve, an increase in the number of photoreceptive membranes can have no effect. A change in the optic nerve must in turn induce corresponding neurological changes in the brain. If these changes come about simultaneously, it makes no sense to talk of a gradual ascent of Mount Improbable. If they do not come about simultaneously, it is not clear why they should come about at all.

The same problem reappears at the level of biochemistry. Dawkins has framed his discussion in terms of gross anatomy. Each anatomical change that he describes requires a number of coordinate biochemical steps. "[T]he anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple," the biochemist Mike Behe remarks in a provocative new book (Darwin's Black Box), "actually involve staggeringly complicated biochemical processes." A number of separate biochemical events are required simply to begin the process of curving a layer of proteins to form a lens. What initiates the sequence? How is it coordinated? And how controlled? On these absolutely fundamental matters, Dawkins has nothing whatsoever to say.

Casey Luskin writes:

In addition to assuming the abrupt appearance of a fully-functional eyespot, standard accounts of eye-evolution invoke the abrupt appearance of key features of advanced eyes such as the lens, cornea, and iris. Of course the emplacement of each of these features--fully formed and intact--would undoubtedly increase visual acuity. But where did these parts suddenly come from in the first place? As Scott Gilbert put it, such evolutionary accounts are "good at modelling the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest."

Jonathan MacLatchie writes (in response to this Scientific American article):

Lamb's choice of words in the above seems to imply a spontaneous embryological development of the lens, and he suggests that perhaps evolution happened in much the same manner. The problem is that lens formation does not, in reality, possess such spontaneity -- far from it. Rather, it is triggered by the release of several chemicals, called "inducers," from the optic vesicle. In epithelial cells, release of these chemicals triggers the expression of the genes which are involved in implementing lens development. The inducer triggers the epithelial cells to start producing a transcription factor, which is often called the "master control gene" of eye development (known as Pax6). Pax6 subsequently activates the genes that cause the epithelium to form a lens placode and then a lens vesicle.

Pax6 also plays a role in the initial formation of the optic vesicle, and in differentiation of retinal cells. This gives rise to an interesting question -- how does the same transcription factor perform different roles in different cell types? Its action is carefully modulated by an array of other factors which are particular to the respective tissues and cell types. In the case of epithelial cells, Pax6 works in collaboration with another transcription factor called Sox2. When these two proteins bind together on a specific DNA sequence, it literally acts as a genetic switch -- triggering lens differentiation.

As Lamb himself explains, lens morphogenesis results from "a thickening of the embryo's outer surface, or ectoderm, that bulges into the curved empty space formed by the C-shaped retina. This protrusion eventually separates from the rest of the ectoderm to become a free-floating element."

The lens vesicle subsequently morphs into a lens. The cells of the vesicle's posterior wall become lens fibers, which grow substantially to a length dozens of times greater than their original size (meaning they completely cover the vesicle cavity). There are several important changes which these cells need to undergo in order to take up their role as lens fibers. For one thing, they have to lose their internal organelles to allow the incoming light to be successfully transmitted through them. The lens fibers are also packed very tightly together -- hexagonal in cross-section, and aligned parallel to the axis of the eye.

These lens fibers also produce proteins known as crystallins, and Pax6 (the transcription factor which I mentioned previously) is involved in activating the crystallin genes. The high level of production of these proteins confers an extraordinary high density and hence a high refractive index which is responsible for the lens' light-bending properties.

Now, at this point we potentially run into a problem.

In the case of most proteins, if they accumulated in such a high concentration as this, they would have a tendency to agglomerate and denature. This would entail that the lens would become cloudy and thus lose its transparency. The proteins which are used -- crystallins -- however, are exceptionally stable, and the largest class of these proteins actually serves to stabilise the other crystallins. This class is known as α-crystallin, and these molecules interact to form hollow balls which are connected by other proteins called CP49 and filensin. This forms a structure called a "beaded filament". These structures predominate within the lens fibers. They are absolutely critical for facilitating such a dense concentration of proteins to actually enhance visual capabilities. Even more remarkable is the fact that these proteins are never recycled. Unlike most other proteins, these crystallin molecules do not degrade and thereby result in the lens becoming cloudy. The beaded filament structures actually protect the proteins from such degradation and denaturation. Actually, one of the causes of eye cataracts is a faulty beaded filament structure.

But here's the bottom line: This is not the type of system which one might intuitively expect to be the product of trial-and-error Darwinian-type tinkering. To simply appeal to the addition of a lens is to fundamentally trivialise the matter at hand.

I have really only scratched the surface here. Molecular morphogenesis of the eye extends far deeper than this. Once the optic vesicle has contacted the epithelium, it spreads outwards and folds in on itself. This forms the hollow eyeball. The inner layer of this will develop into the retina. What is particularly remarkable is that, while the optic vesicle is absolutely fundamental for the induction of lens development, subsequent development of the eye depends, in large measure, on factors which are secreted by the developing lens! This casts even further doubt on the sorts of scenarios commonly offered to us by Darwinians such as Lamb, wherein the lens is viewed as a relatively late addition to the eye structure.

Casey Luskin writes:

In sum, standard accounts of eye evolution fail to explain the evolution of key eye features like:

The biochemical evolution of the fundamental ability to sense light
The origin of the first "light sensitive spot"
The origin of neurological pathways to transmit the optical signal to a brain
The origin of a behavioral response to allow the sensing of light to give some behavioral advantage to the organism
The origin of the lens, cornea and iris in vertebrates
The origin of the compound eye in arthropods
At most, accounts of the evolution of the eye provide a stepwise explanation of "fine gradations" for the origin of more or less one single feature: the increased concavity of eye shape. But that does not explain the origin of the eye.

Sean Pitman writes:

These are just a few of the reasons why the work of Nilsson and Pelger is still nothing more than a "paper theory" all these years later. What seems to work very well on paper may not work so well when it comes to putting the paper theory to a real life test. No such tests have actually been successful even though testing this theory isn't so hard to do. All that would have to be done is to take a creature with a flat eyespot and have it produce a bunch of offspring, artificially select the offspring with the most dimpled eyespots, have them produce the next generation, again select those offspring with the most dimpled eyespots, and so on. Very quickly, within a few generations, it should be very easy to demonstrate the evolution of dimpled eyespots and to show that these eyespots are actually functionally advantageous with respect to localizing sources of light vs. the use of a simple flat eyespot in the evolved creatures.

Such experimental demonstration has yet to be done. If it were ever done, successfully, it would certainly create a sensation within the scientific community. Creationism and intelligent design theorists would take a huge hit if such an experiment were actually successful. Until this actually happens, however, the eye-evolution theory of Nilsson and Pelger isn't really a true scientific theory since it hasn't actually been subject to any potentially falsifying real life test. It remains, therefore, a working hypothesis - a paper theory at best.

Former Child Star Corey Feldman: Pedophilia Rampant in Hollywood

2011-08-12T09:41:00.003+01:00

Peer-pressure in science & medicine, two recent quotes.

2011-07-24T14:27:00.005+01:00

Vaccines and autism: a new scientific review

A number of independent scientists have said they've been subjected to orchestrated campaigns to discredit them when their research exposed vaccine safety issues, especially if it veered into the topic of autism. We asked [Helen] Ratajczak how she came to research the controversial topic. She told us that for years while working in the pharmaceutical industry, she was restricted as to what she was allowed to publish. "I'm retired now," she told CBS News. "I can write what I want."

CERN chief forbids “interpretation” of CLOUD results

Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN: In the experiment, CLOUD investigates the influence of cosmic rays on cloud formation, using radiation coming from the accelerator. And in an experimental chamber one can study, under controlled conditions, how the formation of droplets depends on the radiation and particulate matter. The results will be published shortly. I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.
Original German: Beim Experiment „Cloud“ geht es darum, den Einfluss der Höhenstrahlung auf die Wolkenbildung zu untersuchen. Die dafür genutzte Strahlung kommt aus dem Beschleuniger. Und in einer Experimentierkammer kann unter kontrollierten Bedingungen erforscht werden, wie die Tröpfchenbildung von der Strahlung und Schwebstoffen abhängt. Die Ergebnisse werden in Kürze veröffentlicht. Ich habe die Kollegen gebeten, die Ergebnisse klar dazustellen aber nicht zu interpretieren. Damit würde man sich sofort in die hochpolitische Arena der Klimawandeldiskussion begeben. Man muss sich darüber klar sein, dass es sich bei der Höhenstrahlung nur um einen von sehr vielen Parametern handelt.

These two quotes are yet more examples of how scientists are pressured into going along with the politically correct views. One can infer from the fact that CERN scientists are forbidden to publicly interpret their research that it most likely supports Svensmark's cosmic ray - cloud cover theory and therefore contradicts the AGW-alarmist view. You can be sure that if it refuted Svensmark's theory, the scientists would be free to announce that fact everywhere and they would be hailed as heroes who refuted 'denialist' propaganda. This is a perfect illustration of how the scientific community is plagued with group-think and peer-pressure.

Helen Ratajczak's quote about how she is now able to investigate vaccines now that she is retired is even more disturbing. She knows the game. She knows that doctors and scientists aren't allowed to question the safety of vaccines if they value their careers. The fact that scientists working in such an important field are forbidden from asking certain questions is deeply disturbing.

A Peer-Reviewed Deception

2011-06-26T09:48:00.034+01:00

References & Links:

IPCC 1990 Report (MWP Graph Figure 7.1)
Dr. David Deming Testimony (Video)
IPCC 2001 Report

McIntyre & McItrick (2003) on the weighting:

"Sheep Mountain CA (ca534) exhibits the distinct “hockey stick” shape of the final MBH98 Northern Hemisphere temperature index, while another NOAMER site, Mayberry Slough AR (ar052), has a growth peak in the early 19th century (Figure 1). The MBH98 algorithm assigns 390 times the weight to Sheep Mountain compared to Mayberry Slough ... "

McIntyre & McItrick (2005) on the 'Censored' Folder:

"MM-type results ... occur ... if the bristlecone pine sites are excluded, while MBH-type results occur if bristlecone pine sites ... are included. Mann’s FTP site actually contains a sensitivity study [/BACKTO_1400-CENSORED/] on the effect of excluding 20 bristlecone pine sites in which this adverse finding was discovered, but the results were not reported or stated publicly and could be discerned within the FTP site only with persistent detective work."

Climategate 'Censored' Folders
Graphs of Climategate 'Censored' and 'Fixed' Data

CO2Science.org Project MWP
Loehle and McCulloch (2008)
Ljungqvist (2010)

List of 129 Climate 'Gates'

Mike’s Nature trick
IPCC and the “Trick”
The Deleted Portion of the Briffa Reconstruction
IPCC: “Inappropriate” to show the decline (Comment ID #: 309-18)

Climategate Code Reveals East Anglia’s ‘Fudge Factor’
CRU data-cooking: recipe exposed!

D’Aleo and Watts (2010) on the GCHN station dropout:

"Around 1990, NOAA/NCDC's GHCN dataset lost more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. It can be shown that country by country, they lost stations with a bias towards higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.

The remaining climate monitoring stations were increasingly near the sea, at lower elevations, and at airports near larger cities. This data were then used to determine the global average temperature and to initialize climate models. Interestingly, the very same often colder stations that have been deleted from the world climate network were retained for computing the average-temperature in the base periods, further increasing the potential bias towards overstatement of the warming."

IPCC slips on the ice with statement about Himalayan glaciers
NOconsensus.org IPCC Citizen Audit

Wegmen Report (2006)
Climategate Documents Confirm Wegman’s Hypothesis

Climategate analysis by John P. Costella
Climate Change Peer-Review Hypocrisy

The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide

Lindzen & Choi (2009) (ERBE & CERES Feedback Measurements)
Roy Spencer: Strong Negative Feedback from the Latest CERES Radiation Budget Measurements Over the Global Oceans

Monckton (2008)
Monckton APS Controversy
Reviewed or Not Reviewed?

New study links cosmic rays to aerosols/cloud formation via solar magnetic activity modulation
Svensmark (2007)
Low Cloud Cover vs Global Surface Air Temperature
Shaviv & Veizer (2003)
Indirect Solar Forcing of Climate by Galactic Cosmic Rays: An Observational Estimate

Vaccines & Infant Mortality

2011-06-23T17:58:00.014+01:00

2009 Infant mortality rates and number of vaccine doses for 30 nations. Source: Miller & Goldman (2011).

New Study Finds Direct Link Between Vaccines and Infant Mortality

A shocking new study published in a prestigious medical journal has found a direct statistical link between higher vaccine doses and infant mortality rates in the developed world, suggesting that the increasing number of inoculations being forced upon children by medical authorities, particularly in the United States which administers the highest number of vaccines and also has the highest number of infant deaths, is in fact having a detrimental impact on health.

Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine doses routinely given: Is there a biochemical or synergistic toxicity?

The US childhood immunization schedule specifies 26 vaccine doses for infants aged less than 1 year — the most in the world — yet 33 nations have lower IMRs. Using linear regression, the immunization schedules of these 34 nations were examined and a correlation ... was found between IMRs and the number of vaccine doses routinely given to infants ... Linear regression analysis of unweighted mean IMRs showed a high statistically significant correlation between increasing number of vaccine doses and increasing infant mortality rate ... A closer inspection of correlations between vaccine doses, biochemical or synergistic toxicity, and IMRs is essential.

Climate Change Peer-Review Hypocrisy

2011-06-15T19:24:00.028+01:00

The mantra of the global warming alarmist is 'peer-review'. The problem is, it is obvious that the peer-review process has been corrupted.

In 2009, Lindzen and Choi published a paper entitled On the Determination of Climate Feedbacks from ERBE Data in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The paper provided evidence for a strong negative feedback and a low climate sensitivity, contradicting the greenhouse alarmist view. The paper received extensive criticism, and Lindzen and Choi wrote a followup paper entitled On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications to address these criticisms. First, in February 2010, they submitted the followup paper to the Journal of Geophysical Research. Evidently it was rejected. In October 2010, they submitted it to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was again rejected. Last month, the paper was accepted for publication in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.

On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications

I don't know the story behind the JGR submission, but Lindzen recently wrote about the PNAS rejection. The PNAS response to the submission stated that the board was concerned with the author's choice of reviewers:

The two reviews provided by Lindzen and Choi do not qualify ... Both scientists are formally eligible for refereeing according to the PNAS rules, but one of them (WH) is certainly not an expert for the topic in question and the other one (MDC) has published extensively on the very subject together with Lindzen. So, in a sense, he is reviewing his own work.

They then recommended five additional reviewers, two of whom (Schmidt and Trenberth) are prominent AGW alarmists and ClimateGate conspirators:

The Editorial Board has recommended additional referees to evaluate the paper. Drs. Susan Solomon, Kevin Trenberth, Gavin Schmidt, James G. Anderson and Veerabhadran Ramanathan

After further correspondence, the authors received a letter of rejection with four peer-reviews attached:

The Board appreciates your cooperation in soliciting additional reviews on the paper you recently contributed to PNAS. We consulted the two experts you approved and two others selected by the Board. All four reviews (enclosed) were shared with two members of the Board before reaching a final decision... In light of these additional critiques, the Board concurs that the current paper must be declined for publication.

The authors have responded to these reviews. What is most interesting about this though is that the PNAS not only did not like the authors' choice of reviewers, but also insisted top alarmists and ClimateGate conspirators with an obvious bias, who would undoubtedly consider the paper unacceptable no matter how scientifically rigorous it was, review the paper.

This is especially rich considering papers supporting the alarmist view are not subject to the same rules. This is exposed in the ClimateGate emails. In one email to Michael Mann in 1999, Phil Jones wrote:

You may think Keith or I have reviewed some of your papers but we haven't. I've reviewed Ray's and Malcolm's - constructively I hope where I thought something could have been done better. I also know you've reviewed my paper with Gabi very constructively.

So it seems the British ClimateGate conspirators reviewed papers by the American conspirators and vice-versa. Not exactly independent.

In 2003 when McIntyre and McKitrick were writing criticisms of the work by Mann and his colleagues, Ray Bradley suggested a counter strategy:

Tim, Phil, Keef:
I suggest a way out of this mess. Because of the complexity of the arguments involved, to an uniformed observer it all might be viewed as just scientific nit-picking by "for" and "against" global warming proponents. However, if an "independent group" such as you guys at CRU could make a statement as to whether the M&M effort is truly an "audit", and if they did it right, I think that would go a long way to defusing the issue.

The fact that Bradley chose to put the words "independent group" in quote marks suggests even he knew considering the CRU team to be independent is laughable.

Another interesting email is this one. In response to a standard request by the Journal of Geophysical Research...

Please list the names of 5 experts who are knowledgeable in your area and could give an unbiased review of your work. Please do not list colleagues who are close associates, collaborators, or family members. (this requires name, email, and institution).

Phil Jones suggested a number of people who would fall under the category of "close associates and collaborators":

Agree with Kevin that Tom Karl has too much to do. Tom Wigley is semi retired and like Mike Wallace may not be responsive to requests from JGR. We have Ben Santer in common ! Dave Thompson is a good suggestion. I'd go for one of Tom Peterson or Dave Easterling. To get a spread, I'd go with 3 US, One Australian and one in Europe. So Neville Nicholls and David Parker. All of them know the sorts of things to say - about our comment and the awful original, without any prompting.

The last sentence is particularly interesting. To be "prompting" peer-reviewers would be a violation of ethics in itself. To select people who already know "the sorts of things to say", is just outright corruption. It's not so much peer-review with these people as it is pal-review!

In fact, some of those reviews of eachother's work are in the ClimateGate documents ...

Review of Wahl&Amman.doc
review_mannetal.doc
review_schmidt.doc
SanteretalSciencereview.doc

The ClimateGate conspirators even got to review and reject papers that were critical of their work, as evident in this exchange between Ed Cook and Keith Briffa:

I got a paper to review ... that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology ... is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. ... If published as is, this paper could really do some damage ... It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically ... I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review - Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting - to support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can.

And this email from Phil Jones to Michael Mann:

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Of course the skeptics had no say in the refereeing of papers by Mann & Jones etc. So it seems having your friends review your papers and keeping your opponents out is fine, as long as your paper supports AGW. But if it's a paper that contradicts it, the top journals won't let you do that. Instead, your paper must be reviewed by your staunchest opponents who of course will always respond with ideologically-driven rejections.

Note: I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the PNAS objections to Lindzen and Choi's choice of reviewers, and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with what the reviewers who rejected their paper said. The purpose of this post was to illustrate the hypocrisy. The strict criteria the PNAS invoked for what constitutes an appropriate peer-review is fine. The problem is, this criteria is selectively enforced.

See Also:

Climategate Documents Confirm Wegman’s Hypothesis

Lindzen’s PNAS Reviews

PNAS Reviews: Preferential Standards for Kemp (Mann) et al

Peer Review And ‘Pal Review’ In Climate Science

A Climatology Conspiracy?
by David H. Douglass and John R. Christy

Bias in the Peer Review Process: A Cautionary and Personal Account
by Ross McKitrick

Reviewed or Not Reviewed?
by Christopher Monckton

I'd like to dismiss this as 'probably bull' ...

2011-05-31T18:31:00.006+01:00

... but since the witness is now dead, and the traitor to the crown who's talking about it was detained for several hours and is now barred from entering the UK, it's getting more and more difficult.

I wouldn't put anything past the royals to be honest ...

If stuff like this is true, the recent royal wedding spectacle was even more disgusting.

More:
The World Is Run By Paedophiles!

More selective skepticism on the vaccine issue

2011-04-28T18:31:00.009+01:00

Dr Poul Thorsen, one of the researchers involved in the well known "Danish Study" that is frequently cited by 'skeptics' as proof that vaccines don't cause autism, has been indicted for fraud by the DOJ. The skeptic blogs that a few months ago were gleefully attacking Andrew Wakefield have been strangely silent on this story.

Now I wonder ... Will Thorsen's vaccine study be retracted by its journal in the same way Wakefield's Lancet study was following the GMC's ruling against him? I doubt it.

Skeptical bias? I think so.

The Amazing Truth...

2011-03-05T09:33:00.008Z

'Explicit' striptease Wii game is approved for children as young as 12

ABC/Disney/Nickelodeon/MTV/Viacom Select Next Tween Sacrifice!

2011-02-26T14:31:00.007Z

The Making of a Tween Star - 24/02/2011
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/making-tween-star-12996296

Up and coming actress Victoria Justice could be the next Miley Cyrus.

"Looks like next year's harvest will be even better!"

*Ominous Latin Chanting*

South Park - Britney's New Look
http://www.southparkstudios.co.uk/guide/episodes/1202/
http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/episodes/s12e02-britneys-new-look

Billy Ray Cyrus in GQ: My family is under attack by Satan, I'm 'scared for' daughter Miley
http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=6945

In this startling interview with GQ, Billy Ray Cyrus mentions Miley Cyrus' "handlers", his fears of seeing her dead like Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson and the evil side of the industry.

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201103/billy-ray-cyrus-mr-hannah-montana-miley

Alex Jones: The "Justin Biebler" Rant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8WhT9BwpRs

The Lady Gaga saga and the coming poverty generation of youth left behind
http://www.naturalnews.com/029788_Lady_Gaga_mental_health.html

Anna Nicole, Britney & Mind Control
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-891321698051955222
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9EF78F315E42E810

So... You Wanna Talk Pop Culture? Fine!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1nSU7mZUz0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3HZjBK-4oE

Pseudo-Occult Media
http://pseudoccultmedia.blogspot.com/

Mike Adams & Andrew Wakefield on Scientific Revolutions

2011-02-08T09:47:00.018Z

Dr Andrew Wakefield speaks on the structure of
scientific revolutions: Vaccines, viruses and evolution

An excellent discussion on the history of science and how revolutionary figures are often savagely attacked, despite being correct.

The stuff about cold fusion was interesting. Steven Jones was also a leading name in cold fusion, but his work was separate from Fleischmann and Pons. In 2009, US Navy researchers presented new evidence supporting its existence. Not surprisingly, the Randi-crowd continues to assert that it's a load of bull.

One other example of this sort of thing is the reaction to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. When it was first proposed, many scientists resisted it and passionately defended the old dogma of Newtonian gravity. Today, Einstein's theory stands as probably one of the most successful theories in science. It's been rigorously tested and has passed every single experimental test devised for it. But even it is not the whole picture, as observations that we invoke the mystical concepts of dark matter and dark energy to explain suggest the need for a new physics. I expect in the future a new theory will be proposed that overturns Einstein, and it too will be met with the same level of resistance.

The same thing is happening today in various areas of science, such as climate science and medicine. The old dogmas of vaccines and anthropogenic global warming are collapsing as more and more scientists begin to question their merits. The elitist 'intellectuals' and their 'rational' fans can only resort to smearing their opposition as they cling to their outdated theories and desperately try to prevent scientific revolution.

Bill Gates: Vaccine Safety Skeptics Kill Children!

2011-02-06T09:56:00.006Z

Bill Gates: Vaccine-autism link 'an absolute lie'
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/02/03/gupta.gates.vaccines.world.health/

"We're not telling people not to vaccinate. I don't understand why it's so frickin' hard to comprehend we deserve safe shots! And a safer schedule." - Jenny McCarthy

"Ralph Nader was not anti-car, he was for safer cars. I'm not 'anti-vaccine', I'm for safer vaccines." - Andrew Wakefield

"It was us parents who said there was a connection between the vaccine [and the children's regression into autism]. We saw it, We were there ... All Andrew Wakefield did, as a doctor would, is say, 'this is what the parents are saying, this is extremely concerning and it needs to be investigated'." - Isabella Thomas, Lancet 12 Parent

Related:

Skeptics eating up Big Pharma crucifixion of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

F U Brian Deer, Steven Novella, David Gorski, PZ Myers et al!

Bill Gates wants a Billion Dead! Vaccines and Health Care will do the Job!

Right After Bilderberg, Puppet David Cameron Pledges
£815 Million to Attendee Bill Gates' Eugenics Program

F U Brian Deer, Steven Novella, David Gorski, PZ Myers et al!

2011-02-04T09:00:00.008Z

Sometimes it just needs to be said. :)

Brian Deer lies, Steven Novella, David Gorski and PZ Myers parrot lies.

Truth On Alleged Fraud In The Study Of Autism Cases Revealed

These libelous accusations are based on the flimsiest possible construct. Deer claims fraud on the basis of differences between the case histories in the Lancet study and the children’s private medical records which Deer obtained under questionable circumstances. Since the team at the Royal Free Hospital never had access to the children’s private medical records, it was impossible for them to know what was in them and, therefore, impossible for them to fraudulently report something different.

Wakefield & MMR – BRIAN DEER CANNOT TELL US WHERE THE FRAUD IS

Here is another example of Deer’s evidence of “fraud”.

“Professor” Brian Deer implies in his recent publication in the British Medical Journal that Child 1 may have had symptoms of an autistic condition aged 9 months – well before the MMR vaccination:
“One of the mother’s concerns was that he could not hear properly—which might sound like a hallmark presentation of classical autism, the emergence of which is often insidious.”
But what Deer fails to disclose is that review of the additional GP records (not available to the Royal Free team at the time of writing The Lancet paper) shows that Deer failed to mention the entry documenting his mother’s concerns about Child 1’s hearing, her additional concern was about a discharge from Child 1’s left ear. This concern is not suggestive of an incipient developmental disorder but of an ear infection. But “Professor” Deer decides in his inuendoed non expert opinion it did. But this would have been sufficient reason for his mother to express possible concerns about Child 1’s hearing. Here we have an example of Deer’s selective reporting of results that were not available to the authors of The Lancet paper at the material time. Throughout his reporting, Deer appears to rely selectively on such “facts” that support his premise that Wakefield perpetrated a fraud.

Documents emerge proving Dr Andrew Wakefield innocent;
BMJ and Brian Deer caught misrepresenting the facts

"Remember, Dr Wakefield has been accused of completely fabricating his findings about these same children in his 1998 paper, but these documents reveal that fourteen months before Dr Wakefield's paper was published, two other researchers -- Professor Walker-Smith and Dr Amar Dhillon -- independently documented the same problems in these children, including symptoms of autism."

"The British Medical Journal's accusations against Dr Wakefield -- that he fabricated his findings -- are therefore false. The mainstream media accusation that Dr Wakefield's findings have "never been replicated" is also blatantly false."

Dr Wakefield demands retraction from BMJ after documents
prove innocence from allegations of vaccine autism data fraud

"The BMJ, in essence, has been caught pulling off what may be the largest scientific fraud ever perpetrated by any medical journal in the history of the world. It grossly misrepresented the facts in falsely accusing Dr Wakefield of fabricating the clinical trial data that led to his landmark study being published in The Lancet in 1998. The innocence of Dr Wakefield has now been established by these newly-released documents."

"The first document describes 7 of The Lancet children and was written by Professor John Walker-Smith in December 1996, 14 months before The Lancet paper was published. Professor Walker-Smith prepared this document in an exercise that, in his words, “was totally unrelated to Andy Wakefield”. The document was a report prepared for a scientific meeting, and was based upon Professor Walker-Smith’s own independent assessment of the children’s condition."

Dr Andrew Wakefield answers critics in video interview,
says BMJ has been hijacked by false journalism

"To debate with the conclusions of a physician is one thing; to outright destroy the career and reputation of a man engaged in what can only be called "unpopular" but important scientific investigation is the action of a dogmatic, unscientific institution which can tolerate no real questions at all.

That's not science. It's dogma. And in its desperation to vilify Wakefield, the BMJ has proven to the whole world, once and for all, that the vaccine industry is so afraid of the weakness of its position that it must resort to publishing false accusations in the name of science in order to try to fend off real scientific skepticism.

In seeking to destroy Dr Wakefield, in other words, the British Medical Journal, we will shortly observe, has only succeeded in destroying its own credibility. This story continues in the weeks and months ahead..."

The new documents (PDF):

NO FRAUD, NO HOAX. Here's Proof.

Studies That Support Wakefield

BMJ Must Retract

Evidence of Professor Walker-Smith

Wakefield Response to BMJ

http://vaccinesafetyfirst.com

Download ZIP Archive (Rapidshare)

The Robert Scott Bell Show - 01/09/11

The Gary Null Show - 01/27/11

"[Dr. Gary Null] is doing the very best investigative journalism on this topic anywhere in the world. His four-hour "deconstruction" of the BMJ, Brian Deer and the barrage of false claims against Wakefield stands as perhaps the single most important investigative piece that has yet been produced on this topic. It makes the BMJ's own report by Brian Deer look like a late-night tweet from a drunken blogger." ~ Mike Adams, NaturalNews

Skeptics eating up Big Pharma crucifixion of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

The funny thing is, let's assume the allegations against Dr. Wakefield are true. What they have shown is how easy it is to get bad science published! It's like, congratulations, you've proven Wakefield's a fraud. You've proven financially motivated doctors can get their crackpot quackery published in an established journal. Now imagine what a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical giant can do! How about sending some of that skepticism the other way?!

'Don't investigate the finanical incentives of drug companies, investigate the financial incentives of small fries like Dr. Wakefield!', 'Don't investigate the intellectual honesty of the pharmaceutical industry, investigate the intellectual honesty of small fries like Dr. Wakefield!' - It's completely backwards!

'Don't believe the anti-establishment conspiracy theories, believe the pro-establishment conspiracy theories!' - That should be the new slogan of the Skeptics Society!

I'm sick and fed up with these corruption denialists and their cult-like obsession with defending the bullies and attacking the victims. It's so pathetic.

"The little dog deserved it, the big dog says so!"

Some things 'skeptics' would be more concerned
about if they were real skeptics:

Evidence-based vaccinations: A scientific look at the missing science behind flu season vaccines

Flu vaccines judged ineffective

Publication Of Flu Vaccines Studies In Prestigious Journals Are Determined By The Sponsor

Placebo fraud rocks the very foundation of modern medical science;
thousands of clinical trials invalidated

False Foundations of Science: Can Vaccine Studies Be Trusted?

New research shows vitamin D slashes risk of cancers by 77 percent;
cancer industry refuses to support cancer prevention

Elsevier

Corrupt Census Company and UK Publisher Spins Science:
Doctors Poisoned by Medical-Media Monopoly

Did Reed Elsevier interfere in the editorial decisions of Neurotoxicology?

BBC - Space Age Reptile - The Gecko & Biomimicry

2011-01-28T10:24:00.002Z

Skeptics eating up Big Pharma crucifixion of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

2011-01-06T14:39:00.080Z

The British Medical Journal has published a report by journalist Brian Deer and accused Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who in 1998 published a study suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, of fraud.

Over the last 12 years there has been considerable media misrepresentation of Andrew Wakefields study. The paper was a five page case study, not a double-blind test drawing conclusive results. It studied 12 children and made no claims, it merely posited hypotheses. The paper concludes...

We have identified a chronic enterocolitis in children that may be related to neuropsychiatric dysfunction. In most cases, onset of symptoms was after measles, mumps, and rubella immunisation. Further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome and its possible relation to this vaccine.

These sorts of studies are done all the time in science and are generally ignored because they don't prove anything. They merely function as springboards for further scientific research.

Wakefield's paper however generated enormous controversy that last year resulted in him losing his license and the paper being retracted. The GMC panel that found him guilty of "callous disregard" focused on alleged conflicts of interest and unethical treatment of test subjects, it had nothing to do with the quality of his scientific research.

But it seems accusing him of misconduct wasn't enough, now they have gone further and accused him of outright fraud. The so-called 'skeptics' have not surprisingly eaten this up...

PZ Myers
Orac
Skepacabra
VaccinesandEvolution
GodlessGeek
Steven Novella (Thermite & Desiree Jennings Dystonia Denialist)
Skepchick

The smear campaign against Wakefield has been a Big Pharma conspiracy from the start.

The Lancet, the journal the paper was published in, is owned by global publishing giant Reed-Elsevier. Reed-Elsevier own 2,460 scientific journals, aswell as the magazine New Scientist.

I'll say that again, 2,460 scientific journals! - It's no wonder scientists who dissent from any 'consensus' are so easily shut out of the 'credible' peer-reviewed literature when a significant amount of that literature is owned by a single publishing conglomerate. They're like the science and medicine equivalent of News Corp!

It gets worse. Reed-Elsevier's CEO, Sir Crispin Davis, is a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline! And his brother, Sir Nigel Davis, was a judge who withdrew legal aid from families who claimed their children were damaged by GlaxoSmithKline's MMR vaccine.

Worse still, in 2009 the pharmaceutical giant Merck was sued for paying Elsevier to create a fake journal to promote their products.

Reed-Elsevier's former chairman, Jan Hommen, attended Bilderberg in 2007 and 2010.

Interestingly, Reed-Elsevier was also the company Peter Power of visor consultants was running mock terror drills for on the morning of 7/7.

Brian Deer, the journalist making all these allegations about Dr. Wakefield, has been supported in his efforts by Channel 4, Murdoch's Sunday Times and MedicoLegal Investigations, a private company owned by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry!

The network of corruption is so in your face it's a wonder anyone can buy into this blatant smear campaign.

"We have a turd in the punchbowl!"

Wakefield isn't even anti-vaccine, and neither is celebrity 'anti-vaxxer' Jenny McCarthy, whose son contracted autism from a shot and has completely recovered thanks to alternative medicine.

In a CNN interview two years ago, she said: "We're not telling people not to vaccinate. I don't understand why it's so freakin' hard to comprehend we deserve safe shots!"

Dr. Wakefield appeared on CNN yesterday to defend himself...

Families have been awarded compensation for vaccine-autism cases, yet they still deny any connection...

Family win 18 year fight over MMR damage to son: £90,000
payout is first since concerns over vaccine surfaced

Family to Receive $1.5M+ in First-Ever Vaccine-Autism Court Award

Oh that's right, they don't cause autism, they "result in" autism!

The funny thing is, let's assume the allegations against Dr. Wakefield are true. What they have shown is how easy it is to get bad science published! It's like, congratulations, you've proven Wakefield's a fraud. You've proven financially motivated doctors can get their crackpot quackery published in an established journal. Now imagine what a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical giant can do! How about sending some of that skepticism the other way?!

'Don't investigate the financial incentives of drug companies, investigate the financial incentives of small fries like Dr. Wakefield!', 'Don't investigate the intellectual honesty of the pharmaceutical industry, investigate the intellectual honesty of small fries like Dr. Wakefield!' - It's completely backwards!

'Don't believe the anti-establishment conspiracy theories, believe the pro-establishment conspiracy theories!' - That should be the new slogan of the Skeptics Society!

I'm sick and fed up with these corruption denialists and their cult-like obsession with defending the bullies and attacking the victims. It's so pathetic.

In his 1952 book The Impact of Science on Society, iconic liberal philosopher Bertrand Russell envisioned a world where the government controls its people using 'injections':

"Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so."
- Bertrand Russell, "The Impact of Science on Society" (1952), Page 62.

The safety of childhood vaccinations against things like MMR and Hepititis is still very much debatable. However, one thing that isn't is the clear ineffectiveness of flu shots.

A 2010 Cochrane Library review of 50 reports - 40 of which were clinical trials of over 70,000 people - found that in the unlikely event of a flu shot matching the circulating strain of flu, 33 people would need to be vaccinated to avoid just one case of flu. In average conditions, 100 people would need to be vaccinated to avoid just one case of flu. The review found no evidence that flu shots in any way affect transmission of the virus - which is the main reason flu shots are promoted, to block transmission. At least 15 of the 40 trials were industry funded. So even the industry's own, probably biased studies make a poor scientific case for flu vaccinations.

An earlier review by the BMJ found that industry-sponsored flu vaccine studies were more attractive to prestigious peer-reviewed journals, regardless of their size or quality. The authors lamented, "In most cases, what you see is not necessarily what you get".

What's especially frustrating is how the establishment defenders always put the burden of proof on us. We're supposed to just assume that tainted vaccines and drinking water is fine until proven otherwise. In my opinion, the burden of proof should always be on the side challenging common sense. If I went up to someone with a glass of water spiked with cyanide, told them it was spiked with cyanide and offered them it to drink, would they? No, coz common sense would tell them that water spiked with cyanide isn't gonna be good for them and they'd want some kind of guarantee that it isn't going to kill them before they even consider it. It's called rational thought! They wouldn't say, 'Sure, I'll drink it, there's no proof that this specific drink is going to do me any harm!'

But with things like Mercury, Aspartame and Fluoride the logic is reversed. I don't need a peer-reviewed study to tell me food, water and medicine tainted with toxins is bad for me. Common sense does just fine. What I want to see is a thorough, peer-reviewed, non-industry funded study that proves these things aren't bad for me!

More:

Elsevier Terrorists scared shitless that everyone
knows VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM

Statement From Dr. Andrew Wakefield:
No Fraud. No Hoax. No Profit Motive.

A Roundup of Responses to the British Medical Journal

AGE OF AUTISM reponses

Jenny McCarthy: In the Vaccine-Autism Debate,
What Can Parents Believe?

Autism One: A Conversation of Hope, January 11, 2011

YouTube: GoldenHawkprojects

Dr Andrew Wakefield on The Alex Jones Show
May 25, 2010 Part 1, 2, 3 & 4

Sunday Times’ Discredited – Wakefield’s Autism Research Verified

Wakefield’s Lancet Paper Vindicated – [Yet Again]

Peer Reviewed Papers Support Findings

Autism and the Gastrointestinal System Research

Callous Disregard - Research

Intelligent Design & Common Ancestry

2010-12-08T14:20:00.049Z

"The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that ID is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism - it is intelligent design."
~ Michael Behe, Good News, January 2011

People like Richard Dawkins confidently assert that 'evolution is a fact', but is that true? Well that depends on what you mean by 'evolution'. 'Evolution' is a vague term that can mean a number of different things. It can mean small-scale adaptations and diversification over time due to random variation, mutation and selection (aka 'microevolution'), it can refer the study of lineages and descent with modification - common ancestry, the tree of life, the history of life, 'amoeba-to-man' evolution etc. - and it can refer to the idea that the same material processes that drive small-scale adaptations and diversification can be extrapolated to explain 'macro'-evolutionary transitions - or more specifically, the origin of new organs, mechanisms and genetic information (sometimes called 'The Blind Watchmaker Thesis', after Dawkins' book).

Because of the ambiguity of the term 'evolution', critics of certain aspects of evolutionary theory are often accused of challenging (or worse, denying) the entire thing, and the position of the dissenting view is often misrepresented.

Probably the biggest misconception about the theory of Intelligent Design is the assumption that it is incompatible with common ancestry, and is therefore contradicted by an enormous amount of scientific evidence. Below are several quotes by leading design proponents/sympathizers on the issue of intelligent design and common ancestry...

"I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it."
~ Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, 1996

"I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form?"
~ Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, 1996

"[Eugenie] Scott refers to me as an intelligent design "creationist," even though I clearly write in my book "Darwin's Black Box" (which Scott cites) that I am not a creationist and have no reason to doubt common descent. In fact, my own views fit quite comfortably with the 40% of scientists that Scott acknowledges think 'evolution occurred, but was guided by God'."
~ Michael Behe, [Source]

"From the design theorist’s perspective, the positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance. This is not to deny large-scale evolutionary changes, but it is to deny that the Darwinian mechanism can account for them. Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism."
~ William Dembski, [Source]

"The central issue is not the relatedness of all organisms - what is commonly called 'common descent'. Indeed, intelligent design is perfectly compatible with common descent. Rather, the central issue is how biological complexity emerged and whether intelligence played a pivotal role in its emergence."
~ William Dembski, "The Great Debate", 2002

"I'd like to emphasize that the focus of my argument will not be descent with modification, with which I agree. Rather, the focus will be the mechanism of evolution. How did all this happen, by natural selection or intelligent design? My conclusion will not be that natural selection doesn't explain anything, rather the conclusion will be that natural selection doesn't explain everything."
~ Michael Behe, "The Great Debate", 2002

"Intelligent design does not so much challenge whether evolution occurred, but how it occurred. In particular, it questions whether purposeless material processes - as opposed to intelligence - can create biological complexity and diversity."
~ William Dembski, [Source]

"There is a difference between observations of evolution,
and the cause of the changes that have been observed."
~ Stephen C. Meyer, [Source]

"We're not talking about gaps, we're talking about the
creative power of the mutation/selection mechanism."
~ Stephen C. Meyer, [Source]

"I accept [the land mammal to whale] transition. I'm not arguing that, 'Where are the transitional forms?' [...] My question isn't 'Where's the Ambulocetus?' or 'Where's the Pakicetus?' or 'Where's the Georgiacetus?', No. My question is 'Where's the mechanism?!'"
~Richard Sternberg, [Source]

"Intelligent design does not require organisms to emerge suddenly or to be specially created from scratch by the intervention of a designing intelligence. To be sure, intelligent design is compatible with the creationist idea of organisms being suddenly created from scratch. But it is also perfectly compatible with the evolutionist idea of new organisms arising from old by gradual accrual of change. What separates intelligent design from naturalistic evolution is not whether organisms evolved or the extent to which they evolved, but what was responsible for their evolution."
~ William Dembski, The Design Revolution, 2004

"Many assume that if common ancestry is true, then the only viable scientific position is Darwinian evolution—in which all organisms are descended from a common ancestor via random mutations and blind selection. Such an assumption is incorrect: Intelligent design is not necessarily incompatible with common ancestry. Even if all organisms on earth share a common ancestor, it does not follow that the primary mechanisms causing the differences between the species must be blind, unguided processes such as natural selection."
~ Casey Luskin & Logan Paul Gage, Intelligent Design 101, 2008

"Intelligent design includes a broad spectrum of beliefs. It includes those who accept common descent and support a form of intelligently guided evolution. It also includes those who believe that an intelligent agent designed life-forms separate from other species in something close to their present form. ID doesn't require special creation by any means, but special creationists do share with other intelligent design proponents the view that the complexity of life arose via intelligence, and not an unguided / random process like natural selection acting upon mutation."
~ Casey Luskin, [Source]

How much clearer could they be?! Intelligent design and common ancestry are not mutually exclusive ideas. Therefore, evidence for 'evolution' - transitional fossils, atavisms in embyros, genetic similarity etc. - does not 'debunk' intelligent design, because what is commonly called 'evolution' (common ancestry) is not incompatible with intelligent design.

Despite the fact that design proponents have stated over and over again for more than a decade that their theory primarily challenges the mechanism for macroevolutionary change, not the observations, the establishment defenders continue to misrepresent it. One example of this is this excerpt from the 2007 NOVA documentary, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial:

NICK MATZKE: What's really being advocated is the idea that organisms poofed into existence through the miraculous act of an intelligent designer, i.e., God. That's the view that intelligent design promotes.

[...]

NARRATOR: As it turned out, the latest in a large body of evidence to refute intelligent design and support evolution was coming to light just as this case was unfolding.

[...]

Darwin believed that evidence for his idea of common ancestry would be unearthed in the form of transitional fossils. For example, if, over millions of years, fish gave rise to land animals, as evolutionary theory predicts, we should find fossils of extinct creatures that are part fish and part land animal.

"Transitional fossils ... refute intelligent design" - that's what PBS claims, but that is false. Transitional fossils are evidence for common ancestry. They tell us nothing about the mechanism for macroevolution. Evidence for common ancestry is not evidence for the claim that the chance/selection mechanism can act as a designer substitute - which is the claim that intelligent design is primarily challenging.

"Modern Darwinists point to evidence of common descent and erroneously assume it to be evidence of the power of random mutation."
~ Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution, 2007

Leading ID critic Ken Miller makes the same misrepresentation in his 2008 book, Only A Theory:

What does design theory tell us about the details of the horse family over the past 55 million years? First, it would not consider it a family at all. From the ID perspective, the relationships [...] aren't real, because descent with modification, which is another name for evolution, never actually took place. Those ancestor-descendant relationships so apparent to paleontologists are just an illusion. In fact, the evolutionary tree leading to modern horses isn't a tree at all, but just a collection of individual species, directly created by the designer, each without any relationship to the other.

Ken Miller has made a career out of 'refuting' intelligent design arguments, which is ironic because he also claims it isn't falsifiable and therefore isn't science. He has had it pointed out to him many times over the years that intelligent design does not challenge common ancestry, yet he continues to make the same straw man claims. He will often cite the human chromosome 2 fusion site as strong evidence for 'evolution', as if it refutes design, but again, at best it is only evidence for common ancestry - if that.^{[1] [2]}

"Although useful for determining possible lines of descent, which is an interesting question in its own right, comparing sequences cannot show how a complex biochemical system achieved its function."
~ Michael Behe, [Source]

While many people in the ID community may be skeptical of common ancestry, that doesn't change the fact that the two ideas are entirely separate issues. To argue otherwise is to commit the logical fallacy of equivocation. The evolution debate, like the climate change debate, is not a black versus white issue, but in both cases the establishment defenders like to make it seem like a black versus white issue. They keep the terms deliberately vague and employ semantic fallacies to build straw man attacks against the dissenters. As Jay Richards notes:

Both issues suffer from “semantic creep,” which tends to prevent rational discussion.

So a vague word like “evolution” can range in meaning from the trivial and tautological—change over time and survival of the fittest—to the uncontroversial—certain organisms share common ancestors and natural selection explains some things—to the questionable and ideological—everything is the result of a purely impersonal process, we don’t exist for a purpose, we’re just carriers for selfish genes, natural selection and random genetic mutations explain everything interesting, and so forth. If you doubt the latter, you get lumped in with doubting the former.

Similarly, instead of debating specifics about global warming—Are humans the main cause of the recent warming trend in global temperatures? Would the Kyoto Protocol make any difference?—skeptics of all stripes are called deniers of “climate change,” as if anyone other than non-existent disciples of Parmenides would deny that the climate changes.

Rational discussion would be a nice thing, in both the Climate Change debate and the Intelligent Design debate, but as long as the dissenting views - and thus, the debates themselves - continue to be misrepresented in these silly games of semantics, rational discussion is impossible.

"You're responding to us right out of your debating manual, as if you're dealing with some Young-Earth Creationist who just fell off the turnip truck! This is a serious challenge to your view, and it is not about gaps, it is about the adequacy of the mechanism, and you have not addressed that..."
~ Stephen C. Meyer, [Source]

Circular Rationalism

2010-12-06T11:02:00.006Z

In several Youtube debates I've had on a variety of different subjects, I've noticed the debunkers/skeptics have a number of vague buzzwords that they like to throw around. They include:

'Reason'
'Rationality'
'Debunked by Science'
'Freethinker'

The third one is a common dismissal. "Those 9/11 truthers have been debunked by science" or "Science refutes those global warming deniers" etc. Interesting choise of words ... not "<Insert specific observation here> scientifically rebuts...", but "Science itself debunks...", as if anyone who disagrees with them isn't doing science. And those that make these statements rarely go into specifics. It bares all the hallmarks of some cultist mantra, if you ask me.

As does their use of the words 'Reason' and 'Rationality'. The other day I commented on some video about life's origins, drawing parallels between the evolution of life and the evolution of human technology, and someone replied:

"@ScootleRoyale - Whatever floats your boat. I'd rather use rationality and reason."

I find these types of replies very interesting. What is 'rationality'? What is 'reason'? The dictionary definition of 'rational' includes the word 'reason', so to use both is redundant, and the dictionary definition of 'reason' refers to logic. So true 'rationality' is to use logic.

But 'rationality' is often a subjective thing. What one person considers 'rational', another person may consider 'irrational'. What do we say when people are trying to fit something into their world view? We say they are 'rationalizing' the observations - regardless of whether or not their rationalization is in any way logical.

It seems to me when so-called skeptics/debunkers etc. use the word 'rational', their use is purely subjective. They arbitrarily label things as 'rational' or 'irrational' depending on their world view - and then they say their world view is based on 'rationality'! It's completely circular!

Circular logic is a flawed logic, it therefore contradicts 'reason', and is thus 'irrational'.

Now of course it's not just skeptics who do that. Many Christians arbitrarily label belief in Jesus as 'rational', because that is their world view. But you'd think that so-called 'skeptics' would be better than that. But they are not. They are hypocrites and they have no reason to call themselves 'skeptics' or 'freethinkers'.

James Randi, Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins are 'freethinkers'? ... What a joke!

The name 'rationalist' however is appropriate, if by 'rationalist' you mean someone who rationalizes things to fit their world view, coz that is exactly what they are. But if you use that definition, then flat earthers, religious fundamentalists and holocaust deniers would also be 'rationalists'.

David Icke on Richard Dawkins

2010-12-05T08:47:00.008Z

David Icke is well known for criticising religion - Christianity especially - but I've always wondered what his opinion of Richard Dawkins is. Well, in his new book he writes:

[The Illuminati] know how reality works and they want to make sure that their target population never does. Religion was their major vehicle for this through the ages and then 'science' came forward to play its crucial role in suppressing the truth. The party line in the 'science' establishment is that the world is solid and physical and there is no 'afterlife'. Anything to do with the so-called 'paranormal' is condemned or ridiculed by the programmed, often malevolent, 'experts' wheeled out to debunk views, experiences and research that demolish the manufactured myopia that is mainstream 'science'. Ironically, most of what is accepted as scientific 'fact' turns out to be simply assumption and not fact at all. This includes, indeed especially so, Charles Darwin's 'natural selection' or 'survival of the fittest'. As João Magueijo, the Portuguese cosmologist and Professor in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, said: ' ... most science is just a theory and is not motivated by existing observations crying out for an explanation.' He also rightly observed: 'It seems to me that contradicting textbook wisdom is only heresy for those who have learnt it from the text book.'

It is quite a sight to see 'experts', like Professor Richard Dawkins at Oxford University, trying to discredit anything that doesn't fit with their concrete belief-system. He condemns religion while being an evangelist for his own - the religion of this-world-is-all-there-is. Dawkins ridicules the 'God religions', but doesn't realise that he is a leading voice of the 'no-God religion'. He is the High Priest and Chief Zealot of the religion called 'Scientism' and he is desperate to debunk anything that could question his intellectual pre-eminence. Dawkins targets with religious zeal those who challenge the omnipotence of mainstream science. I have seen him close up during a debate at the Oxford Union, and also on his television programmes, attempting to debunk alternative healing and the 'paranormal'. I see fear in his eyes for some reason and almost a sense of panic and desperation. The thought that he could be wrong seems to terrify him, but surely he must know by now that he has been talking bollocks for decades. If he doesn't, given the evidence available, it's a real head-shaker. Where has he been? It is the legions of mind-made, song-sheet scientists like Dawkins that man the barricades whenever the party line is under threat. They are gatekeepers who seek to impose their own ignorance upon the masses. A few of them, and certainly those who run the institutions, know what they’re doing, but most have just been programmed by the system to program others.

[..]

The university system, elite or otherwise, is ever more irrelevant, ever more in retreat from the cutting edge. There is a revolution of perception going on and the isolated intellect simply can't see it, nor can it see how ignorant the religion of intellectualism really is. How is mainstream science ever going to understand reality when it is populated by 'scientists' filtering everything through a left-brain that can only perceive sequence, time and apartness? It never is and it was never meant to. The idea is to keep people from the truth about reality and the human condition by keeping that knowledge from science. It is the head/heart scientists who are at the cutting edge, not the regular bunch personified by people like Professor Richard Dawkins. He's the Darwinism groupie at Oxford University who targets his nose-in-the-air bile and ridicule at anyone who has another view of reality beyond the edges of his postage stamp. He condemns religion and yet he is the high-priest of his own - Scientism, the belief that only mainstream science has the truth and anything else is blasphemy. I once appeared with him at the Oxford Union years ago. It was like debating with concrete on legs. He didn't like me; I can't think why. The whole Darwinist nonsense, which takes the creator out of Creation, was carefully calculated to indoctrinate a mass perception of life with no purpose, one in which we are mere accidents of 'evolution' and life's a bitch and then you die. It still dominates the collective mind of what is bravely called 'science'.

As with medicine, law and education, so the closed-world of mainstream science is structured to repel all boarders who threaten to breach the dam that passes for its perception. One method is to attack alternative approaches to healing and condemn them as ' crackpot' or 'dangerous', but what could be more crackpot and dangerous to human health than chemotherapy? The science establishment presses for new laws to 'protect' people from alternatives while pursuing policies and technologies that are potentially lethal to both people and planet. Scientists who buck the establishment and seek knowledge through an open mind find their funding and job opportunities disappear. Talk to some of those scientists who have challenged the orthodoxy of global warming, for a start. It is the carrot and stick again and it is used across the entire system to keep dissenters in line and truth in the closet.

Couldn't have put it better myself.