Oh, the irony... Creationism ads in my blog!

Evolution
Science
Religion

I just noticed that Google displays advertisements which promote the "Intelligent Design" concept in my sidebar. Actually, I did put the Adsense code in the sidebar, but this was not what I anticipated. I guess that my recent (?) post regarding Evolution was relevant enough.

Well, I certainly don't expect any of my readers to be clicking any of these ads, so I'll probably remain a poor Ph.D. candidate. I think you should click them and see why "Intelligent Design" is an unbelievably bad idea. I can assure you that the sites linked to them are genuine fun for anyone with a basic understanding of the scientific method.

I had briefly quoted Karl Popper in my aforementioned post and I need to repeat his proposition that any existential statement ("there exists a X that does Y") is verifiable but not falsifiable and therefore is clearly metaphysical (it cannot be corroborated by experience). As such, any statement of the form "evolution was done by X" is clearly not scientific. It may be true, but we may possibly never know. And it isn't science.

I spent quite some time reading Popper's excellent "The logic of scientific discovery since my last post. I picked it up in Edinburgh, where I was visiting a friend (greetz to my 733t friend hax0r, vvas). It illuminates the methodology of science in a way that makes Popper's propositions immediately compelling. It's one of these books that seems obvious once you understand what it says. Truly, the work of a genius.

I'll spend the following few minutes disproving one of the ridiculous claims that I read in one of the advertised "intelligent design" sites. These people claim that natural selection fails to explain the concept of "return to normalcy", according to which talented people may not breed to even more talented children, although inversely, average people may give birth to talented children. First error: Natural selection can not be disproved by individual examples. Natural selection explains the evolution of a species, not the evolution inside a specific genealogical tree. Second error: the concept of "return to normalcy" is a probabilistic concept. The selection of paternal and maternal genes is a random process and a child usually does not get all the good genes that his father or mother have to offer. As a result, a child usually falls in between his parents for most quantitative attributes. As a crude example, if father has Genius_gene_A and Average_gene_B and mother has Genius_gene_C and Average_gene_D, 25% of their offspring will be pure genius, 50% will be like their parents (1 Genius and 1 average gene) and 25% will be pure average. The expansion of these "combinations" when more genes are implicated gives rise to the so-called binomial distribution. On average, most children will be similar to their parents and usually between them. Out of sheer luck (?), gifted children can be born from average parents, without the need to invoke "divine intervention". Similarly, gifted parents may have average children.

PKT

P.S. I just noticed that the creationism ads are gone! Oh, well...