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A crucial difference

A number of science bloggers, myself included, often write about the current manifestation of creationism that is presently popular, but lately I've been starting to wonder why creationism is so well-received in the first place. Despite the fair amount of attention Expelled has attained on science blogs, it seems that most members of the public don't even know it's going to come out. Creationists have published their own technical journal for years, yet outside of a handful of "creation scientists," no one seems to care. Dozens of creationist books, essentially rehashed tracts of previously…

Book Review: Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons

The power of the evolution idea is that it directly affects every creature that has ever lived on this planet and ever will, for that matter. It does not apply only to mussels and marmosets, dinosaurs and date palms, or penguins and porgies; Homo sapiens is as much a product of evolution as the most basic of bacteria or most monstrous of whales. Not everyone readily accepts this basic fact, however, and even before Charles Darwin's landmark work On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection appeared in 1859 many people were threatened by the idea that life (and most of all human life) could…

Laelaps Movie of the Week: Jaws 3-D

During the 1990's I can scarcely remember a time when one television station or another wasn't playing at least one of the four JAWS movies, TBS, TNT, or WPIX often devoting an entire day to films about killer oceanic creatures. Still, of the four films JAWS 3 (or 3-D, if you like) was one of the b-movies that was always making the rounds, and it's gratuitous special effects make it an easy target for this week's cheesy movie selection. Although I didn't realize it as a kid, JAWS 3 picks up the story of the Brody family at a Sea World theme park (Sea World Orlando, a landlocked theme park,…

MythBusters: Bringing on the physics bullet drop

If you didn't catch the latest MythBusters (yeah! new episodes), they did something straight from the physics textbooks. Just about every text has this example of shooting a bullet horizontally and dropping a bullet from the same height. The idea is that they should hit the ground at the same time. No one but the MythBusters could actually show this demo with a real gun. The Physics I am going to do some calculations, but I want to first write about the physics that accompanies this idea (and you can actually do it your self without the gun). What physics principle does this demo show?…

Verb, Noun, POW

John McCain has decides that his time in a POW camp can be used to explain anything at all. He recently sought to deflect criticism for being unable to keep track of how many houses he owns because "I spent some years without a kitchen table, without a chair, and I know what it's like to be blessed by the opportunities of this great nation. … So the fact is that we have homes, and I'm grateful for it." In speeches, he's told a tale about how when his captors asked for the names of his shipmates, he listed off the names of <insert local sports franchise>, varying the team to maximize…

Books

A few days ago I wrote a long post about the importance of ideas, which included this observation: Let us pause, as slacktivist does, to marvel that "Here is a man who speaks off the cuff in complete sentences and complete paragraphs. The contrast with our current president couldn't be more stark." Indeed, the contrast with much of the field of candidates couldn't be more stark. Obama is someone you could have a conversation with, and that discussion would be grounded not only in his experience living around the world and around the country, editing the Harvard Law Review and organizing…

Basics: Free Body Diagrams

**Pre Reqs:** [Intro to Forces](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-what-is-a-force.php), [Vectors](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-vectors-and-vector-ad…) Hopefully now you have an idea of what a force is and what it isn't. What do you do with them? The useful thing to do with forces is to determine the total force acting on an object. At the beginning of the introductory physics course, you will likely look at cases where the total force is the zero vector. This is called equilibrium. Even if you are looking at cases where the forces don't add up to the…

Clocks and Clouds

I recently had a short article in Wired on the danger of getting too enthralled with our empirical tools, which leads us to neglect everything that our tools can't explain: A typical experiment in functional magnetic resonance imaging goes like this: A subject is slid into a claustrophobia-inducing tube, the core of a machine the size of a delivery truck. The person is told to lie perfectly still and perform some task -- look at a screen, say, or make a decision. Noisy superconducting magnets whir. The contraption analyzes the magnetic properties of blood to determine the amount of oxygen…

Enculturation and Wall Street

The process of enculturation doesn't just afflict middle-aged scientists, struggling to appreciate a new anomaly. It's a problem for any collection of experts, from CIA analysts to Wall Street bankers. Let's stick with Wall Street, since Goldman Sachs is in the news. The question for senators and regulators is why some very smart people (and their very clever quantitative models) missed a financial bubble that, in retrospect, looks devastatingly obvious. Let's begin with a classic experiment, led by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman. A group of undergraduates was briefly shown a series of…

Attention and Intelligence

Let's begin with this recent experiment by neuroscientists at Rutgers, which demonstrated that general intelligence (at least in rodents) is mediated by improvements in selective attention. Here's the abstract: In both humans and mice, the efficacy of working memory capacity and its related process, selective attention, are each strongly predictive of individuals' aggregate performance in cognitive test batteries. Because working memory is taxed during most cognitive tasks, the efficacy of working memory may have a causal influence on individuals' performance on tests of "intelligence".…

The Reading Brain

I've got a review of Stanislas Dehaene's new book, Reading in the Brain, over at the Barnes and Noble Review: Right now, your mind is performing an astonishing feat. Photons are bouncing off these black squiggles and lines -- the letters in this sentence -- and colliding with a thin wall of flesh at the back of your eyeball. The photons contain just enough energy to activate sensory neurons, each of which is responsible for a particular plot of visual space on the page. The end result is that, as you stare at the letters, they become more than mere marks on a page. You've begun to read.…

Information Craving

Over at Mind Matters, Chadrick Lane reviews a fascinating experiment that revealed the rewarding properties of information, regardless of whether or not the information actually led to more rewards: In the experimental design, monkeys were placed in front of a computer screen and were trained to perform a saccade task, in which they learned to direct their gaze at specific areas. The monkeys were first given the option of choosing between one of two colored targets. One of these targets would give the monkey advance information about its future reward. The advance information came in the form…

Risk, Fear, Certainty

Apologies, once again, for the blogging silence. I was busy in London, on tour for the UK version of the book, which is called "The Decisive Moment". (We got some great press, including being featured as "Book of the Week" by BBC Radio 4.) Although book tours can, on occasion, be frustrating and grueling - I'm so sick of airport food that I don't even like Egg McMuffins anymore, and I'm getting to the point where I detest the sound of my own voice - one of the genuine highlights is getting to answer questions from your readers. As an author, there is nothing more exciting than learning which…

The tales that the X chromosome tells

Highly Punctuated Patterns of Population Structure on the X Chromosome and Implications for African Evolutionary History: It is well known that average levels of population structure are higher on the X chromosome compared to autosomes in humans. However, there have been surprisingly few analyses on the spatial distribution of population structure along the X chromosome. With publicly available data from the HapMap Project and Perlegen Sciences, we show a strikingly punctuated pattern of X chromosome population structure. Specifically, 87% of X-linked HapMap SNPs within the top 1% of FST…

Fungus adapts fast...at first

The Properties of Adaptive Walks in Evolving Populations of Fungus: The rarity of beneficial mutations has frustrated efforts to develop a quantitative theory of adaptation. Recent models of adaptive walks, the sequential substitution of beneficial mutations by selection, make two compelling predictions: adaptive walks should be short, and fitness increases should become exponentially smaller as successive mutations fix. We estimated the number and fitness effects of beneficial mutations in each of 118 replicate lineages of Aspergillus nidulans evolving for approximately 800 generations at…

Framing and the invisible college

Larry Moran criticizes Coturnix (and by implication Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbett) for their focus on "framing," as described in Chris and Matt's paper in Science (behind a paywall, alas): the top three requirements for good science writing are scientific accuracy, scientific accuracy, and scientific accuracy. As soon as you sacrifice the attempt to convey good accurate science to the general public then you're not doing science writing. You're doing something else. He presents this as a compelling argument against framing, but I think it argues for very careful thought about how we frame…

Two Cultures

Ouch. I got my first nasty review today. (For some nice reviews, check out the NY Times, LA Times, NY Post, Amazon, etc.) In Salon, Jonathan Keats takes issue with the basic premise of the book, which is that meaningful connections can be drawn between science and art: Lehrer's book is worth discussing for this reason: It embodies an approach to the humanities and sciences that threatens the vitality of both. In his coda, Lehrer evokes C.P. Snow, whose 1959 book, "The Two Cultures," has become the standard reference in any discussion about the "mutual incomprehension" (as Snow phrased it)…

The plight of the pragmatic progressive

Dave Roberts writes a dialogue on the notion of growth in modern politics and economics. On one hand, he notes that economic growth has been the most powerful engine for genuinely improving human wellbeing, and on the other hand, that it's doomed to run out, and that even as it can improve wellbeing, it typically creates massive inequality, hurting people rather badly. There's no viable alternative to growth to keep the world turning, but there's no viable explanation of how we can continue growing faster than our resources can recover. Ultimately, we wind up with this dilemma: The idea…

On science and liberalism

John Derbyshire thinks there's a tension between liberalism and science: liberal scientists, which is to say most scientistsâ¦are stuck in an uncomfortable philosophical fork. Liberalism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of progress and improvement. (Why do you think they call themselves âprogressivesâ?) In this, liberalism has had the support of science, which has made so much improvement possible â banishing diseases, improving the quality and variety of our food, reducing the need for arduous labor, increasing our comfort and amusements. The link between liberalism and science is therefore…

I get email

The email below the fold is a fairly typical rant from a creationist who has a teeny tiny bit of information, and therefore thinks he has uncovered an irrefutable disproof of evolution. In this case, he has noted that different species have differing numbers of chromosomes, and therefore, because he believes variation in chromosome number is an absolute barrier to fertilization, evolution could not have occurred. He's missing a few key pieces of information. One is that, contrary to his belief, variation in chromosome number is not a barrier to reproduction, although it can reduce fertility.…

Junk in the trunk: why sauropod dinosaurs did not possess trunks

Before I start: TIANYULONG TIANYULONG TIANYULONG TIANYULONG TIANYULONG. Ok, moving on... It is the contention of some that the field of Mesozoic reptile research is plagued with bizarre, nonsensical hypotheses. You may or may not agree with me that skim-feeding giant pterosaurs, wind-surfing sail-crested pterosaurs, dedicated-to-scavenging Tyrannosaurus, and crampon-using dromaeosaurs are all, shall we say, unlikely. In some cases the science has been done to smack these ideas down, in other cases it has not. In my opinion, one of the most illogical hypotheses entertained within recent…

The Hellinga retractions (part 2): trust, accountability, collaborations, and training relationships.

Back in June, I wrote a post examining the Hellinga retractions. That post, which drew upon the Chemical & Engineering News article by Celia Henry Arnaud (May 5, 2008) [1], focused on the ways scientists engage with each other's work in the published literature, and how they engage with each other more directly in trying to build on this published work. This kind of engagement is where you're most likely to see one group of scientists reproduce the results of another -- or to see their attempts to reproduce these results fail. Given that reproducibilty of results is part of what…

"Science is evil," or: When Mike Adams meets Deepak Chopra and Ben Stein

Recently, there have been grumblings in the ranks of Orac-philes. All is not entirely well. Or, at least, all is less well than usual. Even more unusual, I feel your pain. I really do. We've been enduring a stretch when the anti-vaccine movement has been unusually busy for an unusually long time, leading vaccines to take over and dominate as the main topic of this blog for more than the last week. This has led not only to my getting tired of the topic, but to some of you apparently becoming tired as well of the sheer burning stupid that only the anti-vaccine movement can lay down with such…

When popularity outpaces science in surgery

In science- and evidence-based medicine, the evaluation of surgical procedures represents a unique challenge that is qualitatively different from the challenges in medical specialties. Perhaps the most daunting of these challenges is that it is often either logistically impossible or unethical to do the gold-standard clinical trial, a double-blind, randomized placebo trial, to test the efficacy of an operation. After all, the "placebo" in a surgical trial involves exposing patients to anaesthesia, making an incision or incisions like the ones used for the operation under study, and then…

The Go I Forgot: Concurrency and Go-Routines

A couple of people pointed out that in my wednesday post about Go, I completely left out the concurrency stuff! That's what I get for rushing the post - I managed to leave out one of the most interesting subjects! Go provides very strong support for communicating processes. I haven't done a lot of hacking with the concurrency stuff yet - so my impressions of it are still very preliminary. But my early impressions are very good. A lot of people have been talking about Go as a language for distributed computation. I don't think that's correct: Go programs run in a single, shared address…

Music Mondays: Best Jazz Albums 2016: A list of lists

Another annual obsession to add to the list, along with the listings of best science books? Look like it, if last year and this year are anything to judge by. This particular post collects lists of "best of the year" jazz albums I've found across various websites. For the purposes of this project, I'm not giving each list its own post and showcasing the albums that are part of the list. That's an awful lot of work, which I'm reserving for the science books project which is more core to the mission of this blog. Note: I've included a few not-exclusively-jazz lists if they've happened to…

Canadian Science Policy Advocate Interviews: Paul Dufour, Fellow and Adjunct Professor, Institute for Science, Society and Policy

Welcome to the rebooted science interview series here at Confessions of a Science Librarian! The previous incarnation mostly concentrated on people in the broadly defined scholarly communications community, like Mark Patterson of eLife, Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ or author Michael Nielsen. The series has been extremely irregular for the last few years so I thought my more recent involvement with Canadian science policy advocacy presented an interesting opportunity to start over. In particular, my participation in the recent iPolitics science policy series presented itself as a…

A brief overview of Hox genes

In previous articles about fly development, I'd gone from the maternal gradient to genes that are expressed in alternating stripes (pair-rule genes), and mentioned some genes (the segment polarity genes) that are expressed in every segment. The end result is the development of a segmented animal: one made up of a repeated series of morphological modules, all the same. Building an animal with repeated elements like that is a wonderfully versatile strategy for making an organism larger without making it too much more complicated, but it's not the whole story. Just repeating the same bits over…

Why Parents Fear the Needle (and the gene)

DESPITE overwhelming evidence to the contrary, roughly one in five Americans believes that vaccines cause autism -- a disturbing fact that will probably hold true even after the publication this month, in a British medical journal, of a report thoroughly debunking the 1998 paper that began the vaccine-autism scare. says Michael Willrich, a professor of history at Brandeis University in todays NYT Similarly, according to Dr Oz, the TV host, papaya genetically engineered with a snippet of a mild strain of a virus to make it disease free, causes infertility. This in face of overwhelming evidence…

Modeling antiviral resistance, XII: effects of Tamiflu use and non drug interventions

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] We now take a look at what happens in the model when we vary the intensity of prophylaxis and treatment. The model treats the fraction of those prophylaxed, fp, and those treated, fT, separately, but for illustrative purposes the paper sets these two figures at the same number. In the previous…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Friday - PLoS Genetics, Pathogens, Computational Biology and ONE published today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Circadian KaiC Phosphorylation: A Multi-Layer Network: Circadian clocks are endogenous timing mechanisms that allow living organisms to coordinate their activities with…

Vegeculture and the Season of Roots

My mother in law ate a roasted turnip at my house the other day. It was unfamiliar enough to her in that form (she'd had mashed turnips before) that she had to ask me what it was, and it was a reminder of the fact that this time of year truly is the only time that many Americans come in contact with the lesser-known root vegetables. While carrots, potatoes and onions are part of our daily lives, and sweet potatoes and beets are at least intermittenly familiar (if commonly hated), few Americans know celeriac, turnips, parsnips, taro, rutabagas, yams, jerusalem artichokes or many others well…

Little Goats in Cities

(Rubeus the cat meets Nigerian Dwarf Baby Meadowsweet last summer) Tuesday's New York Times has an article on the expansion of miniature dairy goats in urban areas. It is an interesting article, and has some good points - among them it rightly points out that dairy goats are a bigger deal than chickens. That said, however, it is also pretty clear that the reporter is fairly ignorant about goats in general (this is probably not surpring, I'm guessing the Times Goat beat is pretty small ;-)), and I'd hate for people to get all their information about small scale dairy goats from this.…

Ten Basic Preparations for a New Year

We live in a very strange society in many ways. Think about how weird it is that almost any kind of personal preparation for the future that doesn't involve putting money in the stock market is viewed as survivalism, and as the territory of crazy people with guns. How strange is it that the language of personal responsibility has been claimed for political purposes by the right to imply that one is personally responsible to be financially secure (and a moral and personal failure if you aren't) but not personally responsible to be able to meet basic needs in difficult times? It is regarded…

Pollan and Bittman, the Morano and Milloy of GMO anti-science

Why do food writers think they are competent to evaluate the scientific literature? I know of at least two who, based on their tweets, clearly are not. One is Mark Bittman, who we have previously chastised, and now also Michael Pollan who has been a bit more coy about promoting anti-science related to GMO. Now they've both been broadcasting the flimsy results of this paper - A long-term toxicology study on pigs fed a combined genetically modified (GM) soy and GM maize diet - published in the "Journal of Organic Systems". Why do I feel like I'm reading headlines from Climate Depot or…

The post in which I pick a fight with Jake

Has anyone noticed how my sciblings are really ornery at the moment? We've got PZ bringing out the angry stick over Wilkins' criticism of Dawkins. Physioprof is getting ready to pop Greg Laden in the nose over this thread (and I tend to agree it needs a rewrite). And then Shelley broke my heart by posting this video mocking anesthesiologists that I posted a couple months ago. And here I thought my sciblings paid attention to me *sob*. Mommy and Daddy fighting and my sciblings ignoring me are making me feel insecure and frightened and as a result I'm going to lash out at Jake for this…

Nycticein bats: apparently, a nice example of how assorted distant relatives can be mistakenly considered close allies on the basis of one or two characters (vesper bats part XIII)

A group of serotine-like bats that occur in North America, Cuba, tropical Africa, Asia and Australasia have often been grouped together in a 'tribe' called Nycticeini (or Nycticeiini: both spellings are used in the bat literature and I'm unsure which has proper precedence). Tate (1942) used this name for an assemblage of species grouped together due to the absence of the second upper incisor. Nycticeins also tend to have a near-horizontal dorsal border to the naked muzzle and a slow, steady flight. The name is obviously based around the generic name used for the so-called evening bats (…

Of dragons, marsupial lions and the sixth digits of elephants: functional anatomy part II

More recollections from the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting: part I is here. We looked in the previous article at Robin Crompton's overview of primate locomotor ecology and evolution, Renate Weller's overview of new technologies, John Hutchinson's work on dinosaur biomechanics, and Jenny Clack's new look at Ichthyostega [adjacent image is Jaime Chirinos's Thylacoleo restoration]. Still loads more to get through... Paul O'Higgins took us back to primates. His key message was that two distinct computational techniques used to study anatomy - geometric morphometrics and finite element analysis (…

And yet another political roundup

As usual, under the fold.... Quote of The Day: "Do you think what is appealing here? I'll be careful here. This is not about sexual relations... Everybody watching this. This is not what I am talking about. When you see the picture together of John McCain, who is an older man, but he is a kind of Audie Murphy hero image and this obviously attractive woman much younger than him, it's like they are offering themselves up as a kind of a political couple, almost like Clinton and Mrs. Clinton, Senator... President and Senator Clin... They are offering themselves, it's a fascinating tableaux. They…

Sizzle

Yes, I am one of many SciBlings and other bloggers who got offered to pre-screen Randy Olson's new movie "Sizzle" (check the Front Page of scienceblogs.com for links to all the others). I was reluctant at first, but in the end I gave in and agreed to preview a copy. Why was I reluctant? As a scientist, I need to start my piece with a bunch of neatly organized caveats, so here are the reasons why I thought I would not be a good person to review the movie: - I am just not a good movie critic. Of the thousands of movies I have seen in my life, I disliked perhaps three. I am terribly…

Golden Compass - it's about sex, really

This weekend, with 70 degrees F in Chapel Hill, it would have bin a sin to remain indoors. So I didn't. But in the end, at twilight today, my daughter and I went to see Golden Compass, the movie whose first-weekend box-office earnings I wanted to boost. I made sure not to read any reviews of the movie beforehand. I am, unlike most people who already wrote about it, one of those people who has never read the Pullman books on which the movie is based. Thus, like the majority of the target audience, I was a Pullman "virgin" and I wanted to watch it just like anyone else going out to see a…

My Thoughts About Harry Potter [Review, Rant, Spoilers]

tags: Harry Potter spoilers, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, books I waited to publish my review (and rant) of the last Harry Potter book until today because several friends and SciBlings wanted to also participate in the discussion, and further, I wanted to read the book one more time and think about it for a while. Overall, the book was interesting and action-packed, especially at the beginning and at the end, although the plot did drag a bit in the middle. Basically, this was the most adult of all the Harry Potter books, and as such, it was filled with bloodshed and death of…

Katherine Kersten, Minnesota's little pillock

Minnesota has more than a few local conservative wingnuts; there are a few very popular blogs emanating from these parts to testify that, and in addition, the major metropolitan newspaper, the Star Tribune, has a shrill blitherer they regularly put front and center who has most of us scratching our heads in wonder that they keep such an incompetent hack on the staff. All the Minnesotan readers here know already who I'm talking about, and I don't even need to mention her name…but for all of you lucky out-of-staters, I'll fill you in: it's Katherine Kersten. "Who?", you all say, and that's…

OSHA announces new effort to protect oil & gas workers: Industry investigates silica exposure

“Too many oil and gas industry workers are being hurt or killed on the job,” said Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, David Michaels in remarks delivered to the more than 2,000 people who gathered last week in Houston for the 2014 OSHA Oil & Gas Safety and Health Conference. As part of efforts to address industry safety issues, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has announced a new effort to improve the safety of workers employed in the oil and gas industry. Described as an “alliance,” the initiative involves a two-year agreement…

Wilkins on Dawkins

For the final installment of my Dawkins series, let's have a look at what my SciBling, John Wilkins has to say. In this post, Wilkins takes issue with Dawkins' discussion of agnosticism. Dawkins believes that agnosticism is unjustified fence-sitting. Wilkins thinks Dawkins is wrong. I'm with Dawkins. Let's have a look at the details. Wilkins quotes Dawkins as follows: Philosophers cite this question as one that can never be answered, no matter what new evidence might one day become available. And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced - too eagerly in my view - that the…

Many Worlds Are Never Exhausted

There have been some good comments on last week's post about the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which I find a little surprising, as it was thrown together very quickly and kind of rant-y on my part, because I was annoyed by the tone of the original Phillip Ball article. (His follow-up hasn't helped that...) But then maybe that's why it succeeded in generating good comments. Tough call. Anyway, I let these slide for a while because of day-job stuff, so I'm going to promote this to a new post, and try to address some of these. Because, apparently, we are never out of universes in which I'm…

Where do Supermassive Black Holes Come From?

"Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order." -Robert Coover Our Milky Way, the swath of light and dark that dominates the darkest skies here on Earth, contains a huge variety of stars: large and small, red and blue, from young to old to ancient. Image credit: ESO / Serge Brunier, Frederic Tapissier, The World At…

Erika Is A Remnant: UPDATED

Saturday Mid Day UPDATE: Erika is now an ex-tropical storm. A real hurricane has an eye. Erika is a cartoon dead eye (see graphic above). When the Hurricane Prediction Center woke up this morning, they found Erika, ripped asunder by the rugged terrain of Hispaniola, to have "... degenerated into a trough of low pressure." The latest update from the NWS says, "this will be the last advisory on this system by the National Hurricane Center unless regeneration occurs." Which gives me an idea. If Erika, this year's Atlantic "E" storm, does regenerate into a named storm, it should take the…

Expert! Part Two

My reward for winning in Round One was to be paired up for Round Two. My opponent was the top seed in the section, with a rating of 2179. I received my second white in a row. Here's what happened. I started with my usual king pawn, and he replied with the Modern Defense. This was a fine how do you do. The Modern is a rare bird at the highest level these days, though grandmaster Tiger Hillarp Persson has defended its honor. In the Modern, black simply allows white to occupy the center and gain space, believing that he will later be able to chip away at white's position from the sides…

Gap Arguments and ID

Gil Dodgen at Dembski's blog has a post about ID and "god of the gap" arguments, drawing on quotes from Del Ratzsch in this interview. I think Dodgen's comments make little sense. In the interview, Ratzsch argues that god of the gaps arguments are not necessarily wrong. Dodgen quotes part of that, but leaves some out as well. I'll post the quote from Ratzsch in fuller context below the fold. TGL: Design arguments are often associated with the idea of "gaps" in nature. How important are gaps to design arguments? DR: For some design arguments, they are crucial. For instance, Dembski's '…