[WARNING - this post may not make any sense until I give my BSG talk - sorry - I'll refer back to it later after I describe that talk]
In preparation for my BSG talk on creationary cognition models, I was digging through some papers, and ran into a whole collection of papers on the Gödelian argument against the physicalism of the brain. Would someone please take these papers to the theology departments? Anyone?
This whole area of research seems completely unknown outside of a few specialists (though Penn State seemed to have a lot of contributions, or at least a lot of archived papers that Google Scholar pointed to).
Anyway, when I had started my research in seminary, I thought that my Gödelian argument for the soul was at least somewhat unique. I had read Voie's use of Gödel, but did not realize that there was an actual literature on the subject. I have to say I was a little disappointed when I found Robertson's paper on free will. I realized my argument wasn't brand-new.
Anyway, I found one paper that comes at least a little close to what my BSG presentation will be on - Copeland's Turing's o-machines, Searle, Penrose, and the Brain. On the one hand, even if I didn't add anything to the conversation, I think just popularizing these ideas is worthwhile. However, my goal is to begin a research program to systematize these ideas as part of a general cognitive studies program. I think one reason why these ideas aren't getting as much play is because they are being relegated to philosophy. What we need to do is to start experimenting - then we can put them into practice.
Some interesting and related papers I found in Google Scholar:
Todd just posted the talk list for the BSG/CGS meeting. It looks to be a really exciting time, and I have no idea how they are going to fit so many talks into a day and a half - probably switching to a multiple-track format. Anyone who wants to interact with creation research should come here. Here's the link to register. After this week the registration price goes up.
Here is the list of talks:
John Sanford, a young-earth creationist biology professor at Cornell, just published a bioinformatics paper describing his new genomics tool, called skittle with a bioinformatics graduate student Josiah Seaman. You can read the paper here. The tools allows you to color the genome and experiment with alignments to visualize patterns that are not detectable by other methods.
You can download the program from Skittle's website on sourceforge., or find more information about the program at dnaskittle.com.
It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
This tool allows us to detect a number of new patterns in the genome. Not only does it help to find tandem repeats, it also helps to find structured variations in those repeats.
This holistic approach to genome analysis is precisely the sort of research that IDers and creationists are interested in. The reductionist approaches of the last century were useful for digging deeper, but they often blinded researchers to the larger-scale activities of what was happening.
From the paper:
As we have been able to better visualize tandem repeats using Skittle, we have seen a surprising amount of internal complexity. Some of this complexity seems to be easily understood in terms of point mutations and indels, but a great deal of the complexity appears to provide an intriguing array of "puzzles" which invite further study. These puzzling patterns include co-varying deviations from a repeating theme, and internal patterns that are not simply "repeats within repeats". For lack of a better term we are referring to these patterns as structured variation.
If tandem repeats have any function, the "structured variation"
described above could conceivably carry information. A perfect repeat cannot contain any information beyond the base sequence and copy number. However, a repeat with variation can contain considerably more information. Each of the three types of observable variation (substitutions, indels, and alternating repeats) has a direct analog in electronic information technology (amplitude modulation, phase modulation, and frequency modulation, respectively).
And then later, he mentions something interesting about the alignments:
Interestingly, the self-adjusting cylinder alignment, which was designed to simply optimize local alignment as would be expected in vivo, causes a marked increase in the visual coherence of all complex tandem repeats. This suggests to us that such coherence might reflect a minimal energy state, and may reflect actual structure in vivo, and might even reflect an unknown biological function. Logically, such coils could change circumference in multiples of the repeat length and so might modulate local genomic architecture.
Anyway, I am really excited about this, and hope to dig more into this as I have time.
Thanks to Sal for pointing this out to us!
Todd Wood has an excellent introduction to the form-vs-function debate, focusing on the ideas of Richard Owen. From his post:
Owen's eclectic embracing of functionalism and structuralism were answers to different questions: 1. Why are organisms so well-adapted? and 2. Why are there homologies?....Organismal similarity was to Owen based a [sic] natural law of the archetype. The differences Owen attributed to functional requirements. (Thus he saw two answers for two different questions.)
It's the conferencing time of year! The Creation Research Society is putting on their conference this year at University of South Carolina Lancaster July 23-24. Here is a preliminary list of the talks that are going on (i'll post again as this is updated):
Quite a list! I wish I had time to go to both this and the BSG conference, but funds are limited this year. Hopefully next year I can go to both, and maybe a a secular conference or two.
In any case, you can register for the conference here ($55 for CRS members, $90 for non-members).
In addition to all this, Danny Faulkner will be hosting a free field trip on Sunday, July 25 to Wood's Bay State Park, one of the Carolina bays.
Sounds like a lot of fun! As I mentioned, I'll update this when I get a finalized list of speakers, and I will also post the BSG schedule when it is available. You should come to one (or both) of the summer conferences!
Just found this site and thought someone here might find it interesting. Especially interesting is this page, with instructions on how to setup a kitchen microbiology lab.
Here is a virtual lab.
Registration for the 2010 BSG Conference is now open! I'm excited - Creation research is not a very hot topic in my city, so I rarely have people to talk about new ideas with. So I get excited when the BSG conference rolls around, because I get to spend some time listening, thinking, and talking about God's creation with other interested researchers. I'm giving either one or two talks this year (one has been accepted, the other is still in review).
If any of you are interested, please come! I love meeting readers. In addition, the conference will be at Truett-McConnell college, where Kurt Wise is setting up a Creation research center. It should be fun!
Register Here -- it's only $90 for students ($120 for everyone else), and includes a room!
For those of you who don't know, Stanford has a research project called "Folding@Home" which utilizes extra computing power on people's computers to make a massively parallel computer for doing research on protein folding. Back when I owned a PS3, I used to run this all the time, and started "team creation" for keeping score. Now, however, Dan Watts has been leading team creation, and has just generated a score of 1,000,000 points! Click here to view the team information, and click here to view the certificate.
If you want to be involved in this project, download the software, and then put in team number 59478 to be a part of our team.
There is so much going on, it is difficult to keep track of! Unfortunately, I am, yet again, left without time to make adequate reflection, so I'm just going to give a dump.
And, with that, my browser windows are much happier now.
The "cognitum" is a concept in creation taxonomy that groups animals according to the perceptions that humans have about those creatures. I have been a fan of the idea of the cognitum since I first heard about it from Sanders and Wise's paper at ICC. The goal is to develop a standard of taxonomy based specifically on human perception, and not at all on other standards such as genetic data or morphology.
I found this idea extremely intuitive. There is obviously the Biblical reason that Adam was given to naming each kind that God created. Therefore, perhaps God gave Adam (and by extension the rest of us) the power to discern important relationships. It is interesting, for instance, that even children can usually tell, from a simple drawing, the difference between a cat and a dog, despite their relatively similar morphology, combined with the simpleness of the drawing. The same child can, at least by Sanders and Wise's paper, look at a more bizarre representative of the cat family and still identify it as a cat.
But, I think there is another point worth looking at. When there is a debate about the phylogeny of a species on whether it should be grouped according to its morphology vs. its DNA sequences, how is such a decision decided (or for that matter, when any two trees are in conflict)? I think few people think about how tough a question this is. No one saw the type of animals who were the current animals' ancestor. Therefore, we must lean on secondary evidence. But if the secondary evidence is in conflict, there seems to be some sort of a faculty in the human mind that makes such discernments. It is neither perfect nor consistent, but nonetheless it is there.
Sanders and Wise's paper has a whole host of interesting points:
Anyway, as you can see, there were a lot of things that jumped out at me.
I also had a thought - I wonder if the "fuzzy boundary" organisms might have originated in locations with a low diversity of species. So, basically, an organism "sensed" the lack of biological character space, and then morphed to fill it.
It is interesting to compare this notion of taxonomy with a study on <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1635482/?tool=pubmed">adaptive radiations in cichlid fish</a>. I have not read it in detail (a commenter on UD pointed me to it), but the abstract says, "The evidence suggests that speciation rate declines through time as niches get filled up during adaptive radiation: young radiations and early stages of old radiations are characterized by high rates of speciation, whereas at least 0.5Myr into a radiation speciation becomes a lot less frequent."
But even more interesting is this statement -- "The available data suggest that the propensity to undergo adaptive radiation in lakes evolved sequentially along one branch in the phylogenetic tree of African cichlids, but is completely absent in other lineages."
This indicates that there might be a "basal-type" species which is presumably more similar to ark-based species than others, from whom adaptive radiations tend to take place. This would be super-awesome if it is true.
Sanders also has a newer paper out on the application of the cognitum, but I haven't had time to read it yet. Wood has a basic overview for those interested. A quote from Wood quoting Sanders:
What is most striking from the results compiled in Appendix A is the high level of support by the molecular data for the circumscription of the core groups of most of the primary cognita identified. ... This suggests that the core groups of primary cognita are units that are generally internally consistent morphologically, as well as genomically. ... The decoupling of molecular similarities from morphological similarities just above the family/order level suggests that the circumscribed core groups of cognita at this level or the subfamily/family level may closely reflect the constitution of holobaramins represented by them. In fact, more precise methods of documenting both the decoupling of morphological and molecular characters and mosaic recombination of these characters, so easily depicted in a cognitum system, may eventually prove to serve as a criterion in delimiting holobaramins.