Pope's astronomer dismisses ID and says Church was "spectacularly wrong" in its treatment of Galileo

[Betterave]

Yes. No scientist proposed a theory which has already been falsified, except by mistake. Hence a lot of falsificatons are in a conditional form.

I think you very much miss the point here. All falsifications are in conditional form (if A then C) - there is no problem there. The problem is with the nature of a particular A (A may be an abstract idea which does not translate into any real world “acid test”) and with the implications of accepting A as a falsification criterion for one theory while rejecting not-A as a falsification criterion for another theory.

Behe’s IC idea was indeed scientific, though it did not have as much to do with ID as some people think. It was a valid scientific attempt to falsify evolution. It did not provide any evidence in favour of IC. At most it could have shown that “the bacterial flagellum did not evolve”. That says nothing about ID since the scientific default is “we don’t know”. In order to move science from “we don’t know” to “the flagellum was designed” positive evidence in favour of ID is needed. Proof that rossum did not steal the cookies is not acceptable as evidence that Betterave did steal the cookies.

That’s an interesting way to look at it, but biased. If we have reason to believe that either Rossum or Betterave stole the cookies, then the fact that Rossum did not indeed is evidence that Betterave did. The question, then, is whether we have reason to believe that we are faced with an either/or here, and there are reasons for thinking that we are, it seems to me.

As an illustration of an IC system evolving, start with some stepping stones across a river that let you cross the river dry-shod:

0 0 0 0 0

Now lay a log across the stepping stones:

---

0 0 0 0 0

Now remove the middle stepping stones:

---

0 . . . 0

The resulting bridge is IC. If you remove either end stone or the log then you can no longer cross the river dry-shod. Each stage allows you to cross the river dry-shod from the initial stepping stones to the final bridge. What has happened is that we did not go directly for a bridge, we used the stepping stones as an intermediate and then removed the excess stones after placing the log. Thornhill and Ussery call this “Elimination of Functional Redundancy”, though more informally it is called “Scaffolding”. Parts are used temporarily and then discarded like the scaffolding used to construct an arch.

Interesting example. I don’t think it is an example of IC though: obviously the middle stones never needed to be there in the first place. The outer stones could have happened to be there and the log fell, and voila!

I can see no problem with either proposed way to falsify. That Behe’s IC failed does not mean that another scientist could come up with something better. Indeed there is a consensus among biologists that there are disconnected islands in ‘DNA-space’ that cannot be reached by current life on Earth because there are no viable intermediates. So far all the life that we have found has enough intermediate stepping stones to allow for universal common descent.

As far as I’m concerned, whether you call it IC or “disconnected islands in DNA-space” is irrelevant: you have granted the position that I have been intending to argue for, it seems to me.

We see many species providing structures to help other species, but there is always some advantage to the providing species. Trees provide fruit in return for the advantage of scattering their seeds further away from the parent tree. What has not been found so far is a species that does something similar without getting any return.

But you think we would be able to recognize this if we found it? And that it would actually falsify Darwin’s theory?

 

[reggieM]

Random?: THEWEDGEISID’SSTRATEGYFORWORLDDOMINATION

 

[LittleSoldier]

Enjoy missing the point if you like. The analysis of an artificial object between the earth and the moon concludes it is not natural - at all. That is the data. Now, based on a philosophical bias, there can only be one answer as to its possible builder.

You are on a Catholic forum and apparently, in a way, you still don’t realize that. I know there are people who either dismiss the idea of God/gods, and think beliefs are so much nonsense, but there is something there. If you continue to post while not acknowledging what has been revealed to man, that’s one thing, but I should point out that continuing to do so does not make God go away.

But back to ID. The data shows design.

God bless,
Ed

No, it doesn’t.

 

[grannymh]

A theory can be falsified in many ways.

Thank you.

 

[rossum]

Are you equating the erosion of this arch with deleterious mutations?

No. I am showing that scaffolding need not be particularly complex. The arch started as a single piece of rock, with arch and scaffolding together in one piece. A lump of rock is not IC. After removal of the scaffolding by the natural and unintelligent process of erosion we are left with an IC arch. Hence we can see that a natural unintelligent process can produce an IC result form a non-IC starting point.

This counters Behe’s claim that only intelligent processes can produce IC.

rossum

 

[buffalo]

No. I am showing that scaffolding need not be particularly complex. The arch started as a single piece of rock, with arch and scaffolding together in one piece. A lump of rock is not IC. After removal of the scaffolding by the natural and unintelligent process of erosion we are left with an IC arch. Hence we can see that a natural unintelligent process can produce an IC result form a non-IC starting point.

This counters Behe’s claim that only intelligent processes can produce IC.

rossum

The single rock arch is akin to fabricating a single beam to span the entire distance.

Your claim is that a clump of rock is scaffolding? Then one must say that everything in nature is scaffolding. Where does that leave us?

What is the CSI of the arch? What is the CSI of the fabricated beam?

 

[Touchstone]

No. I am showing that scaffolding need not be particularly complex. The arch started as a single piece of rock, with arch and scaffolding together in one piece. A lump of rock is not IC. After removal of the scaffolding by the natural and unintelligent process of erosion we are left with an IC arch. Hence we can see that a natural unintelligent process can produce an IC result form a non-IC starting point.

This counters Behe’s claim that only intelligent processes can produce IC.

rossum

I think Behe has a much more restricted criterion for IC, and believe he would shrug at the rock arch example, dismissing it as not relevant. It’s not a component-based system, where units are discrete, and “chunky” enough that one component’s removal would be enough to destroy or invalidate the system. The example often given is a stone arch with bricks, and a “keystone” at the top of the arch. The bricks are important as they provide the components of assembly – the rock arch doesn’t collapse from the removal of a grain (?) of rock. For Behe’s purposes, we’re looking at systems that are (analogous to) machines. Hence, his nomination of the flagellum and the blod clotting cascade as examples of IC, if now failed ones.

Behe’s idea is that biological development has nothing analogous to the “monolith with erosion that makes a bridge”, no “scaffolding” mechanisms. He’s not saying that such scaffolding mechanisms cannot be found in nature – manifestly they can, as you’ve pointed out. Rather, he’s saying that biological processes aren’t like that, and can’t be like that. It’s a poor bit of thinking, and a thin veneer over an argument from incredulity, but he’s not going to be surprised at your stone arch example.

Behe just lacks imagination. Nature is the most clever designer, and as a theist, he’s inclined to underestimate it – what can impersonal processes do, after all? They’re so… impersonal. That’s a way to make really dumb mistakes, and Behe has put a good string of them together now, with the flagellum being a challenge to science up front only because it was a new challenge; it didn’t take long at all for the vaunted flagellum to become an embarrassment for him, a good example of non-IC. Whoops.

In any case, Behe’s qualifications for IC are much more constrained than it seems you’re allowing here.

The single rock arch is akin to fabricating a single beam to span the entire distance.

Your claim is that a clump of rock is scaffolding? Then one must say that everything in nature is scaffolding. Where does that leave us?

What is the CSI of the arch? What is the CSI of the fabricated beam?

CSI, you gotta be kidding, right? When’s the last time you heard Dembski speak of CSI?

-TS

 

[rossum]

Thank you, that’s very informative, but I think the issue may be more complex than you suggest here. IC is a conceptual construct - it means whatever we mean it to mean. If we define it as the benchmark of ID, then it cannot be proven that IC systems can evolve. On this reading, if a putative IC system is shown to be evolvable, then it has been shown not to be an IC system. Is there a compelling reason not to interpret the concept this way?

If we define IC as “a system which cannot evolve” then up to now no IC systems have been discovered in living organsims. If we define an IC system as:A single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function of the system, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

– Behe, “Darwin’s Black Box”, 39
Then there are many examples of IC systems in living organisms, some of which have known or at least possible evolutionary pathways. Given such a definition there are also non-living IC systems, shcu as Behe’s mousetrap example, and likewise we have evolutionary pathways for some of those, the mousetrap included.

Isn’t the obvious equivalent: “If it could be demonstrated that it is not true for any of the complex organs which exist that they could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, ID theory would absolutely break down”?

No. Dembski admits that his explanatory filter cannot detect a misleading designer who designs something to look as if it arose by law or by chance. While we can say that we have a law/chance path to a particular system, this does not rule out a Loki/Trickster designer who has set out to fool us. Also, since the Discovery Institute refure to tell us what their designer can and cannot do, we are not in a position to say “the designer(s) cannot make this subsystem”. We could do that with palaeolithic man and the aluminium cylinder block because we have a reasoanble idea of the limits on palaeolithic technology. Since we do not know any limits on the posers of the DI-ID designer(s) we cannot ever say that they “cannot” have done something.

It seems that the word ‘evolve’ is a tricky one here. In the context of a scientific theory it means that there is a specific mechanism by which A can be conceived to evolve into B. The statement “IC cannot evolve” means that what we understand about evolutionary mechanisms cannot account for a putative case of IC. But evolve can also just indicate “spontaneous organization” and it seems that that might be the operative sense in the claim “IC systems are unlikely to evolve.” In other words, the two claims could be interpreted as complementary, not contradictory. (N.B.: I’m not claiming that this is how Behe understands it, just that he perhaps could well understand it in this way.)

The word “evolve” can be used in non-biological contexts. For example astronomers use if for the extected changes over time seen in stars: ‘stellar evolution’. In all contexts it means ‘change over time’. In biology it means “change in the genomes of a population over time”. In abiogenesis the word ‘evolve’ is not generally used, though it can be applied to “chemical evolution” which is a reasonably similar process to biological evolution: changes over time in the ratios of different chemicals (usually RNAs or similar). It is in this case where spontaneous organisation can have an impact, for example Cairns-Smith’s suggestion that clay crystals helped organise early organis molecules.

So far the “knockout definition” of ID, which I quoted above, has been shown to be evolvable in at least some cases, so we know that the statement, “Knockout ID cannot evolve,” is false. It may be that some as yet untested particular examples of knockout ID may be unevolvable but it is up to the ID scientists to show this. The general statement has definitely been falsified.

As to Behe’s later “unlikely to evolve” definition:An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway.

– ISCID Encyclopedia, Irreducible Complexity
This requires detailed knowledge of the actual pathway, which is why Behe’s 2004 paper only dealt with theoretical probabilities. It is also noticeable that no work has been done by ID scientists on actual pathways. Some work has been done on this by non-ID scientists, for example: Bridgham, Carroll, Thornton: “Evolution of Hormone-Receptor Complexity by Molecular Exploitation”, (2006). The second sentence of the Abstract of this paper is a reference to Behe’s IC, and is an example of why I consider Behe’s IC idea to have been useful. It triggered off a lot of good work on the evolution of complex systems. This paper is just one example.

rossum

 

[Ismael]

The pope’s astronomer said the Vatican was keen on science and admitted that the church had got it “spectacularly wrong” over its treatment of the 17th century astronomer Galileo Galilei. Galileo confirmed that the Earth went around the sun – and not the other way around – and was charged with heresy in 1633. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest in Tuscany. Only in 1992 did Pope John Paul admit that the church’s treatment of Galileo had been a mistake."

Galileo’s heresy was that he said ‘the scriptures are wrong’. (Think if he was in a protestant country! ) and not that the earth went around the sun.

Heliocentrism was proposed by Copernicus (who was a priest) even before Galileo and he was not accused of heresy since he claimed something about the universe and not something about the scriptures.

Of course I think the treatment of Galileo was wrong as well, but people make mistakes, even priests and bishops, unfortunately.

---

Regarding Intelligent Design I agree with the Pope’s astronomer.

ID is not a scientific theory since it involves a supernatural factor into it… and phisical sciences (like biology) can only be applied to the natural, even if ID wouldbe true.

After all Tansubstantiation, which we all Catholics believe is very true, can’t be investigated scientifically either.

 

[Ismael]

Galileo’s heresy was that he said ‘the scriptures are wrong’. (Think if he was in a protestant country! ) and not because he said that the earth went around the sun.

Heliocentrism was proposed by Copernicus (who was a priest) even before Galileo . This made him unpopular, since most recognized Ptolemaic geocentrism but he was not accused of heresy since he claimed something about the universe and not something about the scriptures.

Of course I think the treatment of Galileo was wrong as well, but people make mistakes, even priests and bishops, unfortunately.

---

Regarding Intelligent Design I agree with the Pope’s astronomer.

ID is not a scientific theory since it involves a supernatural factor into it… and phisical sciences (like biology) can only be applied to the natural, even if ID wouldbe true.

After all Tansubstantiation, which we all Catholics believe is very true, can’t be investigated scientifically either.

 

[rossum]

The problem is with the nature of a particular A (A may be an abstract idea which does not translate into any real world “acid test”) and with the implications of accepting A as a falsification criterion for one theory while rejecting not-A as a falsification criterion for another theory.

That is the current problem with String Theory. Their ‘A’ is not currently measurable, though in principle it may be measurable in future. It is for that reason that String Theory gets some flak from its opponents as being currently ‘unfalsifiable’.

That’s an interesting way to look at it, but biased. If we have reason to believe that either Rossum or Betterave stole the cookies, then the fact that Rossum did not indeed is evidence that Betterave did. The question, then, is whether we have reason to believe that we are faced with an either/or here, and there are reasons for thinking that we are, it seems to me.

Science does not work in that way. Because there is so much we do not know the “we don’t know” option can never be eliminated. We certainly do not know enough about biology in general or abiogenesis in particular to be able to say that design in the only alternative to evolution.

Interesting example. I don’t think it is an example of IC though: obviously the middle stones never needed to be there in the first place.

Yes they did. The function is to cross the river dry-shod. That is not possible initially without the presence of most of the middle stones; I will allow one of two non-adjacent stones to go while still maintaining function. The required function is maintained at all times through all the changes. Starting from a functional non-IC system we have moved to a functional IC system.

As far as I’m concerned, whether you call it IC or “disconnected islands in DNA-space” is irrelevant: you have granted the position that I have been intending to argue for, it seems to me.

The possible existence of such islands is not in dispute. The question is whether or not any living organsims are actually on those islands. Finding such organisms would be a great puzzle for evolution. A mammal with feathers, rather than fur, might be an example of an inhabitant of such a DNA island.

But you think we would be able to recognize this if we found it? And that it would actually falsify Darwin’s theory?

If found it would indeed falsify Darwin’s theory. All that is needed is to find an example of something very like symbiosis, where both organisms co-operate, but which gives no advantage to one of the co-operating organisms. Symbiosis and parasitism are both relatively easy to recognise so it should be possible to find an example if such exists.

rossum

 

[edwest2]

Galileo’s heresy was that he said ‘the scriptures are wrong’. (Think if he was in a protestant country! ) and not that the earth went around the sun.

Heliocentrism was proposed by Copernicus (who was a priest) even before Galileo and he was not accused of heresy since he claimed something about the universe and not something about the scriptures.

Of course I think the treatment of Galileo was wrong as well, but people make mistakes, even priests and bishops, unfortunately.

---

Regarding Intelligent Design I agree with the Pope’s astronomer.

ID is not a scientific theory since it involves a supernatural factor into it… and phisical sciences (like biology) can only be applied to the natural, even if ID wouldbe true.

After all Tansubstantiation, which we all Catholics believe is very true, can’t be investigated scientifically either.

ID is most definitely science. If an alien probe crashed on earth, no scientist would call it a naturally occurring device. The structure of the cell is such that it could not have formed on its own. The mathematical odds are definitely against natural formation.

God bless,
Ed

 

[rossum]

The single rock arch is akin to fabricating a single beam to span the entire distance.

No. It is akin to using scaffolding to support an incomplete arch.

Your claim is that a clump of rock is scaffolding? Then one must say that everything in nature is scaffolding.

In that particular instance part of the rock acts as scaffolding while another part of the rock acts as the arch. The arch is not scaffolding. How do you get that everything is scaffolding?

What is the CSI of the arch? What is the CSI of the fabricated beam?

You tell me. I have never seen a satisfactory statement of how to calculate CSI.

rossum

 

[buffalo]

No. It is akin to using scaffolding to support an incomplete arch.

In that particular instance part of the rock acts as scaffolding while another part of the rock acts as the arch. The arch is not scaffolding. How do you get that everything is scaffolding?

You tell me. I have never seen a satisfactory statement of how to calculate CSI.

rossum

You and I were working on it, remember, until you dropped it. Ready to pick it up? We could make history.

The rock is one piece. Unless you are now claiming that the arch has individual segments to it.

 

[rossum]

ID is most definitely science.

So, how can it be falsified? Why are the ID journals either not publishing any more (PCID) or completely dead (JoEI)?

If an alien probe crashed on earth, no scientist would call it a naturally occurring device.

How would we know? Maybe they just direct an asteroid into Earth to see what it throws up when it hits? The asteroid would be both perfectly natural and an ‘alien probe’. Only the orbit of the asteroid would be unnatural, and that may well not be detectable if they nudged it far enough away so its orbit was natural be the time we saw it. Your scenario is easily disproved.

The structure of the cell is such that it could not have formed on its own.

The cells we see today did not form on their own, they evolved form earlier cells. You do not know how complex the earliest cells were. We do know enough to say that they lacked mitochondria, chloroplasts and a nucleus. They may well have lacked other components we see in modern cells.

The mathematical odds are definitely against natural formation.

Since we do not yet know the mechanisms of abiogenesis then all mathematical calculations involving those mechanisms are useless, except for the DI’s propaganda purposes. I can easily show that the odds against God are much greater than the odds against any cell forming.

rossum

 

[reggieM]

Measuring fCSI …

Functional Sequence Complexity alone provides algorithmic instruction
biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1742-4682-2-29.pdf

“No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organism with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms’ genomes programmed?”

Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins
tbiomed.com/content/4/1/47

Abel and Trevors have delineated three qualitative aspects of linear digital sequence complexity [2,3], Random Sequence Complexity (RSC), Ordered Sequence Complexity (OSC) and Functional Sequence Complexity (FSC). RSC corresponds to stochastic ensembles with minimal physicochemical bias and little or no tendency toward functional free-energy binding. OSC is usually patterned either by the natural regularities described by physical laws or by statistically weighted means. For example, a physico-chemical self-ordering tendency creates redundant patterns such as highly-patterned polysaccharides and the polyadenosines adsorbed onto montmorillonite [4]. Repeating motifs, with or without biofunction, result in observed OSC in nucleic acid sequences. The redundancy in OSC can, in principle, be compressed by an algorithm shorter than the sequence itself. As Abel and Trevors have pointed out, neither RSC nor OSC, or any combination of the two, is sufficient to describe the functional complexity observed in living organisms, for neither includes the additional dimension of functionality, which is essential for life [5]. FSC includes the dimension of functionality [2,3]. Szostak [6] argued that neither Shannon’s original measure of uncertainty [7] nor the measure of algorithmic complexity [8] are sufficient. Shannon’s classical information theory does not consider the meaning, or function, of a message. Algorithmic complexity fails to account for the observation that ‘different molecular structures may be functionally equivalent’. For this reason, Szostak suggested that a new measure of information–functional information–is required [6]. Chiu, Wong, and Cheung also discussed the insufficiency of Shannon uncertainty [9,10] when applied to measuring outcomes of variables. The differences between RSC, OSC and FSC in living organisms are necessary and useful in describing biosequences of living organisms.

further explanation …

The general principle is that the complexity is the rate between the functional space and the search space. The search space for a protein is easy to calculate, it is 20^length of the protein in AAs.
The functional space, or target space, is the difficult part: it can be defined as the number of sequences of the same length which, if tested, would exhibit the function according to our definition.

If we have a reasonable assumption about the size of the functional space, the complexity of that protein can be easily calculated and expressed in bits, exactly like any other complexity (Kolmogorov complexiy, Shannon’s entropy).

Functional Sequence Compexity (Complex Specified Functional Information) is an example of Irreducible Complexity.

There are limits to the kind and quality of information that can be produced by random/chance processes.

 

[StAnastasia]

Galileo’s heresy was that he said ‘the scriptures are wrong’. … and not that the earth went around the sun. Heliocentrism was proposed by Copernicus (who was a priest).

Except that Copernicus was not a priest.

 

[StAnastasia]

So, how can it be falsified? Why are the ID journals either not publishing any more (PCID) or completely dead (JoEI)?rossum

One guess is that they haven’t sufficient to say to justify publishing a journal.

 

[Betterave]

I think Behe has a much more restricted criterion for IC, and believe he would shrug at the rock arch example, dismissing it as not relevant. It’s not a component-based system, where units are discrete, and “chunky” enough that one component’s removal would be enough to destroy or invalidate the system. The example often given is a stone arch with bricks, and a “keystone” at the top of the arch. The bricks are important as they provide the components of assembly – the rock arch doesn’t collapse from the removal of a grain (?) of rock. For Behe’s purposes, we’re looking at systems that are (analogous to) machines. Hence, his nomination of the flagellum and the blod clotting cascade as examples of IC, if now failed ones.

Behe’s idea is that biological development has nothing analogous to the “monolith with erosion that makes a bridge”, no “scaffolding” mechanisms. He’s not saying that such scaffolding mechanisms cannot be found in nature – manifestly they can, as you’ve pointed out. Rather, he’s saying that biological processes aren’t like that, and can’t be like that. It’s a poor bit of thinking, and a thin veneer over an argument from incredulity, but he’s not going to be surprised at your stone arch example.

Behe just lacks imagination. Nature is the most clever designer, and as a theist, he’s inclined to underestimate it – what can impersonal processes do, after all? They’re so… impersonal. [Your bigotry is showing here: obviously a theist can attribute the wondrousness of impersonal nature to its creator, regardless of how ‘high’ or ‘low’ his estimation of its processes happens to be. You and Leela covered this point already.] That’s a way to make really dumb mistakes, and Behe has put a good string of them together now, with the flagellum being a challenge to science up front only because it was a new challenge; it didn’t take long at all for the vaunted flagellum to become an embarrassment for him, a good example of non-IC. Whoops.

In any case, Behe’s qualifications for IC are much more constrained than it seems you’re allowing here.

-TS

I think you’re right on this last point here, and it seems that you’re conceiving IC as I have been suggesting, not as rossum does. Two questions: What would you say about rossum’s ‘IC’ bridge example? Could you succinctly explain the flagellum refutation you refer to here?

 

[reggieM]

Bio-complexity

BIO-Complexity is a peer-reviewed scientific journal with a unique goal. It aims to be the leading forum for testing the scientific merit of the claim that intelligent design (ID) is a credible explanation for life.

Editor in Chief

Matti Leisola, Enzymology and Enzyme Engineering; Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Finland

Editorial Board

David Abel, Origin of Life; The Origin-of-Life Science Foundation, United States

Douglas Axe, Protein Structure–Function; Biologic Institute, United States

William Basener, Statistics and Population Modeling; Rochester Institute of Technology, United States

Michael Behe, Biochemistry and Biological Complexity; Lehigh University, United States

Walter Bradley, Origin of Life; Baylor University, United States

Stuart Burgess, Biomimetics and Biomechanics; University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Russell Carlson, Biochemistry; University of Georgia, United States

William Dembski, Mathematics and Information Theory; Discovery Institute, United States

Marcos Eberlin, Chemistry; State University of Campinas, Brazil

Charles Garner, Prebiotic Chemistry; Baylor University, United States

Loren Haarsma, Biophysics; Calvin College, United States

Peter Imming, Organic Chemistry; Martin Luther University, Germany

James Keener, Bioengineering and Mathematics; University of Utah, United States

David Keller, Biophysical Chemistry and Molecular Machines; University of New Mexico, United States

Branko Kozulic, Biochemistry; Gentius Ltd, Croatia

Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, Plant Genetics; Max Plank Institute for Plant Breeding Research (retired), Germany

Jed Macosko, Biophysics and Molecular Machines; Wake Forest University, United States

Robert Marks, Evolutionary Computing and Information Theory; Baylor University, United States

Scott Minnich, Bacterial Pathogenicity; University of Idaho, United States

Norman Nevin, Medical Genetics; Queen’s University of Belfast (emeritus), Ireland

Edward Peltzer, Ocean Chemistry, United States

Colin Reeves, Genetic Algorithms and Information Theory; Coventry University, United Kingdom

Siegfried Scherer, Microbial Ecology; Technische Universität München, Germany

Ralph Seelke, Microbiology; University of Wisconsin-Superior, United States

David Snoke, Physics and Modeling; University of Pittsburgh, United States

Richard Sternberg, Genomics, Cladistics and Theoretical Biology; Biologic Institute, United States

Scott Turner, Physiology, Ecology and Evolution; State University of New York-Syracuse, United States

Jiří Vácha, Pathological Physiology and Evolutionary Theory; Masaryk University (emeritus), Czech Republic

John Walton, Chemistry; University of St Andrews, United Kingdom

Jonathan Wells, Cell and Developmental Biology; Biologic Institute, United States