Intelligent design as we know it today is misnomer.

A bold statement only if one ignores the origins of the term “intelligent design” as it is used today.

Creation science

In short, creation science is an attempt to scientifically validate the Biblical account of creation.

Modern creationism emerged shortly after the conclusion of World War I, when Christian fundamentalism was on the rise in the United States.  In 1925, the state of Tennessee passed the Butler Act, prohibiting teachers from denying the Biblical account of the origins of man, and also the teaching of evolution of man.

The Cold War eventually put evolution back into text-books across the country for fear that the Soviet Union would outpace the United States in science education.

Since the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood, by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, the creationist movement has been slowly gaining steam.  The Genesis Flood posits that Earth was created in seven days, and is less than 7,000 years old.  In other words, the authors take a literal interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Bible and examine the scientific plausibility of it.

Creation science by nature seeks to disprove the effectiveness of scientific standards such as radio-carbon dating, as well as accepted scientific facts in cosmology, and biology.

Defenders of creationism tend to be fundamentalist or orthodox Christians.

Creationists were forced to change their tactics when a Supreme Court case ruled that creation science was religious in nature, and therefore could not be taught in public schools.

Edwards v. Aguillard

In 1987, the United States Supreme court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring creationism to be taught alongside evolution was unconstitutional because it violated the Establishment clause of the first amendment.  Which reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”

After that landmark decision, an edited version of Of Pandas and People, the first creationist text-book was released.  The text-book was written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, both of them self-professed creationists.  Percival Davis, when asked about the reasons for writing the creationist text-book, told the Wall Street Journal in 1994:

“Of course my motives were religious. There’s no question about it.”

In what way was Pandas edited?

Every instance of the word “creation” or “creator” or any derivative thereof found in the text was replaced with “intelligent design”, “designer”, or any derivative thereof.  Thus, modern Intelligent Design was born.

Shortly after the case, The Discovery Institute was founded to advertise the concept of Intelligent design, and manufacture false controversy about the acceptance of evolution in the scientific community.

Looking at the history of modern creationism, it’s easy to see that intelligent design is firmly rooted in creationism.  But nevertheless, ID had to be different enough to appear at least slightly more legitimate in a court of law or a classroom, so terms were changed  and “God” or “Creator” was taken out of the picture. Read the rest of this entry »

Thermodynamics is the most fundamental science.  The observed laws of thermodynamics are true across the universe, right down to the the quarks that make up hadrons, and even the the things we know nothing about like dark matter and dark energy seem to follow the laws.

Thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics is what I want to talk about:

The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system always increases over time, approaching a maximum value.

The definition of entropy.

Basically, things will continue to become more and more complicated until an equilibrium is reached.

Just a thought

I’ve suggested in earlier articles that life is the universe.  Humans are not a part of the universe, we are the universe. As Carl Sagan famously said: “We are starstuff.”

The nature of the universe is entropic.

Think for a second about this:  What if survival is a transcendent mechanic?  What if a survival mechanic is prerequisite to existence?

Think about the universe, and everything in it, as one entity.  All the matter, light, life forms, planets, stars, black holes, radiation, and dark matter…everything, as one.  According to the big bang theory, it all had to start somewhere, so it’s not unreasonable to think of everything in the universe, including humans, as related on the quantum level.

So what if the universe has a survival mechanic built into it?

If so, then wouldn’t the emergence of life be inevitable?  Wouldn’t life be a necessary step in the evolution of the universe?  Wouldn’t evolution be an integral part of the universe?

That survival mechanic of the universe is called entropy.  Nature = entropic.

42

The first event I went to was a writer symposium about food in fiction.  The discussion wasn’t very exciting, and the authors weren’t very insightful, but they did bring up a few interesting points. Food can bring believability to a character, and it can help in determining the personality of characters.  I brought up the use of food as a recurring character, and at least one of the authors were fascinated by this concept, and offered me some advice:  Make the appearance of this character gradual, very gradual.

I then preceeded directly to the room across the hall, where Patrick Rothfuss, my favorite fantasy author, held a Q&A.  OMFG, Patrick is fraking amazing!!!!!!!

He’s funny, intelligent, sarcastic, and brutish.  My first question to him was:

“Could you elaborate on your use of music in The Name of the Wind?  How did you go about incorporating it, and why?”

To answer, he brought up the “art of extrapolation”.  Basically, Rothfuss knows very little about music, but he’s very good at extrapolating the meaning and the subtleties in things he doesn’t know about.  Like women and music (two core themes in The Name of the Wind).

I consider The Name of the Wind to be an excellent example of how to develop a character, so my second question, toward the end of the talk was:

“Do you have any precise method for developing a character?”

We didn’t have much time left, so he answered by saying that natural, believable character dialogue was one of the most important ways to develop a character.

On our way out, we grabbed custom made fortune cookies.  The red cookies contained vulgar messages related to Rothfuss and his works, and the orange ones contained regular ones.  My cookie says:

“Book two, page 348-353, Kvothe and Bast fuck like bunnies.”

After that, I went to the exhibitor floor (the gencon that you see in pictures), and browsed.  Saw some pretty interesting new games, gold and silver d20 ear rings, lots of cosplay, cool shirts, OH GODS! FIRE!!!

….I’ll add more when I fee like it…

At around 42:40, the President makes a terrible comparison.

“How can a private company compete against the government? My answer is that if the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining, meaning that taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services, and a good network of doctors, just like private insurers do, then I think private insurers should be able to compete.

“They do it all the time. If you think about it, UPS and Fed-Ex are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems…. there is nothing inevitable about this somehow destroying the private marketplace. As long as it is not set up where the government is being subsidized by the taxpayers so that even if they are providing a good deal, we keep having to pony up more and more money.”

First of all, the taxpayers ARE subsidizing the post office.

Secondly, the Post Office isn’t competing with FEDEX, UPS, or anyone.  In fact, if you try to compete with them, you’ll break the law:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/39/usc_sup_01_39_10_I.html

Thirdly, an excerpt from the July 2009 GAO report:

“GAO is adding the US Postal Service’s (USPS) financial condition to the list of <b>high-risk areas</b> needing attention by Congress and the executive branch to achieve broad-based transformation.
This year, USPS expects to increase its year-end debt to $10.2 billion, and incur a cash shortfall of about $1 billion.”

“This year, USPS expects to increase its year-end debt to $10.2 billion, and incur a cash shortfall of about $1 billion.”

point made?

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A Southern California college student faces 10 years in prison for violating section 1201 of the Digital Millinium Copyright Act, which forbids circumvention of electronic copy protection schemes.

The Entertainment Consumers Association accuses him of illegally modifying game consoles.

A possible 10 years in prison for tinkering.

Why is copyright infringement punishable with a jail sentence?

Repeal the DMCA, completely.

Stop putting DRM systems in software and electronics.

Stop “licensing” products to consumers.

And get the ESA out of the copyfight completely.

Kindle pretty much sucks a lot.  With an actual book you have tons more flexibility than you do with a kindle book, and in this digital age, that’s ridiculous.  Be sure to watch part 1 and 2.

Today I Die is a flash game by Daniel Benmergui featuring music by Hernan Rozenwasser.  Game is the wrong word.  It is a story, a deeply touching story about hope, perserverance, struggle, and love.  Today I Die beautifully combines imagery, poetry, and simple gameplay, and the music is the icing on the cake.  The last game to evoke so strong an emotional response from me was Beyond Good and Evil (particularly the conclusion).  If you have any respect for the art of video games, words, music, and emotion, you NEED to play this game.

Play it here

This article will attempt to expand on a point I briefly mentioned in an earlier article.

When it comes to the beginning of everything, many people of faith point to a single argument for the existence of a divine entity.  They will ask “What are the chances?”

What are the chances that…

The big bang produced all the elements of life in such a seemingly chaotic chemical chain reaction?

Those components formed stars, which then went supernova, eventually giving birth to planetoids?

Strong force, gravitation, electromagnetism, and weak force work perfectly in our favor?

Earth is perfectly situated  in the solar system to support human life?

Bacteria formed from non-living matter or that bacteria arrived to Earth from an asteroid impact?

Bacteria navigated the evolutionary chain to form humans after about a few hundred million years?

Out of 700 songs, the one that happens to be extremely relevant to my life at the moment decided to play when I hit the “shuffle” button?

And so on…

This, in my opinion, is quite literally a backwards way of thinking.  Let me explain…

Many people of faith believe that they were brought into existence, and then life, by an intelligent being of some kind. This belief presupposes that the observable universe is somehow meant for humans, that all the phenomena we witness has something to do with human existence.  This causes believers to see themselves as superior to, if not separate from nature in some way, and they take these conditioned beliefs with them when judging the universe.  They consider themselves a unique part of the universe, special because a divine being created them, or at least has a purpose for them.

And so they approach big questions with a big ego.  Because of their preconceived notions, they assume that, if indeed nature created humans, than it had to have been in defiance of the odds, and that leads them to the mistaken conclusion that an intelligence is behind it all.

I want people to completely abandon the notion that probability had anything to do with our successful evolution.  I want you to understand that we are not part of this universe; we are the universe.

Consider this

The Miller-Urey experiment in 1952 tested chemical evolution in a setting thought to be similar to early Earth atmospheric conditions.  From Wikipedia:

At the end of one week of continuous operation, Miller and Urey observed that as much as 10–15% of the carbon within the system was now in the form of organic compounds. Two percent of the carbon had formed amino acids that are used to make proteins in living cells, with glycine as the most abundant. Sugars, lipids, and some of the building blocks for nucleic acids were also formed.

The results of this experiment have been reproduced countless times since then, and it’s extremely important to know that many of the building blocks of life on Earth (sugars, lipids, amino acids, carbon, etc…) have been found on meteorites.

In April 2009 Paul G. Higgs and Ralph E. Pudritz of McMaster University in Ontario, published an experiment that tested a hypothesis that 10 of the most abundant amino acids can be formed in the universe regardless of the source.  In other words, the recipe for these certain amino acids is built into the universe.  The Abstract of the Higgs and Purditz journal article (emphasis added):

Of the twenty amino acids used in proteins, ten were formed in Miller’s atmospheric discharge experiments. The two other major proposed sources of prebiotic amino acid synthesis include formation in hydrothermal vents and delivery to Earth via meteorites. We combine observational and experimental data of amino acid frequencies formed by these diverse mechanisms and show that, regardless of the source, these ten early amino acids can be ranked in order of decreasing abundance in prebiotic contexts. This order can be predicted by thermodynamics. The relative abundances of the early amino acids were most likely reflected in the composition of the first proteins at the time the genetic code originated. The remaining amino acids were incorporated into proteins after pathways for their biochemical synthesis evolved. This is consistent with theories of the evolution of the genetic code by stepwise addition of new amino acids. These are hints that key aspects of early biochemistry may be universal.

If 10 of the 20 amino acids present in human biology, are in fact built into the universe, than it’s likely that another species of intelligent life would have some similarities to humans.  Intelligent life might be rare, but Humans are by no means special, much less superior to nature.

The implications of this are huge.  If it’s true that the recipe for life is built into the universe, what does that do to the belief that an intelligent force created life?  What does that do to the notion that Humans exist because we ‘beat the odds’?

There was some chance involved in the evolution of humans specifically, but not life in general.  But what I’m trying to get across is that humans aren’t separate from, or superior to nature, thus we are not the perfect beings that God(s) would have us believe we are.  Because of that, the probability of our existence doesn’t matter one bit.

You could make the very same ‘what are the chances?” argument for this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Try to look at it differently

I’ll play into the probability argument a little, if only to prove it even more inadequate.  Suppose the act of rolling a 20-sided die represented the big bang, and what ever the result was, that’s the universe that formed.  Let’s say I roll a 5, and that creates a universe similar to ours, and after a while, intelligent life forms in universe 5.  Well, obviously that intelligent life is going to wonder where it came from.

What are the chances that an intelligent life was formed from all those seemingly chaotic reactions?!!  Well, the chances were 1 in 20.

Now let’s say I roll it again to make a new universe, and this time I get a 7.  Universe 7 gives me intelligent life after a while, but it’s a helium based life form, and they aren’t made of flesh or blood.  But they still wonder:  what are the chances?

well, the chances are 1 in 20.

One last roll, this time, I get a 16, and that creates a universe that somehow doesn’t support the evolution of intelligent life.  In universe 16, no intelligent life is there to ask the question: what are the chances?

The chances that a roll of the d20 will create a universe without intelligent life? 1 in 20.

As far as we can tell, there is only one universe, so assuming that’s true, ask yourself this:

Do you think the intelligent life that could have been is wondering what the chances are?

The chance of it doesn’t matter one bit.  It’s difficult to explain it any better, so I hope you’ll stop looking at the universe with preconceived notions that you’re special, and start being humble.  You weren’t placed here by an intelligent being, you aren’t God’s conduit, and for those of you who have an abstract view of “God”, (i.e. a god of the gaps) I would ask you this:

Why not just save a step and say that the universe is eternal?

The words of Saint Thomas Aquinas:

“…As we attain to the knowledge of simple things by way of compound things, so must we reach to the knowledge of eternity by means of time, which is nothing but the numbering of movement by “before” and “after.” For since succession occurs in every movement, and one part comes after another, the fact that we reckon before and after in movement, makes us apprehend time, which is nothing else but the measure of before and after in movement. Now in a thing bereft of movement, which is always the same, there is no before or after. As therefore the idea of time consists in the numbering of before and after in movement; so likewise in the apprehension of the uniformity of what is outside of movement, consists the idea of eternity.”

We are the universe, go outside and look up.

for fuel.

More specifically, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing an Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR), designed for long range missions.  For fuel, it will take advantage of any fossil fuels and/or biomatter in it’s path, though regular gasoline can also be used.

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The below footage shows protestors overwhelming a few police officers.