Physical Sciences

Reached today for comment about Stephen Hawking’s new book, the Universe said that Professor Hawking should receive no credit for the ideas. “You humans naively assume that ‘physicists’ exist, who discover theories,” said the Universe. “But I did it all. Me. The transitory entity known to you as ‘Stephen Hawking’ is merely an epiphenomenon of the laws of nature, otherwise known as Me, the Universe itself. Mindless physical stuff, the only thing that ever really existed, or ever will exist.” “Hawking, and that other guy — what’s his face, Dawkins — have been stealing my royalties for years. I’ve got some lawyers working on that.” “Anyway, I don’t know why Hawking and Dawkins, or Harris and Dennett and the rest Read More ›

Advocates of intelligent design have long been skeptical of the claim that the majority of our genome is nonfunctional gibberish, a mere relic of our evolutionary past. Many of the key arguments for common ancestry are based around the supposition that certain loci of our genome are functionless. But the gaps in our knowledge of the genome (in which such supposition resides) are continually shrinking.

A recent paper published in Science by Kondo et al. reported on the discovery that some of the supposed “non-coding” regions of the RNA transcript actually actively encode for short peptides that regulate genes involved in Drosophila development.

According to the Abstract,

A substantial proportion of eukaryotic transcripts are considered to be noncoding RNAs because they contain only short open reading frames (sORFs). Recent findings suggest, however, that some sORFs encode small bioactive peptides. Here, we show that peptides of 11 to 32 amino acids encoded by the polished rice (pri) sORF gene control epidermal differentiation in Drosophila by modifying the transcription factor Shavenbaby (Svb). Pri peptides trigger the amino-terminal truncation of the Svb protein, which converts Svb from a repressor to an activator. Our results demonstrate that during Drosophila embryogenesis, Pri sORF peptides provide a strict temporal control to the transcriptional program of epidermal morphogenesis.

I have no reason to believe that the acclaimed physicist Roger Penrose supports intelligent design. But he’s definitely not afraid to take on critics of the argument for fine-tuning. In the video below, he explains that the fine-tuning of the initial entropy of the universe is this precise:

It’s the question raised by yesterday’s New York Times article on the push for balance in classroom discussions of global warming, though, as Jay Richards aptly notes over at The American, the real point of Leslie Kaufman’s story is “to connect the teaching of evolution to the climate change debate.”

Now when I read anything on the environment in the New York Times, I try to keep a couple of deconstructionist qualifiers running in the back of my head: “This is what the New York Times wants me to believe about the issue” and “What are they trying to accomplish with this piece?” I know it’s cynical, but when it comes to environmental stories, I just don’t trust New York Times reporters to keep it straight.

Some things they want to accomplish with this piece:

(1) Divide and conquer skeptics of global warming orthodoxy and Darwinism, by painting the latter as ignorant religious zealots, in hopes of starting a fight among conservatives. No doubt they’re hoping that, say, Richard Lindzen will have to explain why he agrees with those nefarious creationists on the global warming issue, and that he’ll have to spend his time issuing statements of agreement with evolution.

(2) Make it harder for official bodies to encourage critical thinking on global warming, since attempts to do the same with regard to evolution have, in recent years, met with fierce resistance and only modest success.

This is the media analysis required with today’s journalism, though I would call it prudent rather than cynical.
Richards goes on to consider how the debate over evolution and the debate over climate change are alike — and how they differ:

It seems that climate scientists aren’t just nasty and unprofessional in emails. Dr. Andrew Watson, a leading climate scientist from the scandal-plagued School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, appeared December 4th on BBC’s Newsnight program with global warming skeptic Marc Morano. Morano, who runs the superb Climate Depot site, took Watson to task for his denial of the scandal that has rocked the Climate Research Unit at Watson’s university. Watson, who bears an amusing resemblance to Richard Dawkins, clearly was not accustomed to vigorous questions from his lessers, and appeared angry, defensive, and arrogant. At the close of the interview, after telling Mornao to “shut up” and still on live television, Professor Watson commented “What an Read More ›

Some very prominent members of the American Physical Society are circulating an email asking the Society to withdraw a position statement adopted on 2007 that supported the theory of global warming. It’s a powerful statement by leading physicists who are obviously furious about the ClimateGate fraud and about the impact it will have on science. Compare this statement to the cowardly and arrogant editorial in Nature and to the spinning of this transparent fraud by faux pro-science journalists and blogs.

Note that the authors of the email have tried to get the APS management to withdraw the 2007 statement supporting global warming theory because it was based on the fraudulent science. They were unsuccessful, and the APS management has also refused to bring the issue to the membership. Establishment science is circling the wagons to protect this fraud.

Ethical scientists are mortified by the scientific misconduct and fraud in climate science; the question is: are there enough ethical scientists to bring integrity back to science? These courageous folks are trying very hard. I hope they succeed.

The email:

Round-up of some recent noteworthy articles on ClimateGate:

Sheril Kirshenbaum, who blogs at Chris Mooney’s blog Intersection, seems to have an better understanding of the ramifications of the ClimateGate fraud than Mooney does. This fraud will unravel the global warming hoax in short order (public opinion was moving against it even before ClimateGate), and it will likely lead to a civil war within science, pitting scientists who adhere to high standards of integrity against opportunists and ideologues who use science for their own purposes.

But Kirshenbaum gets the problem and the solution completely wrong.

Her post:

Post modernism is creeping into science. The bizarre rationalizations for the self-admitted scientific fraud perpetrated in the ClimateGate scandal are a radical departure from traditional scientific standards. Scientists are rushing to defend the indefensible: manipulating data, faking data, destroying data to prevent examination by other scientists, and conspiring to take control of peer review to advance a particular scientific theory. All of these acts constitute gross scientific misconduct, and several decades ago commission of any of these transgressions would have ended a scientific career. No so any more. The leading scientific journal Nature has defended all of these scientific crimes by asserting that these scientists were under stress, and the Nature editors have made the bizarre claim that evidence for Read More ›

The climate fraud spreads to NASA: