Unsought Input

Jesus, I know you are asking when this will stop.  I promise this is it.  I now it’s gone on way too long but who doesn’t want to hear about arsenic? These guys are cracking me up with this one. You just have to watch it. Arsenic is apparently the soap opera of elements. So dramatic and exciting. Really, I love these guys. And, check out the other elements in this feature, please.

No, boron does not stand for boring. This is the first video in our series with a female chemist. Sorry guys, she’s in love with boron, not looking for a boyfriend. It does start out with fire as well, so that is a plus. The crazy haired guy has a periodic table tie, too. I am totally digging it. And the way she says ’spatula’. It’s so science sexy.

Blah blah blah, you know the deal. And no groaning, you might learn something from watching these. You didn’t have to watch all of them. I did. Really, I know how hard it can be to make these interesting, mostly because most of them are incredibly dry. This one at least has some cool fireworks in it.

More from the element of the day series, Lanthanum. Really the whole reason to watch this one is to listen to the mnemonic, quite amusing according to him. “Language centers praise notes small promise of small European garden tubs dinosaurs hobble erotically thrumming yellow lutes.” What the hell? Maybe you should just memorize all of the elements, it sounds easier than trying to remember this little nursery rhyme. Anyway, watch and enjoy.

In line with our Element of the day series, here is day two: phosphorus.  It’s our younger scientist’s favorite element, he has lot’s of scars from taking it out and playing with it.  Really, you shouldn’t have favorites, it makes the other elements jealous.  This one is lots of fun, fire and such.  Well, as much fun as you can get out of phosphorus I supposed.  Still, it burns a letter P onto the paper all by itself.  Isn’t that just precious?

Head over and check out this cool site, The Periodic Table of Videos. It’s pretty amusing, they have created a video for each element. So, you could watch all 118 videos if you wanted, or you could just let me watch them and check out the element of the day that I pick. Really, some of them are very bland. But…it’s a very cool idea and i give these guys mad props. Seriously. Who else but this crazy haired guy could get so excited about Niobium? It really is such a friendly metal.

Just when you thought it was safe to drink water you hear about this. This headline on yahoo.com today strikes fear into the hearts of all Americans who thought it was healthy to drink water. Yes, conspiracy theories aside, there was a five month probe to find out what was actually in our drinking water. And do you know what they found out? I think you might since I put in in the headline of this article but allow me to reiterate. They found prescription drugs and other stuff in minute concentrations in our drinking water. Minute. I.e. small amounts. Very small. But still present. And what do our utility companies say? Is our water safe? Should we be allowing our selves and our loved ones to drink this water? This aqua pharmaceutical cocktail that comes out of our taps and into our glasses, into our showers and baths and food?

First off, let’s talk about media hype. It’s built up around times when people are getting too worried about other things: war, elections, terrorism, etc, to distract everyday people like you and me from these intense subjects by worrying about something else. In magic it’s call slight of the hand. The magician makes you look the other way and does the trick while you are distracted. Then, viola! You didn’t even know what was happening and now it’s already over and you are just left to wonder how it was done without you noticing.

So, the media creates hype and fear about your drinking water while there are several other important things to be reporting to the good people of America about so that you are distracted. Yes, something in the water is very scary. You need water to live and you trust the water that comes delivered to you. So, I agree, it’s a scary idea that there is something in the water. (more…)

If you’ve been following along, you know that we’ve been discussing problems with Creationism.  In part one we looked at the Second Law of Thermodynamics and why it doesn’t invalidate evolution (or biology in general).  Despite what some wealthy political figures with delusions of persecution might tell you, we still haven’t found any empirical evidence or falsifiable claims in favor of creationism, but we’re going to look at the arguments provided in favor.

Our gracious commenter mentioned another perceived problem with evolution, the lack of direct observation of it.  Of course, we have plenty of direct observations of physical and genetic changes due to natural selection.  The adjusted claim was :

What I’m saying about evolution however is that since we have not observed the transition of one species to another, the fossils, rock strata and any other observations about the world as it is today, don’t make the case for the conjecture of transition from non-life to life and simple lifeforms to complex lifeforms. That transition is still an opinion which could only be confirmed by the scientific method through observation of the actual transition itself.

This is an interesting twist on what’s normally called the God of the Gaps argument against evolution.  Normally the argument is formulated this way:  Okay, sure we have all these fossils which scientists like to fit into a big family tree, but where are all the missing links?  You don’t have them, and that’s because God created the individual species.  Any time we don’t have a scientific explanation for something, God did it.

The biggest problem with the God of the Gaps argument is the tendency of the gaps to shrink over time.  Scientists are constantly discovering new fossils as well as better ways to examine relationships between species such as cladistics and genetics.  Some gaps in knowledge, like the exact method by which RNA or DNA originally formed from non-living molecules, might seem comfortable enough for God to fit in right now, but every day really interesting work is being done.

Now for the interesting twist:  our commenter is not just pointing out the gaps in the fossil evidence, genetic evidence, and explanatory models.  In addition, supposedly all this evidence must be thrown out - anything not based on direct observation of the actual transitions between species is just “an opinion.”  This causes a number of problems.
First, this causes serious problems if we ever want to study speciation, let alone evolution.  Based on what we know from radiometric dating the earth has been around for billions of years.  It’s quite possible that it takes tens of thousands of years before an ancestor and it’s descendant are different enough to be considered separate species, especially for large vertabrates with long gaps between generations.  Unfortunately we humans only live 100 years or so at most - not much time for direct observation of very gradual change.

This might look like a good argument from the creationist side until you realize that this poses a problem for anyone trying to observe some sort of “creationist speciation” as well.  We can cross our fingers and hope God turns a turnip into some kind of super turnip during our lifetimes, but given the geological scale the Lord works on, don’t hold your breath.

Second, this is an extremely high bar to set for evidence - so high that if applied consistently it invalidates entire fields of study.  Forensics, for example, would be completely thrown out the window.  No more collecting fingerprints and DNA in episodes of CSI.  We can’t even take the presence of a dead body too seriously anymore.  That murder is still an opinion which could only be confirmed by the scientific method through observation of the actual murder itself.

Archaeologists all over the world need to hang up their Indiana Jones hats and get real jobs, because all of their work is based on indirect observation.  Since we’re not accepting genetic evidence either we need to throw fields like Linguistics, which use similar methods.  What about all the apparatus used by quantum physicists?  No one has ever really seen a quark.  Don’t even mention geology.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to contemplate this bizarre notion any further, because we actually do have plenty of observations of speciation through selection, otherwise known as evolution.  Two organisms are considered different species if they don’t interbreed, and we’ve actually seen that happen through selection.

I can hear the objections already - “but those are all small changes, show me a monkey turning into a man!”  Now we come to the evidence that creationism is not science.  Let’s recap:

1. First the argument is that there are missing links.  But more transitional fossils are found every day.
2. Next the argument is that no one has ever actually observed evolution.  But it has been observed plenty of times.
3. Next the argument is that microevolution is possible, but no one has ever observed macroevolution or speciation.  But it has been observed as well.
4. Next the argument is that evolution might create different species, but what about different genera?  Or different families?  Or orders?  Or…

Once again we are trying to stick God into an ever-shrinking series of gaps.  We’ve already seen that creationists are willing to throw out perfectly valid observational evidence like fossils and genetics.  Do you get the impression that no amount of evidence will ever be enough to disprove creationism?  That smells fishy.

Part 3 will continue following this thread toward the notion of falsifiability.  In the mean time, we have seen some sophistic arguments, but no actual evidence to support creationism or divine intervention.  Please feel free to comment below.

Recently we had some interesting comments on a post about Ben Stein’s upcoming creationist propaganda film, Expelled.  Since the comments section was exceeding length of the original article, I thought it would be best to write a series of new posts and address each of “Seeker of Truth’s” objections to evolution one at a time.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics does NOT say evolution is impossible. 

The claim:

“…referring to the universe as the system in question, not just the earth. The law of entropy as far as science can tell applies to the entire universe. Thus intervention from outside the universe would have been needed to inject order into it, or at least temporarily violate the law of entropy to produce the higher degree of order.”

The claim was buttressed by a quote from Duane Gish, a Ph.D. in biochemistry who works at the Institute for Creation Research:

“Of all the statements that have been made with respect to theories on the origin of life, the statement that the Second Law of Thermodynamics poses no problem for an evolutionary origin of life is the most absurd… The operation of natural processes on which the Second Law of Thermodynamics is based is alone sufficient, therefore, to preclude the spontaneous evolutionary origin of the immense biological order required for the origin of life.”

So, our commentor concluded:

“…for every transition from low order to high order system such as a single embryo growing in complexity into a human with fully developed organs, we see the effect of the external intervention of this transcendent agent who programmed the system through the genetic code to overcome the law of thermodynamics. Without this intervention natural laws could not have produced the precise complexity we see. Long periods of time would only increase the disorder of such system.”

This claim is based on a poor understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a couple of flaws in logic.  The law can be stated in a few equivalent ways:

In an isolated system, a process can occur only if it increases the total entropy of the system.

Heat cannot spontaneously flow from a material at lower temperature to a material at higher temperature.

It is impossible to convert heat completely into work.

So first off, notice that the Second Law does NOT say that no order can arise, ever.  It also does NOT say that heat can not be converted into work.

To apply thermodynamics to evolution, we first have to look at a reasonably closed system.  The Earth is obviously not a closed system, since the sun is constantly inputting huge amounts of energy.  The solar system as a whole, though, is pretty far away from any other stars so we can say it’s reasonably isolated.  The sun is constantly fusing hydrogen into helium, pouring out energy in the process.  This energy is lost as far as the sun is concerned, and only a tiny, tiny fraction of that energy even hits a planet where it could be used to do some sort of work.

So at this point all is well with the Second Law.  The vast, vast majority of the energetic processes in the solar system occur inside the sun and the vast, vast majority of the heat generated is radiated off where it spreads thinner and thinner as it travels outward.

The teeniest fraction of a fraction of that energy hits the Earth.  Now, the Earth itself is already radiating waste heat from processes like volcanism but those are so small (and also Second Law friendly) that we can ignore them for now.  We know for a fact that the energy from the sun hitting the earth causes some spontaneous order to appear - uneven heating of different surfaces causes weather, for example.  But those are big huge systems that require a lot of energy - the formation of proteins or RNA from simpler molecules would require a ridiculously small fraction of the energy it takes to create a hurricane.  All of these processes are inefficient, never converting 100 percent of the incoming solar energy into work.

The claim of the creationist is:  in a system where the vast majority of heat is radiated into space (high entropy, no work is done), the tiny fraction of energy that hits a planet which CAN cause the spontaneous generation of hurricanes CAN NOT contribute an even smaller fraction to inefficiently cause the spontaneous generation of proteins, RNA, etc. and then life.  Not even over billions of years.

Stepping back for a moment, let’s look at the Second Law from a historical perspective.  The first person to begin to figure out the Second Law was Sadi Carnot.  He was trying to figure out how to convert heat into useful work, and he discovered that the efficiency depends on the heat differential.  The Second Law is depressing for perfectionists because it tells us that you can never be 100 percent efficient.  But it is not so depressing as Duane Gish and our commenter would have us believe - it is entirely possible for work to be done at a lower efficiency.  If this were not true, Carnot would have given up on engines and we’d all be still be riding horses.

How does the Second Law really apply to evolution?  Well, it tells us that evolution can not, say, fill the volume of the solar system with algae.  It leaves plenty of room for the creation of a thin layer of diverse species on the surface of one little planet.  Looking at the system as a whole, entropy and disorder is always increasing - evolution on Earth is a mind-bogglingly minuscule sideshow of localized, temporary order, not a violation.

Now for the flaw in logic.  In our commenter’s second quote, we see the claim that the genetic code was programmed (by the creator) to overcome the Second Law. The genetic code is all over the place (you are shedding millions of copies right now through dead skin cells), so this means that violations of the Second Law can be found all over the place - amazingly common.  With this many violations, we can’t really call it a law anymore, can we?  This whole argument rests on the Second Law being absolute, and then posits that we are surrounded (and made up of) billions of instances of violations of that law!

We have a pretty good understand of the genetic code, and we’re learning more bout it every day.  No one studying genetics or microbiology has ever uncovered any cases that violate the Second Law - it would be huge news!  We have absolutely no evidence that the genetic code overcomes entropy.  Every single chemical reaction that occurs within the cell results in the entropy of the system as a whole increasing.

So again, we come to my challenge to creationists from the previous article:  give me evidence.  You can’t just posit that DNA violates entropy without citing evidence that it actually does.  You can’t just invoke the Second Law of Thermodynamics without showing specifically how it is violated.  I’m sorry that this is hard work, but that’s just how science is.

Think I’m off base?  Please tell me how in the comments below.

A few months back we wrote about the comedic possibilities of super heroes confronting real life.  In the last few years there has been a flood of super hero comics, movies, and TV shows and many of them place people with extraordinary abilities in ordinary situations.  Witness the blockbuster Spider-Man movies, or heroes like Hiro from Heroes.

But beyond the world of fiction, what kind of super powers can we find in real life?  Sure, it’s fun to come up with speculative pseudoscience explanations for Superman’s heat vision, but that’s not likely to produce any results.  Even non-powered heroes like Batman rely too much on poor comic book physics and unrealistic survivability to produce real-life counterparts.

We’ll find our real-life super powers in less obvious places.  In the 1980s Marvel had a character named Cypher, or more properly Doug Ramsey.   Doug wasn’t known by his super hero name because his power wasn’t flashy or very useful in battle - Doug was genetically gifted with the ability to understand languages.

This amazing ability to learn languages (along with numbers, dates, etc.) is something you can find in real life, often linked with disabling autism.  Often, but not always.  Watch the video to see the life of Daniel Tammet, the boy with the incredible brain.

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Oh, and it makes them live longer.  Today’s headline article on Yahoo states that hard working scientists over there at lifescience.com are boasting that old men should be marrying and having children with younger women.  They say that it would be beneficial for the entire species!  I have a hypothesis of my own: the researchers are old men, wondering how to get beautiful young girls to sleep with them since they were not stinking rich like Hugh Hefner.  Because, let’s face it, non of those bleach blond airheads are at the playboy ranch because they find Hugh attractive.  If you disagree, you are a man above the age of 55.  Maybe one of these researchers?

Either way, the article goes on to say something about Darwin, I really don’t think that they know much about Darwin, they just mention him in passing.  And then, folks, it advocates killing women genetically after menopause.  Oh, so old guys are soooooooo much better?  Oh, yes, cause as a young woman I would totally love to be getting it from someone my grandpa’s age?  No.  That is gross.  I know I will be that old eventually.  I will wait till I get there.  I don’t want to be arm candy just so like a hundred years from now our overpopulation problem will suck even more because there will be people who live into their 100’s more often.  Anyway, if you don’t believe me that the people over at lifescience.com don’t want to kill women after menopause, let me just quote them here as saying:

women who can no longer reproduce are non-players, and since “it takes two,” men partnered with menopausal women are also irrelevant.Following that idea, natural selection should select for harmful mutations that impact women after menopause. Over time, the discriminating genes would accumulate in the population causing what evolutionary biologist William Hamilton called the “wall of death,” in which mortality of women spikes at the onset of menopause. (more…)

Did you know that all over the country, nay the world, people are being persecuted for their belief and intelligence? Did you know that a small, powerful elite controls everything that children are exposed to in school for their own devious, Darwinistic ends? Did you know that only a complete outsider, a rebel with nothing but guts and a heart of steel, can expose the truth?

You might not know these things because none of them are true. But the makers of the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” and star Ben Stein will try to shovel that particular pile of poop in theaters this February. Thanks to Pharyngula, an excellent blog by an actual scientist, for the tip.

From the movie’s home page:

Ben realizes that he has been “Expelled,” and that educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired – for the “crime” of merely believing that there might be evidence of “design” in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance.

The movie Expelled, in a sense, is nothing new. It follows the established tactics of the creationist / intelligent design crowd, trying to fight the “materialistic” “darwinists” in the court of public opinion rather than in the labs or peer-reviewed journals. It’s yet another attack on science.

“And what’s so wrong with that,” you might ask, “this is a democracy after all.”

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We’ve written before about why schools continue the practice of favoring legacy admissions - accepting the sons and daughters of wealthy alumni.

Now there is some empirical evidence of the economics that drive this practice. Slate Magazine recently ran an article about the puzzle of charitable giving in economics - if markets are driven by individuals rationally pursuing their own best interest, where does charity come from?

A new study by Jonathan Meer of Stanford and Harvey S. Rosen of Princeton shows that when it comes to donations to one’s alma mater, charity isn’t altruism. Alumni with kids are 13 percent more likely to donate, and they are more and more likely to donate as their kid reaches age 14. At that point there’s a big split - for those parents who’s kids go on to apply to the school, donations continue to increase. The parents whose kids do not apply to the alma mater drop off giving.

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