Dembski vs. Shermer

This time around I'm just postinig a great article that was e-mailed to me. It summarizes the formal debate between Dr. Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society and Dr. William Dembski of the Discovery Institute held on the campus of the University of Kentucky.

by Jeff Prewitt

On Thursday, March 23, I had the pleasure of attending a formal debate between Dr. Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society and Dr. William Dembski of the Discovery Institute on the campus of the University of Kentucky. It’s been two days, but the events are still quite vivid.

I traveled with my brother and a good friend, and, as expected, we had excellent, thought-provoking conversations on several topics spiritual and temporal. It was almost as though we were warming up our brains (so to speak) for the night’s event. We arrived an hour and a half early and, to my surprise, were the first ones there apart from the diligent sound crew. We took seats about five rows back in the center, and watched as people trickled in. I must note for those who haven’t seen it that Memorial Hall looks very much like a church. I felt the strangest urge to genuflect when I entered. It seemed altogether fitting and quite odd at the same time.

After several minutes, seats began filling. Though the hall wasn’t packed until a few minutes before the debate began, it was noticeably more populated at 30 minutes till. It was very interesting just listening to the conversations of the people around me while we waited for the night’s action. I’m sure there were many firm creationists that came to pull for Dembski, but everyone within earshot seemed to be of a more skeptical bend. Despite never having been in a congregation (!) of skeptics before, I quickly felt that these were my kind of people. I listened to men my father’s and grandfather’s age discussing the South Park episode of the night before (Chef’s Farewell — a hot topic!), a man presented another with a Flying Spaghetti Monster emblem, and there was talk of the JREF and the health of Mr. James Randi. Eventually, Dr. Shermer entered the room. He had come from a dinner with KASES members that I was unable to attend. A combination of backwardness and not wanting to disturb the man right before his debate kept me from approaching him, but just being in the same room was enough for me.

A few minutes after 8 local time, the debate began. Dr. Dembski showed examples of very complex systems found in nature (his favorite seemed to be bacterial flagella), and presented the case that evolution through natural selection could not account for the complexity of such systems. He also presented his belief that the statistical improbability of life as we know it happening by chance was so high that it seems unreasonable to believe that such life began by natural processes. Dembski was quite civil during his opening remarks. He even had a funny clip from Dumb and Dumber which related to his probability theme. His delivery was somewhat dry and he rarely cracked a smile (though he seemed a little under the weather — I can’t really judge since I’ve never watched him before), but on the whole he was worth listening to (much more so than, say, Kent Hovind).

Dr. Shermer was given 25 minutes to speak next, and I feel he made the very most of it. Shermer rebutted that complexity can come through natural selection, and presented examples of earlier forms of flagella that were steps up the evolutionary staircase to those mentioned by Dembski. He argued that we simply don’t know what the probabilities are in the formation of life, so any attempts to quantify the improbability of our being here are only guesswork. Shermer noted that many systems in the body show more evidence of a bottom-up tinkerer than a top-down designer. In other words, we seem like we came to our present form more from trial-and-error than from the necessarily perfect design of a perfect creator. Why do I have an appendix and nipples, when I don’t need either to function?

Shermer went on to say that being pro-evolution does not require you to be anti-religious. There are many scientists, Christian and otherwise, who see the overwhelming evidence for evolution and are honest enough to realize that it must take place. He said that science is not about miracles. We (science) don’t know yet how we got here on the cosmological scale, but as we learn how it could happen, we can test things in a lab. Saying “God did it,” though it may come from a strong belief, is not science. It can’t be tested unless He decides to show himself and submit to tests (sound of crickets chirping).

The homerun of the night, in my opinion, came when Dr. Shermer put up a quote by Isaac Newton. In that quote, Newton pointed out that the planets in our solar system lie roughly in a nice, level plane. This, he argued, was proof positive of design by a benevolent (and somewhat artistic) creator. Why don’t Intelligent Design proponents use this argument now? In the centuries since Newton said this, science has shown that this is completely a natural phenomenon. No one, not even IDers will argue that point. Because we didn’t know how it was done, we attributed it to God. The more we learn happens naturally, the less there is for God to do. Our species has gone from our cave-dwelling ancestors attributing everything to a Deity to now, only putting Him in charge of a few, ever-decreasing number of things. What do we think of now as so impossible it must have been done by God? By Dembski’s own words, he feels that evolution is one such thing.

In the question and answer session that followed, I was surprised by the fact that every question asked seemed to come from the skeptic side. I had fully expected the churches to mobilize against the “Darwinists” and to quote scripture to Shermer. This was absolutely not the case. Dembski was called upon to defend his work. Was it peer-reviewed? What theories have Intelligent Design contributed to science? Did he support the “Wedge Document” that the Discovery Institute formulated as their plan to bring religion back to education?

Finally, it was time for closing remarks. Here, Dembski took a cheap shot that seemed somewhat unbecoming of him. He took issue with Shermer’s remarks that a Christian can believe in evolution, and that it doesn’t require losing your faith to accept the theory. He said that Shermer did not, in fact, remain an evangelical Christian — seeming to suggest that evolution was the sole cause of this. Unfortunately, that remark was probably enough to stop some honest, open-minded religious type from searching out the truth for him/herself. There’s nothing like the fear of eternal damnation to stop someone from thinking for themselves and resume following the clergy blindly.

The point of it all for me, is that science takes what we see and makes conclusions and finds answers (more like tentative solutions) based on the evidence. ID starts with the answer that they want, and tries to make the evidence fit that answer. That is simply not science.

Sapolsky on the belief in God

A big dilemma that I always had is why would anyone with even a bit of common sense ever believe in the existence of God (a 2003 Harris Poll reveals that 90% of Americans believe in God and 84% also believe in life after death). In my opinion, simply stating that an invisible man who lives in the sky and spits fire at us every time he gets mad doesn’t make any sense, should be enough to convince every remotely intelligent person that God doesn’t exist. Or as Sapolsky humorously says: “the god concept gets mighty infuriating when you spend your time thinking about, say, untreatably aggressive childhood leukemia”. Michael Shermer, in his book How We Believe, shows that there exists a negative correlation between someone’s level of religiosity and level of education. However, this correlation surely doesn’t imply causation since even very intelligent people (namely Einstein who referred often to God in his scientific work, and even my academic supervisor, a PhD) do believe in God.

I neither have the will nor the energy here to try refuting all extra-biblical proofs believers claim to have of God’s existence (the Bible being nothing but a collection of manuscripts whose contents have been misinterpreted, mistranslated and altered hundreds of times and thus believing in it makes as much sense as believing that Madame Bovary, The Great Gatsby or Tarzan are actually real), such that there must have been something before nothing, the apparently intelligent design of the universe, occurrence of unexplainable phenomena and near death encounters. I spent endless time debating these things with my religious friends, whose arguments always rest on a non-rational basis, and I do not wish to go trough it again here. Instead I would like to refer to Robert Sapolsky’s answer to the 2005 Edge World Question: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” His answer is the “unjustifiable belief that there is no God”. He very amusingly argues that instead of believing without requiring proof, it is more justifiable not to believe without requiring proof. So for instance, if I claim that tofu spaceships are responsible for the crop circles, everyone would agree that you have more reasons not to believe me without requiring proof than I have reasons to believe it without requiring proof. Sapolsky’s idea basically amounts to the logical fact that if someone believes in something as extravagant as the existence of God, it rests on his shoulders to prove his claim rather than on everyone else’s to disprove it.

As to the sticky question why do so many people believe in God, I still am not satisfied with the multitude of answers I came across. I read only some books and scripts on the subject (namely Shermer’s How We Believe) and was never fully convinced by the proposed explanations. My modest opinion is that because we live in a very religious world where well 90% of people believe in God, so much media attention is attributed to the church and the pope (regarded as a superior being who must live in a palace and wear a crown), we celebrate Christmas and Easter and refer to God commonly in the everyday speech (“oh my god”, “please god”, “god help us” and god knows what else), it is uneasy for most people to say that they don’t believe in God.

Robert Sapolsky is a neuroscientist and his main interests include research of stress and neurological diseases in primates. Some of his books on animal and human behavior include:
A Primate's Memoir
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
Monkeyluv

His complete answer to the Edge World Question can be read here.

The Edge World Question for 2006 is “What is your dangerous idea?” and was proposed by Steven Pinker. You can read his always interesting and stylishly written answer here.

Remotely controlled rat

Just recently I came across an article in the May 2002 issue of Nature where a team from the State University of New York describe their implementation of a remotely controlled rat. Electrodes are implanted in the somatosensory cortical (SI) and medial forebrain (MFB) areas of the rat's brain. Electrodes in the SI area stimulate sensory cells associated with the left and right whiskers, whereas stimulation of the MFB serves as a reward cue. Sending electrical pulses to the SI electrodes gives the rat a feeling of encountering an obstacle as would be naturally sensed by the right or left whiskers, compelling it to steer in the opposite direction. Stimulation of the reward MFB area follows correct steering and encourages the animal to respond as desired. Continuous stimulation of MFB while the rat is in motion also encourages it to proceed moving in its current direction. As described in their publication, the research team was able to remotely displace the rat in a simple slalom course as well as in a more naturally occurring three-dimensional obstacle course (watch the video here). Implanted electrodes can be stimulated from a laptop computer located as far as 500 meters away. This is achieved by a microprocessor-based, remote-controlled microstimulator placed in a backpack mounted on the animal.

I find this an extremely interesting study since it doesn't use brain stimulation in its traditional application of discovering functional mechanisms of the nervous system, but it is rather used to induce desired subject behavior. Using as such animals instead of expensive hardware as platforms for robotics can surely beneficially replace mobile machines. Potential applications include search and rescue of survivors, clearing mine fields, pest control, military surveillance and mapping of remote areas, otherwise dangerous and difficult to perform by human workers.

The authors assure that the rats don't suffer in any way and no cruelty is involved in their manipulation. Of course, animal rights proponents and other tree hugging hippies will never be convinced, and oppose such applications by the habitual virtue of their divine ability to determine what is moral and what isn't.

Article reference:
Sanjiv K. Talwar et. al. Rat navigation guided by remote control. Nature, 417: 37-38, 2002.

Article describing the detailed technical implementation:
Xu S et. al. A multi-channel telemetry system for brain microstimulation in freely roaming animals. J Neurosci Methods, 133: 57-63, 2004. (read abstract here)

Related articles on the web:
National Geographic article.
BBC News article.

Back in black

Back from hiatus after almost half a year, you can expect again regular posts on this blog about this, that and the other.

Does parenting influence personality?

According to a number of studies it is very small or even negligible. The latest book I read, The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, makes reference to studies on the influence of genes and environment on personality. They yield estimates of about 40% of genetic influence and a modest 7% of shared environmental influence. Of the remaining variance, half is due to nonshared environmental influences and half to measurement error.

Personality was measured with five main determinants: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness. Genetic influence on personality was measured in several ways. One was to take the correlation between identical twins who were separated at birth and reared apart. They share all their genes and none of their environment, so any correlation between them must be an effect of the genes. Another way was to compare identical twins reared together, who share all their genes and most of their environment, with fraternal twins reared together, who share half their genes and most of their environment. Genetic influence was then estimated as twice the difference between the correlation for identical twins and that for fraternal twins. The influence on personality of the shared home environment (effects of parenting) was estimated as twice the fraternal twins correlation minus the identical twins correlation.

Other techniques compared biological siblings, who share half their genes and most of their environment, with adoptive siblings, who share none of their genes and most of their environment. The conclusion was always the same, much to the surprise of the researchers themselves, that genes account for 40% to 50% of one's personality whereas that of the shared home environment is negligible. The remaining 50% is argued to be due to nonshared environment and chance.

Based on these studies, contrary to widespread belief, systematic differences in treatment within the family does not explain personality differences. These findings then imply that each individual chooses from a range of stimuli and events largely on the basis of his or her genotype to create a set of experiences; meaning that people's genes help to create their own environment. This view of human development amplifies the effects the genotype has on the phenotype. Therefore, a violent individual isn't violent because his parents abused him, but rather because they are themselves violent (they transmitted to him their "violent" genes).

Link to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.

Reference of one of the mentioned studies:
Bouchard, T.J., Jr. 1994. Genes, environment, and personality. Science, 264, 1700-1701.

The Nintendo Light Gun

I was recently wasting my time playing a flash version of the classic 8 bit Nintendo Duck Hunt game. This made me think about the light gun that was used to play this game with the original console, and how that cool little piece of hardware worked so perfectly back in the days. If you remember, every time you triggered the gun the TV screen became white for an instant. This technique permits to detect whether or not the gun is pointed at the target when triggered by the user. The gun itself contains a photodiode in its barrel which, when light falls on it, develops a voltage difference between its input and output leading to a flow of current. This is called the photovolatic effect and is the basis for solar pannels (each solar cell is just a large number of photodiodes).
Now, the gun and the TV are both wired to the game console. When the gun is triggered, it takes time for the electron beam emitted by the CRT to paint the entire screen white starting at the top left corner and ending at the bottom right. The screen driver electronics send pulses to the game console at the start of each horizontal and vertical retrace signal. When the photodiode in the gun first senses the white light, a signal is sent to the console and the number of microseconds between the beggining of the horizontal and vertical retraces and that instant are counted. Due to a fixed retrace frequency, this count gives the X-Y location on the screen where the gun is pointed and is compared to that of the target in order to output a hit or a miss.
Previous light gun techniques only painted the target white and a hit was recorded every time the photodiode outputed current. This allowed users to cheat by pointing the gun at a constant light source like a flashlight. The technique developed by Nintendo, which was patented, overcame this problem.

The flash version of Duck Hunt can be played here.

A detailed technical description of how photodiodes operate can be found in this PDF document from the Hamamatsu Corporation.

Shermer's column in Scientific American

In the May 2005 issue of Scientific American, Michael Shermer wrote a column entitled Turn Me On, Dead Man where he gives an interesting explanation of why people get and believe absurd ideas. Examples of such absurd ideas are the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled toast (see image here), an oyster shell that looks like Jesus (see image here), that clues hidden in Beatles' songs indicate that Paul McCartney was killed in 1966 and replaced by a look-alike, or that it is possible to communicate with dead people through a tape recorder in what is called Electronic Voice Phenomenon. His explanation is that our brains evolved to become pattern-recognition machines able to detect signals that enhance our every day survival. We associate for example a smiling face with hapiness, percieve a scream as a sign of danger or can recognize if a building is a bank, church, school or a residence - this capability is association learning. Shermer argues that this pattern-recognition machine often finds nonexistent signals in the background noise of life. We have a signal-to-noise problem where false associations are made; as our pattern-recognition brains scan the world around us false patterns are found in the background noise.

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the author of a regular column in Scientific American called Skeptic.
He is a strong advocate of the skeptic point of view, although he is a historian rather than a scientist. His skepticism seems to have developed in reaction to his earlier credulity. Indeed, he was greatly involved in the religious community at a younger age and even gave Bible study courses himself. He attended the Church of Christ affiliated Pepperdine University with the intent of majoring in theology.

Links to some of the books written by Michael Shermer:
Science Friction
How We Believe
The Borderlands of Science
Why People Believe Weird Things

Typoglycemia

I received recently one of those chain e-mails that I found quite intriguing. Here it is (try to read it):

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, is taht it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Such a cdonition is arppoiately cllaed Typoglycemia :)-
Amzanig huh? Yaeh and yuo awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.

First of all, I couldn't find any information about such a study conducted at Cambridge University. It seems like it wasn't published in any academic journal nor could I find any detailed reference to it on the internet. It is however very interesting to see how easy it is to read these sentences, and makes one wonder how our brain is able to accomplish that?

One way to try to understand it is to imagine how a robot would have to be programmed in order to be able to "read" such words. Just like our brain has knowledge of the words that constitute our vocabulary, the robot must have a database of "known" words in its memory. Then, when a word like huamn is presented to it as an input, it would keep the first and last letters where they are and go through all possible combinations of the remaining letters untill it finds a match in its database. But when we read the above sentences we don't feel that we do all this processing but rather read the words spontaneously. I do believe however that our brain does at least to some extent a computation similar to that of the robot. Take the following two sentences for example:

Paesle rlpey to tihs mgssaee itlidaeemmy.

Plesae relpy to tihs mesasge immeidaetly.

It is evident that the second sentence is easier to read than the first one since it is orthographically more similar to the correct spelling of the words, and therefore less computation is required by our brain to recover the perceptual representation of each word.

Elsewhere, I find that such misspelled words must absolutely be placed in a meaningfull sentence in order to decipher them. For example, try reading the following words taken from the above text:

rdanieg, taotl, lteter

It is not nearly as easy to read them as it was initially when they were part of a meaningfull sentence. In this case, our brain must do the described robot-like computation in order to recover the perceptual representation of the words reading, total and letter. Therefore, the reason why we're able to read the misspelled text so easily is, I believe, because the presence of meaningfull sentences adds semantic knowledge about each word in addition to partial orthographic knowledge; whereas each word shown individually gives only orthographic information.

I found one functional neuroimaging study that attempts to recover brain regions involved in some way in retreiving word meaning. It is summarized that visual word processing involves activation of orthographic, but also phonologic and semantic codes in the brain. For example, the brain carries out the mapping between all three following perceptual representations of the word love with it's associated knowledge:

love, luv, I lvoe you

The three representations involve respectivelly orthographic, phonologic and semantic codes.

The reference of the mentioned study:
J. R. Binder, Kristen. A. McKiernan, M. E. Parsons, C. F. Westbury, E. T. Possing, J. N. Kaufman and L. Buchanan. (2003). Neural Correlates of Lexical Access During Visual Word Recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 372-393.
The abstract can be found here.