N.Z. Bear has developed a tool to categorize blogs by their linkage. What kind of animal are you?
Off-World Sovereignty
Dave Kopel and Instantman have a sensible suggestion (one that I’ve made myself). It’s time, indeed past time, to withdraw from that other relic of the Cold War, the Outer Space Treaty.
[Update at 12:32 PM PDT]
Jim Bennett notes that there’s at least one other reason to get rid of the treaty that Glenn didn’t mention.
…the OST and its Liability Convention also raise the cost of space launch by assigning strict liability to all earth-to-space operations. This is no longer warranted for ordinary launch operations. Withdrawing from the OST should be accompanied by a new Liability Convention creating a more reasonable liability regime.
Yes. This could also affect the existing regulatory environment for spaceflight in the US, since the existing regulations are based on that strict liability.
Martian Agriculture
Keith Cowing has a nice article up on the issues of growing food on Mars, given current knowledge, and longer-term implications for terraforming.
Yeah, That’ll Work
An emailer says:
I can’t understand why you take such a negative point of view on the solution of aerial acrobatics to disarm terrorists, which I had missed in the news. Please give it a little more thought, considering it in a little more detail.
It will simply require a plan to be developed in stages, as follows:
- Teach airline pilots to roll successfully, in the aircraft in which they are qualified.
- Teach advanced course of four-point slow roll.
- Revise A/C safety lights to announce, “Fasten Seat Belts, NON-TERRORISTS ONLY”
- In event of attack, perform Maneuver 1 and announce “Anyone standing on the ceiling, put up your hands to promise you will surrender…If you refuse to do so we will get quite upset”…. then perform maneuver 2, until the flight attendants catch each perpetrator and cuff with plastic cuffs.
- Before issuing this directive, check with the Administration to get approval for plastic cuffs, but in no event shall these be issued for flight crews, whose judgment on such matters is highly suspect.
Yeah, That’ll Work
An emailer says:
I can’t understand why you take such a negative point of view on the solution of aerial acrobatics to disarm terrorists, which I had missed in the news. Please give it a little more thought, considering it in a little more detail.
It will simply require a plan to be developed in stages, as follows:
- Teach airline pilots to roll successfully, in the aircraft in which they are qualified.
- Teach advanced course of four-point slow roll.
- Revise A/C safety lights to announce, “Fasten Seat Belts, NON-TERRORISTS ONLY”
- In event of attack, perform Maneuver 1 and announce “Anyone standing on the ceiling, put up your hands to promise you will surrender…If you refuse to do so we will get quite upset”…. then perform maneuver 2, until the flight attendants catch each perpetrator and cuff with plastic cuffs.
- Before issuing this directive, check with the Administration to get approval for plastic cuffs, but in no event shall these be issued for flight crews, whose judgment on such matters is highly suspect.
Yeah, That’ll Work
An emailer says:
I can’t understand why you take such a negative point of view on the solution of aerial acrobatics to disarm terrorists, which I had missed in the news. Please give it a little more thought, considering it in a little more detail.
It will simply require a plan to be developed in stages, as follows:
- Teach airline pilots to roll successfully, in the aircraft in which they are qualified.
- Teach advanced course of four-point slow roll.
- Revise A/C safety lights to announce, “Fasten Seat Belts, NON-TERRORISTS ONLY”
- In event of attack, perform Maneuver 1 and announce “Anyone standing on the ceiling, put up your hands to promise you will surrender…If you refuse to do so we will get quite upset”…. then perform maneuver 2, until the flight attendants catch each perpetrator and cuff with plastic cuffs.
- Before issuing this directive, check with the Administration to get approval for plastic cuffs, but in no event shall these be issued for flight crews, whose judgment on such matters is highly suspect.
MIA
Posting will probably be light today–I’ve got a lot of stuff to do.
But there’s plenty to chew on in the evolution threads below–particularly in the comments sections, if you didn’t see them on the weekend.
OK By Me
I just notice that Jay Manifold has cited a poll that states, “”… more than two-thirds favored teaching both evolution and creationism in U.S. public school classrooms.”
Heck, I have no objection to that. I just don’t want them taught in the same class…
The first would be taught in science class, the second in “Survey on World Religions.”
Just one more example of how misleading poll questions, and polls, can be.
And Now, Back To Space
Sort of. Actually, I’m going to meld the two topics of evolution/creationism with space. Since now we know that there is a vast amount of ice on Mars, many think that the probability of finding life there has gone up, for good reason since water is an essential component for LAWKI (Life As We Know It).
So, I’m not going to provide any of my own thoughts yet (partly because I haven’t devoted much time to thinking about it, and many of my readers are smarter than me), but just toss out a little Sunday puzzler.
Suppose we do find life on Mars. There are two possibilities. It will use the same genetic code as life on earth, or it won’t.
What are the implications for believers in evolution, and for believers in divine creation, in either case?
Must Be A Slow Weekend
The intelligent design post is #16 on Blogdex.
And one more follow up. Reader Michelle Dulak writes:
Just stumbled on the creationism/ID discussion via Cornett. You’re right, of course, that there are infinitely many theories of the universe that *might* be true but are unfalsifiable. But I’m not sure that ID is in that category, and I’m not sure that evolutionary theory isn’t.
To take the second first: *is* evolutionary theory falsifiable? Can you imagine any experiment that would be capable of disproving it to any scientist’s satisfaction?
I answered that question in a previous post. Not to speak for other scientists, but I can’t imagine one at this point. The key phrases being “I can’t imagine” indicating a possible failure of imagination on my part and “at this point,” that is, given the current overwhelming evidentiary record.
We’ve demonstrated short-term, small-scale natural selection in bacteria. (I don’t think anyone is really surprised by these results; natural selection in the sense of preserving favorable mutations and weeding out unfavorable ones is common sense — which doesn’t mean that Darwin’s insight wasn’t a tremendous breakthrough. Lots of things are obvious once someone has thought of them.) Suppose one experiment fails to produce natural selection & (micro)evolution — is anyone really going to throw out the theory of evolution on those grounds? There isn’t a Michelson-Morley Experiment for evolution, nothing that would settle the case either way.
That’s true, and I probably overstate the case when I say that evolutionary theory is as well founded as gravitational theory. But it’s sufficiently well founded to teach it as science, particularly considering the scientific alternatives (i.e., none).
The only experiments that might conceivably falsify evolutionary theory in the strong sense — i.e., that it not only preserves favorable mutations but can actually build vastly different organisms from its starting material — would have to run over tens of millions of years. And even then there’s no real falsifiability. The conditions of the original run aren’t replicable. We could run ten-million-year experiments on thousands of planets, find no large-scale evolution, and still not falsify Darwin, because it’s *not the same experiment.*
Yes, I made that point in a comment in an earlier post. Because it’s so chaotic and contingent, there no way to repeat the experience exactly (or perhaps even closely). All we can do is demonstrate the basic principles.
Whereas ID in the Behe sense is really very easily falsifiable. Find one irreducibly-complex system in your rapidly-mutating bacteria that wasn’t there when you started, and Behe is toast. Of course, your case is a lot better if you can explain how the irreducibly-complex system actually did evolve, but all you really need to refute ID is one such system that wasn’t there at the beginning of the experiment and was at the end.
That’s true. I should have been more careful in my wording. When claims get specific enough, “God did it” arguments are falsifiable in the limited sense that one can show an alternate means for it to occur, so the “God did it” argument becomes unnecessary. But it’s still not ultimately falsifiable–the claim can still be made, “Well sure, that’s what happened, but God made it happen that way.”
That claim is unfalsifiable.