Last week, I did an interview on the podcast program called The SciPhi show (Science Fiction and Philosophy), run by Jason Rennie. It has now been posted (direct link to mp3 -- 16 MB). The show previously did interviews with Michael Shermer, and ID guys Salvador Cordova and Michael Behe. I was somewhat annoyed with what the latter two were getting away with in their interviews, so on the spur of the moment I dropped Rennie an email, and boom, he had me on.
In addition to pointing out all the usual ID mistakes, there was an interesting discussion about Star Trek: Remember that Star Trek episode where they discover that the suspiciously coincidental bipedal, humanlike form of all of the Star Trek aliens was (somehow) encoded into bacteria seeded across the galaxy billions of years ago, by an ancient bipedal race, a fact revealed when a 3-D holograph recording is deciphered out of the ancestral DNA genome (somehow!). The only thing the episode left out was an explanation for human-klingon-vulcan interfertility. Great episode, typically ludicrous science, but does it help the ID guys make their case? Listen to find out.
Also, a month or two ago I blogged an online discussion I did at IslamOnline.net with IDist Mustafa Akyol; I forgot to blog Part 2 of the discussion, which answered a bunch of leftover unanswered questions from Part 1, and was posted the following week. Evidently the replies were originally posted, but then Akyol revised some of his answers, and that is what is posted now. Several of the answers in Part 2 make peculiar claims that I have only heard from one other person, DI spokesperson Casey Luskin, which indicates that Luskin might have helped with the revised answers. Alternatively, it shows that at least that Akyol -- and, sadly, me -- read Luskin's stuff closely.The SciPhi Show, IslamOnline.net
Last week, I did an interview on the podcast program called The SciPhi show (Science Fiction and Philosophy), run by Jason Rennie. It has now been posted (direct link to mp3 -- 16 MB). The show previously did interviews with Michael Shermer, and ID guys Salvador Cordova and Michael Behe. I was somewhat annoyed with what the latter two were getting away with in their interviews, so on the spur of the moment I dropped Rennie an email, and boom, he had me on.
In addition to pointing out all the usual ID mistakes, there was an interesting discussion about Star Trek: Remember that Star Trek episode where they discover that the suspiciously coincidental bipedal, humanlike form of all of the Star Trek aliens was (somehow) encoded into bacteria seeded across the galaxy billions of years ago, by an ancient bipedal race, a fact revealed when a 3-D holograph recording is deciphered out of the ancestral DNA genome (somehow!). The only thing the episode left out was an explanation for human-klingon-vulcan interfertility. Great episode, typically ludicrous science, but does it help the ID guys make their case? Listen to find out.
Also, a month or two ago I blogged an online discussion I did at IslamOnline.net with IDist Mustafa Akyol; I forgot to blog Part 2 of the discussion, which answered a bunch of leftover unanswered questions from Part 1, and was posted the following week. Evidently the replies were originally posted, but then Akyol revised some of his answers, and that is what is posted now. Several of the answers in Part 2 make peculiar claims that I have only heard from one other person, DI spokesperson Casey Luskin, which indicates that Luskin might have helped with the revised answers. Alternatively, it shows that at least that Akyol -- and, sadly, me -- read Luskin's stuff closely.
13 Comments
Michael Rathbun · 1 November 2006
Nick (Matzke)) · 1 November 2006
Hmm, good point. In 2004 I noticed I was doing that and tried to stop, but it looks like I have slacked. Ya know?
DT-TJR · 1 November 2006
Nice interview. Jason is an IDist so I was half expecting him to speak up and voice his disagreement with you at various times during the interview, but he seemed to be content to let you speak uninterrupted, which was both nice and a bit disappointing at the same time. It was nice that you weren't constantly interrupted and were allowed to speak freely, but a little bit of debate between you two would have been fun to listen to.
Nick (Matzke)) · 1 November 2006
Wow, it looks like my little debate with Akyol at IslamOnline.net has been mentioned in a Nature cover story on "Islam and Science."
Jake · 2 November 2006
What do you mean by human, klingon, vulcan infertility? They were all capable of interbreeding. Spock himself was half vulcan and half human. On TNG there was a character that was half human and half klingon. Troy, on TNG, was half human and half betazoid.
Jake · 2 November 2006
My bad. My eyes passed over it too quickly. I see now that you wrote INTERfertility. Sorry.
The Sci Phi Show · 2 November 2006
Bill Gascoyne · 2 November 2006
Parse · 2 November 2006
Nick (Matzke) · 2 November 2006
I guess Star Trek has been saddled with the human-alien hybrid thing from the beginning, because for some reason Spock was a hybrid, even though he was more or less thoroughly Vulcan as a character.
In reality, I don't think there is much of a reason to think that independently-evolved life would share much similarity beyond being based on water and carbon chemistry. Maybe the usage of some kind of amino acids and nucleic acids would happen repeatedly through convergence. If independently-originating life on two planets both used DNA genomes, I would surprised. If they both used the same 4 letters and 20 amino acids, I would be extremely surprised. I suppose if aliens went around and seeded engineered bacteria everywhere, that could get you those similarities, but then you would have to explain why apparently boneheaded phenomena like cytosine deamination weren't fixed.
Mike Gene found the cytosine factoid so discomfiting he tried to invent a whole design rationale for it, but he never explains why we should think that this bias is in a good direction rather than a bad one (apart from raw speculation); why we should think that any significant amount of information could be frontloaded into genomes via this process (and why aliens would bother with a method that would be at the very least, extremely difficult to make work, compared to simple genetic engineering by an alien or computer); why any intended effects of a mutational bias wouldn't be completely swamped by selection, and therefore pointless; and why a genetic code that in many respects is optimized to minimize mutations, which are generally detrimental, would defy this alleged "design logic" in the first place.
Sir_Toejam · 3 November 2006
The Sci Phi Show · 3 November 2006
Sir_Toejam · 3 November 2006
LOL